MARTIAN QUEST

The Early Brackett


Books by Leigh Brackett

Science Fiction

Shadow Over Mars (aka The Nemesis from Terra)

Starmen (aka The Starmen of Llyrdis)

The Sword of Rhiannon

The Long Tomorrow

Alpha Centauri or Die!

The Adventures of Eric John Stark:

The Secret of Sinharat / The People of the Talisman

(aka Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars) 

The Ginger Star }

The Hounds of Skaith } collected as The Book of Skaith:

The Reavers of Skaith } The Adventures of Eric John Stark:

Stark and the Star Kings (w/Edmond Hamilton) (forthcoming)

Mystery / Suspense

No Good From A Corpse

Stranger at Home (as by George Sanders)

An Eye For An Eye

The Tiger Among Us

Silent Partner

Western

Rio Bravo

Follow the Free Wind

Collections

The Coming of the Terrans

The Halfing and Other Stories

The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark

The Best of Leigh Brackett (Edmond Hamilton, ed.)

No Good from a Corpse

The Pulp Detective Fiction of Leigh Brackett

Martian Quest: The Earley Brackett

Lorelei Of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances (forthcoming)

Shannach--The Last: Farewell to Mars (forthcoming)

as Editor

The Best of Planet Stories #1

The Bestof Edmond Hamilton


Martian Quest

The Early Brackett


LEIGH

BRACKETT


Introduction by


Michael Moorcock

HAFFNER PRESS

Royal Oak, Michigan

2002



Publisher's Acknowledgments

The publisher wishes to thank the following for their assistance in the preparation of this book:

Gene Bundy and the staff of the Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library at Eastern New Mexico University's Golden Library, for many of the stories and materials in this collection.

Booksellers Howard DeVore, Mark Hickman, and Ray Walsh for additional stories.

John L. Carr for his biography, Leigh Brackett: American Writer, and Gordon Benson, Jr. for his working bibliography, "Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett: The Enchantress and the World-Wrecker" (2nd Revised Ed.).

Eleanor Wood of the Spectrum Literary Agency, literary agent for the Hamilton-Brackett estate.

Richard C. Jones, formerly of the Mahoning National Bank, for his anecdotes and the tour of downtown Kinsman, Ohio.

Emily W. Love and her staff for their kind hospitality and gracious tour of her Kinsman, Ohio farmhouse.

George Flynn and Maria Hofbauer for proofreading the manuscript.

Lail Finlay Hernandez for kind permission to reproduce the Virgil Finlay artwork For the dustjacket.

Michael Moorcock for his wonderfully erudite and personal introduction

And to all the readers and admirers of "planetary romances." 

This book is for you.


CONTENTS


Queen of the Martian Mysteries by Michael Moorcock xi

Martian Quest 1

The Treasure of Ptakuth 19

The Tapestry Gate 37

The Stellar Legion 51

The Demons of Darkside 69

Water Pirate 89

Interplanetary Reporter 105

The Dragon-Queen of Venus 125

Lord of the Earthquake 145

No Man's Land in Space 175

A World is Born 205

Retreat to the Stars 229

Child of the Green Light 249

The Sorcerer of Rhiannon 269

Child of the Sun 299

Out of the Sea 327

Cube from Space 357

Outpost on Io 391

The Halfling 409

The Citadel of Lost Ships 437

Meet the Author by Leigh Brackett 473


FIRST EDITION

Published by arrangement with the agent for the author's estate,

Eleanor Wood of the Spectrum Literary Agency

Copyright 2002 by the Estate of Leigh Brackett Hamilton

All rights reserved

"Queen of the Martian Mysteries: An Appreciation of Leigh Brackett"

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Moorcock

Dustjacket artwork by Virgil Finlay

Copyright © 2002 by Lail Finlay Hernandez

The acknowledgments on page 477 constitute an extension of this copyright page

The special contents of this edition are copyright © 2002 by

HAFFNER PRESS

5005 Crooks Road Suite 35

Royal Oak, Michigan 48073-1239

e-mail: info@haffnerpress.com 

http://www.hafFnerpress.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form whatsoever wit how prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 1-893887-11-1 (Trade Edition)

ISBN: I-893887-I2-X (Limited Edition)

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Number : 2001088980

Printed in the United States of America



Queen of the Martian Mysteries 

An Appreciation of Leigh Brackett

By Michael Moorcock


Few people of later generations than mine know how influential Leigh Brackett has been on the field of science fiction and fantasy. If you’ve read the odd piece by me or by Ray Bradbury, for instance, you’ll know that we admired her, loved her, learned from her and were encouraged by her, but you might not know that E.C. Tubb’s excellent long-running Dumarest of Terra series, which has been appearing for almost half-a-century, was originally written in conscious and acknowledged imitation of Brackett’s much-admired Eric John Stark stories. I heard her Stark stories quoted long before I actually read them, just as, while hitch-hiking through Germany a few years later, I had Borges retailed to me by a Spanish-reading Swede before Borges ever appeared in English. Ted Tubb could quote chunks of Brackett from memory and invent a fair version of his own on the spot! He wasn’t the only one. I remember sessions with him and some of the other UK sf writers of the 50s, including Ken Bulmer and John Brunner, in which her work was the sole subject of enthusiastic conversation and where we vied with one another to capture that typical, intoxicating style in extemporary round-robins, which is what writers used to do at sf conventions before they started becoming stars. Someone always had a typewriter and you took turns on it. Tubb was brilliant at this. 17-year-old John Brunner’s second novel The Wanton of Argus didn’t come out of nowhere and a strong streak of Brackett ran through all his best early space operas and science fantasies which, with books like Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider, are now regarded as his best, most vital work.

But, of course, Leigh was also influential in Hollywood. Her contribution to Star Wars wasn’t limited to the script she did for The Empire Strikes Back. When I saw the first Star Wars movie I was disappointed. I had expected something as good as Brackett. What I got was a dilute of Brackett and the Brackett style. Han Solo's origins lie, it seems to me, in those tough, semi-piratical spacers who took the interplanetary work nobody else would do. I suspect they all looked a bit like Bogart in Leigh's mind! Which says something for Bogart, I'd say, since Leigh got to know him when she was working with Faulkner on the The Big Sleep. She and Bogie enjoyed each other's company. They were the same kind of tough-talking romantics. Her spacegoing heroes were not a million miles away from the seagoing Bogart of Key Largo.

I don't remember her talking about John Wayne much, though she shared his politics more than she did mine. I'd imagine his off-screen antics and language didn't make him an ideal model, especially when she had known Douglas Fairbanks, for whom she and I shared an undying admiration, though Fairbanks's wonderful on-screen joie-de-vivre wasn't something many of our own characters displayed. She tended to prefer people who ran gin joints in Moroccan ports and sacrificed their own happiness for the woman they loved. It was definitely part of her appeal to me when I discovered that there was a kind of sf I did like and it was only rarely found in Astounding—while you found a lot of it in Planet Stories and Startling Stories. Not, as this collection of her earliest work shows so well, that she couldn't deliver a nifty scientific idea or two when she wanted to. What I found interesting about these stories, many of which I first read in the pulps, was how many of them were actually science fiction rather than the science fantasy with which I mostly identify her. She came up with curious, engaging scientific notions, along with some very sexy warrior queens, hard-bitten interstellar dames, and quite a few attractive, god-like or boy-like super-villains.

It's readily arguable that without her you would not have got anything like the same New Wave, which changed generic sf so radically from a fundamentally mechanistic realism to a fundamentally humanist romanticism in the 60s and 70s. In a sense 2001 was the magnificent epitaph for that kind of sf. J.G.Ballard, our master of laconic, poetic imagery, much admired in the literary world and almost as influential upon it as Philip K. Dick, came to the field out of an enthusiasm for Ray Bradbury, as did many British imaginative writers. It's commonly known, because Ray has said so, that Ray Bradbury's Mars, like Ballard's Vermillion Sands, is not a million miles from Brackett's Mars. And before the whole world realised how good he was, Bradbury regularly appeared in the same pulps. Leigh would have credited Edgar Rice Burroughs for everything, but Burroughs lacked her poetic vision, her specific, characteristic talent and in my view her finest Martian adventure stories remain superior to all others.

Burroughs could sometimes rise to her romantic vision but his heroes were fundamentally country (occasionally arboreal) gents, while Leigh's, wherever their actual adventures took place, were fundamentally urban rough diamonds. The tended to bring metropolitan experience and values to the frontier. It was Ed Hamilton who described the likes of The Continental Op not as detective stories but as urban adventure stories and Leigh approved of that description. She took as much from the likes of James M. Cain, who came from Maryland to use the sharp street language of Southern California as his inspiration, as she took from Burroughs. She antedated cyberpunk by some fifty years, by bringing the spare, laconic prose and psychically wounded heroes of Hemingway, Hammett and Chandler into the sf pulp, rather as Max Brand (especially as Evan Evans) had brought it to the Western. It was why she could move so easily between private eyes with a nasty past, star-weary spacers and moody cactus-cussers. And, of course, her lone outlaws, living on the edge of the civilised world, frequently commissioned to dare the unknown, are not a million miles from Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, whose thin-lipped, steely-eyed and somewhat laconic progeny still turn up regularly in, for instance, the films of Clint Eastwood. Eastwood, in his hey-day, would have made a great Eric John Stark and could probably still pull it off, if The Unforgiven is anything to go by.

Echoes of Leigh can be heard in Delany, Zelazny and that whole school of writers who expanded sf's limits and left us with some fine visionary extravaganzas. She's there, for instance, in the influential Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth so inspired M. John Harrison's Viriconium. There used to be some sort of minor dispute about whether Jack Vance or I first described a culture of humans interacting with dragons. Jack wrote the best one, The Dragon Masters (he's also a better banjoist than me). But it turns out that neither of us did it first. Check out The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter. There's no doubt about it. Leigh didn't just do it earlier, she has a whole bunch of albinoes in there, too. Along with Anthony Skene (whose Zenith the Albino, 1935, is soon to be republished by Savoy, UK) she should really be collecting the Elric royalties…

Others who have acknowledged her influence include Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Gene Wolf, Tanith Lee, Karl Edward Wagner… The list goes on and on. Even Edmond Hamilton liked to say how marrying Leigh had definitely improved his work. With Catherine Moore, Judith Merril and Cele Goldsmith, Leigh Brackett is one of the true godmothers of the New Wave. Anyone who thinks they're pinching one of my ideas is probably pinching one of hers.

Leigh wasn't much of a plotter in those early days, as you can see here. In fact she seemed happy to produce pretty much the same plot, through her first couple of publishing years. Neither, strangely, did she have much talent for making up alien names, which is why half the Celtic pantheon appear with changed sex, character and physical shape, along with echoes of more current places and names. If Barrakesh (an ancient Martian city) is what it's called by a Moroccan with a cold, I was also deeply confused by Rhiannon turning out to be a bloke in Leigh's superb Sword of Rhiannon, which first saw bookform as an Ace Double, backing the first paperback appearance of Conan the Conqueror. What a bargain for twenty five cents! Titles, too, could be a bit confusing. Leigh probably never expected many of these stories to see print in any other form, so she tended to produce similar-sounding titles for totally different stories. Citadel of Lost Ages, The Last Days of Shandakar, The Lake of the Gone Forever, Shannach—The Last. So many hold a note of loss or finality about them, especially when describing the Mars of Eric John Stark, the Mars that has been millions of years in its dying, that Mars to which, on occasion, he can return, to cultures old when Earth was still ruled by the dinosaurs. It's a mood which goes directly back to the Gothics whose doomed anti-heroes challenged the very nature of existence and were only rarely victorious. But, again, it is distinctly American, echoing the sense of vanishing worlds found in novels like The Last of The Mohicans or The Vanishing American. In her Martian stories, however, she mourned past complexity quite as thoroughly as she mourned passing simplicities. Her nostalgic vision of a redeemed America, in which the Amish are the only society to survive successfully, was published as The Long Tomorrow, one of the best faux-dystopias I've read.

Most of Leigh's characters definitely had complex skeletons in their closets. Sometimes you even found out a bit about them. Sometimes you didn't. I think it depended how the story went, for she wrote with few notes, flying by the seat of her pants but usually bringing the ship in to some kind of reasonable landing. She had great instincts and she learned to trust them. Like Howard's, Leigh's characters didn't vary much. Usually the central character was a star-weary spacer down on his luck, good-looking in a battered kind of way, something eating his heart or conscience he'd rather forget, a past he's not proud of, ready to take the jobs and the women nobody else would or could handle. In her hands the form grew more sophisticated, but the Leigh Brackett of The Big Sleep was pretty much the same as the Leigh Brackett who wrote The Long Goodbye many years later (including one of my favourite lines from the villain, after bottling his girl-friend's face, to Marlowe “Her, I love. You—I don't even like.”). It was the same Brackett who wrote Martian Quest and her last story, a collaboration with Ed Hamilton, Stark and the Star Kings, which has yet to appear. Her characters were complex by suggestion only, yet they are almost always believable. Because what she could do was create an ambience. She might have raised a suspicious eyebrow at my French, but it produced a bloody good frisson, that ambience. And it was that atmosphere you inhaled as hard as you could, just as you would with Bradbury and Ballard. Who cared about the plot mechanics? Brackett's atmosphere made you high and wanting more of it. You soon discovered indeed that Brackett was extremely addictive. You started searching the second hand bookstores for those old pulps containing unreprinted work (much now at last reprinted here). You developed a Stark habit. You didn't care that you had a fair guess the hero would get neither the girl nor the gold but redeem his honour instead. Her plots improved in quality but most of the time remained variations on her favourite theme—the man with only his life to lose is offered a dangerous job he can't refuse. It's there in Martian Quest. In her most famous collaboration with Ray Bradbury, Lorelei of the Red Mist. She had almost a mother's pride in Ray and was tickled when that story, which had appeared in the magazine with her byline as the most prominent, was reprinted in book form with Ray's name in the largest type. She had a generous affection for Ray. She celebrated his success. I feel that I, too, in some ways, was one of Leigh's boys. She had a way of making you feel very proud of yourself. She had a kind of integrity you don't seem to run across as much as you did. And she had a strong sympathy for the underdog. Especially the one who makes it back from the bottom. She showed that sympathy in Rio Bravo. It was in her wonderful historical novel Follow The Free Wind and, of course, when Eric John Stark returned in The Ginger Star and its sequels, he was still, in her words, a wolf's head, an outlaw.

Donald A. Wollheim, who was another great admirer and opposed to most of what she stood for politically, said she was the best possible combination of Burroughs and Merritt. He was proud to publish much of her early work in book form. She learned most of what she knew about structure after 1940 from Ed Hamilton, whom she married January 1st, 1947, with Ray Bradbury as their best man. Ed really helped her discipline her talent. He wrote complicated plot-outlines and detailed chapter by chapter plans, whereas she just sat down at the typewriter and started. She always said that she owed most of what she learned about structure to Ed, while he was always quick to say that her influence had improved his style.

She'd start with a mood, a bit of landscape, an image, a feeling. The plots of those early stories weren't what caught you. It was that atmosphere, the glamour, the sense of romantic desolation which harks back to science fiction's Gothic roots and which can be found, for instance, in Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe and the Brontes. Rapidly written, for the most part, these stories have the feel of raw visionary poetry. They appeared in what I believe were the superior pulps, containing more vivid and often more lasting fiction than the admired Astounding and F&SF, which were considered more prestigious in their day. I preferred the pictures in Fantastic, particularly when they were by Finlay. With Weird Tales and Campbell's excellent Unknown, for me Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Science Fiction—all contained more idiosyncratic writing, more stylish innovation, than an entire run of the more respectable sf magazines. It's where I first read Charles Harness, author of The Paradox Men, a romantic classic to rival Captain Blood, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber and many others. By the late 50s only Galaxy ran the best examples of that kind of fiction, serialising, for instance Bester's Tiger! Tiger!, which for me is a truly American novel, reflecting the spirit of Tom Paine in a way I have never seen bettered. Bester also enjoyed Leigh's stories.

There was a time when the kind of science fantasy Brackett made her own was looked down upon as a kind of bastard progeny of science fiction (which was about scientific speculation) and fantasy (which was about magic). Critics of the 50s hated it because it was very uncool to be as blatantly, gorgeously romantic as Brackett, to combine the natural and the supernatural so effortlessly. Maybe that was why, too, she deliberately obscured her gender in the early days. It was a pretty unladylike form. Her friend Catherine Moore had to appear as C.L.Moore, just so that the reader shouldn't be any further upset. Unless it came in the debased form of a bodice-ripper or wore a stetson, romanticism in the 40s and 50s had to chainsmoke and wear a fedora and a trenchcoat or it had better not come at all. An unsuitable job for a woman. It was a tribute to Howard Hawks that he wasn't phased by the famous revelation that the guy he had hired for The Big Sleep was actually a gal in a gingham dress. Hawks was as famous for his regard for strong women as he was for his exploitation of weaker ones. And Leigh's steady integrity impressed him. She stayed on the picture. There are many who believe she materially helped make it the classic it became. She worked with Hawks and Wayne on movies like Hatari! (about which she had some hilarious stories) and Rio Lobo, as well as the classic Rio Bravo and she also wrote for television. The western, like her Martian stories, depends chiefly on reflective landscape for its constant appeal and she was a great painter of reflective landscapes.

To some extent the post-war rejection of gorgeous fantasy, of full-blooded romanticism was the result of our sudden growing up as cultures, recognising the results of Hitler's over-the-top use of romantic propaganda. Even Errol Flynn had to get out of his tights and into that trenchcoat. Tony Curtis in The Black Shield of Falworth became the benchmark for ludicrously miscast low budget historicals. Robert Taylor was a severely miscast Ivanhoe, though Elizabeth Taylor remains the best Rebecca ever. Nobody with any serious ambition wanted to work on such travesties. There were only a few restricted areas where a certain kind of romanticism was acceptable. The ruling literary caste was prepared to take The Third Man, and Philip Marlowe but not Gormenghast and Titus Groan or Queen of the Martian Catacombs and Eric John Stark. Yet Brackett has less in common with Mervyn Peake than she has with Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler and other superior writers of popular fiction. Yet common to all these writers is the sense of yearning loss, as of innocence, a nobler, irredeemable past and an uncertain future. Her heroes are often deeply aware of some moral transgression which everyone forgives them for except themselves. At the time these stories were written we had seen our sense of our history, of our progress towards real civilisation, blasted to bits before our eyes. By the time these stories were appearing in the pulps, Germany's Nazi armies seemed unchallenged in their conquest of Europe. All those idealistic aspirations for world peace and the rule of civil law had collapsed before the cheap rhetoric of a bad journalist like Mussolini or a mediocre painter of postcards like Hitler. Bogart made more than one speech about how we felt, most famously in Casablanca. Yet the dominant sf of the day did not reflect the mood of the times, unless it was the militaristic, xenophobic elements. John W. Campbell was so busy being upbeat and celebrating crackpots who created perpetual motion machines and cults like early scientology which offered personal empowerment and an alternative to atomic war, he didn't notice that the world had changed profoundly. We were beginning to realise that controlling it might not produce the effects we desired. I was never entirely sure whether he was disappointed by the failure of the Hitler experiment. Campbell marched on to his own simple, stirring tunes, convinced he had a handle on the future. Ironically, it was the humanistic writers, like Sheckley, Bester and Dick, who most closely predicted our present. As a result, much of what Campbell published dated badly and became quickly unreadable. But Leigh, like so many of her peers, captured the mood of her time which translates so easily to the mood of our present and appears in writers like William Gibson or the graphic novel work of Moore and Gaiman. Martian Quest, good as it was, wasn't the work of a typical Astounding contributor.

Like so many of her heroes, Leigh preferred the outlaw life. She always said her first love was science fantasy. She said it defiantly, when it generally paid less than other pulp fiction. When it paid less, indeed, than other kinds of science fiction. If she had chosen, in her fiction, to hang out more with the scum of the LA streets rather than the dregs of the spacelanes she could have made a lot more money. Here's one of her heroes, Mike Vickers, more used to steering a 1940 Ford than an interplanetary tramp:

There was a street. It was narrow and crooked. It had no lights and no paving. There were little mud-walled houses. There was garbage and the odor of it, heavy and rank, and filth, and a dead rat lying in the dust, and a subtle breath of heat. Vickers drew back. He was afraid. He willed his feet to move, to go away, but the floor slid under them like a running stream. He cried out, loud enough for God to hear, and all that came from his mouth was a whisper: Angie! Angie.

There was someone behind him, and he knew that there was no escape.

Find a copy of Stranger at Home, as by George Sanders, which is where that appeared, and you'll see what I mean. Her name is actually in the book. Published in 1946, it's dedicated ‘To Leigh Brackett, Whom I Have Never Met.' I like to think this was George Sanders's way of giving her a credit. I'd love to see that one back in print. We probably have various Hollywood strikes to thank for a lot of the stories she wrote around that time, because when she couldn't work for the movies, she wrote fiction. Later, she would come to write science fiction in favour of writing for the movies. Only once, with The Empire Strikes Back, did she ever script a science fantasy tale. In a sense she had the privilege of self-imitation, just as she had when doing Eldorado, which she knew was a rehash of Rio Bravo. At one point she had suggested to Hawks that he simply change the names of her previous script and save himself some money.

Leigh was never very easy with journeyman work, no matter how good she was when she did it. Her keen sense of freedom made her, like many other fine writers of her generation, choose the more precarious living of writing science fantasy. It was a form which appealed to the romantic visionary in her, to her love of the exotic, the ancient and the long-civilised, as well as an enduring belief in the rights of the individual. She loved England and was proud of her English and Scots ancestry, but she was American to the core. And pretty much the best that an American can be.

It was their work that attracted my admiration, but it was their old-fashioned integrity, their generosity and their honest common sense that attracted me to both Leigh and her husband as people. We met at a science fiction convention. I was in my early twenties. I heard they had been seeking me out to congratulate me. For what? I wondered. I was almost speechless, not knowing what I could have done to impress such influential giants. Perhaps they'd congratulate me on my expertise as a literary thief? Perhaps they had recognised some obvious, if unconscious, plagiarism? We were introduced and Ed immediately began pumping my hand. “I just wanted to shake your hand,” he said. “They used to call me ‘the Galaxy smasher' but you, Mike, you destroyed the universe!” He was kind enough not to mention that my ramshackle book could scarcely have been written at all without the voice of Leigh Brackett echoing in my soul. If I were to quote the opening, you would think it was Leigh on a bad day. It turned out that I didn't quite have her penchant for interplanetary romance, but her example and her influence runs clearly through every Earth- or Mars-bound fantasy adventure story I have ever told and through virtually every other fantasy adventure story that has been told since!

When Ed died, Leigh wrote to let me know. A sad, matter of fact note in her usual laconic style, born of an age when to be self-referential was considered a bit indecent. Nobody wrote to me when Leigh died the next year. I heard the news from Harlan Ellison, who had also enjoyed her friendship. It broke my heart to lose her company but I couldn't imagine her wanting to go on living without her companion of some thirty-five years. And, of course, she does live on, as every influential writer does, through her readers and all the romantic young people, like me, whom she encouraged to dream and be proud of it.

Michael Moorcock

Circle Squared Ranch,

Lost Pines, Texas

October 2000


Martian Quest

Astounding Science Fiction, February 1940


He disembarked at Thern, heart of the Rikatva Area, a pale, stooped shadow of a man, young from his face, but old and hopeless from his eyes. With him nearly five hundred other passengers on the ancient spacetub climbed down into the dry red earth that was their last hope of economic freedom.

Rikatva and Tchava, the Martian Reclaimed Areas. The Tri-Council—great minds of three worlds—had poured money into them in an effort to give the unwanted overflow of a crowded civilization a chance to get off the public charity rolls. Water, brought in tanker ships from wetter worlds; Venusian humus, acid phosphate, nitrate nitrogen, to make the alkaline desert fruitful; after that, crude shacks and cruder implements, scrimped together with what was left from the funds wrung so hardly from resentful taxpayers.

It was common talk throughout the Solar System that the Areas were a failure. Only the destitute still had hope.

The young man breathed the thin air and shivered. When special guards herded the mob across the landing field to the supply houses, he followed with the quiet obedience of a well-broken beast.

He presented his papers at last to the Assistant Commissioner, a lean, saturnine Martian from over Tchava way.

"Martin Drake," read the Commissioner. "Single. Occupation, secretary." He scrawled his name as though sick of seeing it and grunted, "Secretary! And not a farmer in the lot of 'em, I'll wager! All right, Martin Drake; you're out on the edge of the settlement, with the other single men. Makes less fuss when we lose 'em."

And while Martin Drake was pondering that remark, the long line pushed him on, down to tables where guards rummaged in the scanty luggage of the newcomers.

Drake submitted his for inspection. "Any firearms?" demanded the guard, and patted him expertly. Drake shook his head.

The man next ahead of him in line had an automatic taken from him, and commented, "Still remembering last year's outbreak, eh? Made you work for your keep, then, didn't they?"

"I wouldn't be too smart," the guard retorted. "If the guys that have to foot the bill for this outlay keep on howling, and you yellow-bellies don't make a better showing on the credit side, we'll still have army pay, and you'll be right back on the streets!"

The line shoved Drake on and on. Eventually he found himself in the one street of Thern, clutching his allotment of tools, seeds, and clothing, and the halter of a vaard; an ugly, hairless Martian edition of the horse, with harness-galls and a waiting malice in its little yellow eyes. And there was something about them, unscreened now by sheds and hangars, that made the lost, old look deepen on Drake's face.

Huddled and squalid under the huge loom of the water tanks, the cheerlessness of them was horrible; here and there rose the shattered marble spires of the ancient city, mute prophets of futility.

Drake sighed and drew out his land card.

* * *

The words meant nothing to him. He looked about for a source of information, and was abruptly conscious of a clamor arising down the street. People began to pour out of the bars and happy joints in a drab, morbidly curious crowd, and the red dust of the unpaved way rose in a choking cloud.

Only one man stayed behind, a tall Venusian, his boots spread wide apart, his cloud-colored eyes narrowed as he watched the crowd mill and turn back upon itself. A sun-browned man of slow, massive strength, with something of the Earth's hard honesty in the set of his big-boned head and curling yellow beard. Drake became painfully aware of his white skin and undeveloped body. But he had to find his home. He gripped his land card and tapped the tall stranger hesitantly on the shoulder.

The cloud-colored gaze flicked half contemptuously over the Earthman's stooped thinness. "Well?"

Drake showed his card. "Can you tell me—?"

The tall man cut him short with an unenthusiastic grunt. "Your land is next to mine. I'm going home now. Come if you like." He gestured to a two-wheeled cart with a vaard between the shafts. "Get in, and tie your beast behind."

Drake bent over the cart tail, fumbling clumsily with the halter end. The vaard jerked its head perversely, and the knot would not make. He heard the Venusian's derisive grunt, and went scarlet. Then slim brown hands reached over his, and a clear voice spoke in his ear.

"May I help?"

Drake looked up. A girl stood beside him, a slender, smiling angel in patched overalls, crowned with a tangle of black curls that danced in the breeze. She was glowing and strong and confident, and Drake stood in awe before her. She took the rein from his hand, tying it deftly while he stared and could not take his eyes away.

He was still staring when she looked up to ask his name. Drake stammered it out, drinking her in as though she were something he had never dreamed existed, and wanted never to forget. He saw her flush, and never thought of rudeness. Dimly he knew that the crowd was swirling back toward them, but her voice came clearly.

"I'm Terra Brooke. My father has the farm next to Tels'."

Terra. Earth. No other name would have fitted her. Just looking at her roused a strange new joy in Drake, something that sang for no reason except that he was looking at her.

The shock of Tels' great hand on his shoulder was like a physical pain. "Have you never seen a woman?" demanded the Venusian shortly, spinning him round.

Drake gasped out "No!" just as the edge of the crowd curled round them. Terra's brown face paled, and she turned her head away.

"Let's go, Tels," she pleaded, climbing into the cart. "I don't want to see."

Tels didn't hear her. Harsh-faced, he tightened his grip on Drake's shoulder, thrust him bodily through the crush, to where men carried a blanket-covered thing on a stretcher.

"Look there, Earthpuppy! That's what's driving us from the land. That's what you city-bred weaklings can't fight. But Khom doesn't care. He gives no quarter to weaklings. Go on. Look!"

He ripped the blanket savagely from the huddle on the stretcher. Drake retched and held down a writhing stomach. The man beneath was dead. Naked to the waist, the manner of his dying was horribly plain. Something had struck him in the side, crushed his ribs and snapped his spine and laid his entrails bare.

Something had done that with one blow.

"Khom?" faltered Drake. Martian for Destroyer. "But what . . . what is it?"

Tels' strange burst of savagery had burned out with the sight of death. He muttered, "The great desert lizard," and turned to his cart. Drake stumbled after him, white and shaken.

The road they followed out of Thern ran between dusty fields, set to beans and alfalfa and yellow Martian grapes. Here and there the land was stripped bare of green things, as though a plague of giant locusts had descended. Irrigation ditches, a stink of fertilizer, furrows cut square across the wind, weathered shacks without a shrub or a shade tree, and ahead, the open desert. Drake looked out across the flat emptiness of it, and heard for the first time the low laughter of its drifting earth under the hand of a wind that never stopped.

"Ugly, isn't it?" said Terra Brooke's low voice. "But it's all we have."

"It's better than nothing at all," said Drake with a queer, cold bitterness. "Anything is better than that!"

Tels studied him in his slow way. "Your clothes are good," he said finally, "and your thinness is not from starvation. I think you don't know what 'nothing at all' can mean."

Drake flushed. "I didn't mean—" He broke off, staring. "Look at that vineyard!"

The others looked, startled; then they turned questioningly to Drake.

"What about the vineyard?" growled Tels, and Terra added, more kindly, "It's only one that Khom has stripped."

"Yes," said Drake excitedly, "but look at the vines! They're eaten right down to the ground."

Tels stared at him. "Of course. So is the desert scrub he eats. So is everything he touches. What of it?"

"But how strange for a lizard to eat wood!"

"Perhaps," said Tels. "But he eats it, Earthman, and everything else beside."

"I suppose," added Terra gently, "it's because there's so little food in the desert; only the scrub and the cactus. Khom needs a lot of food, and I guess he's learned to use all there is. He even gets his water from the cactus, you know."

Drake nodded; for the first time his face was animated. "Odd, isn't it? Adaptability—"

"All that interests me, "Tels interrupted, "is dinner. And even that I hate. Beans! When my melon ripens, I'll have something sour to cut the rotten dust from my throat!"

* * *

Drake had dinner at Tels' shack that night. Terra wanted it. She explained that she often cooked Tels' supper when he was late in town. Khom the Destroyer had stripped their vineyards not long before, and her father was not well, so any company Terra had, she had at Tels' place. Tels came for Drake, to show him the way, and before they left Drake's shack, the Venusian faced him.

"For Terra's sake you are welcome," he said, his eyes embarrassingly steady on the Earthman's thin face. "But look you, stranger." The curling blond beard was thrust rockily forward. "I will marry Terra when my farm is settled. And she is no street wench, to be stared at. You come for dinner, that is all!"

Drake's face flushed angry scarlet, but Tels' broad back was turned. They went in silence to the neighboring farm.

Terra was an expert cook. The strong desert hen was like pheasant, the baked red cactus and mixed beans from the fields fit for a potentate, for all Tels' grumbling. Drake's dinner went down in a dream; a dream filled with a black-haired angel rattling dishes on an ancient stove.

The overalls had been replaced by a simple print dress, and the sweet slim lines of her made Drake's throat ache. He was a confusion of unfamiliar feelings. He flushed and choked and stammered, and wished himself a hundred miles away, and yet nothing would have made him go.

Terra talked to him a good deal, about the Areas; Tchava, she said, was no better off than Rikatva, and the whispers of a sudden stoppage of funds grew steadily louder. The lizards were worse than any Biblical scourge, killing without mercy when disturbed at their feeding. Khom was the greatest enemy; dust storms and dryness and grudging fertility could be whipped in time, but Khom was the harvester of the crops.

Terra smiled suddenly at Drake. "Never been on your own before, have you?"

"No," Drake admitted humbly. "My uncle raised me."

Tels snorted. "You picked a fine place to come to," he growled. "Dust and wind and barrenness." He rose abruptly, thudding his fist with savage gentleness against the wall. "On Venus," he said softly, "there is dark earth that doesn't blow, and rain. Rain!"

Terra laid a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. "It is a hard place, Martin. And since the trouble last year, they won't let us have guns."

Drake remembered the man in the supply shed. "What happened?"

"Some of the settlers here got tired of fighting. There are barbarian tribes in the desert; they live by plunder. North of us are the radium mines. The settlers sent the barbarians against Rikatva to keep the soldiers busy, and went and attacked the radium mines. There was fighting, and a lot of men died before it was over. So all guns are forbidden here."

"But the lizards! Haven't you any protection?"

Tels shrugged. "Guns are not much use against Khom. Only his eye and his throat are vulnerable, and since he feeds only at night, it's hard to hit them. We all keep flares; the light sometimes drives him off. So far he has let me alone."

Changing the subject abruptly, he said, "Here, you, Earthman; see what I have raised."

There was a box full of black earth in the warmest corner by the stove. Drake saw that the conditions were as much like Venus' sultry dampness as anyone could make on Mars. He studied the pallid melon vine with its two long fruits, and said:

"Wouldn't it have been better to grow it in a culture?"

Tels glared. "A culture!" he snorted, and held out his hands. "Not while I have these to dig in the earth!"

Terra's eyes were suddenly shining. "First the lizards, now growth-cultures. Are you a scientist?"

Drake's thin face showed sudden lines. "No," he said dully. "No, I'm not a scientist. I'm a—secretary."

Terra studied him. "Show me your hands, Martin Drake."

Puzzled, he held them out. Then, abruptly realizing, he snatched them back, thrust them deep in his pockets. Terra smiled and shook her head slowly.

"Stains, and acid burns. You're no secretary; you're a chemist."

Drake was shaking, and his eyes were hollow. "I thought I was, once," he muttered. "Now I'm just a farmer, out on the edge of things where Khom can get me without making a fuss!"

"Why did you lie?" demanded Tels.

Terra, tense with some strange urgency, rushed on uncaring.

"Martin, I think a scientist could save the Reclaimed Areas! We can't do it ourselves, and the Tri-Council can't afford to send experts out here to work, perhaps for months and months. But you're one of us, Martin. You could try!"

"Try—what?"

"To destroy Khom! Guns and poison won't do it, but science could find some way, I know it!" She caught the Earthman's bony shoulders impulsively. "Will you do it?"

And while Drake stared at her, trembling, while Tels' harsh laughter rocked the room, there came from outside a horrible hoarse screaming; a rasping shriek of fear that set the hair prickling down their necks.

Tels swore a furious oath and sprang for the door, catching a flare from a shelf as he ran. Terra's brown face paled, and she said one word: "Khom!"

* * *

The frosty air bit into Drake as he followed them outside. Both moons were up, throwing crazy shifting patterns on the fields. Tels was leaping for the vineyard, shouting terrible things in his own tongue. Drake made out several blots of darkness, eight or ten, that had independent movement. They were among the grapes, and the neat rows of vines were broken now like crumbling battlements.

Tels threw the flare. A lurid glare burst over the vineyard, and Drake saw Khom, disturbed at his feeding.

Wicked triangular heads shot up from the ruined vines, horny reptilian heads framed in ruffs like Triceratops. Bodies two feet longer than a tall man raised high in ominous preparation on strong clawed legs, and tails—

Drake shivered, remembering the dead man on the stretcher, torn in two with one blow. Khom had a tail as long as his body and his head together; a mighty, supple flail armed with rows of deadly spikes.

Tels was still running toward the invaders, mad with the rage that takes a man when he sees the work of his hands destroyed. The vaard in the stable screamed on monotonously, terrified by the rank scent of the lizards. Tels stopped suddenly, began throwing clods of earth, shaking with a bitter, dreadful wrath.

Terra yelled a frantic warning. Eight of the lizards turned abruptly from the glaring light of the flare, running swiftly, high on their legs like monstrous crocodiles. But one, larger than the rest, stayed behind to do battle.

A clod burst squarely between its eyes. Opening wide a gaping mouth set with strange rodential teeth, Khom charged.

Tels turned to run, twisting frantically aside from the sweep of the wicked tail. But Khom was swift. The spiked bludgeon swung, struck viciously. Tels, a hoarse scream of agony stifled in his throat, was tumbled limply aside into his broken vines.

Drake had a momentary glimpse of a back armor-plated like a battle cruiser, and huge jaws agape with silent laughter. Then Khom had shot by them, out into the dark, whispering desert.

* * *

Tels was still breathing. Straining, panting, Drake and Terra carried him back to the shack. The girl was white, dry-eyed. Unhesitatingly she stripped the blood-sodden shirt from the Venusian; drew a long, shuddering breath.

"Right arm and shoulder broken," she whispered; "and I think some ribs. Poor Tels, to be so foolish!" Her fingers bit into Drake's soft muscles. "Get the doctor, Martin. The hospital is the big white house in Thern. Ride Tels' vaard. And hurry!"

Drake hurried. But the one thought in his mind was: "She loves Tels. Terra loves Tels."

Later that night he sat with Terra beside the Venusian's cot. The doctor had set the broken bones, molded a great clumsy cast around Tels' upper body. "He'll live," he said, and left.

Terra placed her hand on Drake's. "You see now why you must try to destroy the lizards?"

Drake spread his hands. "Why not men with flame guns, or atomic bombs?"

"It would take years, and there's no money."

"Poison, then."

Terra shook her head. "Khom eats no flesh, drinks no water. We can't poison our crops. No, Martin"—her eyes caught his, held them—"only science has a chance. It's up to you!"

There was a sudden sound from the cot; a feeble ghost of Tels' booming laughter. The Venusian had wakened.

"You ask too much, Terra," he whispered. "You ask a little weakling to lift the land on his shoulders."

Drake rose, flushing. Terra said quietly:

"What are you afraid of, Martin Drake?"

Again the husky laughter. "He's afraid of death, girl! He's afraid of work and pain and hunger, but most of all he's afraid of death. I saw his face when he looked at the dead man in Thern!"

Drake stood like a stooped, taut thing of marble, head averted, while Terra shook her dark curls and answered.

"No, Tels. You're wrong. It's life Martin Drake's afraid of!"

Drake swung suddenly to face them, his thin hands clenched until the bones gleamed white.

"You can judge me, you people!" he burst out at them. "You weren't born owing your life, food, clothing and the schooling you had, to someone else. My uncle took me; I had nothing when my parents died. I've never had anything. Since I was old enough to talk, I've been paying my uncle back what I owed him.

"He had me taught chemistry, not because I liked it, but because he thought I'd be the most use to him in the laboratories. George Breckner, of Interworld Enterprises, who hated his sister because she defied him to marry my father. My father, you see, was a failure, a visionary scientist who died a pauper. Uncle George had little hope for me, but he made me work! I took orders and cleaned test tubes and mixed solutions, but I never worked as an independent chemist. I wasn't worth it. I was my father's son, and dependent on my uncle for my bed and my dinner.

"It's easy for you to be strong and independent! You weren't taught from babyhood that you were utterly worthless and incompetent, existing on charity. There did come a day when I had my doubts. I thought I had stumbled on something in the laboratory. I thought I could prove to my uncle that I was worthy of consideration as an individual. I thought . . . I thought I could prove it to myself."

His voice faltered. He pressed his palms to his throbbing temples, and his words were almost inaudible when he went on.

"I made my experiment; secretly, because I wanted it to be a surprise, something no one could ignore. Well, I succeeded!

"I destroyed five thousand dollars worth of equipment in the resulting explosion. How I escaped death, I don't know; I wish I hadn't. But I had made a stupid, foolish mistake; if it hadn't been after hours, I might have killed every man in the laboratory. I knew then that my uncle was right. I . . . I ran away—"

Terra put her hands gently on his trembling shoulders. "You can help us here, Martin. I believe in you."

Martin Drake met her eyes. "You don't understand, Terra," he said simply. "I can't help anyone. I haven't it in me."

He turned and went out, walking slowly across the ravaged fields where the stumps of the grapevines were gnawed clear to the earth, and behind him there was silence in the cabin.

* * *

Next morning every house in the Reclaimed Areas found a printed proclamation at its door.

Due to the high cost involved and the untenability of the land, it has become impossible for the Tri-Council to continue to finance the Reclaimed Areas in their present state.

Wishing to give the Areas every possible chance, the Tri-Council has arranged a public hearing on the fourth of November, two Martian weeks from today. If, at this time, reasonable proof can be shown that the Areas may be placed on a sounder basis, the Tri-Council will take the matter under advisement.

However, all residents are requested to hold themselves in readiness for immediate abandonment of Rikatva and Tchava.

Drake was sitting on his bunk, the crumpled paper at his feet, when Terra Brooke came in. She came without knocking; standing there, her black curls disheveled, her eyes strained and tired in her white face, she seemed dazed and queerly uncertain.

Drake stared at her blindly. "There's nothing left now," he said tonelessly. "I've got to go back to my uncle. There's no place else where they'd take me. He . . . he said I'd come back."

Terra's hands made an aimless gesture. Her lips moved, but whatever words were back of them died in her throat.

"Why did you come?" asked Drake.

"I . . . I don't know. Perhaps I thought—" She broke suddenly, covering her face with her hands. Drake could see the tears shining between her fingers.

"—I thought you might still save us, Martin Drake," she said, very low. "But you couldn't. Maybe Tels was right. Maybe you are a weakling!" Her eyes were suddenly shining fiercely into his. "What about Tels? He has to go back too, to a stinking swamp that swallowed his land on Venus. What about the hundreds of people who hoped to live here; the thousands more who might have found new life here? They have to go back, to the charity rolls. What about my father and me, Martin Drake?"

Somehow Drake found himself on his feet and repeated, "Why did you come?"

"Because—" The fierce tenseness went suddenly out of Terra's body. Her head dropped; Drake strained for her whispered, "I don't know—"

There was nothing sane, nothing ordered. In the last day and night he had lived a hundred years. He had lost all identity with himself, all sense of the ordered pattern of things. He tilted Terra's tear-streaked face up and looked into her eyes. It wasn't a conscious act; some strange, hungry yearning, something beyond anything he had ever in his narrow existence known before, took his body and moved it.

He took Terra Brooke in his arms and kissed her.

For a long moment she lay quivering against him. Abruptly, like a wild thing, she wrenched away and struck him, hard, across the face. Then she was gone, running like a deer across the naked fields.

Drake stood still, his fingers against his bruised cheek. "I don't know," he whispered. "I don't know! But what difference can it make? I've failed anyway! Two Martian weeks. That's ten Earth days. Ten days!"

* * *

Eight of those precious days went by in a hopeless search for some point of attack. There seemed no way to begin; Khom didn't offer himself to be studied, there were no research laboratories, no fellow scientists to help. Then, on the eighth night, Khom made a raid across Drake's land into the inner circle of farms, and the furious, hate-filled settlers drove him back with flares, pursuing him right to the edge of the desert. Drake, caught in the forefront of that tide of battle, had barely time to turn his vaard loose to escape by itself, and then run for the comparative safety of Tels' shack. From there, he saw three men die under Khom's tail, and saw his own shack go up in flames from a random flare.

Poking morbidly through the ashes in the morning, choking over a vile stench that rose and went streaming out to the desert on the steady wind, he found something. Holding his breath, he knelt and pawed the ashes away with his hands.

Charred, head and tail partially burned away, but body still intact, a young Khom lay in the ruins. Only eight feet long, but old enough to have musk glands that sent up a stench, along with the charred flesh, that could have been smelled in Tchava.

Drake gasped for air, but he didn't leave. Here was a chance to study the enemy first hand. The armor plate had preserved the important parts of the carcass. He had no instruments, no facilities, but it was just possible—

He shook his head. This was the ninth day. Still—

He dragged the brute clear of the ashes, borrowed a tarpaulin and a sharp knife from Tels, and began his bloody task.

It was a sickening job, cutting and slicing and handling things that were never meant to be seen. The tarpaulin kept the sun off, and Drake stayed on the windward side, but all day that musky reek went trailing out into the desert, seeped clingingly into his clothing.

And, at last, he sat back on his heels and whistled. "So that's how he gets away with his wood! An extra stomach, supplied with an enzyme culture—just like a termite. Protozoans, of course, to digest the cellulose for him. One-celled animals, living in an alkaline culture; got to be alkaline, because everything that grows here has an alkaline reaction in the digestive system.

"So Khom is just a big, four-legged termite!"

To confirm his surmise, he borrowed litmus paper, used in soil testing, and the enzyme culture showed an alkaline reaction. For a moment Drake was enthusiastic. Then his shoulders sagged. Interesting, but it didn't help him any. It didn't show him any way to destroy the beasts. And tomorrow was the Council hearing.

He didn't even bury the carcass. In a few days there'd be nobody left to smell it.

There was smoke over Tels' cabin; Terra was getting supper. Drake crossed the fields, hating to see the two, to parade his failure, but unable to stay alone. After all, he had no place to go.

Somewhere, down the outer line of farms, a vaard voiced a querulous scream. As Drake entered the cabin he fancied he saw a stirring out in the desert, a flickering of low, swift shadows, but the double moonlight was tricky and a freshening breeze was shifting the whispering sand.

Terra turned from the stove; just for a second there was hope in her eyes. It flickered out, and Tels, propped up on his cot, wrinkled his nose in disgust.

"You stink," he said. "Go and wash off that damned lizard."

Drake hadn't realized. Stammering an apology, he added, "My clothes were burned. I haven't—"

"Take mine," said Tels. "But wash!"

Drake shivered under the cold shower in the crude bath, climbed gratefully into Tels' clothes. For lack of anything else to do with them, he left his own reeking garments on the floor.

It was a gloomy meal, the more so because it seemed all the vaards in Rikatva were having the nervous terrors, and the incessant shrieking rasped nerves already ragged. Several times Drake and Terra looked out, but there was no sign of lizards. In the shifting moonlight the desert was always full of shadows.

"Get the melons," said Tels abruptly. "We might as well eat them as leave them here to rot."

Terra brought them. Drake's throat ached at the sight of her; the spring, the joy, the life was gone from her. She was a little like him now, patient and defeated.

"Did you find anything?" she asked.

Drake spoke to them mechanically about Khom's digestive apparatus, accepting his share of the pale Venusian fruit. Tels found no joy in the prized melon now; his face was stony as he bit into his portion.

"Little animals living in his stomach?" he grunted around a mouthful, and shook his head. "It does not help us."

Drake sighed and took a bite. Instantly he choked and gasped over a corrosive sourness. The melon was acid, not pleasantly, like alkaline citrus fruits, but with a biting, astringent acerbity comparable only to some mess in a test tube. He gagged and retched, snatching for water.

Tels' blond beard crinkled to a roar of laughter. "Earth puppy! If you ever come to Venus, you'd better get some little animals to live in your stomach and drink your acids for you!"

Drake was suddenly transfixed, staring at the melon with a sort of awe. "My God!" he whispered. "That's it!"

* * *

Startled questions, sudden blazing inspiration, were drowned utterly in the high, wild shriek from Tels' stable. Other vaards picked it up, until the shack was ringed with screaming beasts. And this time the running shadows in the desert were close in the fields, and solid.

They congregated, dozens of them, in a milling swirl around a charred and butchered corpse that sent its musky stench out on the wind.

Tels, lips tight with pain, joined them at the window. "Never have I seen them like that. Look, they break a little; some are coming this way. But there is nothing in my fields!"

Drake's face was white in the lamplight. "There's something in your bath. My clothes, with the smell of Khom on them. The corpse has brought them in; now they're coming here, after me!"

Terra's hands were clenched; the cords stood out on her wrists. "Martin," she said, "what did you mean just now, about the melon?"

Drake's eyes were on those milling shapes. "Khom depends on wood-cellulose for his food. The protozoans that digest it for him live in an alkaline culture. This melon is acid. Introducing it into the culture would kill the protozoans—and Khom would starve to death!"

Tels snorted. "You talk nonsense! Khom will not be fed by hand, those melons will not grow here naturally, and besides, there is but one plant."

"Hydroponics, Tels! Growth cultures. A ring of specially constructed tanks, fencing the Areas; nutrients, auxin, vitamins, intensifying chemicals. They can ship more vines from Venus; Khom can eat them as fast as they grow. Inside of six months, there won't be a lizard left in the desert!"

"You've got to get away, Martin." Terra caught his shoulders. "You've got to get that knowledge to the Council tomorrow. Khom will be all around us in a moment. You've got to get away!"

Drake stared at her unseeingly. "Get me pencil and paper, quickly."

Tels turned slowly, an unbelieving rage hardening his face. "You would go? You would leave Terra here?"

Drake was silent. The girl put paper on the table; he wrote, rapidly. Tels saw what he wrote.

"Will fear make you forget even your idea?" he said softly, and struck suddenly with his good arm.

Drake went down. Tels, white with pain and anger, cried: "Run, Martin Drake! We'll hold off the lizards. Run, damn you!"

Drake staggered up, gripping the paper. "We've all got to get out of here. Those brutes have the scent of my clothes now; in a few minutes they'll break in."

"He's right, Tels," sighed Terra. Drake caught her look and winced. She'd had hope before; now she knew he was a coward.

"The stable," he said, "is the only chance. They may not find us for a while. Bring the flares, Terra."

She took the webbing sack of them, offered her other arm for Tels to lean on. Drake opened the door, and stopped.

* * *

Khom was everywhere. Great armor-plated shadows slid wide-jawed in nervous circles about the shack, drawing ever closer. The vaard in the stable screamed as Drake had never heard one scream before, and every beast in Rikatva was answering. There was a pregnant tension in the air; Death had come in from the desert.

Drake hurled a flare. Khom drew back, and the short path to the stable was momentarily clear. "Come on!" he yelled, and broke into a run, helping to bear Tels' half-helpless weight.

Glaring light and lashing tails, and armored heads that grinned hate at them. Then they were in the odorous dark of the stable, with the vaard thrashing and shrieking. Drake caught its head-rein; something in the touch of his hand quieted it.

He held out the paper to Terra. "Take this to Thern. Get it into responsible hands. Then, if you can, bring help. Now go, before Khom closes in!"

She didn't understand. She stared at him, clutching the paper with the fate of the Reclaimed Areas written on it. "But Martin! You . . . Tels—"

Hardly knowing where the words came from, driven by something deep within him, Drake plunged on. "I don't matter; Tels doesn't matter. Nothing matters but getting that paper where it has to go. The Council meets tomorrow morning! You ride better than I, you're lighter. The vaard will have a better chance to get away. Be you're . . . you're—"

He stopped abruptly, loosing the halter. "Go now, Terra. Hurry!"

She was close to him in the dark; suddenly there were soft, warm lips on his, firm and vital. Then she was on the nervous beast, shoving the door wide. "Throw a flare, Martin! Keep throwing them, until I come back!"

Tels grinned. He hadn't seen that kiss. "Terra is a real woman! Where are the flares? I have one hand left!"

Drake saw her go, in the white glare, low on the vaard's neck, flying in a wide circle for Thern. Then he looked at the prowling, silent things in the naked fields.

"Afraid?" growled Tels.

Martin shook his head. "I . . . I don't know. Look, Tels! There they go!"

Khom had made up his mind at last. There was a crash and a splinter as Tels' shack door went in; the flimsy walls rocked, cracking at the joints as the great bodies went hurtling in. They were mad, now. In a moment they would scent the humans in the stable.

"I'll kill a few!" snarled Tels, and lobbed two flares in quick succession at his shack. Wood grows dry on Mars. In five minutes it was aflame.

"My God!" groaned Drake. "That's done it. Here they come!"

Balked of their objective, the lizards turned to the stable. In a grim, silent horde they came through the blowing dust, the flames red behind them. The two men hurled the precious flares, trying to keep a ring of light around the stable, and Khom prowled in nervous jerks, beyond the blaze, stopped, but only momentarily.

Without warning, Tels crumpled to the floor. His face was gray, sweat on his forehead. "I can't—" he gasped, and fell back against the wall, half fainting.

Drake knew fear, then; the full impact of it, cold and brutal. Tels' strength was taken from him. He stood alone, Martin Drake against the Destroyer. And with that icy realization came another knowledge. He had a job to do, and it didn't matter whether he was afraid or not.

It occurred to him, fleetingly, that maybe this was the secret of living.

Picking up the half-empty sack, Drake flung the door open; he could aim better from the outside. Two of the beasts had got through already. A well-placed flare drove them back, but he didn't dare let it happen again. Much closer, and he'd set fire to the barn. Just keep the circle closed as long as the flares last. Why? Because Tels is in there, and maybe— Well, a man lives as long as he can.

He had the last flare in his hand when he stopped. "Tels!" he shouted. "Tels, look! Flares all along the fields there. Terra's brought the settlers. We're saved, Tels!"

He ran inside, seeing as he did so, that Khom was breaking his battle formation as the flares sizzled up from the rear, heading out into the desert again. Tels still leaned weakly against the wall, but he held up his hand. Drake took it, prepared to help them up.

"No!" said Tels. "I'll faint if I stand up. Shake it, Earthpuppy. Shake it!"


The Treasure of Ptakuth

Astounding Science Fiction, April 1940

Terry Shane stood in his deserted camp and swore. To his left the red Martian desert stretched in waterless desolation to the horizon. To his right, perhaps fifty yards away, rose a range of barren hills, low and worn by the press of ages. And at his feet was all the equipment the deserting bearers had left him; a canteen that might, with careful nursing, take him across the desert to the oasis of Morn, whence he had just come.

"By the holy saints!" swore Terence Shane, in a fury as black as his hair; "I'll not be frightened from Ptakuth by any crawling scut that hides his face in the dark!"

The note in his hand mocked him. It had been pinned on his tent flap, and it said: "Your bearers have finally been persuaded to go home. Since you have proved obstinate, I can only say I hope you'll change your mind before you run into trouble. Having heard Terence Shane's boast that he never knows fear, I'm afraid you won't. But in all fairness, I warn you again: stay away from Ptakuth!"

It was signed Thaldrek of Ved. Shane knew of him. Everyone in the System knew of the Martian adventurer who sold valuable secrets to the highest bidder, and was never caught. Shane crumpled the paper in his great muscular hand and flung it away. Picking up the canteen, he swung off toward the hills which hid the lost city of Ptakuth from the world.

He found the place he was looking for: a gap where the mouth of a dry river joined the dry sea. Somewhere up the course of that dry river lay the cliff city of Ptakuth, cursed and lost for centuries that made Shane's head reel with the thinking of them. There were legends of Ptakuth on Mars as there were legends of Atlantis on Earth, and the gray-bearded men of the Martian Archeological Foundation had paid adventurer Terry Shane a goodly sum to find it for them.

The rock walls and the sand floor hurled the Martian sunlight on Shane until he was soaked with sweat and parched with thirst. He endured the thirst. There might be no water for miles, if at all.

"And if there is water," he reflected, "there'll surely be barbarians. Shunni, in this part of Mars, and tough lads in a fight. Well, I've been paid to find Ptakuth, and I've come too far to turn back now!"

In his heart he knew that wasn't the reason. The real reason was that someone wanted what he wanted, and dared him to come and get it.

He was climbing a narrow trail alongside the river bed when he heard the sound. It came from across the gorge, beating down from the rocky walls in broken, maddening echoes; a low, sonorous note like a bell clanging. Shane shook his dark head in pain. The sound set his eardrums to banging in and out, bemused his brain, enraged him, because he sensed a definite purpose behind it. There was nothing in these naked hills to make such a sound, except a man-made agency.

Furious, trembling with the pain of his ears, he put his hands over them and went on. Abruptly the sound stopped. His head vibrated dizzily for a moment. Then there was blessed silence. Frowning, Shane climbed on.

There was a faint noise high on the cliff top above him, and a pebble bounced on the path at his feet. Someone was up there, climbing cat-footed over the rocks, spying on him. Shunni barbarians, or the man who had left that taunting note on his tent flap? Shane's gray eyes were keen, his hand ready on the butt of his proton gun. But there was nothing but empty silence.

The musical note came again, lower in pitch so that it took his very heartbeats and shook them. The vibrations hammered at him from the cliffs, from the rocks on the bottom of the gorge, from the trail at his feet, booming and thudding and setting every atom of his body and brain aquiver with them. Shane had heard of a similar thing; how certain Venusian tribes used musical notes to torture their victims, letting constant vibration send them mad after days of agony.

The very rock quivered under his feet; the cliff beside him, when he touched it, sent the low-pitched pulsing shooting through him. His jaws rang against one another like a tuning fork, and his brain was a darkened, shuddering anguish.

It stopped, and he was weak with the silence. Flexing his great shoulders, he bellowed defiance across the empty gorge, but there was no answer. And he wondered, if the sound came again, if he could fight ahead against it.

"Faith," he said suddenly, "that's it! A warning, to make me go back."

His jaw set to an ugly line, and he went on, speeding his pace in the blinding heat.

Still he was conscious of watchers above him; faint clicks of metal on stone, a pebble dislodged from the crumbling rock. "Shunni," he decided, "because the notes came from across the gorge, and it's no barbarian making those."

Sound again, this time a high-pitched screaming that was just within hearing range. Shane cried out before he knew it. The sound was like a knife in his head, a thousand times worse than the low note. It sang itself into the very bones of his skull, piercing and shrilling, maddening him with the pain of it. Nothing would shut it out. Shane raged at his weakness; pain, privation, danger, he had stood without flinching. But this he couldn't fight; it got hold of his brain and sent him wild as a frantic horse.

He knew it was the last warning. He knew he wouldn't have obeyed it if he could. But he was frantic, insane, driven by the piercing shriek in his head.

He ran with all his strength, up the trail and through a sort of unroofed tunnel. And then, abruptly, he stopped. The agonizing shriek snapped off short. And Shane's hand dropped to his gun butt.

He had come out into what had once been a semicircular plateau, cupped in the wind-worn hills. Standing negligently at ease on the reddish earth were some two hundred Shunni warriors; great swarthy men in gaudy kilts and leather harness, bearing spears almost twice as long as Shane was high.

Shane's head turned quickly at a noise behind him. Then his hand dropped the half-drawn gun casually back in its holster. Tall warriors filled the tunnel back of him; he shrugged and followed their pointing spears out onto the plain.

Then, for the second time, he stopped.

"Faith," he murmured, "it's sun-stroke I have, and this a vision come to comfort me!"

The girl had come from behind the front rank of Shunni. She had sun-brown hair and hazel eyes and a queenly way about her, and the blue skirt and copper corselet she wore only made her gorgeousness a little more patently gorgeous. Shane set his thumbs in his belt and smiled, watching the glitter and swish of her as she came to stand in front of him.

In a minute he'd try the Martian dialects he knew. But now: "Girl, you're as pretty as Shaughnessy's little brown pig!"

"Thanks," said the girl, in perfect English. "You're not bad-looking yourself. Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

She laughed as Shane's tongue tried to come out of the paralysis of surprise; the clear, merry sound brought a shamed flush to the man's cheeks.

"You make a man's tongue speak out of turn, girl. I'm Terence Shane, heading an expedition for the Martian Archeological Foundation."

The girl frowned. "Expedition?"

Shane nodded. "My bearers left me back on the desert. I'm hunting for Ptakuth; it's a lost city somewhere in these hills."

The girl's face darkened. "The city," she said slowly, "with the treasure."

"Treasure?" Shane shook his head. "Perhaps they mentioned one, along with the curse and the destruction, but it means little." He grinned, looking down at her. "Who are you?"

The girl met his eyes for a long minute. Then, "Zenda Challoner," she said, as though it meant a lot.

The name struck an echo way back in the hazy corridors of Shane's memory, but whatever it might have meant was sidetracked in a sudden clamor in back of him. Shane swung to follow the girl's gaze, and his bronzed face hardened.

A group of warriors had come through the tunnel, and they had a captive; a slight, fair man, dressed like Shane in spun-glass tunic and shorts. The Irishman, looking at the newcomer's high-boned, hawk-clean face, murmured: "Thaldrek of Ved, by the devil himself."

Zenda Challoner smiled, and Shane found it difficult to believe that an angel's face could produce such a hard, mirthless expression. It was like a bared and sharpened spear point.

"Where did you get this one?" she demanded.

The leader grinned.

"On the other side of the river, xanara, beside a spaceship. Will there be sport tonight?"

There was a nasty thought behind that last, Shane felt. Zenda shook her head, saying brusquely: "Are you an archaeologist, too?"

The stranger had an easy smile. "No, xanara. I am—" His eyes, long, cloud-colored Venusian eyes in a Martian face, caught Shane's with suppressed laughter in them. "I'm Thaldrek of Ved, a dealer in—well, rare merchandise. My flier cracked up in the hills. Do I trespass?"

"You do," said Zenda Challoner curtly, and turned away with a gesture to the waiting Shunni.

In another minute Shane and Thaldrek, disarmed, were marching across the plateau and into a narrow defile, closely guarded by strapping barbarians.

The Martian grinned crookedly. "Looks as though we're in a mess, Terence Shane."

Shane glared at him. Then, "I've been in tighter spots than this," he said, and his eyes went to Zenda Challoner.

Thaldrek grunted. "Some day," he said feelingly, "you'll meet something that'll throw the fear of God into you. And I hope I'm there to see it!"

The red Martian sunset was deepening when they reached the valley where the Shunni lived; a place of low cliffs honeycombed with caves, with little tilled fields along the course of a thin trickle of water. Shane noted the guards at the one entrance, and had to admit that leaving was going to be harder than getting in.

The two captives were permitted to wash and eat. Then, when full dark had fallen and there was a flare of torches and cooking fires in the chill air, they were taken to Zenda Challoner's cave.

A big cave, floored and cushioned with skins, with an incongruous metal lock box on a high shelf. Thaldrek of Ved saw it, and Shane noted the quick flame that burned and then was hidden in the Venusian's long, cloud-colored eyes.

Zenda Challoner watched them, lithe and lovely, from a couch of skins, their two guns under her hand, and her face was hard and troubled all at once.

"I don't know what to do with you," she said abruptly. "If I let you go, you'll come back with more men, and it will mean war. I don't wish to keep you prisoners here. And I don't want to kill you."

"Why, now," smiled Shane easily, "couldn't we just go on to Ptakuth as we planned, and nobody bother anybody?"

Thaldrek laughed. "Yes, xanara. Why not?"

Zenda Challoner frowned angrily. "Are you accomplices?"

Shane growled, and Thaldrek said quietly, "We know each other by reputation rather than acquaintance!"

"Then what is it? You're hiding something!"

"So are you." Shane moved closer to her. "Who are you? And why are you keeping us from Ptakuth?"

The brown-haired girl gave him a long, level look. "My father," she said quietly, "was a god."

For the second time Shane's tongue was enmeshed in startlement. "A god!"

Zenda nodded. "He was Harold Challoner, The-One-Who-Never-Sleeps. He came here from Outside, many years ago, and settled among the Shunni. They knew he was a god, because he never slept. He mated with a woman of the tribe, and when it came time for his body to go elsewhere, his soul entered my body, and I, his daughter, became goddess-queen in his place. He left a certain trust with me, a guardianship."

"Of Ptakuth " murmured Thaldrek. "Of course."

Again that nebulous tugging at Shane's memory. Somewhere before he had heard the name of Harold Challoner.

He said gently, "You're too pretty for a goddess, and too little for a queen. You sleep, don't you?"

"Of course. I have said my mother was a Shunni woman. Therefore I am only half god."

"But what of Ptakuth?" Thaldrek's face was keen as a questing wolf's.

The girl seemed perplexed for a moment; that look of troubled indecision came again to her face. "It is forbidden," she said at length, "even to me." And she made an imperious gesture to a warrior standing guard.

As Thaldrek and Shane were led out, she said, "I will decide in the morning what to do with you."

Shane shrugged. With a colleen like that to deal with, no great harm could befall Terence Shane. But Thaldrek's keen face was set, his eyes unseeing with intense concentration.

Back in their cave, alone except for half a dozen Shunni on guard around a fire on the ledge outside, Shane turned on the Martian.

"All right, Thaldrek, it's time now for speaking. What are you after?"

Thaldrek had come out of his thoughtful daze. There was a look about him as though he had made his decision, and the world lay at his feet. Again Shane noted the mingled strains in him: cloudy eyes of Venus, wiry litheness of Mars, and the fair hair some Earthman had given him, on a planet where the eternal sunlight makes most men dark. Shane could have broken Thaldrek's slim, supple body in his two hands, but he could not down a grudging respect.

"I am," smiled Thaldrek of Ved, "doing exactly what you're doing—looking for Ptakuth."

Shane grunted. "I'm getting paid for it, though. You'll not be taking up archaeology this late in life, will you?"

"Have you heard mention of a treasure?"

"So that's it!" Shane let go a roar of laughter. "Yes, and I've heard of a curse and a destruction, too. All legendary bosh, Thaldrek!"

"The-One-Who-Never-Sleeps isn't legendary bosh, Shane; his daughter sits there, ruling these barbarians, believing she's a goddess, and guarding the door to Ptakuth. There must be a reason."

"Challoner. Harold Challoner. Got it! He headed an expedition in search of Ptakuth about twenty years ago. Did it with his own money, tried to keep it a secret. Disappeared, along with his three companions. He lived his life out here, of course. Wonder why he didn't come back when he failed?"

"He didn't fail," said Thaldrek slowly. "Remember, he was The-One-Who-Never-Sleeps."

Shane stood over the Martian, and there was no humor in his face. "What is the treasure of Ptakuth, that you're so anxious to get it? And what's all this talk of Challoner never sleeping?"

Thaldrek smiled at Shane, his hands folded on his belt. There was something dangerous in his smile.

"The gods didn't give me the body of a bull," he said, "so I've been forced to develop brains. The first law of a full brain is a close tongue."

He glanced at the skin-curtained entrance. Then, quietly, he asked, "How would you like to escape?"

Shane glared at him. "I could probably kill those six guards, but it's very angry the rest of the Shunni would be! Surely you know our escape lies through Zenda."

"Dealing with women, eh?" The Martian's veiled eyes held a malicious amusement. "I've heard your boast, Terence Shane. Are you afraid?"

His laugh stopped the Irishman's angry roar, but his hands were still at his belt.

"Why, now," snarled Terry Shane, "is it an angel you'll bring from heaven to carry us off, or himself from down below?"

Thaldrek snapped the zipper of his tunic down to the belt. Strapped tight against his muscular body was a web belt bearing two little square boxes, hidden by the blouse of the loose garment.

"An electro-vibrator," said Thaldrek. "Operates on tiny storage batteries, sending vibrations of ultra-sonic perception over a beam with a six-foot range. Really a miniature of the tonal apparatus I used on you back in the gorge. Small, but powerful. Watch."

He stood by the skin curtain, within four feet of the guards outside, manipulating the dials. As Shane listened, the talk and laughter died away. There was a clatter as someone's spear dropped. Then silence.

Thaldrek grinned. "Brains, Shane. Thought is electrical in principle; telepathy depends on electrical vibrations from one mind impinging on another. The ultra-sonic vibrations blank the conscious mind so that I can exercise complete control of anyone under its influence, provided I make the vibrations of my own mind strong enough through concentration. I told the guards to go to sleep."

"You win," grunted Shane. "But the holy saints keep me from tearing you apart before it's time!"

Phobos shot up out of the west as they stepped out onto the ledge among the sleeping guards, casting an ink-black shadow under the western wall of the valley. It was late, and the cooking fires had smoldered to ashes. What folk were still awake were in their caves, for the night was cold.

Prowling silently as cats down the well-worn trail in the moon-cast dark, Shane and Thaldrek made for Zenda's cave.

"How long will the guards sleep?" whispered Shane.

"About four hours," answered Thaldrek.

There were three guards on Zenda's ledge; the sonic-vibrator put them to sleep without trouble. Zenda slept alone, lying like a child, with her honey-brown hair tumbled over her shoulders. Thaldrek made sure, with the little box at his waist, that she slept soundly.

They retrieved the weapons Zenda had taken from them, and Shane turned to go. Thaldrek stopped him with a whispered, "Wait!"

"We have what we came for," Shane snapped.

Thaldrek shook his head impatiently. "You're taller. Reach me that lock box from the shelf."

Shane hesitated. "You want to find Ptakuth, don't you?" demanded Thaldrek. Shane shrugged and lifted down the heavy box, muscles coiling, along the one naked arm he deigned to use.

The lock was tight. Thaldrek turned to Zenda, lifting back the curtain of her hair with strangely gentle fingers. There was a twisted thong about her neck. The Martian loosed it, grasping the key that hung from it.

The opened box yielded a metal-leaf notebook, written close with acid-etched lines. Thaldrek opened it, taut with suppressed eagerness. "Harold Challoner's diary," he murmured. "The secret of Ptakuth!"

Shane's patience had reached the snapping point. Distrust of Thaldrek, perplexity over his reason for aiding his, Shane's, escape when he might have gone alone, dislike of the uninvited trespassing in Zenda Challoner's boudoir, combined to set an ugly temper rising in him.

Thaldrek's low voice stopped his half-defined impulse toward violence. Almost as though he were thinking aloud, the Martian stared at the notebook and spoke.

"He found the city, and the treasure. His three friends died there, realizing too late. When he understood his own condition he destroyed the entrance to the cliff city of Ptakuth and came here. Of course! Zenda has the only key."

"Zenda?" Shane was very close to him, his face hard.

Thaldrek met Shane's gaze. "The girl goes with us, Shane. She's the only one who can find Ptakuth for us. There's a hidden way that Challoner left, not quite daring to hide the treasure completely from the world. You only want the city; you're welcome to it. But I want the treasure!"

There was eager laughter under his words. "Ptakuth was cursed and destroyed because of that treasure, Shane. Challoner became a god because of it—and killed himself ten years ago. But there's a place for that treasure in the world, Shane, and I want it!"

Shane sensed danger very close. His gun was half out of its holster, but Thaldrek's hand was quicker on the dial. The tall man's eyes glazed, his face went slack, and he slid the gun back.

Thaldrek smiled and shook his head. "I don't know why I bother with you, Terence Shane, except that I had a hunch it would be like this. My sources of information are better than yours. The Shunni are going to be annoyed when they find their goddess gone—and being torn to pieces is such a messy death."

Tucking the notebook in his belt-pouch, Thaldrek turned to his prisoners. "Walk ahead of me, to the valley entrance. Zenda, you will handle anyone who gets in our way. I'll fix the guards."

A quarter of an hour later they were far beyond the valley, leaving half a dozen Shunni sleeping peacefully at their posts. Thaldrek spoke briefly but earnestly with Zenda, listening intently to her mechanical answers. When another half-hour of brisk walking across the barren, tumbled rocks was past, Thaldrek halted his strange little cavalcade.

A narrow cleft was driven into a low cliff nearby. Shane, obeying like an automaton, walked into it and lay down, falling instantly into a deep sleep.

"For three hours," ordered Thaldrek. "That's about the best I can do for you. The Shunni will be coming along here eventually; that should give them time to get past you. They won't see you, you have your gun, and you can suit yourself from there on." He grinned. "You should be duly grateful, but I suppose you'll only swear."

Thaldrek sealed the end of the cleft with a boulder, thinking over his plan. "It's cut rather fine, but I don't see why it won't work. The Shunni will be between me and Shane. I should be through and away before they get to Ptakuth, but in case they trap me there—they won't come in after me because the place is taboo—I've got Zenda to get me out. And I'll give the bomb plenty of time."

He turned to Zenda, still quiescent under the spell of the sonic hypnotism, and there was something sad and wistful in his long gray eyes as he looked at her.

"Take me to the secret entrance of Ptakuth, Zenda," he said quietly, and sighed.

Shane woke abruptly to the fading scuff of many sandaled feet and a muffled clank of weapons. Springing up, dazed and angry with half-remembered things, he climbed the concealing boulder in time to see the last of a band of Shunni warriors vanish into a tangle of naked tors. Phobos was low in the east, Deimos rising slowly over it to cast a jumble of conflicting shadows. A word came to Terry Shane's lips, and the word was "Zenda!" Thaldrek had taken her, to find the hidden way to Ptakuth and the treasure. What would he do, or had he done, to her afterward?

He could guess where the Shunni were going. Thaldrek and the girl must have left a trail that these hillmen could follow in the dark, and they wanted their goddess back.

Half wonderingly, Shane found his gun safe in his holster. Like a black bull he took the trail of the Shunni.

He had no notion of time. But suddenly, as he topped what had been in distant ages a wooded peak overlooking the river, he saw his goal. To his left the river widened to a great inland harbor; there were crumbling stone quays still jutting into dry red sand, but the cliffs behind them had fallen in ruin. Man-made ruin.

"Challoner destroyed the entrance," grunted Shane. "And that must be the one he left!"

Five hundred Shunni warriors squatted in a grim semicircle about a crack in a cliff some fifty yards to his right. Thaldrek and the girl were still in there, then. Shane nodded. Then a sudden icy question flashed in his brain. "What's taking him so long?"

There was just one way to get into that crack—from the top. The guarding Shunni would kill him in sheer rage if they caught him. Driven by haste that had something strange and disquieting in it, Shane skirted the cliff, climbed its wind-pitted surface at a safe distance, wormed his way silently back, and lowered himself into the narrow crack.

A man of lesser strength would have fallen. Shane, knees and elbows scraped raw, fingers bleeding, drenched with sweat, came safely to the bottom and turned down the low tunnel that opened into the heart of the cliff, drawing an atomic torch from his belt pouch.

The white beam showed him mighty buildings hewn out of the living rock, rearing up to hold the stony sky; great shadowy doorways and the marks of countless sandals in the stone floor underfoot. On all sides, branching away in every direction, were high-arched corridors broad as city streets, spanned at many levels by metal bridges. Shane stopped, uncertain.

From somewhere, thinned by distance and the winding of the maze-like galleries, came a voice, calling.

"Thaldrek!" grated Shane and started off, guided by that voice that called and called. The rocky walls picked up his footsteps, threw them from side to side, hurled them back at him from metal doorways.

New footsteps echoed abruptly, coming nearer. Around a carven corner came Thaldrek, his hawk face strained with a deadly urgency, and he was calling, "Zenda! Zenda Challoner!"

Torches made crazy patterns on the carven walls as Shane caught the running Martian by the shoulders, shook him savagely.

"Where is Zenda?"

"Lost," said Thaldrek, in a flat, quiet voice. "Lost in the dark in these corridors. And unless I find her and get us out of here within twenty minutes, we'll both die. You, too, Shane, since you somehow blundered in here."

"I didn't blunder," said Shane grimly. "And why will you die in twenty minutes?"

"I set the bomb forty minutes ago, to destroy the cyclotron. When I went back for Zenda, she was gone. It was my fault; in my excitement I forgot to give her a time command, and as soon as the sonic beam was off her, she regained consciousness. She ran away, of course, and I've been hunting her ever since."

There was much that Shane didn't understand, but there was just one thing now that mattered.

"Can I get to the bomb in time to disconnect it?" he asked, and Thaldrek's eyes widened slowly at the tone of his voice.

"You think I'm afraid to go back, don't you?" Thaldrek laughed suddenly. "And I am. Not of dying—but of living!"

His eyes fastened on Shane's. "Yes, you can get there. Perhaps you can disconnect it in three minutes, though I don't see how. But if you stay more than three minutes under the ray, you'll get what Challoner got. Immortality!

"I've already stayed the limit, making calculations and setting the bomb. And I don't want immortality at the price Ptakuth paid!"

Shane shook his head. "I don't understand. But I'll disconnect that bomb if-Wait!" His hand caught the neck of Thaldrek's tunic in a strangling grip. "What are you trying to pull? If the bomb goes off, it'll only destroy the cyclotron."

"Look." Thaldrek kicked the nearby wall, looked at Shane as a trickle of dust cascaded to the floor. "Mars is old. The water is gone from these rocks, the iron rusted out. The shock of that atomic bomb in the heart of the city will bring Ptakuth down in fragments."

Shane let him go. "Where is the bomb?"

Thaldrek turned. "This way. And hurry!"

Ringing, shadowy corridors reeled behind them. And abruptly Thaldrek snapped off his torch. "The treasure of Ptakuth, Shane."

Light filtered into the darkness, growing as they approached its source. A massive archway opened, and beyond it was a square, spreading away in majestic simplicity to a raised platform. On the platform, under banked generators and transformer tubes, hemmed in by screens of unfamiliar metal, towered a great machine; a vacuum tube standing between poles of an electro-magnet that must have generated twenty million volts. There was a sort of shimmering all through the square, as though there were colored light just beyond seeing range.

"It draws power from the heart of Mars itself," murmured Thaldrek. "A power that has never weakened." He stiffened suddenly. "Zenda!"

Walking slowly through the shimmer, her bronzed slimness undulant, her arms raised as though in adoration, Zenda Challoner came from around the circular platform. Shane gasped. He had not remembered she was so beautiful. She was transfigured, filled with a joyous vitality as a glass is filled with wine.

"Zenda!" shouted Thaldrek, and there was tragedy in his voice. The girl paid no attention. Thaldrek caught Shane's arm in a grip that made him wince. "Get her, Shane! Get her, before it's too late! Unless it is already—"

Shane didn't understand, but he caught the deadly terror in Thaldrek's voice. Terror not for himself, but for Zenda. Shane started forward, into the square. There was a mild electric shock, a surging in his blood as though all the life processes were being speeded up. He could understand Zenda's worship of the strange force.

"The bomb!" he said, stopping suddenly. "What about the bomb, Thaldrek?"

The Martian groaned. "Get Zenda! Never mind—oh, my God! There won't be time afterward. Five minutes left. And you'll have used at least half of your three minutes of safety!"

Terry Shane swore. "What is this talk of three minutes'?"

"The limit of safety under the ray. At three minutes the radiations make a definite impression on the body. At five you have immortality. At six, death!

"Get Zenda before you're both lost!"

Shane turned and ran toward the girl. The ray was like strong sunshine on him; he felt vitalized and invincible, afraid of nothing. Thaldrek was a quivering coward—

Harold Challoner stayed too long under the ray. He killed himself. He was The-One-Who-Never-Sleeps.

Something strange and cold caught Shane by the throat. Blood beat in his ears, his heart thundered, his knees bent under him. Ptakuth was cursed and lost, Challoner died by his own hand, and he, Terry Shane, was soaking in the same ray that caused it all.

He stopped, and a strange, incredulous look came over his face. "Faith," he whispered. "Faith, and I'm afraid!"

Thaldrek's voice spurred him. "Hurry, Shane, hurry!"

The Irishman shook his head to clear it. Zenda Challoner wavered in the misty radiance, utterly uncaring. Shane felt a surge of pity rise in him; pity, and something else. He grinned crookedly as he broke into a desperate run.

"And," he muttered, "I'm thinking I'm in love also!"

The girl was warm and light in his arms. He shielded her with his body, not knowing that the rays went through him unchecked. And, while he ran with all the strength that was in him, he kissed the soft hollow of her throat where it lay under his lips.

"Three minutes left," said Thaldrek tightly as he caught the girl from Shane. "And only a minute and a half left for you, if you go back."

"Can a man be in love and afraid at the same time?" wondered Shane, and turned back into the shimmering square.

Across the sandal-hollowed stones, running like a deer with the new power that was in him from the ray. Up the steps of the circular dais, searching, searching. Then he saw it, a little globe like a big marble, with a timing device set clockwise atop it in a strong metal case.

Shane had seen bombs like that before. Once they were set there was no stopping them, unless one had time and the proper tiny tools. And again fear gripped Terry Shane as he thought of the seconds ticking away, felt the ray beating its wonderful, horrible strength into him, thought of those artificially unstabilized atoms ready to blow Ptakuth and everyone in it to powder. Fear, and a humble realization that there were bigger things in the world than Terence Shane.

There was just one thing he could try. Kneeling, he caught the timing device between thumb and forefinger, set the thumb and forefinger of his other hand over those. And he pressed.

Veins swelled in his forehead, his face drew into a tight mask of agonized effort. The thing was so tiny, his strength baffled by its very smallness. He lost track of time, of everything except that stubborn bit of metal between his fingers. Perhaps he was already a "god" like Challoner. Perhaps the bomb would go off in his hand. Perhaps there was no use of anything, because Zenda was already cursed with the curse of Ptakuth.

Blood spurted from his fingertips as the flesh split under the pressure. One more effort, and he must stop.

Like a sweating colossus he poured every last ounce of his strength into his crushing fingers. And the metal gave, bent inward, split away with a tiny jangle of ruptured instruments.

Shane sagged, his cramped hands cushioning the fall of the bomb. He would have lain there and slept, but that a voice kept shouting his name. "Thirty seconds, Shane. Run!"

Blindly he rose and ran across the wide and empty square, hardly knowing it when he was safe in the corridor, not knowing it at all when ultra-sonic waves blanked what was left of his conscious mind, set him walking toward the entrance where the Shunni sat.

He came to with his head pillowed in Zenda's lap. They were atop the hill from which he had first seen Ptakuth, and where the cliffs had risen beside the dead sea, there was now only a vast rubble-choked hollow. Ptakuth was gone, the treasure with it.

Shane struggled up, questions coming to his lips. A change came suddenly over Zenda; her eyes glazed, and when she spoke it was not with her voice.

"This is post-hypnotic command, Shane," she said. "Don't worry, Zenda is quite safe. Her body displays none of the symptoms of immortality; she had probably been there only a minute or so.

"I went back, after Zenda got us through and sent her warriors away, and set another bomb near the entrance. The secret of the cyclotron is too big and dangerous, I realize now, to loose upon the world, no matter how much money it might bring me. That's my business, as you know; selling secrets to the highest bidder. I set the first bomb, of course, to avoid any competition. The second was to destroy all my notes as well as the 'treasure' itself.

"This much I can say, Shane; tell it to the men of the Martian Foundation, and let them make what good they can of it. The cyclotron fired hydrogen bullets against a screen of yttrium. Using rubidium filters, the scientists of Ptakuth generated a ray with a wonderful property; the property of making the human bloodstream radio-active with a gamma-principle. This gamma element in the blood gave a power of regeneration to the body cells, but most of all, being in itself a germ-destroying element, it made the human body immune to all disease. You can see how this would extend the life span.

"The tragedy was that the ray destroyed whatever mysterious center of the brain it is that controls sleep. Imagine, Shane; a lifetime of several centuries, with never a moment's relaxation in sleep, never a quiet time of darkness and rest. Every second of every day lived to the uttermost. Ptakuth went mad! Like Challoner, it destroyed itself, and the rest of the world said it was cursed. Ptakuth was shunned.

"Yet there may still be good in the secret. Let modern scientists build what they can from the scraps of knowledge you have; they may find a safer way.

"We may meet again somewhere. If we do, remember that I know your secret. You were afraid twice on the same night!

"Good-by, and good luck to you and Zenda. May your daughters be as lovely, your sons as brave!"

Abruptly, as though it had never been, the post-hypnosis was gone. Zenda smiled, half shyly. Shane stretched out his arms, cradled her face between hands bandaged with strips of her blue skirt. "Thaldrek told me what you did," whispered Zenda. "At least I know."

Miles away on the other side of the dry river, a small spaceship roared up and drew a streak of vanishing flame against the paling sky. Shane looked after it with an odd little grin. Then he bent toward Zenda.

He stopped, chuckling. "Faith, girl," he murmured, "I'm afraid again!"

But not for long.


The Tapestry Gate

Strange Stories, August 1940

"I MUST have it, Dick. It's exactly what I want for your den."

"But I don't want it, Jane," groaned Dick Stratton. "I want that sporting print of mine."

Jane Stratton's carefully made-up face, under the fashionable onstrosity she termed a hat, was set like a china mask.

"I'm going to have that place decent enough so that I can show it my friends without apologizing. Will you bid for it, or must I?" Her voice was hard, uncompromising.

"You don't give a damn what I want, do you?" muttered Stratton savagely. "You don't care about anybody but yourself." Jane shrugged coldly.

"I can't make you see what possible difference it can make to you," she answered. "You always have your nose poked into some silly book anyway. Are you going to bid?"

Dick Stratton placed his bid. He was filled with cold desperate rage. not so much against the scrap of tapestry itself as what it stood for. To him it was a symbol of Jane's implacable domination, her maddening selfishness and stupidity.

Three times in the last year his house had been torn to pieces and redone in answer to the latest fad. It was no longer a home – it was a showcase for Jane. He was banished to his den, and even there he had nothing to say about the furnishings, though his bank account and salary were drained to the bottom to pay for them.

He got the tapestry for seventy dollars. It was an odd thing, about two feet square, with nothing but a patternless blending of odd colors. Jane took it with a little nod of triumph.

"This finishes the house," she said. "Let's go"

"Until next time," prophesied Stratton, under his breath. Their expensive coupe stood at the curb. Before getting in, Jane unrolled the tapestry in the sunlight.

"Modern as Dali. Pity you can't appreciate these things, Dick. It would make things so much more agreeable for me."

Stratton stifled his mounting fury. The tapestry looked different out in the sunlight, almost as though it would form a picture if one could just find the focus. Black and brown and silver, russet and gold, it shone with a soft lustre unlike any thread he had ever seen. Queer, springy texture, too. He reached out to touch it.

"De Good Lawd have mussy!"

Stratton jerked a quick, startled look upward. The Negro bootblack who kept a stand beside the auctioneer's was staring at the tapestry, wild-eyed with fear. As though drawn by the sheer fascination of terror, he came closer.

"Ah seed one o' dem befo'.Ah look into a conjure-woman's hut way down in de swamps in Loosiana, an' she done had one. She laughin' fit to bus', an' she say Mis' Commeroi's name, and nex' week Mis' Commeroi done gone! De conjure-woman say it's de Devil's joke-rag, whut's used all over de worl' to trap people.

"T'ain't only in dis' worl'!" His gnarled black hand fastened hard on Stratton's arm. "De conjure-people knows conjures in other places. Dey swap souls, jus' fo de laugh. Anywheah dey's hate in de house, it work. It steal yo' soul! Hate's whut make it work. Burn it! Burn it!"

Stratton disengaged his arm in a burst of anger.

"Sorry," he said, "but I just paid seventy dollars for that rag. My wife insists it's modern art, so you must be mistaken. Besides," he added dryly, "there's no hate in our house" And he smiled as he thought of his own growing dark hate.

He turned his back on Jane's sharp look and slid under the wheel. The Negro still stood there, shivering, his gaze on the tapestry, Iying now in Jane's lap.

"Look whut it's made of," he whispered. "Den maybe Ah'm not such a fool."

Stratton looked.The sunlight glinted on the haphazard threads, crisp and almost alive looking. It was like — well, like Jane's hair had Keen when he married her. That was before he had money, before the lie beauty parlors had created their shellacked perfection.

With a shock of revulsion, he realized what it was.

"Jane! It's human hair!" he exclaimed.

Jane's expensively-gloved hands recoiled from it.

"Ugh!" she shuddered. "How disgusting! Dick, take it back. I won't have it in the house!"

Stratton's mouth twisted in a little smile. After all, what was so disgusting about it? Wigs were made of human hair, and nobody minded.

"Why not? Just think, Jane, there won't be a woman in NewYork that won't envy you," he sneered. "You'll have something that nobody else can possibly copy I can just see Mrs. Lydell—"

"You needn't make fun of my friends," snapped Jane. Rather reluctantly, she picked it up, turned it in the sunlight. "Still, there's something in what you say. Alice Kelly copied everything in my drawing room and I had to have it completely done over. And after all, it'll he in your den.bYes, I'll keep it."Jane, thought Stratton as he drove away, was really a horrible woman. His knuckles showed white against the steering wheel as he felt helpless anger welling up in him.

The Negro bootblack watched the car as far as he could see it. Then he shook his head and muttered something as his fingers hint lied the amulet in his pocket.

That night, when Dick Stratton rose to go to bed, he glanced at the tapestry hanging over the cubistic mantel. The light from the nearby, hideous lamp brought the formless pattern almost into focus. It He had a momentary glimpse of people ringed about some central

beneath a darkly branching thing, and just above the center of the little square he thought he saw a face. An evil, laughing face.

"Nonsense," he grunted. And then the bootblack's half forgotten words came back. He stared at the tapestry, drowsily, thinking of the disappearance of Mis' Commeroi, whoever she was, and thinking-

With a start of horror, he realized what he was thinking. He was thinking how wonderful it would be if the Negro's ravings were true, if Jane might disappear into the picture and leave him free to find happiness. He was thinking of murder.

He turned and fled the room.

Jane didn't sleep well, either, that night. Stratton could hear her tossing in the adjoining room. It kept him awake, and he thought, though he didn't wish to think. Jane was ruining him. She was vain and extravagant and foolish, and cared for nothing except for what she could get out of him. But he had no real grounds for divorce. She'd fight to keep him with every bit of strength and every trick at her command. Besides that, he couldn't afford the scandal.

And yet his life was ruined. He was still young. If Jane should die-- 

"No!" he whispered. "Never that. You can't get away with that!"

After a long time he slept and dreamed of a soul-trap made of human hair and the Devil laughing over Jane's dead body.

Jane was late for breakfast. Stratton, on his way down, was drawn as though by a magnet into his den. Sunlight struck through ultraviolet glass, which, like everything else in the place, he hated. It shone obliquely on the tapestry

Stratton felt the skin of his back crawl icily--

There was a picture!

Twelve people were standing in a ring about a cross-shaped block that was oddly channeled. A most peculiar and unpleasant tree coiled twisting branches above them, and, standing behind the cross-shaped block so that his face was just above the tapestry's center

He wasn't really a man. Somehow Dick Stratton knew that. He looked like a man, but no normal human ever had such eyes, like mirrors of all the foul, evil thoughts that had been born since time began. Laughing eyes. Horribly laughing. As though sin and wickedness were the most pleasureable, the most amusing, the most soul-satisfying things in the universe.

Involuntarily Stratton closed his own eyes and jerked away; and when he looked again the picture was gone.

"Some trick of the light," he whispered almost fiecely. "Imagination. Those dreams I had."

But he couldn't shake the vision of those laughing eyes. In self-defense, he tried again to find the same spot from which he had seen the picture, but the sun had moved a bit and he could not. For a long time he stood staring at the blurred, mocking little rag, trying to understand the feelings that raged within him. Then, starting almost guiltily at Jane's step in the hall, he shook himself out of the queer mood that held him.

"Just tired," he told himself. "Worried. Mustn't let this —" He'd been going to say "morbid," but the mood was more than morbid. It was horrible. Funny how that Negro's wild ranting had fished up the In oughts he had never admitted even to himself. You didn't think about — murder. You didn't let yourself hate people that way, openly

OF course, it wasn't really murder. That stuff about the tapestry being a trap was just ignorant superstition. He hadn't really seen that picture. There was nothing to it. But the thought was there just the same, and he couldn't blink it — he wished there were something to it.

"No I don't!" Stratton pressed his fists to his temples. "Jane isn't really bad. Only selfish and stupid. I've got to stop all this right now Alter all, I married her. I've got to try to go on."

He didn't look at the tapestry again. But as he left the room, a crossed his mind, unbidden:

"If what the Negro said was true, it wouldn't really be murder. Because there wouldn't be any body." He repeated it, half aloud.

Jane faced him across the table like a china doll dressed in peach, colored satin.

"Dick," she said, before he was fairly in his chair, "I've go to have some money."

"But, Jane! Your allowance —"

"It's gone. I spent it on that dress for Mrs. Lydell's reception, but I've got to have another."

Stratton put down his paper.

"Why, Jane?" he asked.

"Alice Kelly has one of the same material. I simply can't wear the thing to the reception."

"Then wear something else."

"Dick! You know perfectly well I haven't —"

"Never mind," he said wearily. "I can't give you any more money this month.You've cleaned me out."

Jane's mouth tightened and her blue eyes went flat with anger.

"I call that gratitude!" she shouted. "I wear myself out trying to keep your home from looking like a hog-wallow. I try to keep up appearances when I go out. And you call me extravagant! Well, if you haven't any pride, I have. I'm not going to let those women laugh at us behind our backs because you're so stingy"

Stratton got up.

"Jane," he said very quietly, "you'd better be careful. I don't want the scandal, nor the trouble. But if you don't learn some sense, by heaven, I'll divorce you!"

Jane smiled.

"You can't," she said smugly. "I won't give you a divorce. And if you try to get one, I'll tell about Doris Rider."

Stratton's heart stopped, jerked, and pounded on. He hadn't known that Jane had ever heard of Doris Rider.

"You can't," he said thickly "There's never been anything between us. Nothing at all!"

"But you can't prove it." Jane nodded, sure of herself. "Even if you could, I don't think such publicity would do her career any good. She's pretty famous, you know. Child welfare, isn't it? I think you'd best make me out a check, Dick."

He made it out without seeing either pen or figures.Then he left the room. He found himself standing in his den, staring at the tapestry, fists clenched and veins almost bursting with the black rage that shook him.

"I wish it were true!" he whispered savagely "I wish the damned thing were a trap. I wish Jane were dead and in hell!"

It couldn't be just the light. It was as though the hate in him reached out, touched the little woven square of human hair and brought out the picture like a magic wash. Twelve people around a cross-shaped block, with that high priest of hell down at them. It was clear and unmistakable. So clear that Stratton realized there was an empty place in the ring just at the high priest's right, as though the weaver had intended a thirteenth person.

He went closer. It must be the violet glass that gave the picture the illusion of depth, the sudden dizzy effect of mists parting over an abyss. It was almost as though he could see the trees of that strange forest growing, spreading back and out, shooting upward into an eerie sky.

He found he was trembling violently. He turned away, though it took all his will power. He must get hold of himself—The crazy gibberings of that bootblack, coupled with his own disrupted emotional state, had set everything awry. Suppose he did see a picture. There had been pictures before, done with treated dyes that showed only in certain lights or temperatures. After all, he had no idea how human hair would react as a fabric. The fact that there was a picture in the tapestry didn't in any way mean that what the Negro said was

A soul-trap. Conjure-folk of one world bartering souls with the wizards of another. Traffickers in evil, laughing at their secret jokes. Even Satan had to have a laugh now and then.

"Anywheah dey's hate in de house, it work!"

"No," said Dick Stratton. "No. I'm a sensible man. It's impossible.

I'll simply get rid of the cursed thing."

But if he did, he'd be admitting fear. And besides, buried deep under his denials, under the revulsion of his civilized, conscious mind, was the fiendish, trembling hope that it was true.

For the second time Dick Stratton fled the room. And it seemed

that he took with him a breath of charnel wind from a deep and rotting forest.

Jane slept even worse that night. Dick Stratton shivered in a mad turmoil of thought. In the morning, utterly unable to keep away, he looked at the tapestry.It must have been the light; but he was almost sure that a nebulous mist was forming in the thirteenth place, the gap in the circle.

In the evening they went to one of Jane's interminable 'musicales.' Stratton, dog tired, went to his den for some papers he'd want in the morning. And this time there was no doubt. A blurred shape was forming on the weird tapestry.

Jane's voice woke him from troubled sleep, late that night.

"What will you give me?" she was saying, quite clearly.

Stratton smiled grimly, then shivered. There was something unnatural about her voice, about the way she waited, as though she were listening to someone. After a bit she sighed, a little breath of pure ecstasy.

"How wonderful!" she whispered. "Everything I want. Everything! And no one to nag me. But so far away, another world!" Again the waiting silence.

"What payment?" she whispered. A pause. "It can't be anything very bad, you're so nice. So generous. Everything I want! But my husband?"

There was quite a long wait this time. And then Jane laughed and rolled over into sound, deep sleep.

It was several minutes before Dick Stratton realized what a chillingly horrible sound that little low chuckle had been.

Driven by a feverish wildness, he went quietly downstairs, using a small pocket torch. In the pitch darkness of the den the beam made a brilliant white finger of light and touched unerringly on the thirteenth place in the circle in the tapestry of human hair.

The mist had thickened, grown to the blurred yet recognizable outlines of a woman.

The torch went out as Stratton dropped it. He stood there in the grip of a dense fear that crawled out of some unknown abyss to freeze his heart to ice and his blood to snow-water. Every atom of common sense, of sanity, or normality, rose in him to declare that this was a lie, that it was all a nightmare from which he would awaken.

But he knew. And the Negro had known. Jane, sleeping upstairs with some strange new power, knew.

There was hate in this house. He hated Jane, and his hate had broken ken the barrier. He had let Jane's selfish little soul be temptred to--to what?

Even in the dark the picture was visible, as though it had light of its own. It was as if some unimagined moon rode an eerie sky, to light a demon's way through that forest. And all the while the high-priest's face was full of laughter.

Shuddering, sick with terror, Dick Stratton pressed his hands to his pounding temples. There was still time. He could burn the tapestry. Jane would be safe. The whole mad business could be forgotten.

But he wouldn't be free. He'd have Jane's selfishness, Jane's extravagance, Jane's smug knowledge of her power over him, until the end of his life, or the end of his money – or both. This way, if he didn't burn the tapestry, he'd be rid of her. He wouldn't really have murdered her. There couldn't possibly be any legal repercussions. They'd never find her body, because it would be in the tapestry. He'd he free.

He could enjoy life, perhaps even marry Doris Rider.

Another thought occurred to him, and he jerked a frightened glance at the picture. If the hated one was trapped into the other world, what happened to the hater?

Then he shook his head. The circle was closed. There was no more room for anyone. Besides, after Jane was gone, he could burn the tapestry. Then the gateway would be closed forever.

For a long, long time Dick Stratton stood in that cold, dark room, looking into the laughing eyes of the high-priest. Then he turned and went back to bed, leaving the tapestry safe on the wall.

Jane was languid and tired the next day. It was as though some vital force were being drained out of her. Stratton thought of the mist in the tapestry and smiled. He even gave her a check without complaint.

"You dreamed last night. I heard you talking," he said, prompted by a curiosity he couldn't deny.

"Did I? I don't remember." Jane stared vacantly out of the win, dow.

Stratton fought down a shudder and left.

That night Jane, moving almost as though in a dream, put on a white satin gown that had been part of her trousseau. It looked more like an evening dress, with its exquisite white roses at the neck. One

them was loose.

Dick Stratton lay down, but he knew he wouldn't sleep that night.

He heard Jane's breathing slow to a deep, steady rhythm. For several hours she slept. Then, without speaking or waking, he heard her get up.

He followed her silently downstairs. Moving slowly at first, Jane went faster and faster, like a child approaching some promised treat. At the doorway of the den she paused, and Stratton saw her shiver, as though some shadow of dread had touched her. Then she went through.

He didn't follow. He knew he couldn't and remain sane. Grabbing a whiskey decanter from the library, he fled back upstairs, where he paced his room all night in a curious and semi-alcoholic state that plunged between light-headed relief and nightmare horror.

Morning brought saner thinking. His first impulse was to burn the tapestry at once, but he decided against it. The act was too abrupt, too senseless. It might even lead to awkward questions. And while there was no danger of a murder charge lodging permanently, there was always the fact that he dared not tell the truth. It would only mean an insane asylum.

Taking a deep breath, he went downstairs to call the police.

He did rather well with his bewildered husband act. He might have managed to get away with it, but there were complications. Jane's maid testified that her lady wasn't the sort of person to leave in the middle of the night without money, or clothes.

The butler hastened to tell of their quarrel over money. Jane's mother, a fat, overdressed, hysterical woman, heaped abuse on Dick Stratton's head. And the Law frowned, having heard before of mysterious vanishings that turned out to have been involuntary.

Stratton was called into the den for private questioning. He stood it for a surprisingly long time, bathed in icy sweat, heart thudding, wildly, fists clenched. But his eyes were drawn, slowly, inexorably above the mantel toward the cloth made of human hair.

A shaft of sunlight shone through the violet glass, lighting the Lip tapestry like a spotlight.The ring of people stood there under the monstrous tree, clearer than Stratton had ever seen them. Again he had he that dizzy sense of depth, of distance. Their faces were ghoulish, convulsed with a secret mirth that held the shadow of a horror beyond human knowledge. They waited; with a curious, relaxed tensity, they wanted. And the eyes of the high-priest laughed.

I he nebulous mist had thickened to solidity. The thirteenth place filled.

Dick Stratton's nerves broke. His story lost coherence, became studded with babblings that hung on the brink of madness. He tried to pull himself together. He knew, in some lucid corner of his brain, that it was only the shock of seeing the final, indisputable proof—the mad, the impossible. He achieved silence, but that was all.

The frown of the Law deepened. The half-empty whiskey decanter was found in his room. And then, under the tapestry, almost hidden by the cubistic jut of the hearth, a white satin rose.

Dick Stratton looked at his wife, standing at the high-priest's right, at the head of the cross-shaped block. The white satin gown showed bone-white against the dark of the twisting tree, the gown with the satin rose missing at the neck.

"What are you staring at?" demanded the Law, and it was then Stratton realized that the picture was visible only to himself. He just a shade hysterically.

"You'd better come with us," said the Law, "till we get this business cleared up. Sorry. Suspicion of murder."

Dick Stratton went quietly. He wasn't afraid of a murder charge. But an uneasy question clung in his mind.

"The Devil's joke-rag. What are they laughing at?" he would ask himself frantically.

After a bit he was glad he was in jail. He hadn't realized what an unhealthy influence the house was beginning to have on him. He stood the grilling of the homicide men well enough, and by nightfall he had so recovered his assurance that he lay down on his cell cot in for healthy sleep. It was all over, and he was rid of Jane. He was safe. All he had to do now was wait until they let him go. Then he would burn the tapestry and forget about it.

He slept but not well. He woke in the morning, tired and dimly conscious of dreams, dreams he could not quite recall, hideous dreams.

It was then that he began to be afraid.

THE next night it was worse. He woke in a cold sweat of fear, his mind breaking with an almost physical struggle from a black web of evil. Then he slept again, dreamed again, and woke, screaming. He fought until they threatened him with a strait-jacket. Then he crouched silently in a corner, trembling because of his knowledge.

He, too, was being drawn into that circle!

Another nebulous mist was growing and thickening on that hellish tapestry of human hair, a mist that would be himself. He knew that, surely as he had ever known anything in his life.

He had to get out. He had to go and burn that tapestry. But he couldn't get out. He had to wait. He fought against sleep, but it trapped him. He dreamed, of a ring of leering faces, of a monstrous, towering tree, of a band of constriction, of heaviness.

Jane's dreams couldn't have been like this. She hadn't remembered them when she woke. And the circle was filled. There was no place for him to go.

What was happening to him? What inevitable fate was in store for him?

They talked about letting him go the next day. No body, no murder. But the law was reluctant to give up, just yet. Stratton stayed. And again sleep caught him like an entangling cloak.

He saw the tapestry hanging on his wall, and a little point of light struck full on the high-priest's face. His eyes were full of laughter, his face convulsed with some secret, cosmic mirth.

A gateway between two dimensions, a trap woven of human hair to snare souls so that Satan could have his laugh. Stratton felt evil. A black, abnormal sensation brushed his mind with charnel fingers. An evil that attacked the subconscious in sleep and lured the soul away, away into 

He woke shrieking, fighting back a knowledge that struggled to reveal itself. Again they threatened him into silence, and again he crouched — shivering, thinking.

He could feel a vital force draining out him. First from his soul, then his body. Something was waiting for him in the tapestry, something that made his dreams different from Jane's.

It wouldn't be long now — perhaps tonight. He had to get out, he had to burn the tapestry before it was too late.

Miraculously, his cell door clashed open.

"All right, Stratton," they said. "This still looks fishy, but we can't prosecute without a body. You can go."

His trip home was a nightmare wherein he strove to hurry with his feet buried in quicksand. Everything was against him — traffic lights, all the possible delays of driving. A consuming weakness weighted him, coupled with fear that tottered on the brink of madness. One single thought hammered over and over within his mind:

"Burn the tapestry, burn the tapestry."

The servants were gone, amusing themselves during his absence. He let himself in, ran panting down the hall to his den. The sun was dropping low in the west.

Shaking with frantic haste, Stratton clawed his cigarette lighter from his pocket and reached up to tear the tapestry from its place on the wall.

A level red ray struck through the violet glass full on the waiting, laughing eyes of the high-priest. Those eyes drew Stratton's as though an invisible bond had been forged in those minutes when he had stood there in the dark, making his decision.

Stratton screamed once. The lighter dropped from his hand and lay unheeded, burning a hole in the pale rug.

The sunlight dimmed, reddened. Shadows curled across his vision, drew back, showed him depth and thickness. He reeled in icy vertigo as distance opened suddenly into long forest aisles. Tiny trees shot up and up into an eerie sky.

Dick Stratton swayed horribly between two worlds. The little figures swelled dizzily to human size and the shadows thickened around the monstrous tree. A heavy, sepulchral breeze rustled the clothing of the thirteen who stood in the waiting circle, and the face of the high-priest was horribly close to his own.

wrenching whirl of worlds and dimensions, Dick Stratton looked at the spot where his soul-mist had thickened and shaped.

Then he was lying on the grooved and cross-shaped block. Bonds cut his wrists and ankles as he stared up into a face contorted with secret, evil mirth.

A pan-pipe made a reedy, whispering chuckle. A little ripple of laughter ran through the waiting circle. And as though the pipe had been a signal, they closed in.

A ring of faces was over him, blotting out the twisting pattern of the tree above. He saw the stamp of evil on them, the mark of souls condemned mingled with the sins that had brought them there–hate, greed, wickedness. His gaze fled wildly across them, stopped on Jane's haughty, selfish face – a face that had changed....

The high-priest laughed, and the deep, gloating sound went round the circle like a litany. The Devil's joke-rag. Why did they laugh, why -- 

Dick Stratton lay on the cross-shaped block, quite still, and beyond screaming.

In another minute, he would know.


The Stellar Legion

Planet Stories, Winter 1940

Silence was on the barracks like a lid clamped over tight-coiled springs. Men in rumpled uniforms—outlanders of the Stellar Legion, space-rats, the scrapings of the Solar System—sweated in the sullen heat of the Venusian swamplands before the rains. Sweated and listened.

The metal door clanged open to admit Lehn, the young Venusian Commandant, and every man jerked tautly to his feet. Ian MacIan, the white-haired, space-burned Earthman, alone and hungrily poised for action; Thekla, the swart Martian low-canaler, grinning like a weasel beside Bhak, the hulking strangler from Titan. Every quick nervous glance was riveted on Lehn.

The young officer stood silent in the open door, tugging at his fair mustache; to MacIan, watching, he was a trim, clean incongruity in this brutal wilderness of savagery and iron men. Behind him, the eternal mists writhed in a thin curtain over the swamp, stretching for miles beyond the soggy earthworks; through it came the sound every ear had listened to for days, a low, monotonous piping that seemed to ring from the ends of the earth. The Nahali, the six-foot, scarlet-eyed swamp-dwellers, whose touch was weapon enough, praying to their gods for rain. When it came, the hot, torrential downpour of southern Venus, the Nahali would burst in a scaly tide over the fort.

Only a moat of charged water and four electro-cannons stood between the Legion and the horde. If those things failed, it meant two hundred lives burned out, the circle of protective forts broken, the fertile uplands plundered and laid waste. MacIan looked at Lehn's clean, university-bred young face, and wondered cynically if he was strong enough to do his job.

Lehn spoke, so abruptly that the men started. "I'm calling for volunteers. A reconnaissance in Nahali territory; you know well enough what that means. Three men. Well?"

Ian MacIan stepped forward, followed instantly by the Martian Thekla. Bhak the Titan hesitated, his queerly bright, blank eyes darting from Thekla to Lehn, and back to MacIan. Then he stepped up, his hairy face twisted in a sly grin.

Lehn eyed them, his mouth hard with distaste under his fair mustache. Then he nodded, and said; "Report in an hour, light equipment." Turning to go, he added almost as an afterthought, "Report to my quarters, MacIan. Immediately."

MacIan's bony Celtic face tightened and his blue eyes narrowed with wary distrust. But he followed Lehn, his gaunt, powerful body as ramrod-straight as the Venusian's own, and no eye that watched him go held any friendship.

Thekla laughed silently, like a cat with his pointed white teeth. "Two of a kind," he whispered. "I hope they choke each other!" Bhak grunted, flexing his mighty six-fingered hands.

In his quarters, Lehn, his pink face flushed, strode up and down while MacIan waited dourly. It was plain enough what was coming; MacIan felt the old bitter defensive anger rising in him.

"Look," he told himself inwardly. "Books. Good cigars. A girl's picture on the table. You had all that once, you damn fool. Why couldn't you. . ."

Lehn stopped abruptly in front of him, grey eyes steady. "I'm new here, MacIan," he said. "But we've been Legion men for five generations, and I know the law; no man is to be questioned about his past. I'm going to break the law. Why are you here, MacIan?"

MacIan's white head was gaunt and stubborn as Tantallon Rock, and he kept silent.

"I'm trying to help," Lehn went on. "You've been an officer; every man in the barracks knows that. If you're here for any reason but failure in duty, you can be an officer again. I'll relieve you of special duty; you can start working for the examinations. No need to waste you in the ranks. Well?" MacIan's eyes were hidden, but his voice was harsh. "What's behind this, Lehn? What the hell is it to you?"

The Venusian's level gaze wavered; for a moment the boy looked through the man, and MacIan felt a quick stab in his heart. Then all that was gone, and Lehn said curtly,

"If you find the barracks congenial, stay there, by all means. Dismissed!"

MacIan glared at him half-blindly for a moment, his fine long hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Then he 'bout faced with vicious smartness and went out.

Nearly an hour later he stood with the Martian Thekla on the earthworks, waiting. The monotonous pipes prayed on in the swamp; MacIan, looking up at the heavy sky, prayed just as hard that it would not rain. Not just yet. Because if it rained before the patrol left, the patrol would not leave; the Nahali would be on the march with the very first drop.

"And my chance would be gone," he whispered to himself.

Thekla's bright black eyes studied him, as they always did; an insolent, mocking scrutiny that angered the Scot.

"Well," he said dryly. "The perfect soldier, the gallant volunteer. For love of Venus, Thekla, or love of the Legion?"

"Perhaps," said Thekla softly, "for the same reason you did, Earthman. And perhaps not." His face, the swart, hard face of a low-canal outlaw, was turned abruptly toward the mist-wrapped swamp. "Love of Venus!" he snarled. "Who could love this lousy sweatbox? Not even Lehn, if he had the brains of a flea!"

"Mars is better, eh?" MacIan had a sudden inspiration. "Cool dry air, and little dark women, and the wine-shops on the Jekkara Low-canal. You'd like to be back there, wouldn't you?"

To himself, he thought in savage pleasure, "I'll pay you out, you little scum. You've tortured me with what I've lost, until I'd have killed you if it hadn't been against my plan. All right, see if you can take it!"

The slow dusk was falling; Thekla's dark face was a blur but MacIan knew he had got home. "The fountains in the palace gardens, Thekla; the sun bursting up over red deserts; the singing girls and the thil in Madame Kan's. Remember the thil, Thekla? Ice cold and greenish, bubbling in blue glasses?"

He knew why Thekla snarled and sprang at him, and it wasn't Thekla he threw down on the soft earth so much as a tall youngster with a fair mustache, who had goaded with good intent. Funny, thought MacIan, that well-intentioned goads hurt worse than the other kind.

A vast paw closed on his shoulder, hauling him back. Another, he saw, yanked Thekla upright. And Bhak the Titan's hairy travesty of a face peered down at them.

"Listen," he grunted, in his oddly articulated Esperanto. "I know what's up. I got ears, and village houses got thin walls. I heard the Nahali girl talking. I don't know which one of you has the treasure, but I want it. If I don't get it. . ."

His fingers slid higher on MacIan s shoulder, gripped his throat. Six fingers, like iron clamps. MacIan heard Thekla choking and cursing; he managed to gasp:

"You're in the wrong place, Bhak. We're men. I thought you only strangled women."

The grip slackened a trifle. "Men too," said Bhak slowly. "That's why I had to run away from Titan. That's why I've had to run away from everywhere. Men or women—anyone who laughs at me."

MacIan looked at the blank-eyed, revolting face, and wondered that anyone could laugh at it. Pity it, shut it harmlessly away, but not laugh.

Bhak's fingers fell away abruptly. "They laugh at me," he repeated miserably, "and run away. I know I'm ugly. But I want friends and a wife, like anyone else. Especially a wife. But they laugh at me, the women do, when I ask them. And. . ." He was shaking suddenly with rage and his face was a beast's face, blind and brutal. "And I kill them. I kill the damned little vixens that laugh at me!"

He stared stupidly at his great hands. "Then I have to run away. Always running away, alone." The bright, empty eyes met MacIan's with deadly purpose. "That's why I want the money. If I have money, they'll like me. Women always like men who have money. If I kill one of you, I'll have to run away again. But if I have someone to go with me, I won't mind."

Thekla showed his pointed teeth. "Try strangling a Nahali girl, Bhak. Then we'll be rid of you."

Bhak grunted. "I'm not a fool. I know what the Nahali do to you. But I want that money the girl told about, and I'll get it. I'd get it now, only Lehn will come."

He stood over them, grinning. MacIan drew back, between pity and disgust. "The Legion is certainly the System's garbage dump," he muttered in Martian, loud enough for Thekla to hear, and smiled at the low-canaler's stifled taunt. Stifled, because Lehn was coming up, his heavy water-boots thudding on the soggy ground.

Without a word the three fell in behind the officer, whose face had taken on an unfamiliar stony grimness. MacIan wondered whether it was anger at him, or fear of what they might get in the swamp. Then he shrugged; the young cub would have to follow his own trail, wherever it led. And MacIan took a stern comfort from this thought. His own feet were irrevocably directed; there was no doubt, no turning back. He'd never have again to go through what Lehn was going through. All he had to do was wait.

The plank bridge groaned under them, almost touching the water in the moat. Most ingenious, that moat. The Nahali could swim it in their sleep, normally, but when the conductor rods along the bottom were turned on, they literally burned out their circuits from an overload. The swamp-rats packed a bigger potential than any Earthly electric eel.

Ian MacIan, looking at the lights of the squalid village that lay below the fort, reflected that the Nahali had at least one definitely human trait. The banging of a three-tiered Venusian piano echoed on the heavy air, along with shouts and laughter that indicated a free flow of "swamp juice." This link in the chain of stations surrounding the swamplands was fully garrisoned only during the rains, and the less warlike Nahali were busy harvesting what they could from the soldiers and the rabble that came after them.

Queer creatures, the swamp-rats, with their ruby eyes and iridescent scales. Nature, in adapting them to their wet, humid environment, had left them somewhere between warm-blooded mammals and cold-blooded reptiles, anthropoid in shape, man-sized, capricious. The most remarkable thing about them was their breathing apparatus, each epithelial cell forming a tiny electrolysis plant to extract oxygen from water. Since they lived equally on land and in water, and since the swamp air was almost a mist, it suited them admirably. That was why they had to wait for the rains to go raiding in the fertile uplands; and that was why hundreds of Interworld Legionnaires had to swelter on the strip of soggy ground between swamp and plateau to stop them.

MacIan was last in line. Just as his foot left the planks, four heads jerked up as one, facing to the darkening sky.

"Ram!"

Big drops, splattering slowly down, making a sibilant whisper across the swamp. The pipes broke off, leaving the ears a little deafened with the lack of them after so long. And MacIan, looking at Lehn, swore furiously in his heart.

The three men paused, expecting an order to turn back, but Lehn waved them on.

"But it's raining," protested Bhak. "We'll get caught in the attack."

The officer's strangely hard face was turned toward them. "No," he said, with an odd finality, "they won't attack. Not yet."

They went on, toward the swamp that was worse in silence than it had been with the praying pipes. And MacIan, looking ahead at the oddly assorted men plowing grimly through the mud, caught a sudden glimpse of something dark and hidden, something beyond the simple threat of death that hung always over a reconnoitering patrol.

The swamp folded them in. It is never truly dark on Venus, owing to the thick, diffusing atmosphere. There was enough light to show branching, muddy trails, great still pools choked with weeds, the spreading liha-trees with their huge pollen pods, everything dripping with the slow rain. MacIan could hear the thudding of that rain for miles around on the silent air; the sullen forerunner of the deluge. Fort and village were lost in sodden twilight. Lehn's boots squelched onward through the mud of a trail that rose gradually to a ridge of higher ground. When he reached the top, Lehn turned abruptly, his electro-gun seeming to materialize in his hand, and MacIan was startled by the bleak look of his pink young face.

"Stop right there," said Lehn quietly. "Keep your hands up. And don't speak until I'm finished."

He waited a second, with the rain drumming on his waterproof coverall, dripping from the ends of his fair mustache. The others were obedient, Bhak a great grinning hulk between the two slighter men. Lehn went on calmly.

"Someone has sold us out to the Nahali. That's how I know they won't attack until they get the help they're waiting for. I had to find out, if possible, what preparations they have made for destroying our electrical supply, which is our only vulnerable point. But I had a double purpose in calling this party. Can you guess what it is?"

MacIan could. Lehn continued:

"The traitor had his price; escape from the Legion, from Venus, through the swamp to Lhiva, where he can ship out on a tramp. His one problem was to get away from the fort without being seen, since all leaves have been temporarily cancelled."

Lehn's mist-grey eyes were icy. "I gave him that chance."

Bhak laughed, an empty, jarring roar. "See? That's what the Nahali girl said. She said, 'He can get what he needs, now. He'll get away before the rains, probably with a patrol; then our people can attack.' I know what he needed. Money! And I want it."

"Shut up!" Lehn's electro-gun gestured peremptorily. "I want the truth of this. Which one of you is the traitor?"

Thekla's pointed white teeth gleamed. "MacIan loves the Legion, sir. He couldn't be guilty."

Lehn's gaze crossed MacIan's briefly, and again the Scot had a fleeting glimpse of something softer beneath the new hardness. It was something that took him back across time to a day when he had been a green subaltern in the Terran Guards, and a hard-bitten, battle-tempered senior officer had filled the horizon for him.

It was the something that had made Lehn offer him a chance, when his trap was set and sprung. It was the something that was going to make Lehn harder on him now than on either Bhak or Thekla. It was hero-worship.

MacIan groaned inwardly. "Look here," he said. "We're in Nahali country. There may be trouble at any moment. Do you think this is the time for detective work? You may have caught the wrong men anyway. Better do your job of reconnoitering, and worry about the identity of the traitor back in the fort."

"You're not an officer now, MacIan!" snapped Lehn. "Speak up, and I want the truth. You, Thekla!"

Thekla's black eyes were bitter. "I'd as well be here as anywhere, since I can't be on Mars. How could I go back, with a hanging charge against me?"

"MacIan?" Lehn's grey gaze was leveled stiffly past his head. And MacIan was quivering suddenly with rage; rage against the life that had brought him where he was, against Lehn, who was the symbol of all he had thrown away.

"Think what you like," he whispered, "and be damned!"

Bhak's movement came so swiftly that it caught everyone unprepared. Handling the Martian like a child's bean-bag, he picked him up and hurled him against Lehn. The electro-gun spat a harmless bolt into empty air as the two fell struggling in the mud. MacIan sprang forward, but Bhak's great fingers closed on his neck. With his free hand, the Titan dragged Thekla upright; he held them both helpless while he kicked the sprawling Lehn in the temple.

In the split second before unconsciousness took him, Lehn's eyes met MacIan's, and they were terrible eyes. MacIan groaned, "You young fool!" Then Lehn was down, and Bhak's fingers were throttling him.

"Which one?" snarled the Titan. "Give me the money, and I'll let you go. I'm going to have the money, if I have to kill you. Then the girls won't laugh at me. Tell me. Which one?"

MacIan's blue eyes widened suddenly. With all his strength he fought to croak out one word: "Nahali!"

Bhak dropped them with a grunt. Swinging his great hands, forgetting his gun completely, he stood at bay. There was a rush of bodies in the rain-blurred dusk, a flash of scarlet eyes and triangular mouths laughing in queer, noseless faces. Then there were scaly, manlike things hurled like battering-rams against the Legionnaires.

MacIan's gun spat blue flame; two Nahali fell, electrocuted, but there were too many of them. His helmet was torn off, so that his drenched white hair blinded him; rubber-shod fists and feet lashed against reptilian flesh. Somewhere just out of sight, Thekla was cursing breathlessly in low-canal argot. And Lehn, still dazed, was crawling gamely to his feet; his helmet had protected him from the full force of Bhak's kick.

The hulking Titan loomed in the midst of a swarm of redeyed swamp-rats. And MacIan saw abruptly that he had taken off his clumsy gloves when he had made ready to strangle his mates. The great six-fingered hands stretched hungrily toward a Nahali throat.

"Bhak!" yelled MacIan. "Don't . . . !"

The Titan's heavy laughter drowned him out; the vast paws closed in a joyous grip. On the instant, Bhak's great body bent and jerked convulsively; he slumped down, the heart burned out of him by the electricity circuited through his hands.

Lehn's gun spoke. There was a reek of ozone, and a Nahali screamed like a stricken reptile. The Venusian cried out in sudden pain, and was silent; MacIan, struggling upright, saw him buried under a pile of scaly bodies. Then a clammy paw touched his own face. He moaned as a numbing shock struck through him, and lapsed into semi-consciousness.

He had vague memories of being alternately carried and towed through warm lakes and across solid ground. He knew dimly that he was dumped roughly under a liha-tree in a clearing where there were thatched huts, and that he was alone.

After what seemed a very long time he sat up, and his surroundings were clear. Even more clear was Thekla's thin dark face peering amusedly down at him.

The Martian bared his pointed white teeth, and said, "Hello, traitor."

MacIan would have risen and struck him, only that he was weak and dizzy. And then he saw that Thekla had a gun.

His own holster was empty. MacIan got slowly to his feet, raking the white hair out of his eyes, and he said, "You dirty little rat!"

Thekla laughed, as a fox might laugh at a baffled hound. "Go ahead and curse me, MacIan. You high-and-mighty renegade! You were right; I'd rather swing on Mars than live another month in this damned sweat-box! And I can laugh at you, Ian MacIan! I'm going back to the deserts and the wine-shops on the Jekkara Low-canal. The Nahali girl didn't mean money; she meant plastic surgery, to give me another face. I'm free. And you're going to die, right here in the filthy mud!"

A slow, grim smile touched MacIan's face, but he said nothing.

"Oh, I understand," said Thekla mockingly. "You fallen swells and your honor! But you won't die honorably, any more than you've lived that way."

MacIan's eyes were contemptuous and untroubled.

The pointed teeth gleamed. "You don't understand, MacIan. Lehn isn't going to die. He's going back to face the music, after his post is wiped out. I don't know what they'll do to him, but it won't be nice. And remember, MacIan, he thinks you sold him out. He thinks you cost him his post, his men, his career: his honor, you scut! Think that over when the swamp-rats go to work on you—they like a little fun now and then—and remember I'm laughing!"

MacIan was silent for a long time, hands clenched at his sides, his craggy face carved in dark stone under his dripping white hair. Then he whispered, "Why?"

Thekla's eyes met his in sudden intense hate. "Because I want to see your damned proud, supercilious noses rubbed in the dirt!"

MacIan nodded. His face was strange, as though a curtain had been drawn over it. "Where's Lehn?"

Thekla pointed to the nearest hut. "But it won't do you any good. The rats gave him an overdose, accidentally, of course, and he's out for a long time."

Macian went unsteadily toward the hut through rain. Over his shoulder he heard Thekla's voice: "Don't try anything funny, MacIan. I can shoot you down before you're anywhere near an escape, even if you could find your way back without me. The Nahali are gathering now, all over the swamp; within half an hour they'll march on the fort, and then on to the plateaus. They'll send my escort before they go, but you and Lehn will have to wait until they come back. You can think of me while you're waiting to die, MacIan; me, going to Lhiva and freedom!"

MacIan didn't answer. The rhythm of the rain changed from a slow drumming to a rapid, vicious hiss; he could see it, almost smoking in the broad leaves of the liha-trees. The drops cut his body like whips, and he realized for the first time that he was stripped to trousers and shirt. Without his protective rubber coverall, Thekla could electrocute him far quicker even than a Nahali, with his service pistol.

The hut, which had been very close, was suddenly far off, so far he could hardly see it. The muddy ground swooped and swayed underfoot. MacIan jerked himself savagely erect. Fever. Any fool who prowled the swamp without proper covering was a sure victim. He looked back at Thekla, safe in helmet and coverall, grinning like a weasel under the shelter of a pod-hung tree-branch.

The hut came back into proper perspective. Aching, trembling suddenly with icy cold, he stooped and entered. Lehn lay there, dry but stripped like MacIan, his young face slack in unconsciousness. MacIan raised a hand, let it fall limply back. Lehn was still paralyzed from the shock. It might be hours, even days before he came out of it. Perhaps never, if he wasn't cared for properly.

MacIan must have gone a little mad then, from the fever and the shock to his own brain, and Thekla. He took Lehn's shirt in both hands and shook him, as though to beat sense back into his brain, and shouted at him in hoarse savagery.

"All I wanted was to die! That's what I came to the Legion for, to die like a soldier because I couldn't live like an officer. But it had to be honorably, Lehn! Otherwise. . ."

He broke off in a fit of shivering, and his blue eyes glared under his white, tumbled hair. "You robbed me of that, damn you! You and Thekla. You trapped me. You wouldn't even let me die decently. I was an officer, Lehn, like you. Do you hear me, young fool? I had to choose between two courses, and I chose the wrong one. I lost my whole command. Twenty-five hundred men, dead.

"They might have let me off at the court-martial. It was an honest mistake. But I didn't wait. I resigned. All I wanted was to die like a good soldier. That's why I volunteered. And you tricked me, Lehn! You and Thekla."

He let the limp body fall and crouched there, holding his throbbing head in his hands. He knew he was crying, and couldn't stop. His skin burned, and he was cold to the marrow of his bones.

Suddenly he looked at Lehn out of bright, fever-mad eyes. "Very well," he whispered. "I won't die. You can't kill me, you and Thekla, and you go on believing I betrayed you. I'll take you back, you two, and fight it out. I'll keep the Nahali from taking the fort, so you can't say I sold it out. I'll make you believe me!"

From somewhere, far off, he heard Thekla laugh.

MacIan huddled there for some time, his brain whirling. Through the rain-beat and the fever-mist in his head and the alternate burning and freezing that racked his body, certain truths shot at him like stones from a sling.

Thekla had a gun that shot a stream of electricity. A gun designed for Nahali, whose nervous systems were built to carry a certain load and no more, like any set of wires. The low frequency discharge was strong enough to kill a normal man only under ideal conditions; and these conditions were uniquely ideal. Wet clothes, wet skin, wet ground, even the air saturated.

Then there were metal and rubber. Metal in his belt, in Lehn's belt; metal mesh, because the damp air rotted everything else. Rubber on his feet, on Lehn's feet. Rubber was insulation. Metal was a conductor.

MacIan realized with part of his mind that he must be mad to do what he planned to do. But he went to work just the same.

Ten minutes later he left the hut and crossed the soaking clearing in the downpour. Thekla had left the liha-tree for a hut directly opposite Lehn's; he rose warily in the doorway, gun ready. His sly black eyes took in MacIan's wild blue gaze, the fever spots burning on his lean cheekbones, and he smiled.

"Get on back to the hut," he said. "Be a pity if you die before the Nahali have a chance to try electro-therapy."

MacIan didn't pause. His right arm was hidden behind his back. Thekla's jaw tightened. "Get back or I'll kill you!"

MacIan's boots sucked in the mud. The beating rain streamed from his white hair, over his craggy face and gaunt shoulders. And he didn't hesitate.

Thekla's pointed teeth gleamed in a sudden snarl. His thumb snapped the trigger; a bolt of blue flame hissed toward the striding Scot.

MacIan's right hand shot out in the instant the gun spoke. One of Lehn's rubber boots cased his arm almost to the shoulder, and around the ankle of it a length of metal was made fast; two mesh belts linked together. The spitting blue fire was gathered to the metal circle, shot down the coupled lengths, and died in the ground.

The pistol sputtered out as a coil fused. Thekla cursed and flung it at MacIan's head. The Scot dodged it, and broke into a run, dropping Lehn's boot that his hands might be free to grapple.

Thekla fought like a low-canal rat, but MacIan was bigger and beyond himself with the first madness of fever. He beat the little Martian down and bound him with his own belt, and then went looking for his clothes and gun.

He found them, with Lehn's, in the hut next door. His belt pouch yielded quinine; he gulped a large dose and felt better. After he had dressed, he went and wrestled Lehn into his coverall and helmet and dragged him out beside Thekla, who was groaning back to consciousness in the mud.

Looking up, MacIan saw three Nahali men watching him warily out of scarlet eyes as they slunk toward him.

Thekla's escort. And it was a near thing. Twice clammy paws seared his face before he sent them writhing down into the mud, jerking as the overload beat through their nervous systems. Triangular mouths gaped in noseless faces, hand-like paws tore convulsively at scaly breastplates, and MacIan, as he watched them die, said calmly: "There will be hundreds of them storming the fort. My gun won't be enough. But somehow I've got to stop them."

No answer now. He shrugged and kicked Thekla erect. "Back to the fort, scut," he ordered, and laughed. The linked belts were fastened now around Thekla's neck, the other end hooked to the muzzle of MacIan's gun, so that the slightest rough pull would discharge it. "What if I stumble?" Thekla snarled, and MacIan answered, "You'd better not!"

Lehn was big and heavy, but somehow MacIan got him across his shoulders. And they started off.

The fringe of the swamp was in sight when MacIan's brain became momentarily lucid. Another dose of quinine drove the mists back, so that the fort, some fifty yards away, assumed its proper focus. MacIan dropped Lehn on his back in the mud and stood looking, his hand ready on his gun.

The village swarmed with swamp-rats in the slow, watery dawn. They were ranged in a solid mass along the edges of the moat, and the fort's guns were silent. MacIan wondered why, until he saw that the dam that furnished power for the turbine had been broken down.

Thekla laughed silently. "My idea, MacIan. The Nahali would never have thought of it themselves. They can't drown, you know. I showed them how to sneak into the reservoir, right under the fort's guns, and stay under water, loosening the stones around the spillway. The pressure did the rest. Now there's no power for the big guns, nor the conductor rods in the moat."

He turned feral black eyes on MacIan. "You've made a fool of yourself. You can't stop those swamp-rats from tearing the fort apart. You can't stop me from getting away, after they're through. You can't stop Lehn from thinking what he does. You haven't changed anything by these damned heroics!"

"Heroics!" said MacIan hoarsely, and laughed. "Maybe." With sudden viciousness he threw the end of the linked belts over a low liha-branch, so that Thekla had to stand on tiptoe to keep from strangling. Then, staring blindly at the beleaguered fort, he tried to beat sense out of his throbbing head. "There was something," he whispered. "Something I was saying back in the swamp. Something my mind was trying to tell me, only I was delirious. What was it, Thekla?"

The Martian was silent, the bloody grin set on his dark face. MacIan took him by the shoulders and shook him. "What was it?"

Thekla choked and struggled as the metal halter tightened. "Nothing, you fool! Nothing but Nahali and liha-trees."

"Liha-trees!" MacIan's fever-bright eyes went to the great green pollen-pods hung among the broad leaves. He shivered, partly with chill, partly with exultation. And he began like a madman to strip Lehn and Thekla of their rubber coveralls.

Lehn's, because it was larger, he tented over two low branches. Thekla's he spread on the ground beneath. Then he tore down pod after pod from the liha-tree, breaking open the shells under the shelter of the improvised tent, pouring out the green powder on the groundcloth.

When he had a two-foot pile, he stood back and fired a bolt of electricity into the heart of it.

Thick, oily black smoke poured up, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the fire took hold. A sluggish breeze was blowing out of the swamp, drawn by the cooler uplands beyond the fort; it took the smoke and sent it rolling toward the packed and struggling mass on the earthworks.

Out on the battlefield, Nahali stiffened suddenly, fell tearing convulsively at their bodies. The beating rain washed the soot down onto them harder and harder, streaked it away, left a dull film over the reptilian skins, the scaly breastplates. More and more of them fell as the smoke rolled thicker, fed by the blackened madman under the liha-tree, until only Legionnaires were left standing in its path, staring dumbly at the stricken swamp-rats.

The squirming bodies stilled in death. Hundreds more, out on the edges of the smoke, seeing their comrades die, fled back into the swamp. The earthworks were cleared. Ian MacIan gave one wild shout that carried clear to the fort. Then he collapsed, crouched shivering beside the unconscious Lehn, babbling incoherently.

Thekla, strained on tiptoe under the tree-branch, had stopped smiling.

The fever-mists rolled away at last. MacIan woke to see Lehn's pink young face, rather less pink than usual, bending over him.

Lehn's hand came out awkwardly. "I'm sorry, MacIan. Thekla told me; I made him. I should have known." His grey eyes were ashamed. MacIan smiled and gripped his hand with what strength the fever had left him.

"My own fault, boy. Forget it."

Lehn sat down on the bed. "What did you do to the swamp-rats?" he demanded eagerly. "They all have a coating as though they'd been dipped in paraffin!"

MacIan chuckled. "In a way, they were. You know how they breathe; each skin cell forming a miniature electrolysis plant to extract oxygen from water. Well, it extracts hydrogen too, naturally, and the hydrogen is continually being given off, just as we give off carbon dioxide.

"Black smoke means soot, soot means carbon. Carbon plus hydrogen forms various waxy hydrocarbons. Wax is impervious to both water and air. So when the oily soot from the smoke united with the hydrogen exuded from the Nahali's bodies, it sealed away the life-giving water from the skin-cells. They literally smothered to death, like an Earthly ant doused with powder."

Lehn nodded. He was quiet for a long time, his eyes on the sickbay's well-scrubbed floor. At length, he said:

"My offer still goes, MacIan. Officer's examinations. One mistake, an honest one, shouldn't rob you of your life. You don't even know that it would have made any difference if your decision had been the other way. Perhaps there was no way out."

MacIan's white head nodded on the pillow.

"Perhaps I will, Lehn. Something Thekla said set me thinking. He said he'd rather die on Mars than live another month in exile. I'm an exile too, Lehn, in a different way. Yes, I think I'll try it. And if I fail again—" he shrugged and smiled—"there are always Nahali."

It seemed for a minute after that as though he had gone to sleep. Then he murmured, so low that Lehn had to bend down to hear him:

"Thekla will hang after the court-martial. Can you see that they take him back to Mars, first?"


The Demons of Darkside

Startling Stories, January 1941

It was early, so the ancient televisor was only observed by a scant audience. Sila, the town buried on the edge of Venus' eastern swamp belt, didn't wake till dark.

Barry Garth, almost alone in the scrap metal barroom, put his head in his arms and listened with a weary hatred. He'd heard so many telecasts during the past months. Thousands, it seemed, and all on the same subject.

"A third appeal for clemency was today denied Alice Webster by the Interplanetary Court," rasped the blurred image of the telecast announcer. "This means that the twenty-three-year-old heiress, convicted of murdering her uncle, Gavin Webster, the Mercurian Metals tycoon, will die as scheduled three weeks from today. Her fiancé-accomplice, Barry Garth, has not yet been apprehended by the police, from whom he escaped soon after the trial."

"Dirty rat!" hiccupped a space sailor at the bar. "Leaving a dame to take the rap by herself!"

"Flash! Ladies and gentlemen!" The telecaster's voice fairly crackled. "Word has just come from Mercury. The private yacht of Wilsey Stevens, third vice-president of Mercurian Metals and chief witness for the prosecution at the murder trial of Alice Webster, crashed on Darkside two hours ago. Our Mercurian informer states that the yacht, the Hermes, struck a magnetic storm before she broke her drag, and was sucked down into the shadow.

"Wilsey Stevens himself was piloting the craft. Since experience has proven salvage work impossible, and since no one has ever survived either a crash or an expedition on the dark face of Mercury, it must be concluded that Stevens and his entire crew of six men are lost. Names of those aboard—"

Barry Garth didn't hear them. He was staring blankly at the telescreen, his big raw-boned frame taut. So Wilsey Stevens was dead, after all. All his lying, all his signing away of two lives, had availed him nothing. Darkside had caught him, and he was dead.

That meant Alice was dead, too. There was no hope now of saving her. He might as well go back and die with her.

Wilsey Stevens dead! But was he? Who knew what happened on Darkside? No one had ever come back to tell. Perhaps, if the crash hadn't killed him, he might live—at least for awhile. Was there a chance, one meager but all-important chance?

Barry Garth strode out of the barroom then, and there was something strangely ruthless in his dark, handsome face and the set of his wide shoulders.

The slow Venusian dusk cloaked the single shoddy street. The fever-mists crawled up out of the swamp, and some faraway scaly beast sent up a hissing scream. Blue mud reeked and squelched under Garth's boots. Ahead, a space of desolation with the rocket-blown pits filled with water, was the port of Sila, the town's only excuse for existing.

* * *

Garth paused near a cluster of rusty shanties, searching with narrowed blue eyes. Finding what he sought, a cracked and slimy board bearing the legend "Scotia Salvage Co.," he started forward and stopped again, wondering if he were not a little mad.

The odds were greatly against him that he could find Stevens alive, or live to come back himself if he did. Darkside was one of the impenetrable mysteries of the System. No one knew what existed under the blanket of everlasting shadow and freakish magnetic currents—except that men who went there never came back!

Garth shrugged. Perhaps he was going mad. To be a crack racing flier with a future and the grandest girl in nine planets, to be, out of a clear sky, accused and convicted of murder, to face an unjust death with that girl was enough to make anyone crazy.

Wilsey Stevens either killed or knew who killed Gavin Webster. His testimony at the trial, convicting Alice and Garth, had proven that. He had woven an unbreakable chain of evidence around them. But they knew they were innocent. Garth's one hope had been to force Stevens to confess. His one meager clue as to discovering Stevens' possible motive for the murder had brought him to Sila, only to end like this.

A new thought occurred to Garth. Even if Stevens were dead, the Hermes might yield some clue that would be sufficient to stop Alice's execution and give them another chance.

He knew what he was going to do to the man in the Scotia Salvage Company office. He didn't care. Not all the population of this rotten sinkhole put together added up to Alice Webster. He would cheerfully have shot them all down, if it meant one single chance for her.

As for himself, he was no diamond-studded hero. He wanted to live. He had a right to live!

Barry Garth put his right hand in his pocket and pushed open the door of the Scotia Salvage Company.

A pungent reek of white Venusian whisky struck his nostrils. The cramped, untidy office was growing dark, but he could see the man who rose from behind the rickety table. He looked into a dark face sunk between tremendous shoulders, with savage gray eyes half-veiled by hair, black, shaggy as that of a bear. Heavy stubble shadowed a square, grim jaw. The man's worn spacemen's kit, wrinkled against a powerful body, was stained and dirty. The tunic was torn open over a black-haired chest.

"There's no job here," growled the man. "And I'm closed for the night." His voice was deep and harsh, with a slight burr.

Garth shook his head.

"I don't want a job," he said.

"Then what do ye want?"

"Your ship," said Garth.

The gun blurred out of his pocket, snapped softly. A needle laden with a quick-acting anesthetic caught the man at the base of his hairy throat. Before his startled curse could voice itself, the big Earthman fell.

Barry Garth eased his fall. There was something about that bitter, deep-lined face that seemed familiar, even important, but he couldn't bring the half-memory clear. He knew he'd never seen the man. He shrugged and sat down to wait.

The black, starless night shut down, and it began to rain. Staggering under the big man's weight, Garth ventured out into the deserted landing field. There was no one here but himself and the Scot.

* * *

He found the hangar, opened it with the Scot's keys. There was a squat, ancient salvage tug inside, one of those disreputable pirates of the space lanes, who preyed on misfortune and made ill luck worse. Garth knew these tramp salvage men. They'd give aid, preferably to private ships, and then strip the owner to his underclothes to pay for the service. He had, in his younger days, lost his first ship to just such vultures.

The name Bruce was painted on the scarred hull. Garth dumped the Scot through the open port and set about checking the ship. Because of the darkness he was forced to risk a small light.

Some instinct made him look up suddenly. A face was framed in the opening of the door he had thought was closed. It was a thin, unhealthy Martian face, with lank hair and a mouth purpled from chewing finchi. Then it was gone.

Garth jumped for the door and caught a dim glimpse of a tall, awkward form running. But there was no chance for a shot.

He turned back to the Bruce. He might, of course, have been watched all the time. By whom? Police spies, perhaps. A sharp-eyed space rat who had recognized him and wanted the reward. Or just a curious loafer.

There had been something purposeful about that peering face. Garth's bony jaw locked grimly. Strapping the Scot in his bunk, he slid back the hangar top and sent the Bruce hurtling up on roaring jets, outbound for Mercury . . . .

He was far beyond the cloud blanket, out in space, when he saw the little streak of flame on his visi-plate. Another ship, up from Sila, was following him.

Crouched in the pilot's bay, which was little more than a sweltering air-space between banks of machinery and control panels, Barry Garth threw every last atom of speed into the Bruce and cursed its slowness. If that was a police ship following—

But it wasn't. The ship reached its maximum velocity, approximately that of the Bruce, and hung there. It was close enough so that Garth could make out its shape in the brilliant glare of the Sun. It was a squat, shabby salvage tug like the Bruce. Barry Garth frowned.

There was something funny about that. There was nothing ahead but Mercury, and there was no salvage job on Mercury except the Hermes. Besides, it took a damned strong motive to get any man near Darkside.

Uneasy curiosity sent his hand for the televisor switch. But he drew it back. He didn't dare contact that ship. If the Martian back in Sila had anything to do with it, they knew he had stolen the Scot's ship. If not, he didn't dare tip them off. They could radio the Venusian police to pick him up before he hit the shadow.

Garth forced himself to calm, and set about checking his course. Then he jerked bolt upright, sweat bursting in a sudden flood from every port.

The Scot had screamed—screamed in black, abysmal terror!

Barry Garth stood in the dim glow of the panel light, facing into the darkness toward the stern. The bunkroom was back there, beyond the air-tight door. Garth cradled the needle gun, waiting.

The bulkhead door clanged open wildly against the wall. A towering shape burst through it, staggered, and plunged for the light switch. The cold white glare of full power blazed blindingly.

The Scot stood flattened against the curving hull-wall, every muscle rigid. His face was a ghostly gray and his eyes were mad.

Garth forced his voice to be quiet.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

* * *

Breath sobbed into the big man's lungs.

"The demons," he whispered. The burr was deep and thick in his voice. "They come i' the dark. I can hear them."

"You've had a nightmare," Garth said. "Take a drink and go back to bed."

A measure of sanity returned to the Scot's wild gray eyes. His heavy muscles knotted in his effort to still them.

"The light," he said. "It drives them awa'. They cannot stand the light."

Garth relaxed, remembering that the Scot had been drinking.

"All right, I'll leave the lights on," he agreed. "Go and sleep it off."

The Scot's harsh laugh startled him.

"I'll nae sleep them off while I live, lad." He ran huge scarred hands through his shaggy hair, and looked up again, completely under control. "Now then. What are ye doing, and why?"

"We're going on a salvage job," said Garth evenly. "To Mercury. There's a man there I want to see."

"To Mercury?" Fear leaped bright in the big man's eyes, but he held it down. "Go on."

Garth told his story.

"Stevens is my last and only hope," he finished. "He must have had a motive, a reason for what he did to us. I've tried every other way to find it, and failed. Now I'm trying this. I'll die if I fail, but I'd have to die anyway. I had to have a ship, a salvage ship, and I knew I couldn't get anyone to go where I'm going voluntarily. I'll get you out of it if I can get out myself. But I'd rather kill every rat in Sila than let this chance go."

"Aye, ye're right," the Scot said. "And why not? Life's nae a merry gambol. Where on Mercury is it ye're going?"

"Darkside."

The Scot's grim mouth opened, but no sound came forth. His eyes widened like ice-gray flames. Garth saw a tremor shoot through him, as though he'd taken a death-blow over the heart. Then he laughed.

The roar of that wild, harsh laughter shook Garth strangely, and sent his blood running boiling hot and then cold. He braced himself and raised his gun.

"Darkside!" the big man whispered. "He's taking me to Darkside. Me, Sandy MacDougal!" He swung to face forward, toward the silver blaze of Mercury. "This is yer doin'! Ye thought ye had me once, ye black demons of hell, but I cheated ye! Ye got Sarasoff, but nae me. Ye've hounded and followed me, and noo ye want me back. But I'll nae come! D'ye hear me? I'll nae come!"

He flung himself forward with startling speed for such a big man. But Garth was ready. His finger closed convulsively on the trigger. MacDougal's hands had only time to close around his throat before they went lax.

Barry Garth dragged the Scot back to his bunk and strapped him in, this time where he couldn't get at the buckles. Then he stood staring down into that lined, bitter face, and he felt himself tremble.

"Sandy MacDougal," he whispered. "I remember now. He was a crack pilot on the Mercury run for Interplanetary Mails nearly fifteen years ago. And he was reported to be lost on Darkside!"

So someone had come back from the shadow. Someone had cheated whatever deadly forces lived in that sunless cone of eternal night. Garth smiled grimly. What one man had done, another could do.

Then he looked at MacDougal again, and his smile died . . . .

* * *

Twenty-four hours went by, and then another five. Barry Garth, keeping himself awake on caffeine tablets from the supply locker, crouched in the narrow bay, stripped to the waist. The metal shields were over the ports, but the blaze of the huge, malignant Sun sent in heat that the hard-worked refrigerator units couldn't down. The thermometer crawled up and up, and the control levers were almost too hot to touch.

Three times in that period of hours, Garth had thrust another needle into Sandy MacDougal, keeping him in drugged quiet. Far more often than that he had cursed the necessity of bringing another man, cursed the luck that had given him MacDougal, of all men.

"Perhaps," he muttered, "it's my punishment for risking another man's life." Then he thought of Alice Webster waiting in her cell—waiting for a death she didn't deserve. Garth glared red-eyed at the shuttered ports.

"I'll get him back if I can," he said aloud. "But I had to do it! I had to!"

It was the heat, he decided, that made his nerves go tight. The heat and that damned ship behind him that hung on and wouldn't go away. He swore viciously at the image in his visi-plate. It blurred before his eyes, and he felt the cabin spinning. Another caffeine tablet helped keep him awake. How much farther was it? He'd wait another hour. MacDougal would come to by then.

Still the heat climbed. Several times Garth found himself on the verge of collapse. His rangy body was tough, but the ordeal of the past months had taken something out of him, and he hadn't eaten regularly since his escape. He kept his aching, burning eyes on the chronometer, and when it reached a certain mark, he gripped the emergency fuel-dump lever.

The plastic burned his palm, but he pulled it back, watching the gauge drop. He had calculated nicely, and he prayed that his calculations were right. If they weren't, it was just too bad.

When he staggered back to the bunkroom, the Scot was awake. Garth bent over him.

"Listen," he said. "There's just enough fuel in the tanks to get us to Mercury. You can't go back to Venus, no matter what. Now get in there and stand your watch."

MacDougal looked at him.

"Ye love that lassie, don't ye?" he asked surprisingly.

Garth nodded. "I'll sleep now. And there's nothing you can do about it, MacDougal, so don't try."

The Scot rose stiffly, stood looking down.

"Ye've the kind of guts I like, lad. Sorry I can't help ye."

Garth's bony face went ugly.

"It takes two pilots to get a ship through the disturbance field. That's one reason why I had to bring you. And you're going to pull your weight!"

MacDougal shrugged.

"Without fuel, I'll have to, for awhile."

Garth hefted the pistol significantly.

"I'll see that you do," he said meaningly. He smiled as MacDougal turned and went down the corridor. And then he groaned as a thought struck him. He had forgotten that ship following them!

He plunged forward, and felt the vibration of the rockets die out of the hull, then start again as the forward jets cut in, decelerating. Raging, Garth burst into the control room and raised the needle gun.

Then the televisor buzzed. MacDougal, almost smiling as he looked into the visi-plate that had given him his chance, flipped the switch.

* * *

Garth saw the duplicate of the Bruce's cramped sweatbox of a cabin blur onto the old screen. A man filled the foreground—a burly man with iron-gray hair and a fighting jaw and level dark eyes. His half-naked body gleamed with sweat, but even so, there was a compact neatness about him.

"What the hell's going on there?" the man said.

MacDougal laughed.

"Brent, for the first time in my life I'm glad to see yer ugly face!" Relief amounting almost to hysteria rang in his voice. "My young friend here dumped my fuel, so ye can gi' me a tow back to Venus."

Amazement and suspicion vied in Brent's dark, hard face.

"Akal!" he called. And another face materialized beside his. It was the unhealthy Martian face that Garth had seen back in Sila. "Is that the man you saw?"

The Martian licked his purple lips and nodded. Brent scowled.

"What are you trying to put over on me?" he demanded. "You were headed straight for Darkside, and you know it!"

"Aye, but we've changed our plans," MacDougal said.

"Then you've given up?" A fierce smile creased Brent's cheeks. "It's just as well. I'd have wrecked you before I'd have let you have what Wilsey Stevens owes me. Though how you got onto it is beyond me."

Garth bent forward, suddenly taut.

"What do you know about Stevens?" he shouted.

Brent's black eyes glared at him.

"You know damn well!" he said. "I'm going for what you were, before you lost your nerve. It's funny, too. I'd have thought a man with guts enough to tackle Black Sandy there and steal his precious Bruce would have had the guts to do anything."

Garth was abruptly conscious of MacDougal's face. It was lined with a growing terror now.

"The tow, Brent?" he said. "Ye'll do it?"

"No! I'm going after the Hermes! Radio Venus for help. They'll take the Bruce away from you, but that won't matter much. We independents are nearly dead, anyhow—and a good thing." Garth caught the surprising bitterness in his voice. "We're nothing but a bunch of filthy pirates, anyway."

"Brent!" Garth shouted. "What's in the Hermes? What do you know about Wilsey Stevens?"

Brent frowned.

"I don't know what you're driving at, and I haven't time to find out. So long!"

The screen went dead. MacDougal shot a shaking hand to the dial, and in the same instant, Garth lunged. The heavy needle gun in his hand rose and smashed down. Tubes and fragile metal shattered. Garth stood back, breathing hard, and cut the forward jets. The flame of Brent's ship passed their dot on the visi-plate.

"Get going," Garth said. "It's Mercury, or slow death for us."

MacDougal looked at him like an animal beaten numb with hopeless fear. Garth shivered, but he stifled the stab of remorse he felt.

"There aren't any demons," he snarled. "You're crazy with drugs and whisky."

"Why d'ye think I drink?" MacDougal whispered. "So I can stay as sane as I am." He turned to the controls, set the stern tubes blasting again.

Garth went back and locked himself into the bunk-room. But it was a long time before he slept . . . .

* * *

Time passed in a blur of rising heat, of dials and gauges that danced before aching eyes, of metal that burned at the slightest touch, of clattering machinery and warm, stale water that did not quench thirst.

At first, after his escape, the fear of failure had risen in Garth in racking waves. The knowledge of Alice Webster, waiting in her cell for him to free her, drove him on incessantly.

The answer to his problem lay on Mercury. He had only to overcome certain obstacles to find it. And success or failure—when it was over, it was over. Alice would die in a few days. There'd be no time to try again.

Garth was rather glad. He knew he couldn't stand another try, another struggle. All that was left to him now was the memory of Alice Webster's face when he kissed her in the court-room, before they were drawn apart.

MacDougal stood his watches in a dangerous, tight-lipped quiet, drinking steadily from a supply in the locker but never getting drunk. The little flame of Brent's ship stayed always ahead of them, but unable to break away.

The Bruce and Brent's ship entered the disturbance area almost together, and Garth prepared himself. Now was the time that MacDougal would probably make his last bid for freedom. There was no radio communication to Mercury, due to the nearness of the Sun and the crazy electro-magnetic currents generated by the wild flight of the planet's metallic body across the force-field of the Sun.

But MacDougal would try to semaphore the relay ship that hung above the Twilight Belt, or he could try to regain control of his ship and set her down on one of the mining company fields.

His face looking more like a death's head than ever, Garth came into the control room. It was empty. He'd taken one foolish step forward before he realized that the bulkhead door wasn't flat against the wall in its hooks.

He caught the blurred movement out of the tail of his eye as he dived forward and heard the crash of the spanner flung by McDougal on the metal floor. It was close enough to jar his teeth. Then he was bunched together and springing up, and the heavy pistol that never left him was flying for MacDougal's head.

The Bruce lurched as the Scot swayed back, stunned and bleeding. The machinery bellowed and clanged as timers and compensators went off balance. Garth caught up the needle gun.

"Get over to those controls," he said almost gently. "Or I'll put enough of these needles in you so you'll never wake up."

Blood was running from MacDougal's temple, matting his shaggy black hair.

"I'll get you out of it, MacDougal," whispered Garth. "I swear I will!"

MacDougal took the controls, uncertainly at first as the wild currents gripped the Bruce, then with strength flowing back into his hands. Garth, watching the struggling machinery, operated manual controls where the electric systems were too deranged, looked curiously at MacDougal.

What had happened, down there on Darkside, to change him so horribly?

The flame of Brent's ship curveted across the visi-plate, still ahead. And then, abruptly, there was darkness edging across the field toward the little flame and the little dot that were their two ships—a darkness utter and impenetrable.

The dot was so tiny against the immensity of glare and shadow that Garth didn't see it until it was almost on them. MacDougal saw it, too, and took his hands away from the controls, staring at the oncoming edge of darkness.

* * *

At that velocity, it wouldn't be fatal. But it would be enough to crack their outer hull, force them to head for the Twilight Belt and repairs. Brent was in earnest, then. He knew something about Wilsey Stevens, something he didn't want to tell, something big enough to take him to Darkside.

Garth blasted his port steering jets, knocking MacDougal aside to get at the levers. There was a dull, vicious thud somewhere astern. The Bruce yawed and shuddered, and there was a tiny hiss of air finding emptiness.

Violet flames were born abruptly here and there along the metal. Electricity penetrated the broken skin in greater strength. The rockets broke in ragged discord as the timers went out. And it began to grow hotter. The refrigerators had quit, short-circuited.

"Vac suits!" yelled Garth, and sent the Bruce hurtling toward the shadow. There was no time to get to the Twilight Belt now, even if he'd wanted to. At these temperatures, a man would roast alive in a matter of minutes.

MacDougal got the suits. He seemed completely beaten, beyond even terror.

"What will ye do?" the Scot asked.

"You're the salvage man," Garth said.

Brent's ship had already touched the shadow, plunged into it. Garth could follow the crimson streak of her rockets.

"Ye'll have to land and study the damage," MacDougal said finally.

"Then we'll land." Garth pulled the final zipper on his vac suit, switched on the refrigerating unit and gasped with relief.

And then the shadow suddenly touched them!

The temperature shot downward, freezing where it had seared. Electric fire danced and flared through the ship. Garth felt the Bruce leap under his hands as wild, mad currents surged against her.

MacDougal laughed suddenly.

"Ye've killed us for nothing, lad," he said evilly. "My Brucie's done, and even if she weren't, Brent's ahead. The law of salvage says the wrecked ship belongs to the first one there!" His harsh, wild laughter rang against the helmet phones, and then was silent. And through the silence Garth heard someone whispering, very softly, but he couldn't quite hear the words. MacDougal's eyes met Garth's.

"The demons, lad," he whispered. "The demons of Darkside!"

They struck with a skidding crash that jarred them brutally, but the Bruce was tough and it didn't kill them. Garth, crushed under MacDougal's weight, felt it lift suddenly, heard a broken cry and the shriek of a bent metal port being hurled open. And then he was alone.

Garth had never been so alone, even in prison, or out in space with his racing ship. The cold glare of his torch, thrown out the open port, showed him only an endless maze of crystal spires, glimmering eerily in the light. There was a naked loneliness about those tumbled crystal peaks, held forever in the unchanging vacuum and the unimaginable dark.

Garth felt the desolation seeping into him, flowing like water through his bones. The darkness pressed down, a solid thing beyond the narrow shaft of his torch. It was smothering, overpowering. The black of utter blindness, untouched by sunlight since the Universe began.

* * *

He swore loudly, defiantly. The Hermes was somewhere down here. MacDougal was out there, and Brent, and Akal, the Martian. And Wilsey Stevens!

Barry Garth left the ship. The crystals walled around him, flung back his light in broken glints of green and gold, blue and crimson.

"MacDougal!" he shouted over and over, bellowing into his helmet phone.

He heard wild, faint laughter. And then the Universe was drowned out in a rush of voices.

Whispers, loud and clear, were at his elbow, and stretching to the very borders of infinity. Whispers not borne by his helmet phone. Whispers that came through the airless dark and into his brain.

There was something indescribably horrible about them. They reached deep inside him and dredged up buried ugliness—hate, fear, lust and a brutal desire for vengeance he hadn't known he possessed. Did he really hear words, or was it just that his mind formed them from habit, out of the things that stalked inside his skull?

"MacDougal!" he cried, and ran—ran engulfed in a mocking sea of whispers that kept pace with him, filling him like an empty vessel with shapes of naked horror.

Climbing a jagged ridge, he saw the shattered hulk of a wreck. He knew it, even in the dim reflection of his powerful light, by the peculiar design of the rocket tubes. It was the Hermes!

"Stevens!" he shouted, and instantly the whispers surged stronger and louder in rhythms of hatred and murderous rage. Then terror blotted them out.

Perhaps MacDougal was right about the demons. Only the bull strength of the Scot could have brought him through this alive. What had happened to the Sarasoff he'd mentioned, down here in these crystal valleys?

Desperately he got a grip on himself, shouting to drown out the whispers. Then he heard another voice, crying:

"What is it? In God's name—"

Garth stumbled forward, and quite suddenly, the whispers stopped.

Sounds rocketed through his headphones. MacDougal, crying his lament. Brent, swearing viciously. And a thin, high scream from Akal.

A pit yawned suddenly beneath him, filled with shards of light broken from the blue-white torch beam. There were men down there, five of them! Lost from some ancient wreck. They were rigid and unchanging in the spatial cold. Garth looked at their dead faces and swayed with a long, icy shudder.

He couldn't find MacDougal, and his voice grew fainter as the Scot wandered farther away in the crystal maze. The Hermes loomed quite close now. Garth moved through showers of flame, over faceted ridges and between rearing cliffs, ever toward that silent ship.

He realized that he was waiting with a terrible fascination for the whispers to come again.

"Akal!" Brent's voice shouted suddenly."Where are you?"

There was no answer. Garth's torch picked out a stocky figure in a vac suit standing beside the broken hulk of Stevens' yacht. There were other shapes there, strewn on shattered crystals, but they didn't move. Brent had a gun in his hand, one of the deadly proton guns forbidden to civilians.

Quickly Garth came up to him, and stopped.

"This ship is mine," Brent said to him. "Keep off."

"I don't want the ship," Garth said. "I want Stevens."

Brent gestured.

"There he is, damn him. MacDougal's demons got him." He laughed, but it had a cracked, uncertain quality.

Garth knelt hurriedly. He could see Stevens' strong face clearly. But it wasn't impassive now. It was twisted into a mask of deadly terror. Stevens was dead.

* * *

Garth rose slowly, his sunken blue eyes fixed on the Hermes. His last hope of saving Alice lay there, barred by the stubborn figure of Brent.

"Listen," he said harshly. "I don't want that ship, or anything in it, except information. I'm going in, Brent."

Brent's gun hand lifted.

"You'd better not," he warned. And suddenly his voice broke out, loud and hard and bitter. "Do you think I'm going to let any man near this ship? Do you think I want to die here? Stevens owes me this. He made me what I am. But I wasn't cut out for a smuggler, nor a damned tramp salvage pirate! Stevens wouldn't let me go. But he's got his—and I want mine!"

Questions broke from Garth, savage, urgent, but were lost in whispers. Again the world was filled with them, goading, driving, lashing him with brutal sensations. They swirled chaotically through him, bringing a jumble of alien voices, Brent's, MacDougal's, Akal's, all shrieking fear and death and hatred.

No wonder MacDougal was crazy. Garth would be, too, if he lived. He'd even be too crazy to marry Alice. What were the whispers? They weren't demons. Then what were they?

And then things happened. A dark shape plummeted from a crystal peak, hurled itself at Brent. Garth glimpsed a white face gashed with purple. He heard Akal's thought rhythms, heavy with greed and hate, but most of all, greed.

Brent hadn't seen him in time. Akal had him down in a flash. He was kneeling on his gun hand, battering his tough glassite helmet against the crystals on the ground. Garth leaped forward, gripping the heavy torch. Brent knew something. He couldn't die yet. The torch crashed down on Akal's helmet and knocked loose the life-giving oxygen valve. The Martian squealed, gasped, and fell away.

The whispers had sent Akal mad with the magnification of his greed for whatever was in the Hermes. Garth grabbed up the gun and plunged on into the wreck.

The cabins were a shambles. Fire from a short-circuit in the control relays had consumed every inflammable substance, every paper. There was nothing!

Garth stood lax in the shattered cabin. There was nothing to do now but wait for death. His last hope was gone. He had taken MacDougal to his death for nothing. Alice Webster was doomed.

But Brent knew something. He had to shake off this weariness and make him tell what was so important in the Hermes. The demon whisperings surged and swelled now. Garth dropped the gun and began to laugh. He'd solved the secret of Darkside, anyway. He couldn't stop laughing. Brent knew something, but he wouldn't tell. And it didn't matter now. They were all going to die, here in the dark and the whispers.

Louder and louder came those voices. Brent was in the cabin, yelling defiantly. It was something about Yttrium, and Wilsey Stevens.

Yttrium was rare and valuable, he babbled. Found in the mines of Mercurian Metals, it was stolen and smuggled through Sila to secret agents who bought it for armaments. It was smuggled by Brent and Wilsey Stevens. Stevens flew the stuff from the Twilight Belt on his own yacht. He killed Gavin Webster because he found out, and hung the murder on Alice Webster and Barry Garth.

Brent didn't know about the murder, but Garth could fill in the gaps. He gripped Brent by the arm.

"Let's get away!" he shouted. "Hook onto your cargo of Yttrium and let's go."

* * *

Brent laughed crazily.

"Ship's smashed," he muttered. "I'm going to stay here with it."

The whispers, surging and swelling, came again. Over and over, a hideous monody. Suddenly Brent rushed at him. But he couldn't avoid the attack. The whispers drugged him. He fell under Brent's rush and lay laughing. Laughing, because he couldn't help it, because he had the evidence to save Alice Webster, and he couldn't use it.

Alice. The whispers said her name. He saw her, heard her, touched her. The picture of her steadied him. He stopped laughing and began to fight.

Struggling, they rolled through the broken port and onto the crystal ground. And though Garth's torch was lost, there was light, faint webs of rainbow light tossed from facet to facet.

MacDougal rushed up to them then. A giant with mad gray eyes, he stood above the two, a heavy shard of crystal in his hands, muttering with the whispers.

"The demons sent Sarasoff to kill me," he mumbled. "I killed him first. Kill! Kill before they do!"

The shard struck down. Desperately Garth flung Brent aside, took the blow glancingly on his shoulder, and struggled up. Even with Alice strong in his mind, he wanted to kill. He remembered a short-handled pick in his belt. While MacDougal was regaining his balance, poising the shard for another blow, Garth took the pick and brought it down solidly on the Scot's helmet. It stunned him, but didn't knock him out. Then an amazing change came over MacDougal.

"Their censor-band has relaxed," he said dazedly. "Conscious and subconscious are merged in my brain now. We can communicate with them for a short while. Listen!"

Garth started violently. Brent was shocked back a little to sanity. The whispers were faint. The crystals flickered eerily about the Scot, who was lying on the ground.

"We realize that we've made a mistake," a strange voice said. "But it's lonely here. You unfamiliar organisms were new, interesting. We thought we might be friends. But we bitterly regret it. We understand now."

Garth stared wildly. Had he gone mad already? The crystals flamed, weaving dim veils of gold and scarlet, and purple and green.

"Your minds are strange to us," the voice went on. "They give off wavelengths of which we know nothing. We do not know about hate, fear and love. We can but guess at them, and sensory impulses are unknown to us. In some manner we do not understand, we have caused unfavorable reactions in the organisms that have come into our sphere of life. Their mind-waves are confused, and then lost.

"We don't understand, now, why the censor-band, which seems to keep the vibrations of a part of your minds separate from the other part, has slackened in McDougal's brain. But for the first time we can communicate with you."

Why was there light in the crystals? Why had the cold torchbeam broken to a full spectrum?

"Yes, we're alive," the voice went on. "You call us crystals. We're carbon, as you are, but static. We came into being with this planet and we'll go out of being with it. We neither die nor change. But we can't build up vibration of the proper frequency to enter your conscious minds. That's what you term them, isn't it?

"In some ways we have, instead, amplified the vibrations of your subconscious minds, which seem to be a storehouse for impulses not permitted in your conscious minds. We didn't realize for a long time that your fleshly brains had two centers of thought."

* * *

These, then, were the demons!

"But how do you do it?" Garth managed to ask.

"We build up thought impulses by simple oscillation of our facets," the voice explained. "During this exchange of vibrations, energy is liberated in the form of light. When all of us oscillate to the same frequency, we have quite a powerful output. Solar radiations destroy our thoughts by introducing counter-vibrations. That's why we're powerful only in the screening shadow of this planet.

"We meant no harm. We wanted contact, not destruction. It's very lonely here in the eternal dark, the eternal silence, the eternal thought. We might have helped you. Instead, we have—is killed the thought—killed you. We're glad that this contact has been possible, for we wanted to explain and to tell you that we'll never try it again. As soon as we sense the presence of one of your organisms, we shall cease oscillating until it's gone. You need never—is fear the sensation?—fear us.

"We're sorry. We meant no harm. But we're lonely. Pure thought is wonderful. There's no limit to it. But we're so near the limit, though we hadn't believed it existed. And we're lonely. Lonely. Lonely."

The fires died out of the crystals like fireflies drowned in the mist. Darkness, black and unbroken and cold, followed. And there was silence, utter and complete. The whispering had stopped for all time.

MacDougal stirred and opened his eyes. They were wide and dazed, but the madness was gone from them.

"I heard," he whispered. "Somehow, I heard. Thank God!"

Garth turned away. He had no right to watch another man's soul being released from hell.

Far away he could make out the dim glow of the Twilight Belt. They could make it now, without madness dogging them. He could semaphore the relay ship and get a stay of Alice's execution. Brent's testimony would change things. Alice would be free, and he, too!

Brent could come back to claim his Yttrium. MacDougal was free of his demons. And Darkside was no longer a death-trap, except for the magnetic currents, which man's engineering genius could soon overcome.

The dark, lonely plain spread around him. He could feel it, though he was blind with the darkness. For just an instant, he could feel the black eternities of flight through frigid space, the silence, the desolation, the terror of a Universe coming to its end.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to the voice-crystal. "So very sorry" Then, quite loudly, he yelled to the others: "Come on. Our air won't last forever. Let's go!"


Water Pirate

Super Science Stories, January 1941

It was early in 2418 that the Solar System realized that there was a Water Pirate. The great tanker ships, carrying water to the rich dry-world mines and colonies, began to vanish from the space-lanes, with their convoys. The Trans-Galactic Convoy Fleet, which for two hundred years had kept the space-ways safe, was suddenly helpless. Ships and men vanished without a trace or an explanation, and there was no clue to be found.

For four solid weeks not a drop of water got through. The storage tanks dropped lower and lower; a panic fear of thirst swept the dry worlds. The Interplanetary Trade Marts shook in the wind of that fear, and the economic system trembled with it.

Old Johan Gray, Chief of Special Duty of the Convoy Fleet, played his last card. His son Jaffa went through the worst hell-spots of the System, searching for something that might show them some way to fight.

And on a moon-washed Martian night, Jaffa Gray stood in the shadow of the Valkis slave-market and cursed, bitterly and softly; a stocky, strong-boned man, his square face hard with the failure that he had at last to admit.

For the first time in the two days he had been in Valkis, he took off his peaked spaceman's cap, wanting the desert wind on his head and not giving a damn who saw his trademark—the broad streak where his hair had come in white over a scar. He raked his fingers through it, swearing out the last of his vocabulary; and a voice said out of the darkness: "Jaffa Gray!"

He whirled, his heat-gun blurring into his hand. A boy stepped into the moonlight. His arrow-straight body was clad like Jaffa's in dark spaceman's leather, but where Jaffa's dark hair was cropped short, the boy's rose in a shining crown, bound with the thin metal chains that marked him already a warrior in Kesh, a barbarian state in the Martian drylands.

Jaffa's face hardened. He had seen that gleaming pile of hair almost everywhere in Valkis. "All right, Keshi, you've caught up with me. Talk, and talk fast!"

The boy came closer, fearless of the gun, and his words were a breathless whisper. "I can take you to the Water Pirate!"

Jaffa stood like a graven image. He had risked his neck on an invisible trail. The last possible covert had drawn blank. He had been going home defeated; and now Fate dropped the whole thing neatly in his lap! His lips curled in a silent laugh. His left hand shot out to clamp the Keshi's tunic in a throttling grip; his right jammed the gun-muzzle in the boy's ribs. "Now," he said easily, "what's your game?"

The Keshi didn't flinch. "You are Jaffa Gray; I was sure when I saw your hair. You are hunting the Water Pirate. I can take you to him. There is no game."

Jaffa's eyes blazed. "If you were telling the truth. . . ."

The boy grinned in his face, a fighting grin. "Feel my chin, Jaffa Gray, if you want proof!"

Puzzled, the Earthman slid the fist of his gun-hand along the up-thrust jaw. His breath hissed in sharply. Intently he retraced the jaw-line, ran downward along the smooth curve of the throat. Then he let go of the tunic abruptly, as though it had burned him.

"By the Nine Red Hells of Jupiter!" he whispered. "A woman!"

"Now do you believe?" mocked the low voice. "Would I have risked Valkis to tell you a lie? What would those wolves do to me, if they found out? I need you, Jaffa Gray, and you need me!"

The white lock gleamed as Jaffa's blunt fingers rumpled it. Then he nodded shortly and shrugged his heavy shoulders.

"I'll take a chance," he grunted. "Let's go. We can talk aboard my ship."

The Kallman two-seater was ready to fly. Behind the bolted space-port they were safe from spying, and the warrior-girl of Kesh told her story in rapid sentences.

"My name is Lhara. My brother Lhar was pilot on one of the tanker ships that disappeared. The Water Pirate holds him prisoner, along with the men from the other ships, but one man escaped. My brother sent me a message by him; told me to find you, because you were the one man in the System who could bring the Water Pirate in.

"The pilot, who escaped in one of the Pirate's own ships, was to have helped us. But something went wrong; we crashed, and he was killed. You've got to fix the ship."

"Why not just use my own?" asked Jaffa.

"How close do you think you'd get to the Pirate's hideout?" returned Lhara impatiently. "Besides, it has much better weapons than any of our ships."

Jaffa's ears pricked. "Who exactly is the Water Pirate?"

"I don't know. None of the men has ever seen him."

Jaffa nodded. "Where did you crash?"

"Near the Teka range, about three hundred miles from here."

"Just a minute," demanded Jaffa suspiciously. "How'd you get across the desert to Valkis?"

The girl's grey eyes were contemptuous. "I am a Keshi." She touched the chains in her tawny hair. "I have earned these honestly. It was not hard to steal a thak from a village across the first range. I rode to Valkis."

Jaffa shook his head. "You win. But warrior or no warrior, if you're lying to me I'll wring your pretty neck. What's your position?"

He was admiring the pretty neck as he slid the strato-wings out of the hull and set the air-rotors going.

"By the Nine Red Hells of Jupiter!" Jaffa shoved back his cap and whistled. "Where did this crate come from?"

He was standing in the open port of a wrecked space ship, lying at a slight angle in the red sand of the Teka desert. It was the weirdest ship he had ever seen, and he had seen plenty. A flattened oval, rather than the familiar cylinder of the System, the alloy of its metal and the use of various gadgets projecting from the hull were both a mystery. Inside, the control cabin was furnished with queer low couches and upholstered all over with a peculiar silky stuff that flowed in quavering patterns of green and blue and brown.

A small ship, carrying four at the outside on a long voyage.

To Jaffa's right as he stood was the control panel, and beyond it, the buckled bow-plates that had sustained the brunt of the crash. Ahead was a wall pierced with thick quartzite visiports. To his left was a bulkhead; the heavy door into the rear cabins was closed. And at his feet. . . .

At his feet was the maddest thing of the whole crazy ship. Covering most of the floor space was an oval pit some six feet deep, tiled in a pattern of outlandish marine growths. It was bone dry; whatever moisture had been there had long ago gone out into the dry Martian air. But it was undoubtedly a pool of some sort, and Jaffa wondered profanely what lunatic would cart a swimming pool through space.

He whirled as bolts shot to behind him. Whirled; and dropped in a jointless heap on the narrow floor. Lhara looked grimly down at him, the paralysis-gun that Jaffa had not taken from her steady in her hand. Mutely, Jaffa raged. He had not disarmed her, for there was no way beyond actual imprisonment to keep her from the Kallman's gun-rack; and Jaffa had been reluctant to risk alienating her help. Also, he had had no real reason to believe she lied. Now he could have kicked himself.

From a locker she produced manacles and chained him securely, wrist and ankle, taking his gun. "I'm sorry, Jaffa Gray," she said steadily, as she stood at last over him. "That was an unworthy trick. But I have told you no lie. My brother is a prisoner, I need your help, and I can take you to the Water Pirate!"

Then she was gone, out into the desert.

Jaffa glared bitterly after her. The paralyzing charge had not been strong, and the life came back into him quickly. He struggled against his chains, knowing it was useless. Then he lay still, too bitter against himself and Lhara even to curse.

After a bit there came a thundering shock that rocked the desert under the ship. Sand pelted against the ports, and the sagging bow-plates shook in the surge of ruptured air. Jaffa swore. Only one thing could have made that explosion; Lhara had bombed his Kallman. His only hope of escape now lay in this queer ship that he must make fly.

The girl came back, carrying a bundle of Jaffa's things, her hair shaken in a tawny veil across her shoulders and full of sand. Subconsciously Jaffa saluted the courage it had taken to heave a sub-atomic bomb into the ship and then lie in the sand with that explosion roaring over her.

Lhara freed his hands, lengthened the chain between his ankles so that he could walk after a fashion, the paralysis-gun ready to topple him if he made a false move.

"Go look at the damage, Jaffa. You'll find everything you need here. And I advise you to hurry."

He went, grappling the problem of why, if Lhara had been telling the truth as she said, she was acting this way. She must have gone to a good deal of trouble to track him to Valkis, for he was not in the habit of leaving guide-posts behind him; and she hadn't done it simply because she needed a man to repair the ship, or even to fly it. Almost anyone else would have answered that purpose as well as he. There was something more behind it, something damned queer.

He tried to solve the mystery by the simple method of asking questions. But Lhara, along with the chains in her hair, had learned a warriors trick of keeping her jaw shut.

He learned nothing.

The damage to the ship was not great. The bow-plates had been broken so that the cabin was not space-worthy, but the instrument panel had not suffered much. The pilot had died of a broken neck, according to the girl. Jaffa studied the controls. Unfamiliar in pattern, they yet bore a resemblance to those he knew, and the ship ran on the same vibratory atom-smashing principle. He nodded in grim admiration as he saw what had made the disappearances of the tanker ships and their convoys possible. A powerful vibratory field was created by means of exterior electrodes, neutralizing the vibrations in the atom-smashing units of the System ships, rendering the engines useless. The vibrations also blanketed the radios, preventing communication. After that, the huge electro-magnets simply clamped on and towed the helpless ships like fish on a line.

A queer, wonderful ship. But he knew he could fly it; and given the proper materials, he could fix the damage in two days.

"Of course," he added, when he made his surly report to the girl, "if the mechanism of the ship has been sprung or damaged. . . ."

"It hasn't," she assured him, and he wondered how she knew.

That night the two of them bunked in the control cabin. Jaffa never thought of being alone with a woman. They brought up their girls to be men in Kesh. Lhara simply chained her prisoner securely, lay down and went to sleep. The door in the bulkhead remained closed. Jaffa tried more questions, but finally gave up and went to sleep too.

Sometime much later he came awake, not starting up, but simply ceasing to be asleep. Both moons were up, shooting crazy shadows across the narrow floor and the dry pool. Lhara's couch was empty.

Jaffa realized suddenly what had waked him. There was a sense almost of fog in his nostrils, a warm moisture faintly tinged with an unfamiliar smell. The dry, cold air sucked it up before he could analyze it. But it had been there; and Lhara was gone.

He sat up. His ankle-chain passed around a stanchion, but from where he was he could see that the bolts of the space-lock were shot from the inside, and the hatch into the engine-rooms below was locked.

His eyes fastened on the bulkhead door. Lhara was there, behind it; there was no place else for her to be. Something else was there, too, something that made warm moisture in a climate drier than the Earthly Sahara. What?

Jaffa lay awake, waiting, trying till his head ached to answer his own question. He lay so that he could see the door and still seem to be asleep; when at last the heavy door swung cautiously open, he held his breathing to an even rhythm, though he strained every sense to see what was beyond.

Nothing. Just darkness, against which Lhara's unbound hair shone like a silver cape in the moonlight. But there came again that gush of moist warmth that had wakened him, and the strange odor was a thought stronger. Then the door swung to again, and the thirsty air swallowed all trace.

Lhara stood over him a moment, listening to his breathing. Then she went back to her couch; and in spite of his rage against her, Jaffa dreamed of her, and pleasantly.

Two days of hard work saw the bow-plates once more tight. That evening Jaffa faced the Keshi girl.

"All right," he grunted. "Your crate will fly. Now what?"

"Now you try it." Lhara shot the space-bolts home. "Take her up. If she's all right, go on. If not, come back and finish the repairs."

"Had you thought we might not be able to get back?" asked Jaffa dryly.

Lhara's jaw set. "Those are the orders, Jaffa Gray."

"Yours—or someone else's?"

"That doesn't concern you." The ever-present paralysis-gun motioned him to the pilot's seat. Jaffa shrugged and obeyed.

He switched on the air-pumps and the purifying system, watching the gauges intently. The needles held steady for a moment, then wavered back to the danger point.

"What is it?" asked Lhara sharply. "Cut in your rockets!"

Jaffa pointed to the gauges: The girl's eyes hardened abruptly with suspicion. "The pumps were all right when we tested for tightness an hour ago."

"You can see them now," retorted Jaffa indifferently. "If you go up with them this way, you'll not live two hours."

She wavered a moment, for the first time uncertain. She suspected a trap, but she knew nothing of machinery. In the end, she gave in; there was nothing else to do.

"All right. You'll have to go below and fix them, and you well know there's only room for one down there. But hear me, Earthman!" Her grey gaze was steel-hard, her jaw stern. "You can't escape from there. And if you make a single false move, I'll drop you in your tracks!"

Jaffa shrugged and slid his manacled feet down the hatch.

A single narrow runway ran between the great bulk-headed power units, back to the fuel feed and the vibration chamber, where the special heavy atoms were smashed to power the rocket tubes. He found the air unit without any trouble, stood staring speculatively at the gleaming mass of machinery. There was nothing wrong with it; he himself had caused the reaction on the gauges. But there was an idea at the back of his mind, an unformed thing made of closed doors and cryptic actions and warm moisture in cold, dry air. With the queer inventiveness of a man on the brink of a mysterious fate, something had occurred to him; a fantastic thing, that might, just possibly come in handy. Any way, it was all he could do, and anything was better than nothing.

He set to work with quick, sure hands. For nearly an hour he was at it, answering Lhara's shouted questions with surly plausibilities. When at last he climbed the ladder back to the control chamber, there was something in the air-unit that had not been there before.

He took the strange ship up, testing her in every way and finding her sound. Lhara gave him his course; he stared at it, raking the white streak in his hair with blunt fingers.

"The Asteroid Belt, eh? Trust the Water Pirate to do something no crook has done since the Fleet got its long-range detectors thirty years ago! I'll be interested to see how he does it!"

"By the Nine Red Hells of Jupiter!"

Jaffa said it, very slow and soft. Impossibility was manifest before his eyes.

Mars was back of them, across the curve of space. All around them the Asteroids hurtled on their far-flung way. Ahead, where Jaffa, under Lhara's pistol-enforced order, was steering, was a tiny world-pebble a mile or so in diameter. It seemed a long way to come to commit suicide, but Jaffa held the ship steady, straight for the barren surface.

Then the impossible happened. Emptiness yawned behind a backslid portion of the asteroid itself; Jaffa, goggling, took the ship in. The strange space-door closed behind them.

"We must wait until the air is replenished," said Lhara, as though she were reciting a lesson, and Jaffa waited, staring.

A vast space had been hollowed in the rock of the asteroid, probably with powerful disintegrators, and fitted out for a hangar. Ranged neatly in ranks were the convoy ships that had vanished with the tankers; of the clumsy tankers themselves, there was no sign. There was no other ship like the one he flew, and Jaffa smiled. That fitted his embryonic theory. The floor was sheeted in metal, and he guessed at magnetic gravity plates.

A green light flashed against the wall. The Keshi girl got up and shot the space-bolts back. "Come," she said, and Jaffa, shuffling in his ankle-chains, followed obediently.

Lhara guided him, muttering directions under her breath as though she had memorized them. There was a barrack room where men of the Convoy Fleet sat in strange, quiescent alertness, like robots of flesh and blood. Lhara's eyes went in anxious pain to a tall Keshi in the uniform of the tanker company; but there was no recognition in his face, and she did not pause. Then there was a little terminal room where a car waited on a curved trough. Lhara motioned her prisoner in. Then she pressed a button, and the car shot down a green-lit tube straight for the heart of the asteroid.

With a dizzying, vertiginous suddenness, the car shot out of the metal tube into one of glass. Space opened around them—space filled with water, swarming with queer sea-creatures, suffused by a curious pale radiance. Jaffa realized, with a suffocating sensation, that the water filled the whole hollowed-out center of the asteroid.

Lhara's face was set and pale; he could not read her expression. But her knuckles were white on the grip of the ray-gun, and her breast rose to deep-drawn fighter's breathing.

There were glassite buildings ahead in the water's blur. The tube went straight into one, closing transparent walls around them. They went down a ramp and into a small room, furnished as the spaceship had been, and at Jaffa's feet there was a sunken pool, broad each way as two tall men.

Jaffa followed the Keshi girl through swinging doors into a room that stretched vastly under curving crystal walls. Intricate mechanisms, control panels, coils and vacuum tubes and gigantic things of cryptic identity filled every foot of available space; there were ray lamps and heating apparatus and rack upon rack of cultures in gleaming tubes.

And there was water, in a deep sunken pool tiled green and brown in a pattern of water-weeds.

Lhara led her captive to the brink of the pool and stopped. They stood waiting, and there was a silence like a holding of breath in the laboratory.

The water in the pool stirred suddenly, lapping against the tiles. Far down, cloaked in the rippling refractions, a solid something moved, sending a stream of crystal bubbles up along the surge of the disturbed water.

Something that was swift and sure and graceful; something that gleamed with a golden sheen as the light struck it; something that was panther-lithe and supple, and had areas of shimmering iridescence at its extremities. Jaffa's blunt fingers raked his white-streaked hair and did not feel it.

The head broke water.

A strange, unearthly face. Fine golden fur-covered features that were strong and clear and as streamlined as a space-cruiser. Eye and nostril were fitted with protective membranes, and there were no outward ears; but Jaffa, looking into fire-shot dark eyes, knew that this was a man, with no taint of the hybrid in his blood.

In one light surge the stranger gained the tiles beside the pool. The close golden fur that covered him shed the water in glistening streams down a smooth-muscled body, as human in shape as Jaffa's own, save that at wrist and ankle there were fanlike membranes. There was a strange, triumphant fire burning in the swimmer as he stood looking at Jaffa; and the Earthman realized abruptly that Lhara was trembling.

"You have done well, girl," murmured the golden Being, and Lhara's voice burst out of a tight throat.

"Give me my brother and let me go!"

The water-man might not have heard her. His dark gaze was fastened on Jaffa. "The gods are with me!" he said softly. "I shall succeed."

Jaffa's face was hard as carven stone. "I seem to be the sacrifice," he observed. "Is it permitted that I know for what?"

The golden swimmer swung about, reaching for a switch, "I'll show you, Earthman!" The light went out, leaving a suffocating blackness. After a moment a pale square of light gleamed; the strange voice, that had a liquid music in it, called them closer. "Look here, into this ultra-visor. It will explain better than any words."

Jaffa looked, hearing the taut breathing of the Keshi girl beside him. Something, a spinning blur, took shape in the screen, resolved itself into a planet, revolving about a triple sun. The focus drew in, blotting out the suns; the curve of the globe flattened, became a concave bowl of water, stretching to the limits of the screen. Here and there tiny islands raised swampy heads, barely above the face of the warm, teeming sea; in the shallows around them were domes of gleaming glassite, housing cities.

Closer still; into the streets of the under-water cities, where there were great buildings fallen to ruin and disuse, all save the temples. No children played, and the homes were desolate. Only the temples had life—and the taverns. There were as many taverns as there were temples, and here the sunken pools were filled with stuff that was not water; those who wallowed in them were mere sodden, licentious hulks.

The cities faded to show writhing undersea forests, growing on oozy mud. Amongst the towering fronds of weeds and the amorphous bulks of giant sponges swam monstrous shadows, things with gills and dorsal fins that were yet not fish. They were to the beings in the cities as the apes are to man, and their faces were bestial beyond anything Jaffa had ever seen. They swam around the glassite domes, nuzzling the transparent surfaces, glaring hungrily at the men within; and here and there a shining dome was cracked before the strength of their numbers. The sea-things rode the spurting water through the rifts, and the men who had time to drown were the lucky ones.

Lhara gasped, and Jaffa sensed her averted head. Then, as the screen flickered out and the light came up again, the voice of the golden swimmer spoke, low and somber.

"I, Rha, was the last child to be born on Vhila."

They stood waiting, the man and the woman. The alien one faced them, his muscles drawn taut.

"Vhila is a dying world. Once, as you saw, she was great. But we are an old people, and we have seen our doom approaching for centuries. The sea-dwellers out-breed us a thousand to one. One by one our cities fall, and my people have fallen too, under the load. You saw them; some wait for death in the temples, some in the kulha-tanks. But learning and work and hope are dead on Vhila.

"Can you understand that, Earthman? A world of living dead! No future, no life, just a dumb acceptance and an endless waiting. I revolted. I lived alone in the empty colleges, the laboratories, the museums; I learned all the ancient knowledge of my race. And I turned my eyes to your solar system, where I dreamed of a new life for what remains of my people. When I was ready, I took a spaceship from the museum, stocked it with the tools I would need, but no weapons, for we are a peaceful race."

"I landed first on Venus. You can guess why, Earth-man; we are amphibious, taking water through the skin. We cannot live in a dry world. But instead of the peaceful welcome I had expected, I was attacked and driven off. The people feared me. They would have killed me if they could. I knew then that my people could not come in peace. We are alien."

"I found this asteroid, and changed it to suit me. Then I studied your system more thoroughly, by means of the ultra-visor, that I might find means to conquer it. I have no wish to kill, only to force recognition of my wishes and to gain the power to carry them out. I found that your civilization rests basically on the water trade that permits your far-flung colonies to live. Fitting, was it not? I could prey on this water trade, bring you to the brink of destruction, and then make my demands. Under the circumstances, there could be no refusal."

Again the fire-shot eyes rested on Jaffa. "The gods have been kind. So far I have succeeded."

Jaffa raised his head. "Where do I fit in?"

Rha smiled. "I need a hostage, to insure that my demands are believed, understood, and carried out promptly. You are the son of Johan Gray. The Chief of Special, I have learned, is really the most powerful man in the System, for he sits at the secret head of all the activities of the planets. To him, through you, I shall make my demands."

Jaffa nodded, his eyes hooded behind dropped lids. "And if he refuses?"

Rha sighed and spread his hands.

For the first time Lhara spoke. Both men started. Her voice was sharp and fearless as a sword, and the paralysis-gun was steady in her hand.

"I've been a fool, Rha! I knew none of this; only that if I brought you this man, you would cure my brother and let him go. I thought you were only a clever bandit, and I was willing to barter with you for my brother's life. If I had known, I would have killed Lhar with my own hands before I would have obeyed you!"

She flung quick words over her shoulder at Jaffa. "I am sorry, Earthman, for what I did. Stand by me now!"

Rha did not flinch. "You cannot escape. The doors are closed, and my pilots, who are my slaves since I injected them with a special hormone, guard the hangar. Only I can take you out of here."

Wills met and locked. Then Lhara bowed before the truth. Rha took the gun from her unresisting hand.

"Now," he said. "We will go out again in my spaceship, away from here so that my position cannot be traced by the radio carrier-waves, and contact Johan Gray. You will not be stubborn, Jaffa, I am sure."

Jaffa's eyes were still hidden, and there was a ghost of a smile on his lips. He asked: "Why did you come back here at all? You were aboard the ship back on Mars."

"You guessed it, did you?" Rha nodded as he led the way out of the laboratory. "The Martian air is so dry I couldn't leave my cabin, and I was afraid if you knew, you'd try something. An unfortunate thing, that smash-up, especially the pilot's death. But I had to have you, Jaffa, and I had to have Lhara to get you.

"I came back here for two reasons. The water, air, and food were nearly exhausted; but particularly I wanted you to see my stronghold and my laboratory, so that you would know I made no idle boasts. Vhila has scientific secrets your people won't guess at for several centuries yet."

They made a silent trio on the trip back to the hangar. Rha picked up three armed pilots from the barrack-room. He smiled at Lhara as he motioned her into his ship, saying: "I feel safer with you where I can watch you." Then the ship roared out through the space-door. The bulkhead door was closed, and the pool in the control cabin was newly filled.

At a safe distance Rha brought the ship to a standstill. And as the throb of the motors died, Jaffa came to his feet. His chains clashed as he hurled himself in a desperate dive for the control panel. Before anyone could stop him, he had landed all his weight on a knife-switch set beside the controls, smashed it down to the end of its slot.

Down in the bowels of the ship there was a grating clash. The water in the pool began to bubble and hiss, and a whitish gas rolled sluggishly over the brink to spread across the floor. In the time it took Jaffa to regain his feet, it had covered the floor-plates and was lapping the ankles of the thunderstruck people who watched it.

"That gas," said Jaffa steadily, "is highly explosive. I should advise the men not to fire their heat-guns."

Rha snapped his orders. "Take him—but don't fire!"

The three pilots moved forward like plastic robots. Jaffa faced them; without shifting his eyes he called to Lhara, "Keep your head above the mist!" Rha stood quietly, waiting, but his eyes were on a switch above the one Jaffa had thrown, and he said "Hurry!" very quietly.

The white gas billowed sluggishly at their wrists.

The rest, afterwards, was a blur to Jaffa's memory. One man missed his footing on the narrow floor and vanished into the pool. The other two came on, holding their heat-guns clubbed. The Earthman caught a glimpse of Lhara, stalking like a panther behind Rha. Then he had grappled the two pilots and gone lurching down into the sea of mist.

The swirling opacity blinded him; he held his breath while he struggled, praying that his chest wouldn't burst until he had what he wanted. The pilots fought doggedly to hold him while they regained their feet. But Jaffa had the desperation of a man clutching his last chance; and he knew that above the rising flood of gas, Rha was reaching for the switch that would mean defeat.

His hand closed on a flailing heat-gun. His head was ringing, his lungs burned with the agony of suffocation. Dimly he knew that one man had fallen limply to the floor, unconscious. He wrenched desperately at the gun, knowing he couldn't last much longer. The distorted face close to his loosed a burst of breath that set the white gas swirling. Then the empty lungs sucked in; the hand went limp.

With the last of his strength Jaffa surged upward. The gas had risen; how high? Above his head, perhaps. Perhaps it had choked all air from the cabin, pouring up faster than the air-conditioners could work. Perhaps Rha and Lhara were lying under it, dying of anoxia. And suddenly, through his pain and desperation, Jaffa knew something. The hard-held air in his lungs broke from him in a cry.

"Lhara!"

Like a swimmer, his head broke the surface. The gas lapped his chin, but there was air still. He gulped it in. Rha's head was rigid above the rising tide, and behind it, Lhara's, her hair fallen in a bright cloak that gleamed through the mist.

Jaffa raised his gun and fired.

In a crackling fury of sparks the flying controls fused to a blackened ruin. Jaffa lurched forward, dragged at the switch above the one he had pressed before. The handle scorched his palm, so near had the destructive blast come to it. A gurgling rush came from the pool, and the gas sucked downward in a sullen whirlpool. Jaffa leaned weakly against the bulkhead, and knew that he was laughing at the two thunderstruck faces.

"Dry ice!" he gasped. "I diverted carbon dioxide from the air purifiers and improvised a compression unit with one of the pressure tanks. Then I connected the compression-tank release with a cut-in on the feed-pipe for this pool, the only one that can be emptied from the control panel. When I pulled that switch I dumped about ten pounds of dry ice into the water. That gas was the released carbon dioxide, perfectly harmless, except that it can suffocate."

Lhara released the arm she had been holding in a vise-grip behind Rha's back; the grip that had kept him from getting to that all-important switch and wrecking Jaffa's plans. Together they got the men up above the last of the gas that hovered above the empty pool. When they were breathing properly again, Jaffa turned to Rha.

"You realize your position. Very soon after I radio, Fleet ships will come to take us in tow. In the ordinary course of events, you will be destroyed as a danger to the welfare of the Solar System.

"But I don't think you are a menace, Rha. I think you're a very courageous man, and a great scientist; and on those grounds, I'll make a bargain with you. My father, as you said, has influence. I think, after I explain, that I can persuade him to arrange a colony for you, provided you give your word to live in peace. And that's what you really want, isn't it, Rha?"

"I ask only a useful life for my people." For a long, long moment Rha looked into the Earthman's eyes. Then he bowed his head, and his voice was deep as he answered:

"I accept your offer, Jaffa Gray."

Jaffa sighed relieved and turned to the radio. Lhara sat on a couch beside it.

"You'll go back to Kesh now?" he asked abruptly.

"As soon as my brother is free." She faced him frankly. "I'm sorry for what I did, Jaffa. But since it's turned out this way. . . ."

"I think," said Jaffa, "if I were to come to Kesh, and you were to try very hard, I might forgive you."


Interplanetary Reporter

Startling Stories, May 1941

The news broke just after Chris Barton left the Stellar Queen at Vhia, the trade city for Venus. He stood on the steps of the spaceport. Looking out over the white city under its pearly dome, he breathed the cooled, scented air. As he listened, his thin mouth was set in a bitter smile of complete cynicism.

Silence had settled over Vhia, a silence of pent breath and tautened nerves, of ears strained to catch every word from the great newscasters in every green square. People were converging in soft-footed multitudes on the three-dimensional, full-color television screens. The marts that supplied all Venus with the treasures of the Solar System had stopped in mid-career, to listen.

"I could have told them," Chris Barton thought. "I saw it coming, out in the asteroids. I can smell it the way a vulture smells death."

Still the men on the vision screens talked on, curiously low and hurried. The people of Vhia stood frozen in a kind of incredulous daze, through which realization began to seep like pain through a new wound.

"Jupiter has declared war on Venus! Instructions will be given to the civilian population as soon as possible. Military classes will report at once . . ."

"For what?" muttered Chris Barton. "These people are like sheep. They can't fight. Most of them aren't even Venusians. Poor fools, they'd better just run, because Vhia is the first place the Jovians will lay eggs on. Hang it, I've got to stay and watch!"

* * *

He went down the steps. Among the stunned, unmoving mob, he walked like a lean old he-wolf among domestic cattle.

Something about him seemed to penetrate the stricken daze that held them. Perhaps it was his careless, piratical dress, or the hard-bitten arrogance of his walk. It might have been that the outland suns which had burned his skin to dark leather had also burned out all the soft places and left only the steel. Whatever it was, he attracted their eyes, and they drew back from him. He heard his name, tossed between white lips.

"Chris Barton, war correspondent for Interplanetary Press, the Sexton Syndicate. Wherever he goes, it means trouble."

Chris Barton smiled—bird of ill-omen, vulture of pain. Beyond the dome of pearly glass, on the other side of Venus, lay the swamp where he had left his boyish illusions, covering the Leng campaigns. Out beyond the steamy canopy of clouds was Mars, where he had stood by a tele-transmitter until it was blown up under him, covering the Martian World War of 2504.

There was Earth, where he had dodged bullets and poisoned darts to inform the people of the Solar System how the Dark Invasion was going. And there was the Asteroid Belt, where he had just televised a vicious, small-scale war.

Forty-three years of life, and he was alone. The men who had started with him were dead, but his fatalistic contempt of death had pulled him through. There was not a man in the news world who didn't resent or dislike him. There had never been a woman.

Chris Barton stopped. An I. P. man pictured above his head was rehashing the situation—the Venusian defenses, the population of the Jovian moons, the boundaries of the Jovian Mandate in the Asteroid Belt, where the trouble had started. The same words, with different names, that he himself had said so many times.

Standing on the feathery Venusian grass, under the dome of a city listening to its death sentence, Barton felt the weight of those forty-three years increase to a hundred. The sordidness of them made him sick.

Battle, news, death, and more news, endlessly. For what? Though he was a legend in newspaperdom, for all the thrills he had given the boobs, he was a pariah.

Fear-whitened faces. Voices tight with hysteria. Newscasters droning out death and suffering. They tripped a spring somewhere in Barton's mind, brought to light the worm that had been gnawing at his subconscious. He was tired, old and alone. And there was another war on, which only Chris Barton could give to the people.

His hard, light-blue eyes narrowed. He went on again, across the breathless city, with a sort of grim ruthlessness. He knew quite suddenly what he was going to say. Sanger could take his war and go to blazes with it.

The fine white building that housed the Venusian headquarters of the Sexton Syndicate was in chaos. Reporters, rewrite men, telecasters, copy boys, technicians—wherever possible, the Syndicate employs native men—were swarming out into the streets, to find loved ones, to report for duty. Down below, where the great silent presses turned out the indispensable papers in the universal language of the trade cities, it was the same. Only the robot teletypists remained.

Barton shouldered through the mob, heading for the office of John Sanger, I. P. head for Venus. Halfway across the anteroom, he stopped. For a moment he didn't know why. Then his mind, fixed on one urgent goal, registered dimly.

It was a woman who had swung from a window at his entrance. She was tall and wide-shouldered and lithe, dressed in a spaceman's dark coverall. Barton saw green, slanting Martian eyes set startlingly in a tanned, heart-shaped face, and hair that was the soft white-gold of Venus.

Confusedly he knew that she was familiar, yet he knew he had never seen her before. His eyes met hers, held them. For one electric instant he was lost, disoriented, charged with a queer fascination. Then the bitter urge in his heart drove him on without speaking, and the thread was broken. The closing of Sanger's door behind him shut her out of his mind.

"Sanger," said Chris Barton grimly, "I quit."

* * *

John Sanger froze, half risen in welcome. A well built, well kept man, his dark hair had gone gray at the temples, and his clean-cut face was scored deep with weariness. He sank back into his chair.

"Why, Barton? What's the reason?"

Barton's lips twisted. "Getting old, I guess. Cracking at the seams. Anyway, I'm through."

"With reporting?"

"With the whole rotten game!"

John Sanger was silent, looking into Barton's bitter, stubborn face. Then he shook his head in bewilderment.

"You can't quit. I don't know what's the matter with you, but you're a newspaper man. You have your duty, as well as a job. There's a war on. The people have a right . . ."

"Blast the people!" snarled Chris Barton. "A bunch of fat fools, getting a thrill out of other people's suffering and hating you when the thrill comes home to them. No need to preach, Sanger. I learned all about the sanctity of the press with my ABCs—and forgot about it with my second war. I'm sorry if it leaves you in a hole, but I'm finished."

"Be sensible, Barton!" said Sanger irritably. "You've been in this too long. It's all you know. You wouldn't fit anywhere else."

"You let me worry about that."

Sanger suddenly looked what he was, a tired man. He passed a hand across his eyes.

"I was counting on you. I've got a newspaper to run, and I'm going to have to do it almost single-handed. There's no one else. . . ." He broke off and shook himself erect. "Why not? There were reporters before you were born!"

He flipped a connection open, and Barton knew his voice was booming out along the empty corridors.

"Bobby Lancer! Report to Sanger's office, at once!"

Barton shrugged and turned away. As he did so, a picture on a paper spread on Sanger's desk caught his eye. Picking it up unceremoniously, he stood staring at it.

Slanting green eyes looked back at him out of a heart-shaped face. Pale-gold Venusian hair fell to wide, coverall-clad shoulders. The three-dimensional, natural-color photograph brought her almost to life. The caption read:

Kei Volhan, socialite adventuress of Vhia, who, it is rumored, is prepared for a takeoff despite the Venusian Space Committee's injunction. She will try to shatter the existing record for a three-point, non-stop flight—Venus, Earth, Mars, and back.

That was where he had seen her. In the brief lulls between wars and their rumors, he had read casually of her wild exploits along the spaceways. He had put her down as a feather-brained brat, product of the soft, over-stimulated trade cities, and forgotten her. Now he knew he couldn't forget her again.

"What's she doing out there?" he asked abruptly.

Sanger shrugged. "Came to raise a fuss about that story. The war changes all that, anyway. She'll probably take it out on young Lance. They're engaged to be married."

Still the enigmatic phantom pulled at Barton. He knew dimly that it wanted him to stay, because of Kei Volhan.

"I still quit!" he grunted, flinging the paper down.

* * *

Yanking his piratical old hat down over his eyes, he started out. He was through, finished, fed up. He hated himself and the world. He was going to get drunk, or die, or both. What difference did a green-eyed girl make?

The door opened before he reached it. She was there, and a tall young man was with her, his arm about her waist. Chris Barton stopped.

"Come in, Lance," Sanger said. "You too, Miss Volhan, if you wish."

Those disturbing green eyes met Barton's again, held them, sent an almost electric current through his blood. Something in the girl rose to the emotions in him that everyone else turned away from. It was strange how strongly he felt that, because he didn't know women, didn't like them. He wrenched his gaze away, let it waver back.

It was then that the first Jovian bomb struck!

The instant his ears registered the first reverberations, Barton realized that the Jovians must have had a fleet waiting, invisible somehow from the charted space-lanes. Briefly he wondered how. With the growing tension in the Asteroids, each world had kept a doubly sharp watch, and there had not been even the rumor of a fleet. But it must have been there. With the declaration of war it had swooped, catching the peaceable Venusians unprepared.

There was a splintering crash as the dome was ruptured, a vast ripping sound as the tough glassite starred and cracked away from the hole. The office windows rattled with the change of pressure, as the wet, heavy outer air rushed into the cooler, thinner Vhian atmosphere. Then the shell burst. Chris Barton fell in a shower of plaster.

From the sound, Barton knew that the shell had struck on the far side of the city. Three more of them came in quick succession. The power of the sub-atomic explosive was strong enough to rock the heavy I. P. building like a cardboard toy. He nodded a brief acknowledgment of Jovian marksmanship. The invaders were out beyond the atmosphere, sending the heavy eggs down with a self-contained direction unit.

"Sanger!" he called out. "Have you got a cellar?"

The I. P. head pulled himself up from behind the desk, bleeding from a nasty gash over the eye.

"You know quite well there are cellars," he grunted. Glaring upward, he added: "This is the lowest, dirty-dog trick anyone's pulled in a century!"

"I'd still like to know where they hid their fleet."

Barton scrambled up, coughing, and gave his hand to Kei Volhan. She didn't need his help, but she held his hand and looked at him while she rose. He knew that she was no more afraid than he was. Sanger joined them, wiping blood from his face.

"Hurry up. The skunks'll shell Hades out of us before the Venusian fleet wakes up. Hey, Bobby, are you hurt?"

* * *

Barton had forgotten Bobby Lance. He was half-crouched against the wall, his gray eyes dazed and staring in a bloodless face. For an instant Barton thought he was hurt, and was vaguely sorry. Lance looked like a promising youngster, well built, with a keen, intelligent face. But he wasn't hurt. He got up jerkily, bending his head to hide his face, running shaky hands through his dusty yellow hair.

"Come on, Kei," he muttered, and started for the door.

Barton knew, then. Lance was scared. Barton shrugged cynically as they hurried down the corridor. Lance was young. Eventually you either got the fear hammered out of you, or you let it get you. Either way, it didn't matter, for the System didn't give a hang. All it wanted was thrills at a distance.

They didn't dare use the lifts. Bombs began to fall again, cracking the steps under them as they ran down. Already the temperature was rising as the hot Venusian air steamed in. Barton thought of all the soft Vhians who had never been beyond the dome. They looked upon the hardy outsiders as barbarians, while they built their own polyglot civilization in a manufactured comfort. It was the same on all the planets. The trade cities are alien, a law and a race unto themselves. Vhia, at last, was going to get a taste of the real Venus.

"Nuts!" cried Sanger abruptly. "The summer rains are on Outside. With the dome broken, Vhia will be flooded out!"

"Perhaps," said Bobby Lance too loudly, "the cellars aren't such a good idea, after all."

"Perhaps," suggested Kei Volhan, "you ought to join the refugees. They'll be evacuating women and children."

Chris Barton's thin brows went up at the savage contempt in her voice. She didn't sound much in love with Lance. Lance looked at her. There was something in his gray eyes that penetrated even Barton's armor.

"That's not fair, Kei. You know I won't leave. There's the newspaper. There'll be a battle up there. Somebody's got to take the ship up and televise it."

"Why?" demanded Barton. His harsh voice brought Kei's green eyes around, and he felt that stimulating leap along his veins.

"Why?" said Lance simply. "The news has to be broadcast. The people have a right to know what's going on."

Chris Barton laughed, a sardonic bark. Kei's fingers fastened on his wrist. He felt the tingling strength of them answered in himself. Her brown, heart-shaped face was level with his own.

"You'll take the ship up, Chris Barton," she said.

For some reason, he didn't tell her he was through with reporting. His hard, dark face went quizzical.

"Who'd fly me?" he demanded, knowing the answer. "I couldn't do it all alone."

"I will" said Kei Volhan.

"Kei!"

Incredulous hurt bleated almost comically in Lance's cry. But he wasn't comical. Barton had seen it before—a kid under fire for the first time, having a hard enough time without his girl going back on him. But those were the breaks. You had to take them, beat them down and go on, or quit. It was up to Lance.

Barton's gaze held Kei's. His world had exploded in his face. Why not have a last fling? Besides, those green eyes promised something. He didn't know what, but he wanted to find out.

"Okay, sister," he said. "I might as well die that way as any other."

Three steps below them, still running down, Sanger laughed.

* * *

The I. P. newscasting ship was in a hangar at the Dehra Spaceport, a private field beyond the dome. Normally it was an easy half-mile jaunt in a car.

"Take it up if you can get it, Barton," Sanger said. "I've got to stay here."

They stood in a side entrance at street level, staring out. Barton's harsh face was grim. The pearly dome was cracked and shattered. Through the breaks, the outer air poured in like fog, smelling of jungle and swamp and lush-grassed uplands. There were growing pools of water where the hot rain splashed through. Barton could see smoke and broken buildings to the south, where the heaviest bombing had been. Rain was falling in torrents through a vast hole in the dome.

Refugees jammed the streets, pushing toward the outlets and safety. Men who handled the System's trade with Venus. Women whose lives had been smooth, easy and unruffled. People who had worked in peace and plenty, and ignored the storm signals too long. Barton had coldly seen it a hundred times before, yet this time it made him feel as he had felt in the square—old, tired and alone in a system that was doubly ugly, with this cowardly brutality of the Jovians.

He sighed. Then he saw Kei's tumbled pale-gold hair, the brown arrogance of her heart-shaped face, and felt life stealing through him again.

"Come on," he said, "if you're not afraid."

She laughed at him like a Martian cat. She must have forgotten Bobby Lance, for she started when he spoke.

"I'm coming, too!"

Barton stared at him. Years of judging kings, dictators and presidents, warlords and treaty-makers, had given him a clinical insight into people. His cold, impersonal judgment managed to be uncannily accurate. When he had first seen Bobby Lance in the doorway with Kei, he had seen only a good-looking young masculine body. After the bombing, he had seen a youngster scared half out of his wits by his first taste of war.

Now he saw a man, disheveled and pale as death, his muscles jerking involuntarily as though with a high-tension current. Sick with fear, he was even sicker with rage against Kei Volhan, for turning her back on him because he was afraid. He raged against Barton as any man would hate the object of his fiancée's sudden favor.

Barton smiled. It was the first time any man had had occasion to feel that way about him. It was a stimulating experience, made him feel as though he were not really dead. He felt that Kei was being hard on Lance, and yet he could understand it. It was his own cynical ruthlessness, the impersonal harshness of a nature that asked no quarter and could see no reason for giving it. Kei had no fear, and she was savagely disappointed in Lance.

"I'm going, too," repeated the young man stubbornly, and his jaw was set and ugly.

"Why?" demanded Kei. "You—"

Her words were drowned in a thundering fury of sound. Great jagged pieces of the dome showered down, meeting an up flung geyser of plastic and concrete where two whole blocks vanished in oily smoke. It was close. Debris fell in the streets around the I. P. building. People screamed and fell, broken like dolls, and the whole mass of refugees surged forward in a frantic wave, mad with fear.

* * *

Lance was whiter than the cracked white terrace he lay on. He didn't seem to realize the time-lag between her question and his answer.

"It's my job. All this is happening. The people have a right to know the truth. The ship needs three—one to fly, one to broadcast, one to handle the equipment. There's no one else, even if it weren't my job."

Rising cautiously from the rocking terrace, Chris Barton stopped long enough to meet Lance's gaze.

"I didn't know they still made people like you," he grunted, shaking his head. "Idealism's a bad thing. Quicker you get over it, the better. Not so tough, then. The boobs can't hurt you."

The barrage had started again, and this time it was too close for comfort. Barton saw water running in ominous little rivers down the streets. Vhia, without gutters or storm drains, was in for a wetting.

"You can't stay, Sanger," he said abruptly. "Even if the bombs didn't smash this place to glory, you'd drown in the cellars."

John Sanger sighed. "You're right. I'd hoped. . . . Oh, well, I can probably get over to Lhash. Our nearest branch is there, and I can carry on all right from it, thanks to you." Unexpectedly he gripped Barton's hand. "I knew you'd realize you couldn't quit. Good luck, Chris, and thanks."

He plunged out into the rushing human sea before Barton could open his mouth.

"Well?" snapped Bobby Lance. "Are we going?"

Barton was still staring after Sanger.

"What?" he muttered absently. Then, jerking himself back, he rasped: "Come on!"

He led the way off the terrace. It was nightmarish, that struggle toward Dehra Spaceport. The three kept close together, Barton's shoulder touching Kei's. Water ran deeper and deeper in the streets as more of the dome fell in. Bombs were razing Vhia behind them.

The wild stampede slackened somewhat, slowed by the rain. Barton knew that it was thinning out. Most of those untouched by the first bombings had got out. He prayed they hadn't taken the I. P. ship for transport. Then, remembering that it only held two besides the pilot, he decided they probably wouldn't.

They came to the smashed pressure-lock in the base of the riven dome, and were carried through with the outgoing press of people. Over in the main hangars and out on the field, people were fighting for space on any kind of ship going anywhere, away from Vhia. Barton's eyes went anxiously to the little private combination hangar and launching rack. He saw with relief that it was still locked.

"This way!" he called, and battled across the stream.

Kei squared her shoulders like a man, staying at his side. Lance was taking out some of his inner turmoil with his fists. They won clear at last and broke into a run. The mob, intent upon escape, never noticed them.

In five minutes, Kei Volhan had the retractable plastic roof slid back, the motors roaring to life. The trim little Fitts-Sothern quivered on the launching rack. Then it shot up through the rain, past the miles-thick layers of steaming clouds, out into the star-shot black of space.

* * *

In those brief moments of acceleration, Barton's lungs felt crushed, his eyeballs bursting. The seat straps were cutting his flesh. He cursed himself, wondering why a green-eyed girl had been able to make him do something he had sworn never to do again. He was used to having his brain clear, like a cold, accurate machine. Since he had stood in the square in Vhia, feeling the Old Man of the Sea that was his life fasten on his shoulders, his mind had been confused. Kei hadn't helped any. It gave him an angry feeling of helplessness, as though he no longer controlled his actions.

The pressure slacked abruptly, and he could see again. The Fitts-Sothern was a sweet little ship. Sanger had evidently wanted the most modern newscasting ship in his territory.

Electronic cameras of the newest type were mounted in nose and keel. The transmitter was compact and powerful, operating on an ultra-short wave controlled beam. Tight and strong enough to pierce the heavy Venusian atmosphere, it would be comparatively unaffected by ionization in the upper layers. Automatic full-color, three-dimensional cameras were mounted with the electronics, along with sound-recording apparatus to make a permanent record of what the reporter sent out to the world.

An extra, independent camera was in the pilot's bay, to be used at the reporter's discretion. All had infra-red and ultra-violet filters to take care of various conditions of light, as well as long-range lenses and telescopic sights.

Barton unstrapped himself, for they were in free space now. He went up beside Kei, noting that Lance, still pale and grimly silent, was already at the instrument panel. Looking out, he frowned.

"Where are the blighters?" he grunted.

Space was black and empty, except for the stars and the great cloudy ball of Venus. There was no fleet, no sign of anything at all. But the meteoric mass-detectors on the board showed the close presence of a small metallic body.

"What the—" shouted Chris Barton.

He was flung back violently, striking against the transmitter panel. Lance was already crumpled brutally against the stern bulkhead. Barton felt the wild, reverberant shuddering of the ship's metal sides.

"Space torpedo!" groaned Lance.

Strapped in her seat, Kei fought the ship to an even keel, shot away in a screaming tangent. Barton got to his feet shakily, hugging his bruised ribs and swearing. That had been much too close, and it had come from nowhere.

"Something funny," Kei said evenly. "Why can't we see the ship?"

"I don't know."

The pilot's bay gave full vision, and there was absolutely no ship. On an impulse, Barton switched on the infra-red projector, a lamp which shot a powerful beam of "black light" that helped in taking pictures in world-shadow areas or heavy atmosphere. It was a nasty feeling, waiting for another torpedo to fly out of nothing. This time it might not be a miss.

The little visi-plate of the infra-beam showed a small, dim shape, off to sunward of them, lying still in space. It showed another, a tiny shape, streaking. . . .

"Kei!" Barton almost screamed. "Ahead, fast!"

* * *

The Fitts-Sothern shrieked in agony at the sudden acceleration, but they made it. They were bathed in the red flare of the torpedo that had been fired by a timing device.

Bobby Lance spoke from the transmitter panel. It had taken him a long time to get there. He sat straight in his chair, gripping the arms, and his young face was bone-white under his tumbled yellow hair.

"Can't they see our badge?" he asked flatly.

All news ships carried a broad band of white paint, to mark them plainly as non-combatant neutrals. If the reporter were cautious, he could televise his battle from a distance in reasonable safety. Barton knew from experience that an incautious correspondent took the same risks as anyone else.

"Yes," he answered. "Sure they can see it."

Whoever they were, they had a reason for ignoring it. Finding them again with the infra-beam, he flipped on the cameras and motioned to Lance. The young man's fingers quivered on the dials and verniers, but in a moment Barton's screen came clear. The man at the I. P. station at Lhash was speaking.

"You've got a System-wide hookup. Go ahead, but watch out for the Venusian fleet. It's on its way up. After what the Jovians did to Vhia, I hope we knock the devil out of 'em!"

"Okay."

Barton flipped the connection over, cuddled the mike in his palm. Then, with his eyes still glued to that enigmatic little blot of darkness in the lens, his mind began to race perversely.

"No more torpedoes," he thought. "Ship's no bigger than ours. No room for more. Why don't I hate this? I hated it back in Vhia. Was Sanger right? It was Kei that made me come, but why did Kei make any difference? And I don't understand young Lance. Could I have understood him once? Did I ever feel that way?"

Then his mind was hard and clear again. There was news, a story in that strange black ship.

"Mr. and Mrs. Solar System!" he began. His voice went on, almost of itself, pouring out those short, electric sentences that had kept people glued to their televisors for twenty years, whenever something exciting was going on.

Pale but unshaken, Kei sent the ship arcing toward the black one in obedience to his gesture. Infra-red beams and filters were raking it, pinning it indelibly to sensitive film. Abruptly its rocket tubes burst into flame.

"They know we've seen them," said Barton. "They've been quiet up to now, hoping to destroy us without betraying their position. They didn't count on the infra-red beam. Now. . . . Hold on. They're not Jovians! Their rocket gases—"

A bolt of vivid violet shot away from the black ship. Kei lurched the ship violently aside, but there was no escaping. The purple light was drawn to them. Before Barton could finish his sentence, it struck with a blinding flare of electric blue. In airless space, there was no sound, but the light lasted so long that Barton had an eerie feeling of fire. Fire in space?

"Lance, try to contact Lhash!"

The young man's face was ghastly. Barton hadn't believed fear could produce that gray, deathly pallor. Lance's fingers fumbled uncertainly. Barton heard Kei's bitter little snort of disgust.

"It's dead," Lance whispered. "Antenna fused."

* * *

Barton grunted. No more broadcasting, so the boobs would have to do without their thrill.

"What did you mean, Chris?" Kei spoke over her shoulder, watching the rocket flare of the black ship intently.

"Jovian ships use a fuel mixture that produces a red exhaust flare. If you'll notice, this is yellow. What fuel makes a yellow exhaust?"

"The Martian liquid-hydrogen mixture! You don't mean. . . ."

"I mean that's a Martian ship," Barton said, evenly. "The Jovians didn't bomb Vhia."

"Martians! "The enormity of the thing gradually took shape. Kei was half Martian, but she was Venusian-born. "They've been fighting us over water prices. They claim we victimize them, because they're dependent on us for water. So that's it—revenge!"

Barton shook his head. "There's more to it than that. You are pretty hard on them, you know. They need water badly, especially with these new reclaimed areas. The Jovian mandate in the Asteroid Belt contains three of the wettest little worlds in the System. If she could get hold of those, Mars would be practically independent."

"They'll be coming for us as soon as they break their orbital drag," said Kei quietly. "What should I do?"

Venus loomed, a vast cloudy disc, beside them. Barton shrugged.

"Run like fury. We can't fight 'em."

Bobby Lance spoke behind them. They both started at the vehemence of his labored whisper.

"You can't run. We still have a camera and the infra-beam. The cameras outside are ruined, and so are the films. That bolt of electricity—they planned on a camera ship. But we've got to take pictures of them that will prove the Jovians had nothing to do with Vhia!"

"If we did," said Barton slowly, "it would change the whole aspect of the war. Jupiter wants territory. That's where the fight started. Mars wants water, and Jupiter has it. So Mars deliberately infuriates Venus against Jupiter by committing such an outrage that even peace-loving Venus will never quit until Jupiter is licked.

"Now Mars can either abrogate her trade treaty with Jupiter in return for the Jovian mandate, which Venus will hand over after the war is won. Or, if Jupiter looks like winning, she can give active aid to Venus in return for the Jovian asteroids and water rights here. Either way, it's a filthy business. Vhia didn't have a chance. And Venus is out to smash Jupiter for good because of it."

"That's it. We've got to put the blame where it belongs. Perhaps we can save millions of people from dying." Lance dragged himself erect. "You've got to do it, Barton. Will you?"

Barton's hard, light eyes pinned him, trying to see through him.

"We'd be crazy to try. They're armed, we're not. What about Kei?"

The boy looked stubbornly past him at nothing.

"Kei got herself into this. And we have a duty to the world."

So Lance could be ruthless on his own account. Barton's thin, harsh face creased in a puzzled frown. What was it about Lance and Kei that set all his values askew?

"They're gaining speed," said Kei. "We haven't all day."

Barton cursed the new confusion of his brain, hesitated.

* * *

Suddenly Bobby Lance was gripping his shoulders with fingers that hurt, shouting at him in a hoarse, strangled voice.

"Curse you, Barton, haven't you got a heart? Why are you a newspaperman, if the truth doesn't mean anything to you?"

"It may mean your death."

"I don't care. We've got to try . . ."

He fell abruptly, huddled at Barton's feet.

"They'll have enough velocity for fighting in a minute now," Kei said. "We won't be able to run much longer. What'll I do, Chris?" She hadn't noticed Lance s fall.

"Hang on a second longer." He was staring down at Lance. Could the kid be right? "Nuts!" he snarled, kneeling. "What does he know? Passing out that way from fright."

He lay on his face. Barton caught his shoulder, pulled him over. Then Barton caught his breath with a sudden hiss, and ran his hand along Lance's side.

"Kei, we're both heels," he said, rising slowly.

"Why?"

The ship lurched upward in a shuddering arc. Something yellow and vicious licked past the starboard ports—just a practice stab with a heat beam, but it showed that the Martians were getting deadly serious.

"Lance is a star-spangled hero," rasped Barton wryly. "He was scared stiff, but he came, anyway. He's stuck to his job, egged me on to be a noble little boy. And all this time, half his ribs were stove in. The first torpedo did it."

Kei dared not leave the controls, but she looked over her shoulder. Barton saw her heart-shaped face, suddenly pale in spite of the tan, the fire softened and misty in her green eyes. Chris Barton nodded.

"You'll make him a good wife, Kei. He needs your strength and you need his idealism. You're too much like me. That's why we're so drawn to one another. But it wouldn't work, even if you didn't love Lance. We'd bring out the worst in each other. Well," he added irritably, "what are you waiting for? The Martians'll blow us out of the sky if you don't wake up. I've got some pictures to take before that happens."

They had a chance, Barton knew—a long one, but a chance. The atomic heat ray was mounted in the nose of the Martian ship, and a good pilot could keep clear for awhile. The Jovian fleet wasn't due from its base on Ceres for an hour or so, and the man at Lhash had said the Venusian fleet was coming up. With luck, he could get his pictures and make a run for it.

He could guess the first plan of the Martian raiders. They had meant to lie still, protected by their black paint, until the two fleets met in battle. After that, the flare of their rockets would not have been noticed. The I. P. ship had blundered too close. They had tried to finish it with torpedoes. Failing that, they had cut off communications and were out to prevent any word from getting back, even by word of mouth. But they had to work fast, because of the Venusian fleet.

* * *

Barton grinned. "Go get 'em, Kei—for Bobby!"

The rockets roared into full power as he knelt again beside Bobby Lance. Not daring to lift him into a seat, because of the broken ribs, Barton wedged him under the transmitter panel.

Acceleration squeezed Barton like a giant press. He fought his way into the seat behind the remaining camera, mounted inside the pilot's bay. The infra-red beam still probed the sky, but they could follow the black ship now by its exhaust flare.

The Martian was equally good as pilot and bomber. Pulling his ship over in a skidding turn, he raked the Fitts-Sothern so closely with his heat beam, the hull glowed cherry-red along one side. Barton saw Kei's face settle into a hard grin. Her strong hands were firm on the controls, her green eyes a bright emerald. Barton nodded and turned all his attention to his camera. If anyone could bring them out alive it was Kei.

Infra-red beam, filters on the camera, black light pinning a black ship to three-dimensional, all-revealing color film. Barton got some striking shots as the two ships wheeled and arced across space under the vast bluish disc of Venus. Time and again the heat beam touched them, so close to destroying them that the hull went almost incandescent. But the Fitts-Sothern had a tough skin, built to resist the heat of atmospheric friction. The beam never found a real chance to eat through.

"Glory!" whispered Barton. "How the boobs will love this!"

Kei cried out, a shrill whoop of sheer excitement. The Martian had risked breaking the back of his ship to turn her in her own length. Now he was on their tail, with their already overheated rocket tubes square in his sights. One tube blown or fused, and he could finish them off at his leisure.

Barton tensed his lean body against the sudden pressure. Kei was calling the final ounce of power, the last shred of endurance from the camera ship. Metal groaned and rang. The shuddering roar of the rockets was brain-numbing in the sealed air of the cabin. Back and up they went, in a shrieking arc that took them right over the black ship, so close that Barton felt he could have touched it. He saw something shining through the black paint, like water marks on silk.

The twin circles of Mars, emblem of her two moons . . . .

"Kei," he yelled. "There's our proof! Anybody might use Martian fuel, but not a Martian ship. I've got to get that shot. It'll be the biggest scoop in three centuries. Can you do it again?"

"Watch me!"

The Martian could not have been expecting that mad attack. Kei looped over, through the thinning flare of his rockets, shot under his belly and up in a tight curve, right across his nose. Barton went white, but his eyes never left the camera finder. Every rivet, every seam, every strut in the ship seemed ready to burst apart. And there came the heat beam—

* * *

But the Martian's hand was a second slow on the trigger. The beam caught one rocket tube as they shot past. Kei shut off the fuel stream before the metal was fused, and their momentum carried them over before the remaining rockets could force them off. Barton got his picture, clear and unmistakable.

Now they were finished, though. The Fitts-Sothern was too crippled for any quick maneuvering. Barton gripped Kei's shoulder, and she smiled at him.

Neither spoke.

The Martian swung around slowly, as though savoring his triumph. He could take his time now. Then he suddenly wavered.

"The Venusian fleet," Barton said coolly. "One more try, Kei."

Kei blasted her remaining rockets just as the heat beam licked out, then shut off her fuel. The tubes fused as the Martian ray caught them, but the unchecked velocity carried them wide. Then the black ship had no more time. Venusian ships were pouring out of the cloudy disc beside them, their sunward sides flashing. The black ship raced away. It was over. They were safe.

After awhile Barton's hand found Kei's.

"For the honor of the Fourth Estate," he muttered. "I'm all confused. It isn't easy for a man to change his ideas all at once. You and Bobby have shown me things I'd forgotten existed. Maybe those things make all the rest worthwhile—loving someone, believing in something. I think I've been alone too much. I think I've seen too much of the ugly things, with nothing to take the taste out of my mouth. I think I need friends, and perhaps . . ."

Kei turned her lovely face to him, and her green eyes were smiling. Barton kissed her, was surprised at what it did to him.

"Oh, yes," said Chris Barton. "I'm going to have to learn to live all over again!"


The Dragon-Queen of Venus

Planet Stories, Summer 1941

Tex stirred uneasily where he lay on the parapet, staring into the heavy, Venusian fog. The greasy moisture ran down the fort wall, lay rank on his lips. With a sigh for the hot, dry air of Texas, and a curse for the adventure-thirst that made him leave it, he shifted his short, steel-hard body and wrinkled his sandy-red brows in the never-ending effort to see.

A stifled cough turned his head. He whispered, "Hi, Breska."

The Martian grinned and lay down beside him. His skin was wind-burned like Tex's, his black eyes nested in wrinkles caused by squinting against sun and blowing dust.

For a second they were silent, feeling the desert like a bond between them. Then Breska, mastering his cough, grunted:

"They're an hour late now. What's the matter with 'em?"

Tex was worried, too. The regular dawn attack of the swamp-dwellers was long overdue.

"Reckon they're thinking up some new tricks," he said. "I sure wish our relief would get here. I could use a vacation."

Breska's teeth showed a cynical flash of white.

"If they don't come soon, it won't matter. At that, starving is pleasanter than beetle-bombs, or green snakes. Hey, Tex. Here comes the Skipper."

Captain John Smith—Smith was a common name in the Volunteer Legion—crawled along the catwalk. There were new lines of strain on the officer's gaunt face, and Tex's uneasiness grew.

He knew that supplies were running low. Repairs were urgently needed. Wasn't the relief goin' to come at all?

But Captain Smith's pleasant English voice was as calm as though he were discussing cricket-scores in a comfortable London club.

"Any sign of the beggars, Tex?"

"No, sir. But I got a feeling. . . ."

"H'm. Yes. We all have. Well, keep a sharp. . . ."

A scream cut him short. It came from below in the square compound. Tex shivered, craning down through the rusty netting covering the well.

He'd heard screams like that before.

A man ran across the greasy stones, tearing at something on his wrist. Other men ran to help him, the ragged remnant of the force that had marched into new Fort Washington three months before, the first garrison.

The tiny green snake on the man's wrist grew incredibly. By the time the first men reached it, it had whipped a coil around its victim's neck. Faster than the eye could follow, it shifted its fangs from wrist to throat.

The man seemed suddenly to go mad. He drew his knife and slashed at his comrades, screaming, keeping them at bay.

Then, abruptly, he collapsed. The green snake, now nearly ten feet long, whipped free and darted toward a drainage tunnel. Shouting, men surrounded it, drawing rapid-fire pistols, but Captain Smith called out:

"Don't waste your ammunition, men!"

Startled faces looked up. And in that second of respite, the snake coiled and butted its flat-nosed bead against the grating.

In a shower of rust-flakes it fell outward, and the snake was gone like a streak of green fire.

Tex heard Breska cursing in a low undertone. A sudden silence had fallen on the compound. Men fingered the broken grating, white-faced as they realized what it meant. There would be no metal for repairs until the relief column came.

It was hard enough to bring bare necessities over the wild terrain. And air travel was impracticable due to the miles-thick clouds and magnetic vagaries. There would be no metal, no ammunition.

Tex swore. "Reckon I'll never get used to those varmints, Captain. The rattlers back home was just kid's toys."

"Simple enough, really." Captain Smith spoke absently, his gray eyes following the sag of the rusty netting below.

"The green snakes, like the planarians, decrease evenly in size with starvation. They also have a vastly accelerated metabolism. When they get food, which happens to be blood, they simply shoot out to their normal size. An injected venom causes their victims to fight off help until the snake has fed."

Breska snarled. "Cute trick the swamp men thought up, starving those things and then slipping them in on us through the drain pipes. They're so tiny you miss one, every once in a while."

"And then you get that." Tex nodded toward the corpse. "I wonder who the war-chief is. I'd sure like to get a look at him."

"Yes," said Captain Smith. "So would I."

He turned to go, crawling below the parapet. You never knew what might come out of the fog at you, if you showed a target. The body was carried out to the incinerator as there was no ceremony about burials in this heat. A blob of white caught Tex's eye as a face strained upward, watching the officer through the rusty netting.

Tex grunted. "There's your countryman, Breska. I'd say he isn't so sold on the idea of making Venus safe for colonists."

"Oh, lay off him, Tex." Breska was strangled briefly by a fit of coughing. "He's just a kid, he's homesick, and he's got the wheezes, like me. This lowland air isn't good for us. But just wait till we knock sense into these white devils and settle the high plateaus."

If he finished, Tex didn't hear him. The red-haired Westerner was staring stiffly upward, clawing for his gun.

* * *

He hadn't heard or seen a thing. And now the fog was full of thundering wings and shrill screams of triumph. Below the walls, where the ground-mist hung in stagnant whorls, a host of half-seen bodies crowded out of the wilderness into which no civilized man had ever gone.

The rapid-fire pistol bucked and snarled in Tex's hand. Captain Smith, lying on his belly, called orders in his crisp, unhurried voice. C Battery on the northeast corner cut in with a chattering roar, spraying explosive bullets upward, followed by the other three whose duty it was to keep the air clear.

Tex's heart thumped. Powder-smoke bit his nostrils. Breska began to whistle through his teeth, a song that Tex had taught him, called, "The Lone Prairee."

The ground-strafing crews got their guns unlimbered, and mud began to splash up from below. But it wasn't enough. The gun emplacements were only half manned, the remainder of the depopulated garrison having been off-duty down in the compound.

The Venusians were swarming up the incline on which the fort stood, attacking from the front and fanning out along the sides when they reached firm ground. The morasses to the east and west were absolutely impassable even to the swamp-men, which was what made Fort Washington a strategic and envied stronghold.

Tex watched the attackers with mingled admiration and hatred. They had guts; the kind the Red Indians must have had, back in the old days in America. They had cruelty, too, and a fiendish genius for thinking up tricks.

If the relief column didn't come soon, there might be one trick too many, and the way would be left open for a breakthrough. The thin, hard-held line of frontier posts could be flanked, cut off, and annihilated.

Tex shuddered to think what that would mean for the colonists, already coming hopefully into the fertile plateaus.

A sluggish breeze rolled the mist south into the swamps, and Tex got his first clear look at the enemy. His heart jolted sharply.

This was no mere raid. This was an attack.

Hordes of tall warriors swarmed toward the walls, pale-skinned giants from the Sunless Land with snow-white hair coiled in warclubs at the base of the skull. They wore girdles of reptile skin, and carried bags slung over their brawny shoulders. In their hands they carried clubs and crude bows.

Beside them, roaring and hissing, came their war-dogs; semi-erect reptiles with prehensile paws, their powerful tails armed with artificial spikes of bone.

Scaling ladders banged against the walls. Men and beasts began to climb, covered by companions on the ground who hurled grenades of baked mud from their bags.

"Beetle-bombs!" yelled Tex. "Watch yourselves!"

He thrust one ladder outward, and fired point-blank into a dead-white face. A flying clay ball burst beside the man who fired the nearest ground gun, and in a split second every inch of bare flesh was covered by a sheath of huge scarlet beetles.

Tex's freckled face hardened. The man's screams knifed upward through the thunder of wings. Tex put a bullet carefully through his head and tumbled the body over the parapet. Some of the beetles were shaken off, and he glimpsed bone, already bare and gleaming.

Missiles rained down from above; beetle-bombs, green snakes made worm-size by starvation. The men were swarming up from the compound now, but the few seconds of delay almost proved fatal.

The aerial attackers were plain in the thinning mist—lightly-built men mounted on huge things that were half bird, half lizard.

The rusty netting jerked, catching the heavy bodies of man and lizard shot down by the guns. Tex held his breath. That net was all that protected them from a concerted dive attack that would give the natives a foot-hold inside the walls.

A gun in A Battery choked into silence. Rust, somewhere in the mechanism. No amount of grease could keep it out.

Breska swore sulphurously and stamped a small green thing flat. Red beetles crawled along the stones—thank God the things didn't fly. Men fought and died with the snakes. Another gun suddenly cut out.

Tex fired steadily at fierce white heads thrust above the parapet. The man next him stumbled against the infested stones. The voracious scarlet flood surged over him, and in forty seconds his uniform sagged on naked bones.

Breska's shout warned Tex aside as a lizard fell on the catwalk. Its rider pitched into the stream of beetles and began to die. Wings beat close overhead, and Tex crouched, aiming upward.

His freckled face relaxed in a stare of utter unbelief.

* * *

She was beautiful. Pearl-white thighs circling the gray-green barrel of her mount, silver hair streaming from under a snake-skin diadem set with the horns of a swamp-rhino, a slim body clad in girdle and breast-plates of iridescent scales.

Her face was beautiful, too, like a mask cut from pearl. But her eyes were like pale-green flames, and the silver brows above them were drawn into a straight bar of anger.

Tex had never seen such cold, fierce hate in any living creature, even a rattler coiled to strike.

His gun was aimed, yet somehow he couldn't pull the trigger. When he had collected his wits, she was gone, swooping like a stunting flyer through the fire of the guns. She bore no weapons, only what looked like an ancient hunting-horn.

Tex swore, very softly. He knew what that horned diadem meant.

This was the war chief!

The men had reached the parapet just in time. Tex blasted the head from a miniature Tyrannosaurus, dodged the backlash of the spiked tail, and threw down another ladder. Guns snarled steadily, and corpses were piling up at the foot of the wall.

Tex saw the woman urge her flying mount over the pit of the compound, saw her searching out the plan of the place—the living quarters, the water tanks, the kitchen, the radio room.

Impelled by some inner warning that made him forget all reluctance to war against a woman, Tex fired.

The bullet clipped a tress of her silver hair. Eyes like pale green flames burned into his for a split second, and her lips drew back from reptilian teeth, white, small, and pointed.

Then she whipped her mount into a swift spiral climb and was gone, flashing through streamers of mist and powder-smoke.

A second later Tex heard the mellow notes of her horn, and the attackers turned and vanished into the swamp.

As quickly as that, it was over. Yet Tex, panting and wiping the sticky sweat from his forehead, wasn't happy.

He wished she hadn't smiled.

Men with blow-torches scoured the fort clean of beetles and green snakes. One party sprayed oil on the heaps of bodies below and fired them. The netting was cleared, their own dead burned.

Tex, who was a corporal, got his men together, and his heart sank as he counted them. Thirty-two left to guard a fort that should be garrisoned by seventy.

Another attack like that, and there might be none. Yet Tex had an uneasy feeling that the attack had more behind it than the mere attempt to carry the fort by storm. He thought of the woman whose brain had evoked all these hideous schemes—the beetle-bombs, the green snakes. She hadn't risked her neck for nothing, flying in the teeth of four batteries.

He had salvaged the lock of silver hair his bullet had clipped. Now it seemed almost to stir with malign life in his pocket.

Captain John Smith came out of the radio room. The officer's gaunt face was oddly still, his gray eyes like chips of stone.

"At ease," he said. His pleasant English voice had that same quality of dead stillness.

"Word has just come from Regional Headquarters. The swamp men have attacked in force east of us, and have heavily besieged Fort Nelson. Our relief column had been sent to relieve them.

"More men are being readied, but it will take at least two weeks for any help to reach us."

* * *

Tex heard the hard-caught breaths as the news took the men like a jolt in the belly. And he saw the eyes sliding furtively aside to the dense black smoke pouring up from the incinerator, to the water tanks, and to the broken grating.

Somebody whimpered. Tex heard Breska snarl, "Shut up!" The whimperer was Kuna, the young Martian who had stared white-faced at the captain a short while before.

Captain Smith went on.

"Our situation is serious. However, we can hold out another fortnight. Supplies will have to be rationed still further, and we must conserve ammunition and man-power as much as possible. But we must all remember this.

"Help is coming. Headquarters are doing all they can."

"With the money they have," said Breska sourly, in Tex's ear. "Damn the taxpayers!"

". . . and we've only to hold out a few days longer. After all, we volunteered for this job. Venus is a virgin planet. It's savage, uncivilized, knowing no law but brute force. But it can be built into a great new world.

"If we do our jobs well, some day these swamps will be drained, the jungles cleared, the natives civilized. The people of Earth and Mars will find new hope and freedom here. It's up to us."

The captain's grim, gaunt face relaxed, and his eyes twinkled.

"Pity we're none of us using our right names," he said. "Because I think we're going to get them in the history books!"

The men laughed. The tension was broken. "Dismissed," said Captain Smith, and strolled off to his quarters. Tex turned to Breska.

The Martian, his leathery dark face set, was gripping the arms of his young countryman, the only other Martian in the fort.

"Listen," hissed Breska, his teeth showing white like a dog's fangs. "Get hold of yourself! If you don't, you'll get into trouble."

Kuna trembled, his wide black eyes watching the smoke from the bodies roll up into the fog. His skin lacked the leathery burn of Breska's. Tex guessed that he came from one of the Canal cities, where things were softer.

"I don't want to die," said Kuna softly. "I don't want to die in this rotten fog."

"Take it easy, kid." Tex rubbed the sandy-red stubble on his chin and grinned. "The Skipper'll get us through okay. He's aces."

"Maybe." Kuna's eyes wandered round to Tex. "But why should I take the chance?"

He was shaken suddenly by a fit of coughing. When he spoke again, his voice had risen and grown tight as a violin string.

"Why should I stay here and cough my guts out for something that will never be anyway?"

"Because," said Breska grimly, "on Mars there are men and women breaking their backs and their hearts to get enough bread out of the deserts. You're a city man, Kuna. Have you ever seen the famines that sweep the drylands? Have you ever seen men with their ribs cutting through the skin? Women and children with faces like skulls?

"That's why I'm here, coughing my guts out in this stinking fog. Because people need land to grow food on, and water to grow it with."

Kuna's dark eyes rolled, and Tex frowned. He'd seen that same starry look in the eyes of cattle on the verge of a stampede.

"What's the bellyache?" he said sharply. "You volunteered, didn't you?"

"I didn't know what it meant," Kuna whispered, and coughed. "I'll die if I stay here. I don't want to die!"

"What," Breska said gently, "are you going to do about it?"

Kuna smiled. "She was beautiful, wasn't she, Tex?"

The Texan started. "I reckon she was, kid. What of it?"

"You have a lock of her hair. I saw you pick it from the net. The net'll go out soon, like the grating did. Then there won't be anything to keep the snakes and beetles off of us. She'll sit up there and watch us die, and laugh.

"But I won't die, I tell you! I won't!"

He shuddered in Breska's hands, and began to laugh. The laugh rose to a thin, high scream like the wailing of a panther. Breska hit him accurately on the point of the jaw.

"Cafard," he grunted, as some of the men came running. "He'll come round all right."

He dragged Kuna to the dormitory, and came back doubled up with coughing from the exertion. Tex saw the pain in his dark face.

"Say," he murmured, "you'd better ask for leave when the relief gets here."

"If it gets here," gasped the Martian. "That attack at Fort Nelson was just a feint to draw off our reinforcements."

Tex nodded. "Even if the varmints broke through there, they'd be stopped by French River and the broken hills beyond it."

A map of Fort Washington's position formed itself in his mind; the stone blockhouse commanding a narrow tongue of land between strips of impassable swamp, barring the way into the valley. The valley led back into the uplands, splitting so that one arm ran parallel to the swamps for many miles.

To fierce and active men like the swamp-dwellers, it would be no trick to swarm down that valley, take Fort Albert and Fort George by surprise in a rear attack, and leave a gap in the frontier defenses that could never be closed in time.

And then hordes of white-haired warriors would swarm out, led by that beautiful fury on the winged lizard, rouse the more lethargic pastoral tribes against the colonists, and sweep outland Peoples from the face of Venus.

"They could do it, too," Tex muttered. "They outnumber us a thousand to one."

"And," added Breska viciously, "the lousy taxpayers won't even give us decent equipment to fight with."

Tex grinned. "Armies are always stepchildren. I guess the sheep just never did like the goats, anyhow." He shrugged. "Better keep an eye on Kuna. He might try something."

"What could he do? If he deserts, they'll catch him trying to skip out, if the savages don't get him first. He won't try it."

But in the morning Kuna was gone, and the lock of silver hair in Tex's pocket was gone with him.

* * *

Five hot, steaming days dragged by. The water sank lower and lower in the tank. Flakes of rust dropped from every metal surface at the slightest touch.

Tex squatted on a slimy block of stone in the compound, trying to forget hunger and thirst in the task of sewing a patch on his pants. Fog gathered in droplets on the reddish hairs of his naked legs, covered his face with a greasy patina.

Breska crouched beside him, coughing in deep, slow spasms. Out under the sagging net, men were listlessly washing underwear in a tub of boiled swamp water. The stuff held some chemical that caused a stubborn sickness no matter what you did to it.

Tex looked at it thirstily. "Boy!" he muttered. "What I wouldn't give for just one glass of ice water!"

"Shut up," growled Breska. "At least, I've quit being hungry"

He coughed, his dark face twisted in pain. Tex sighed, trying to ignore the hunger that chewed his own belly like a prisoned wolf.

Nine more days to go. Food and water cut to the barest minimum. Gun parts rusting through all the grease they could put on. The strands of the net were perilously thin. Even the needle in his hand was rusted so that it tore the cloth.

Of the thirty-one men left after Kuna deserted, they had lost seven; four by green snakes slipped in through broken drain gratings, three by beetle-bombs tossed over the parapet. There had been no further attacks. In the dark, fog-wrapped nights swamp men smeared with black mud crept silently under the walls, delivered their messages of death, and vanished.

In spite of the heat, Tex shivered. How much longer would this silent war go on? The swamp-men had to clear the fort before the relief column came. Where was Kuna, and why had he stolen that lock of hair? And what scheme was the savage beauty who led these devils hatching out?

Water slopped in the tub. Somebody cursed because the underwear never dried in this lousy climate. The heat of the hidden sun seeped down in stifling waves.

And suddenly a guard on the parapet yelled.

"Something coming out of the swamp! Man the guns!"

Tex hauled his pants on and ran with the others. Coming up beside the lookout, he drew his pistol and waited.

Something was crawling up the tongue of dry land toward the fort. At first he thought it was one of the scaly war-dogs. Then he caught a gleam of scarlet collar-facings, and shouted.

"Hold your fire, men! It's Kuna!"

The grey, stooped thing came closer, going on hands and knees, its dark head hanging. Tex heard Breska's harsh breathing beside him. Abruptly the Martian turned and ran down the steps.

"Don't go out there, Breska!" Tex yelled. "It may be a trap." But the Martian went on, tugging at the rusty lugs that held the postern gate. It came open, and he went out.

Tex sent men down to guard it, fully expecting white figures to burst from the fog and attempt to force the gate.

Breska reached the crawling figure, hauled it erect and over one shoulder, and started back at a stumbling run. Still there was no attack. Tex frowned, assailed by some deep unease. If Kuna had gone into the swamps, he should never have returned alive. There was a trap here somewhere, a concealed but deadly trick.

Silence. The rank mist lay in lazy coils. Not a leaf rustled in the swamp edges.

Tex swore and ran down the steps. Breska fell through the gate and sagged down, coughing blood, and it was Tex who caught Kuna.

The boy lay like a grey skeleton in his arms, the bones of his face almost cutting the skin. His mouth was open. His tongue was black and swollen, like that of a man dying of thirst.

Kuna's sunken, fever-yellowed eyes opened. They found the tub, in which soiled clothing still floated.

With a surge of strength that took Tex completely by surprise, the boy broke from him and ran to the water, plunging his face in and gulping like an animal.

Tex pulled him away. Kuna sagged down, sobbing. There was something wrong about his face, but Tex couldn't think what.

"Won't let me drink," he whispered. "Still won't let me drink. Got to have water." He clawed at Tex. "Water!"

Tex sent someone after it, trying to think what was strange about Kuna, scowling. There were springs of sweet water in the swamps, and even the natives couldn't drink the other. Was it simply the desire to torture that had made them deny the deserter water?

Tex caught the boy's collar. "How did you get away?"

But Kuna struggled to his knees. "Breska," he gasped. "Breska!"

The older man looked at him, wiping blood from his lips. Kuna said something in Martian, retched, choked on his own blood, and fell over. Tex knew he was dead.

"What did he say, Breska?"

The Martian's teeth showed briefly white.

"He said he wished he'd had my guts." His expression changed abruptly. He caught Tex's shoulder.

"Look, Tex! Look at the water!"

* * *

Where there had been nearly a full tub, there was now only a little moisture left in the bottom. While Tex watched, that too disappeared, leaving the wood dry.

Tex picked up an undershirt. It was as dry as any he'd ever hung in the prairie air, back in Texas. He touched his face. The skin was like sun-cured leather. His hair had not a drop of fog on it.

Yet the mist hung as heavy as ever.

Captain Smith came out of the radio room, looking up at the net and the guns. Tex heard him mutter, quite unconsciously.

"It's the rust that'll beat us. It's the rust that'll lose us Venus in the end."

Tex said, "Captain. . . ."

Smith looked at him, startled. But he never had time to ask what the matter was. The lookout yelled. Wings rushed overhead. Guns chattered from the parapet. The attack was on.

Tex ran automatically for the catwalk. Passing Kuna's crumpled body, he realized something he should have seen at first.

"Kuna's body was dry when he came into the fort. All dry, even his clothes." And then, "Why did the swamp-men wait until he was safely inside and the door closed to attack?"

With a quarter of their guns disabled and two-thirds of their garrison gone, they still held superiority due to their position and powerful weapons.

There was no concerted attempt to force the walls. Groups of white-haired warriors made sallies, hurled beetle-bombs and weighed bags of green snakes, and retired into the mist. They lost men, but not many.

In the air, it was different. The weird, half-feathered mounts wheeled and swooped, literally diving into the gunbursts, the riders hurling missiles with deadly accuracy. And they were dying, men and lizards, by the dozen.

Tex, feeling curiously dazed, fired automatically. Bodies thrashed into the net. Rust flakes showered like rain. Looking at the thin strands, Tex wondered how long it would hold.

Abruptly he caught sight of what, subconsciously, he'd been looking for. She was there, darting high over the melee, her silver hair flying, her body an iridescent pearl in the mist.

Captain Smith spoke softly.

"You see what she's up to, Tex? Those flyers are volunteers. Their orders are to kill as many of our men as possible before they die themselves, but they must fall inside the walls! On the net, Tex. To weaken, break it if possible."

Tex nodded. "And when it goes. . . ."

"We go. We haven't enough men to beat them if they should get inside the walls."

Smith brushed his small military mustache, his only sign of nervousness. Tex saw him start, saw him touch the bristles wonderingly, then finger his skin, his tunic, his hair.

"Dry," he said, and looked at the fog. "My Lord, dry!"

"Yes," returned Tex grimly. "Kuna brought it back. He couldn't get wet even when he tried to drink. Something that eats water. Even if the net holds, we'll die of thirst before we're relieved."

He turned in sudden fury on the distant figure of the woman and emptied his gun futilely at her swift-moving body.

"Save your ammunition," cautioned Smith, and cried out, sharply.

Tex saw it, the tiny green thing that had fastened on his wrist. He pulled his knife and lunged forward, but already the snake had grown incredibly. Smith tore at it vainly.

Tex got in one slash, felt his knife slip futilely on rubbery flesh of enormous contractile power. Then the venom began to work. A mad look twisted the officer's face. His gun rose and began to spit bullets.

Grimly, Tex shot the gun out of Smith's hand, and struck down with the gun-barrel. Smith fell. But already the snake had thrown a coil round his neck and shifted its grip to the jugular.

Tex sawed at the rubbery flesh. Beaten as though with a heavy whip, he stood at last with the body still writhing in his hand.

Captain Smith was dead, with the snake's jaws buried in his throat.

Dimly Tex heard the mellow notes of the war-chief's horn. The sky cleared of the remnants of the suicide squad. The ground attackers vanished into the swamps. And then the woman whirled her mount sharply and sped straight for the fort.

Puffs of smoke burst around her but she was not hit. Low over the parapet she came, so that Tex saw the pupils of her pale-green eyes, the vital flow of muscles beneath pearly skin.

He fired, but his gun was empty.

She flung one hand high in derisive salute, and was gone. And Breska spoke softly behind Tex.

"You're in command now. And there are just the fourteen of us left."

* * *

Tex stood staring down at the dead and dying caught in the rusty net. He felt suddenly tired; so tired that just standing and looking seemed too much drain on his wasted strength.

He didn't want to fight any more. He wanted to drink, to sleep, and forget.

There was only one possible end. His mouth and throat were dry with this strange new dryness, his thirst intensified a hundredfold. The swamp men had only to wait. In another week they could take the fort without losing a man.

Even with the reduced numbers of the defenders, this fiendish thing would make their remaining water supply inadequate. And then another thought struck him.

Suppose it stayed there, so that even if by some miracle the garrison held out, it made holding the fort impossible no matter how many men, or how much water, there was?

The men were looking at him. Tex let the dead snake drop to the catwalk and vanish under a pall of scarlet beetles.

"Clean up this mess," said Tex automatically. Breska's black eyes were brilliant and very hard. Why didn't the men move?

"Go on," Tex snapped. "I'm ranking officer here now."

The men turned to their task with a queer reluctance. One of them, a big scar-faced hulk with a mop of hair redder far than Tex's, stood long after the others had gone, watching him out of narrowed green eyes.

Tex went slowly down into the compound. There were no breaks in the net, but another few days of rust would finish them.

What was the use of fighting on? If they left, now, they might get out alive. Headquarters could send more men, retake Fort Washington.

But Headquarters didn't have many men. And the woman with the eyes like pale-green flames wouldn't waste any time.

Some falling body had crushed a beetle-bomb caught in the net. The scarlet things were falling like drops of blood on Kuna's body. Tex smiled crookedly. In a few seconds there'd be nothing left of the flesh Kuna had cherished so dearly.

And then Tex rubbed freckled hands over his tired blue eyes, wondering if he were at last delirious.

The beetles weren't eating Kuna.

They swirled around him restlessly, scenting meat, but they didn't touch him. His face showed parchment dry under the whorls of fog. And suddenly Tex understood.

"It's because he's dry. They won't touch anything dry."

Recklessly, he put his own hand down in the scarlet stream. It divided and flowed around it, disdaining the parched flesh.

Tex laughed, a brassy laugh with an edge of hysteria in it. Now that they were going to die anyway, they didn't have to worry about beetle-bombs.

Feet, a lot of them, clumped up to where he knelt. The red-haired giant with the green eyes stood over him, the men in a sullen, hard-faced knot behind him.

The red-haired man, whose name was Bull, had a gun in his hand. He said gruffly,

"We're leavin', Tex."

Tex got up. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. We figure it's no use stayin'. Comin' with us?"

Why not? It was his only chance for life. He had no stake in the colonies. He'd joined the Legion for adventure.

Then he looked at Kuna, and at Breska, thinking of all the people of two worlds who needed ground to grow food on, and water to grow it with. Something, perhaps the ancestor who had died in the Alamo, made him shake his sandy head.

"I reckon not," he said. "And I reckon you ain't, either."

He was quick on the draw, but Bull had his gun already out. The bullet thundered against Tex's skull. The world exploded into fiery darkness, through which he heard Breska say,

"Sure, Bull. Why should I stay here to die for nothing?"

Tex tried to cry out, but the blackness drowned him.

He came to lying on the catwalk. His head was bandaged. Frowning, he opened his eyes, blinking against the pain.

Breska hunched over the nearest gun, whistling softly through his teeth. "The Lone Prairee." Tex stared incredulously.

"I—I thought you'd gone with the others."

Breska grinned. "I just wasn't as dumb as you. I hung behind till they were all outside, and then I barred the door. I'd seen you weren't dead, and—well, this cough's got me anyway, and I hate forced marches. They give me blisters."

They grinned at each other. Tex said,

"We're a couple of damn fools, but I reckon we're stuck with it. Okay. Let's see how long we can fool 'em." He got up, gingerly. "The Skipper had some books in his quarters. Maybe one of 'em would tell what this dry stuff is."

Breska coughed and nodded. "I'll keep watch."

Tex's throat burned, but he was afraid to drink. If the water evaporated in his mouth as it had in Kuna's. . . .

He had to try. Not knowing was worse than knowing. A second later he stood with an empty cup in his hand, fighting down panic.

Half the water had vanished before he got the cup to his mouth. The rest never touched his tongue. Yet there was nothing to see, nothing to feel. Nothing but dryness.

He turned and ran for Captain Smith's quarters.

Hertford's Jungles of Venus, the most comprehensive work on a subject still almost unknown, lay between Kelland's Field Tactics and Alice in Wonderland. Tex took it down, leafing through it as he climbed to the parapet.

"Here it is," he said suddenly." 'Dry Spots. These are fairly common phenomena in certain parts of the swamplands. Seemingly Nature's method for preserving the free oxygen balance in the atmosphere, colonies of ultra-microscopic animalcules spring up, spreading apparently from spores carried by animals which blunder into the dry areas.

" 'These animalcules attach themselves to hosts, inanimate or otherwise, and absorb all water vapor or still water nearby, utilizing the hydrogen in some way not yet determined, and liberating free oxygen. They become dormant during the rainy season, apparently unable to cope with running water. They expand only within definite limits, and the life of each colony runs about three weeks, after which it vanishes.' "

"The rains start in about a week," said Breska. "Our relief can't get here under nine days. They can pick us off with snakes and beetle-bombs, or let us go crazy with thirst, let the first shower clear out the ani—the whatyoucallits, and move in. Then they can slaughter our boys when they come up, and have the whole of Venus clear."

Tex told him about Kuna and the beetles. "The snakes probably won't touch us, either." He pounded a freckled fist on the stones. "If we could find some way to drink, and if the guns and the net didn't rust, we might hold them off long enough."

"If ," grunted Breska. "If we were in heaven, we wouldn't have to worry."

* * *

The days that followed blurred into a daze of thirst and ceaseless watching. For easier defense, there was only one way down from the parapet through the net. They took the least rusted of the guns and filled the small gap. They could hold out there until they collapsed, or the net gave.

They wasted several quarts of water in vain attempts to drink. Then they gave it up. The final irony of it made Tex laugh.

"Here we are, being noble till it hurts, and it won't matter a damn. The Skipper was right. It's the rust that'll lose us Venus in the end—that, and these Dry Spots."

Food made thirst greater. They stopped eating. They became mere skeletons, moving feebly in sweat-box heat. Breska stopped coughing.

"It's breathing dry air," he said, in a croaking whisper. "It's so funny I could laugh."

A scarlet beetle crawled over Tex's face where he lay beside the Martian on the catwalk. He brushed it off, dragging weak fingers across his forehead. His skin was dry, but not as dry as he remembered it after windy days on the prairie.

"Funny it hasn't taken more oil out of my skin." He struggled suddenly to a sitting position. "Oil! It might work. Oh, God, let it work! It must!"

Breska stared at him out of sunken eyes as he half fell down the steps. Then a sound overhead brought the Martian's gaze upward.

"A scout, Tex! They'll attack!"

Tex didn't bear him. His whole being was centered on one thing—the thing that would mean the difference between life and death.

Dimly, as he staggered into the room where the oil was kept, Tex heard a growing thunder of wings. He groaned. If Breska could only hold out for a moment.

It took all his strength to turn the spigot of the oil drum. It was empty, All the stuff had been used to burn bodies. Almost crying, Tex crawled to the next one, and the next. It was the fourth drum that yielded black, viscous fluid.

Forcing stiff lips apart, Tex drank.

If there'd been anything in him, he'd have vomited. The vile stuff coated lips, tongue, throat. Outside, Breska's gun cut in sharply. Tex dragged himself to the water tank.

"Running water," he thought. Tilting his head up under the spigot, he turned the tap. Water splashed out. Some of it hit his skin and vanished. But the rest ran down his oil-filmed throat. He felt it, warm and brackish and wonderful, in his stomach.

He laughed, and let go a cracked rebel yell. Then he turned and lurched back outside, toward the steps.

The net sagged to the weight of white-haired warriors and roaring lizards. Breska's gun choked and stammered into silence. Tex groaned in utter agony.

It was too late. The rust had beaten them.

His freckled, oil-smeared face tightened grimly. Drawing his gun, he charged the steps.

"Where the hell did you go?" snarled Breska. "The ammo belt jammed." He grabbed for the other gun set in the narrow gap.

Then it wasn't rust! And Tex realized something else. There were no rust flakes failing from the net.

Something had stopped the rusting. Before, his physical anguish had been too great for him to see that the net strands grew no thinner, the gun-barrels no rustier.

Scraps of the explanation shot through Tex's mind. Breska's cough stopping because the air was dried before it reached his lungs. Dry stone. Dry clothing.

Dry metal! The water-eating organisms kept the surface dry. There could be no rust.

"We've licked 'em, Breska! By God, we've licked 'em!" He shouldered the Martian out of the way, gripped the triggers of the gun. Shouting over the din, he told Breska how to drink, sent him lurching down the steps. He could hold the gap alone for a few minutes.

Looking up, Tex found her, swooping low over the fight, her silver hair flying in the wind. Tex shouted at her.

"You did it! You outsmarted yourself, lady. You showed us the way!"

Scientists could find out how to harness the Dry Spots to keep off the rust, and still let the soldiers drink.

And some day the swamps would be drained, and men and women would find new wealth, new life, new horizons here on Venus.

Breska came back, grinning, and fought the jam out of the gun. White bodies began to pile up, mixed with the saurian carcasses of their war-dogs. And presently the notes of the war-chief's horn drifted down, and the attackers faded back into the swamps.

And suddenly, wheeling her mount away from the others, the warrior woman swooped low over the parapet. Tex held his fire. For a moment he thought she was going to dash her lizard into them. Then, at the last second, she pulled him up in a thundering climb.

Her face was a cut-pearl mask of fury, but her pale-green eyes held doubt, the beginning of an awed fear. Then she was gone, bent low over her mount, her silver hair hiding her face.

Breska watched her go. "For Mars," he said softly. Then, pounding Tex on the chest until he winced.

Two voices, cracked, harsh, and unmusical, drifted after the retreating form of the white-haired war-chief.

"Oh, bury us not on the lone prairie-e-e. . . ."


Lord of the Earthquake

Science Fiction, June 1941.


CHAPTER I

THE COSMIC HOLE

IT WAS stiflingly hot in the submarine's tiny cabin. The steady pound of the screws was a throbbing ache. Coh Langham, his scarred hawk face set in lines of restless boredom, stared out the port at the featureless muck that rolled endlessly away under the searchlight,

"Krim," he said abruptly, "you're crazy"

Simon Krim, hunched like a shaggy black bull over the tiny control panel, spoke without taking his eyes from the sea-floor. "What's the matter, Langham? Has the thrill petered out?"

"Thrill!" Langham's strong brown body, stripped to dungarees, hitched angrily lower in the seat. Yes, he had expected a thrill. He had hated seeing Krim again; it took him back to a time he wanted to forget. But Krim had asked him, and he, at a loose end and restless as always, had accepted. Hunting a sunken continent with a submarine was something he hadn't done before. It looked exciting.

The excitement had resolved itself into three weeks of hellish monotony, heat, and inactivity, and utter boredom.

Simon Krim grunted. "That's all you think about, isn't it? Thrills. Your father was a hard-working archeologist, my best friend. And you spend your life crashing planes and climbing mountains, 'having

There was an edge to his voice; his hairy body gleamed with sweat, and there were tight lines around his mouth.

Coh Langham's blue eyes went hard under the scarlet cloth that held back his damp fair hair. "My life's my own, Krim. My father certainly never got much out of his!"

He locked his hands suddenly behind his head. The motion, in the dim greenish light that seeped through the ports, made a ripple of color up his arms and across his muscular chest. Kukulcan, the Feathered Serpent, writhed in blue-and-crimson splendor upward from each hand, to meet crest to crest on his breast.

"I still say you're crazy, Krim," Langham said. "You spend your life mucking, like my father did, in God-forsaken holes, tracking down the Murian legend – that damned Murian legend, that I had rammed down my throat daily until I was twenty-three! Now you put every cent you own into this submarine, and go poking along the bottom of the Pacific trying to find proof that Mu really existed. What does it get you?"

Simon Krim turned to look at him, stubby fingers raking at his tangled black hair. "I don't know," he said slowly. "I don't think I ever stopped to figure it out – except that I'm happy; and I wouldn't be happy doing anything else."

Coh Langham laughed. It was an ugly little laugh, and it turned Krim's stubbled face into a thundercloud.

"That's the trouble with you, Langham," he blurted. "You don't I. How what happiness is. You're too damned selfish. You say your fat father never got anything out of life. Well, he died happy, and several people regretted his death – which is more than they'd do if you I broke your fool neck!"

Krim's words waked something in Coh Langham; a loneliness, a dissatisfaction, a sense of lack. Then, as always, a blind anger surged up and drowned the fleeting vision. He came erect, his hands resting lightly on his belt – a heavy belt with a massive silver buckle, curiously scarred and dented.

"I saw my father die," he said with dangerous softness. "Fever, in a swamp in Yucatan. All his precious archeology never brought him anything. I le died poor, a young man. He was cheated, Krim! Well, you can plod and plug and dig in kitchen middens, and 'die happy'. And you can shut up!"

Still Krim stared at him, forehead wrinkled in groping thought. "It looks to me," he said slowly, "as though you're running away from something. I don't know. But I wish to God I had the brain you're wasting!"

Again that truth nagged at Coh Langham's soul. He beat it back, and his hands tightened on his belt. Krim's face enraged him. What right did the plodding fool have to question him?

Then, over Krim's shoulder, rising out of the murky water, he saw something that sent a great wild emotion surging through him, a feeling unbidden and strange.

"Simon!" he cried. "A pyramid!"

Krim stared. His stubbled jaw worked, but no words came. Then he sent the submarine shooting toward the majestic, water-worn pile that reared from the muck, split here by a great fissure running down from low, flat hills.

Langham, stirred in spite of himself, watched out the port. Suddenly he gripped the fixtures, so that the twin serpents writhed convulsively. "Turn!" he shouted. "Turn!"

Krim stared, uncomprehending. Langham threw himself bodily at the controls. Then he was drowned, blinded, deafened, in roaring darkness that was like no darkness he had ever known.

He felt the submarine shudder, a strange, silent quiver as though its very atoms were shifting; felt his own body twisted by great impalpable forces, heard himself cry out in wild terror. Then there was only darkness and a horrible rushing as though the little ship was hurtling to the outer ends of space.

CHAPTER II

TO ANCIENT MU!

COH LANGHAM woke to coppery light streaming through canted ports. Climbing across the tilted deck, he looked out onto low hills alternately tilled and forested, sloping to a green plain. The roofs of what seemed to he him buildings were visible across the first ridge, and just within the range of Langham's vision to the right was a bulking outline that made him stare with a queer sense of vertigo:

A pyramid, flat topped and terraced, worn by centuries but still clear and sharp of outline, the carvings plain — a lot plainer, Coh Langham thought, than when he had seen it a few minutes ago, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Whirling, he shook Simon Krim to his feet, silently because all he might have said was too wild for utterance. Then he wrenched the hatch open and climbed out, his keen, scarred face alert.

For the first time, he regretted that they carried no weapons on the submarine, and his hands hovered near the massive buckle on his belt.

Nothing stirred. There was stifling heat and a faint hint of sulphur on the air, and an ugly yellow tinge to the murky sun. Here and there were cracks in the plain's turf and falls of loose rock that Coh Langham knew meant recent earthquakes. The low hills and the plain looked familiar; here was where the fissure had run, and there was the pyramid.

The pyramid, now untouched by twelve thousand years of ocean burial. A thought spoke in Langham's mind — a thought so fantastic, so incredible that he shook it angrily away.

Krim was staring about with blank amazement. He saw the pyramid. A look almost of reverent worship came over him, and he whispered:

"Older than the Temple of Sacred Mysteries at Uxmal! But...my God, Coh, what happened?"

Langham's scarlet headcloth shook. "I saw something queer about the water near the pyramid; a sort of hole that seemed to be sucking the water in. I tried to turn...."

"And we got caught." Krim scratched his unkempt head in something like panic. "Where in hell are we?"

"I don't know" said Langham, admitting to himself that he was almost afraid to think. "We'll find somebody and ask."

The submarine was jammed fast in the narrow channel of a stream that flowed deep and swift away from the low side of the canting deck. Langham looked over the other side, and clutched dizzily at Krim.

He was looking down into illimitable emptiness — a hole, like the hole that had been beside the sunken pyramid, with a rim that wasn't a normal, solid rim, but one that wavered and shifted. Up to ground level there was nothing. Then, exactly parallel with the earth, there was water, flowing in a steady stream, salt water, bearing an occasional deep-sea creature that promptly exploded with the release of pressure.

Coh Langham rubbed his scarred chin, and his first mad thought came back with battering-ram force. Turning, he leaped the short distance to the stream's bank, and started toward the buildings that showed over the first little hill.

And then he stopped, because there was a shadow across the sun, and he saw that the roofs were burning.

Simon Krim, lumbering up beside him like a shaggy black bull, cocked his head. "Sounds like a fight. I'll bet no accident started that fire!"

Kukulcan writhed as Coh Langham shrugged his shoulders. "We've got to find out where we are, and that's the only place I see. Anyway, the fight's none of ours. They'll let us alone." He strode off through the hot, dingy sunshine. Krim swore under his breath and followed.

THE picture was clear when they topped the hill. Low rambling buildings built of stone were being gutted by the fire, buildings much finer than a common farm. Loot was piled in jumbled heaps on the trampled grass, and a mob of yelling men had four people cornered under the sod roof of a cow-byre.

Four people; a man like an oak tree, grey and stalwart, two fair-haired striplings whom Langham guessed to be twins, and a thin, dark young man whose free hand pressed a bleeding wound. They fought desperately, but the end was clear. And Coh Langham's gorge rose as he saw how the leader of the mob, a paunchy, great-shouldered man covered all over his swarthy body with ornaments, held his men off so that the sport should be prolonged.

One of the fair-haired lads fell with an axe-blade through his brain. The other cried out "Helvi!", and Langham knew that it was no boy, but a woman.

Coh Langham had little use for women, but he couldn't help admiring that splendid girl. She was something new to him. Excitement poured along his veins; in a second his belt was off, wrapped around his tattooed right hand, the great buckle swinging free, and he was striding down the slope.

Krim caught him. "You damned fool, you'll only get us killed!" Langham shook him off. "Start running, if you think you can beat them. They've seen us already."

There was nothing for it but to fight. They stood back to back, seeing in the mad-dog faces of the running men the hopelessness of peaceful advances, even if they could make themselves understood.

Over the attackers' heads, Langham saw that the three still standing under the sod roof were taken and being bound. Then men were rushing at him with drawn swords and heavy scythes, and he knew he was going to die without even knowing where he was.

A squat yellow man cried out, and then a negro, passing it on to others, white and brown and indiscriminate. The ranks split, flowing by the two at bay. Brutish faces stared, filthy paws pointed, weapons fell away into a wary but not deadly circle.

Coh Langham realized abruptly that they were looking at Kukulcan, blue and crimson on his arms and breast.

He realized something else, feeling Krim start as he, too, understood. Both men spoke Quichua and Polynesian and several other dialects, with a smattering of Quanlan. These men spoke a sort of mongrel combination, which Langham found later was a lingua franca spoken everywhere, and which was nearly as clear to the strangers as English.

A man came shouldering through the press; the paunchy, ornamented man who led them. Coh Langham had seen his type before, in a hundred native quarters where crime slinks down the black alleys and carouses in the wine-shops of nights. Very quickly he replaced his belt, and prayed that his weapon had not been noticed.

"Look, Itzan," whispered a one-eyed cutthroat. "He bears the sign of the Creator two-fold on his breast!"

Itzan studied the two, his vast shoulders bowed over his bloody sword, his coarse, cross-breed's face shining with sweat. Little blood-shot eyes traced the twin serpents up Langham's arms, and just for an instant Langham fancied he saw a flicker of fear.Then Itzan shrugged and straightened.

"We take the two of them to Xacul," he said. "Then if they be demons from Naga the Creator, why, the blame will be on Xacul's head, not mine." And he laughed, his belly shaking with the press of mirth that was silent save for a wheezing in his throat.

They were herded to where the three captives stood, the young man white and swaying, the girl like a leashed tigress, the old man with a bitter calm. Itzan laughed again, his ornaments clanking as he walked, and said softly:

"Xacul's commands have been carried out, except for one thing. The old wolf was to die before his cubs were taken to the Master."

He placed the point of his sword at the base of the old man's throat and pressed. Itzan gave a sudden practised twist; the old man fell and was still, and Itzan's laughter wheezed and whistled in his throat.

Coh Langham saw the girl's face. It was like white marble, still and set and terrible.

Past the gutted buildings they were led, Krim and Langham shackled now like the others, and to a meadow where long gleaming metal cars rested on the grass. The cars had no wheels, and there were curving shells at the forward end. Langham, looking, saw Simon Krim's unshaven face as amazed as he knew his own must be.

He had read, in ancient Naga temples in India, of just such ships that flew thirty thousand years before the flood. But he had not quite believed.

THE loot-laden mob split, most of them going off across the meadows to, Langham supposed, other homes waiting to be gutted. Some forty were left, and these were divided between the two cars —Simon Krim and the wounded man in one, Langham and the girl with Itzan in the other. As they were parted, the girl cried "Sigri!" and struggled to break free. Itzan's hand caught her, held her as though she were chained to a post, although Langham was astonished at her strength.

Sigri, swaying against the wide eyed, unbelieving Krim, stained with blood from his wounded side, turned a thin face set with wildly burning eyes, and cried:

"Don't be afraid, Helva. We've already escaped them, and what's happened, has happened!"

"Crazy," thought Langham. And Sigri looked it, his scarlet kilt in ribbons, dark hair streaming from a fillet of gold wire, his thin body quivering like a nervous horse. But suddenly, looking fair into those feverish dark eyes, Langham knew that he was seeing a sane and brilliant man driven by an awful fear, and that his cry to Helva was more a cry of hope than a statement of fact.

Sigri's hand, held tight over the bleeding wound, dropped quickly to his girdle, felt something hidden there, and returned. Only Langham, looking intently, saw the slight movement.

They went into the cars. Globes of clear quartz enclosing intricate prisms were raised just aft of the curving windscreens, covered with shields of what looked like lead, but appeared to be heavier and different in texture. These shields were cranked aside. Slowly a swirling, coruscating brilliance was born in the globes, flashing from facet to facet of the prism, boiling in a splendor of living light. Langham felt a thrumming of power through the body of the ship, and saw the ground dropping away beneath it.

Silently they rose, until the keel made safe clearance of the low hills. Then a second, smaller globe was raised at the stern, so that the ship maintained a steady level, and the cover of the small globe removed. Again Langham saw the birth of light in the prism, felt a surge of power, and the ground was streaming away beneath them.

The two ships fled together under the ugly, shrouded sun. A sulphurous wind snarled around the shield, whipping the girl Helva's long fair hair into Langham's face, catching at the scarlet cloth that bound his own. Coh Langham's square, scarred jaw was set, his eyes eagle-bright above his Roman nose.

"If I'm going to die," he said aloud, "I'm damned if I won't find out where and why first! You, girl, tell me, while that ape-faced butcher is busy up in front."

The girl Helva looked at him, and for the first time, she really saw

Her sea-colored eyes took him in, the dungarees and rubber-soled shoes, strong brown body and scarred brown face, coming at last to rest on Kukulcan. Her hand went to a silver amulet at her throat, and she whispered:

"Who are you, in such strange clothing, with the Creator's symbol on your body?"

"Coh Langham," he said, "from...."

"From Mayax?" interrupted the girl, and something of the awe left her. "A prince of the house of Coh?"

Well, Langham thought, that's who I was named for, and he said, "Yes." Mayax meant Central America, and the Feathered Serpent was the Mayan version of Naga the Creator. Langham wondered whether that whim of decoration was going to do him good or evil. It had saved his life once, but might it yet kill him through giving religious offence?

Then, as the full meaning of Helva's words percolated through his head, the knowledge that he had been fighting off since he first landed struck him squarely between the eyes. Gripping the girl's shoulders in crushing fingers, he demanded:

"What land is this, and what year?"

There was fear in the girl's eyes, fear that he was mad, but she didn't flinch. "This is the Northern Kingdom of Mu, and the year of the Sun is two hundred thousand and six."

Langham's hands fell away. "According to ancient reckoning," he said in a fiat voice, "Mu was that old when she sank. Mu sank...my God! I've traveled twelve thousand years in time!"

CHAPTER III

THE NEW GOD

HELVA caught him fiercely. "What do you know of the sinking of Mu? Are you as mad as Sigri? Or are you a demon, or a godling come to doom Xacul and his butchers?"

Langham shook his head dazedly. "I hardly know myself, Helva."

Her face was clear and lovely, her body strong and full and gracious in tunic. Her loss was in her eyes; the sorrow of them hurt him. Caught in a quite unfamiliar emotional surge, he took her hands in his, the chains of both of them clashing, and said:

"But I want to be your friend. Perhaps we can help each other."

Helva shook her head. "Only God can help us now. We are being taken to Manoa for judgment, and with Xacul, that means death."

"You'll have to tell me what's going on. So much has happened since we came through the hole, and I don't...."

"The Hole!" Helva's fingers sank into his arm. "What do you know about the Hole?"

"Nothing. Only Krim and I were dragged through it somehow in our submarine. That's how we got here."

"Then...then Sigri is right!" whispered Helva, and Langham was startled at the look that came over her face. Not even when she was captured had she shown fear, but it was there now, stark and icy "Sigri is right. But it's mad! Mad!"

There was silence there in the hot wind, with Coh Langham staring into Helva's eyes, that looked beyond at something terrible.

A voice asked, "How goes it, demon?" Coh Langham glared up into Itzan's coarse dark face. He came to his feet, fingers instinctively at his belt, but the girl forestalled him. She sprang like a tigress, silent and blazing eyed, swinging clenched hands weighted with metal cuffs and chain.

ltzan twisted, taking the blow on one great shoulder. His left hand caught Helva's wrists, his right swung open-palmed to her head. Langham caught her as she sagged back, and Itzan, looking down at her, laughed wheezingly until his paunch shook with it.

"Spitfire!" he said. "Xacul will give us rare sport with her!"

There was a red, animal rage surging in Langham, but he fought it down, realizing the futility of violence.

"Who is Xacul?" he demanded. "And why are butchers like you turned loose on the people?"

Itzan's ornaments clashed as he sat down, well out of reach and ready with his sword. He opened his mouth, then grinned and pointed over the side.

"There's the reason. If you are a demon, you should know. If you're not, well, there it is."

"Don't you care?" asked Langham, and Itzan shrugged.

"That's for Xacul to worry about."

Langham looked over the side. For a second he thought the motion of the ship had made him dizzy; the ground was wavering like a badly focussed film. Then he realized that he was watching an earthquake. More as concussion than sound he heard its roar, and saw green meadows slashed as though by a great sword with smoking fingers.

Itzan chuckled. "There won't be any more of those when Xacul and I have killed all you Naga-worshippers."

"Why?" asked Langham incredulously

"You're stupid for a demon," said Itzan. "Xacul tells us that the Creator either never was, or has deserted us, and that those who worship him bring evil on us instead of good. It's very simple. All we have to do is kill everybody, mostly people like the little spitcat with much land and loot, who refuses to deny Naga, or Kukulcan, or the Almighty, or whatever name you choose to call Him. Then with no one to call down evil, the quakes and the fire-spoutings stop:'

"Who is this Xacul?"

"He says he's God." Itzan rose, yawning, stretching his wide, squat body "I don't care. As long as he gives me sport and loot and the wine-shops afterward, he can call himself what he likes:'

Laughing, he added, "Take care of the pretty hell-cat. She mustn't

die yet!"

He lumbered away, up forward. Coh Langham's scarred face was murderous. Then Langham said, "Helva! Helva!" and lifted the dazed girl.

THERE was much he wanted to ask her; about Xacul, about the Hole and Sigri, and about this crazy revolution. But Itzan's blow had done something. Langham was glad it had, knowing that emotion too long dammed has ugly ways of breaking out. Helva cried, sitting hunched with her hair over her like a veil; sobbed over her father and her brother and her home until she was cried out. Then she swayed against him like a tired child, and Langham cradled her in his shackled arms.

Looking down at her, feeling the young vitality of her so close, Coh Langham felt again that stirring of unhappiness in him, far stronger than when Krim's words had waked it. He had lost something, what he didn't know. The search had prodded him on during the ten years since his father's fruitless death, and left him as empty handed as when he started.

As always, an impatient anger rose in him, shaking off the mood. But his eyes, as the ship raced through the sulphurous sky, were drawn often to Helva's face.

The low sun was tingeing the coppery murk with red when Coh Langham began to see farms and roads below, with smoke from burning homesteads and groups of men fighting and running. The revolution, he thought, must be very new Presently he saw the walls and terraced buildings of a city rising ahead, and knew that it was Manoa.

He came near to forgetting his own danger. In spite of himself, he was living the dream that archeologists have and never realize; the chance to go back and see how the ruins looked when they were whole and peopled, how men lived and loved and died in the buried cities before they were buried. In this field the fountainhead was lost, and only cryptic hints were scattered throughout the world; hints that were laughed to scorn by most scientists. Now, through some miracle he couldn't understand, he was in Mu, the land whence, if you believed what the ruins and the carvings told you, the ten tribes descended from Adam and Eve had gone out to colonize the world, black, white, brown, and yellow.

The girl asleep in his arms was pure Norse, speaking the Quanlan of ancient Norway. King Quetzal had led his fair-haired people from Mayax to Cimmeria, leaving legends of blond Indians all through Central America. Itzan was mixed swarthy white, the Latin forerunners, and Negro, with a streak of brown thrown in. Brown that had gone from Hiranypura in Mu to India, taking the Naga symbol with them.

Now, just ahead, rose the towering majesty of a pyramid, which

had gone with the Murians to Central America, on to lost Atlantis, and from there with a priest's son named Thoth to Sais in Egypt.

The other ship, bearing Krim and Sigri, drew in closer. Langham saw his partner's shaggy head thrust over the side, avidly examining everything, and grinned. Apparently nothing worried him but seeing as much of Mu as he could. Irrationally, Langham was suddenly envious.

Looking at the glowing balls of crystal, he wondered for the hundredth time what raised the ships and made them go. It was not until much later that he learned that the Murians had for centuries had the secret of the cosmic ray, catching the boundless power in the prisms and using it to change the molecular vibration patterns of metals so that a repulsion field was created. Here in Mu, thousands of years before the Tertiary Era, when the world was flat because the mountains had not yet been born, the secret of anti-gravity was in everyday use.

In that way the great slabs of Baalbek, the images of Easter Island had been lifted and set in place. Just a network of metal set around the vast dressed blocks, the cosmic-ray globes unshielded, and the stones floated weightless as toy balloons.

The ships passed the city walls; there were fine stone buildings and paved streets black with people, and here and there fighting and looting still going on. The vast pyramid loomed above everything. Built around its base was the carven magnificence of a palace. The ships headed straight for the broad flat top of the pyramid, settled down.

Helva woke, sliding out of his arms with a look of silent gratitude.

Pushing back her golden mane of hair, she said quietly, "Because of this day, we might have been comrades. I'm sorry, Coh, that we must die — and without vengeance!"

Her sea-eyes were on Itzan's bejeweled ungainliness, and Langham remembered seeing the same look in the eyes of a wounded she-leopard. Then the cross-breed's great shoulders were bent above them, and he said:

"Come and meet God, and celebrate the end of earthquakes! At least, we'll celebrate. Xacul is inclined to be too quick and unimaginative; he spoils our sport if we don't take care."

As they were herded out of the car to be joined with Krim and Sigri, Langham asked for the third time, "Who is Xacul?"

Helva shook her head. "He came out of the southern forests; men say he was a hunter. My father said he was mad, but the people are driven mad too, with fear of the quakes, and they follow him. He has been preaching to them for a long time. Two days ago there was a quake that destroyed many towns and many people, and he said it was a sign for them to rise and destroy us. You have seen."

Coh Langham nodded. He had seen. And he hated Xacul as he hated the devil, before he ever saw him.

Simon Krim was as eagerly watchful as a child at a circus. He had bound Sigri's wound with strips from his undershirt, and the slender, feverish man seemed to have caught a little strength. Langham ached to question him, but Itzan forbade further speech.

The four and their guards, headed by Itzan, marched down a ramp that spiraled toward the ground, passing level after level of rooms in which Langham glimpsed parchments and maps and instruments, priceless records of a lost world. Simon Krim saw them too; Langham heard him swear as though the heart was being ripped out of him, and smiled. It would be nice to care as much as that about anything.

The ramp widened to a vast hall covered with magnificent murals and roofed with beams of gilded cedar. Ahead there were bronze doors twenty feet high, with the symbols of the Sacred Four and the flat Uighur Lahun set in jewels upon them. Itzan stopped to speak with the gilt-armored guards before the doors, and Langham felt a body sag close against him.

It was Sigri. At first he thought the man had fainted. Then he heard his urgent whisper, and knew that he was shamming. "Prophesy to Xacul!" Sigri's nervous vitality was like electricity to

Langham. "Prophesy the destruction of Mu! It may win us time." Langham had a sudden horrible premonition. "Destruction?" "At dawn. I know!"

Sigri staggered away as the guards moved in. The great bronze doors swung open to a wild thrumming of harps, and they marched into Xacul's judgment chamber.

CHAPTER IV

THE EARTH ROCKS!

COH LANGHAM'S gaze swept across the floor inlaid with the lotus symbol of Mu, past two harpers alone in silent splendor, up seven steps of black basalt to the throne, which was a lotus flower cut from a single block of chrysoprase. There it stopped, seeing the hunter from the southern forests who called himself God.

Dull-gleaming ebony against the pale green lotus, with no stitch nor ornament on him but a leather clout, his body a towering symmetry of muscle and sinew striped across the breast with the five great scars of a leopard's claws; straight black hair unbound, framing a face of Grecian purity, the face of a Tamil prince; sombre dark eyes that held still, far flames in their depths, and a little marmoset nestled against the curve of his columned neck; this was Xacul, who would stop the earthquake.

He looked at them like a man surfeited with wine.

"Today," he murmured, "I have killed a king. No lesser blood shall wash away the taste of that killing, until I have savored it."

Itzan swore under his breath. "But, Lord, these two are demons," he said hopefully. "The tall one bears the Snake on his breast. He says they have come from the Eternal to punish you."

Xacul, sunk and dazed in his vaulting dream, stroked the tiny marmoset and said softly:

"There is no Eternal, and I am Lord. My word goes through the land, even to the place of the Sun himself. In five moons I will rule all Mu, having the Colonies at my feet. Take these traitors below to the dungeons; tomorrow I will kill them. But today, I have spilled the blood of a king!"

Itzan's vast shoulders shrugged resignedly. Coh Langham, looking back as they were led out, saw those dark eyes still fixed on some mad and splendid distance, the marmoset like a grey puff-ball on an ebon shoulder.

"Get torches," said Itzan, and turned to his prisoners. "The regular

prison is full, so you must go into the old pits. And you may stay there a week, Xacul has so many piled up ahead of you. There's a fine crop; it'll take me some time to get through them."

"You?" asked Langham. "Do you execute them all?"

"Only the strongest men. The rest the common butcher handles. The thing is, Xacul wants them killed quickly. I like a little sport. I let them fight me, man to man. Of course, I can't take too many chances, so their arms aren't as good as mine, but at least, they have a sporting chance."

Langham grunted. The torches were brought, and the guards turned off down a side corridor that presently went down and down without a break. Langham saw Sigri's face in the torchlight, thin and wild-eyed, and frightened. And once more there was that furtive movement to something hidden in his girdle.

"It was no use to prophesy," whispered Langham. "Xacul is quite mad. It either would have made no impression on him, or would have angered him to killing us out of hand."

Sigri nodded. "But it's true. We must escape before dawn!"

They came into a stone corridor that reeked of moldy dampness, where phosphorescent fungi held the torchlight after it was past. And twice on that descent Langham felt the earth heave and groan under him. The quakes hadn't yet obeyed Xacul.

Itzan stopped at last before the first of a row of rusty metal doors. "I'll put you together, because I don't want you going mad or committing suicide before your turn comes. The two demons should fight well; and I may even give the pretty spitcat a chance, by way of variety!"

Langham would have beaten Itzan's head in if he could have reached him. But the spears prodded them into the cell and the door clanged shut. Langharn heard Itzan's wheezing laughter mingling with the retreating sandal-scuffs. Then there were darkness and silence.

The earth rolled and shivered and was still. Langham heard Helva's quick-drawn breath, and then her voice, saying:

"Sigri! These men came through the Hole!"

"I know; the one called Krim told me. Again Langham sensed the driving nerve force in Sigir. He was like a taut wire, pulled almost to the breaking point. "Listen to me. You too, Helva, for I've never told you everything. I've hoped I was wrong, but the quakes and the fire-spoutings leave no doubt.

"You know the pyramid beside the Hole.When I was a small boy, it fascinated me so that I spent all my time there, while the others were playing. Krim will understand; it was the ancient things that drew me, the carvings on the walls. Seven thousand years old, and the secret has been lost. It's taken me all my life to decipher those carvings, but I've done it. And I wish I had never seen them!"

SIGRI'S voice shook. Then it went on again, calm over a depth of near hysteria. "No, I don't mean that. I was happy, working over those carvings, making them give up their secret. It's the secret that terrifies me!

"Tomorrow at dawn, the carvings say, this land, this beautiful land of mine will be destroyed. All the palaces, the temples, the farmlands, the great cities and the quiet places, all destroyed! Krim says it is true, that Mu will sink.That alone would be enough. But..."

His voice broke off weakly. Langham heard a rustle, a groan, a soft thud. Sigri had sat down, and his voice came again, stronger.

"The carvings say something else, something so strange that I thought for a long time I must be wrong in my translation. But the Hole has always been there. You know that now! The carvings explain it. There is much I don't understand; I'm no scientist, only a lover of the past, But I'll try and tell you. You must understand! It means your lives."

There was a pause. Langham waited, feeling Helva taut beside him, sensing Simon Krim's methodical intentness. Sigri began again, slowly, choosing his words with care.

"The universe, according to the carvings, is something like a spool, winding the ribbon of time around it. The axis of the spool is the fourth dimension. By tapping it, you can go to any spot in happened time. So much I can grasp. But the rest is incredible!

"The man who built the pyramid and made the carvings must have been myself! Because he, who found the way to tap the fourth dimension by twisting the warp of time and space as an augur bores wood, did so in order to escape the destruction of Mu! On the very dawn of Mu's sinking, he escaped to the past, seven thousand years.

"Now the cycle has been relived. I am again at the starting point. If Helva and I don't repeat the first action — the man took his sister with him — we'll not only be destroyed with Mu, but we'll cause some horrible disruption in the time-stream. Happened time cannot be altered!"

There was silence for some time. Then Krim said, "But the Hole only sucks one way. How can you go back through it?"

"You don't understand." Sigri's voice was ragged with urgency. "The Hole was first made when Mu was as she is now. You came upon it as Mu is in your time, which hadn't happened when — when I went through first. Dawn tomorrow ends the cycle. The revolving time-factors will close the Hole as the time of its first boring approaches. I'll have to bore it again, using the time machine that is also in the pyramid.

"There will be a moment, before the closing, when the field will be neutralized, so that you can escape back to your own time. You can't come with us, because you didn't come the first time, and we can't alter what's happened. If you stay, it means destruction."

Langham was silent, thinking hard. Once he would have said Sigri was mad. But there was no doubt that the Hole existed.

"I don't understand," he said at length. "You say that happened time may not be altered. Yet this time you copy the secret from a carven wall, not discover it yourself. We weren't here the first time. Xacul must have been, but were you captured?"

Sigri said slowly, "I don't know. Some of the carvings have been destroyed by quakes. That has puzzled me too, but the best I can figure is that some things may be fitted into the time-stream without disturbing it, if the place is wisely chosen, so that men can travel in time if they know how. Other things would conflict with happened things that were important, or leave a gap in time. In other words, although the method of approach may differ, the things that have happened must happen again."

Langham grunted. "Perhaps. But escape isn't going to be easy. It's a long Hight back, and it was sundown when we came into Manoa."

"There was a far-off roaring, coming closer. The stones leaped under them, rocked for two solid minutes, and were still. From the sound and feel, Coh Langham, who knew earthquakes, decided that the palace was built directly over a fault. If Sigri was right, if the convulsion that had plunged the continent to her death was starting, the palace would be first to go down.

He thought of the immeasurable tons of stone above them and shuddered. Yes, they must get out. Even if Sigri was crazy as a loon, there were Xacul and his butcher Itzan, waiting.

CHAPTER V

STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

"THERE'S one thing more," said Sigri. It was almost a groan. "I don't know how the time-machine works. Alone, I haven't been able to decipher the carvings." There was a rustle as he drew something from his girdle; the thing, Langham knew, that he had been terrified of losing. "I was afraid another quake might destroy them, so I copied them on a strip of linen.You, Krim; you love the old things, like I do. Can you help me?"

Memories rose in Langham; things taught him in boyhood by his father, things learned from crumbling walls and cracked clay tablets. He stepped forward. "I'll help."

There was a sudden burst of light in the blackness as Simon Krim's cigarette lighter crackled, The tiny flame showed his face, heavy and dark-stubbled under his tangled hair, his eyes very steady

"You had the makings of an archeologist when you were a boy, Coh," he said slowly "You wasted them. If Sigri, with his years of work, couldn't crack those carvings, you wouldn't be any more help than — than Itzan." He stopped, studying Coh Langham in the feeble glimmer of the flame.

"You're like Itzan, Coh," he said abruptly. "Sensation is all you live for. I imagine you're getting a great kick out of this. No, you can't help us, unless you can figure out some way to get us out of here. Which I doubt."

He squatted down beside Sigri, bending over the strip of cloth, and in a second he and the Murian were off in a world of their own. Langham glared at them a moment, stung, furious. Then he turned to pacing restlessly up and down the cell, purposely keeping his eyes from the dull glint of gold that was Helva's hair. He knew that she was studying him from where she sat against the wall, and wished suddenly that she wouldn't.

Escape. He had to think out some way to escape. Somehow the thoughts wouldn't come, and his gaze kept going unbidden to the corner where the two men labored in the feeble light.

Up and down, up and down, with Kukulcan rippling to his impatient movements, his scarred hawk face catching bronze glints from the lighter-flame. Krim's words rang in his mind, pricking him to a blind anger. Like Itzan, was he, living only for sensation? Far better than living like a grub, sweating his life away like his father had, for nothing.

And yet, was it?

He stopped, standing tigerishly over the two men, lean hands at his belt. The old anger was hot in him, and suddenly he recognized it for what it was; a defense, a wall he had built against truth. It cooled away, leaving an ash of bitter loneliness. For ten years he had chased excitement, trying to drown the longing in him that he hadn't admitted even to himself. Now he was facing the ultimate thrill, death, and he had nothing to show for the days he had lived.

Krim and Sigri would have their monuments; small and unimportant, perhaps, but the fruits of work they had done because they loved it. His father had had that, too. He himself would have nothing.

Looking at those two, lost even to fear, Coh Langham realized the bitterest thing of all. He didn't belong. There was no one he could call friend, no group to which he was drawn. It wasn't just archeology. It would have been the same in any line of work. He was nothing, like Itzan, a creature living solely for its own pleasure.

He wanted to help, and he was barred. His strength, his courage, were useless here. And he had nothing else to offer. He was merely a body, following a lone and aimless track, wasting soul and brain –and life.

He turned suddenly and went down beside the girl; he couldn't have said why. He took her hands in his and bent his head over them, and whispered:

"I've been a fool, Helva. A fool, a fool!"

How long he stayed that way he never knew Quakes slid down the fault, shook them, roared on. Krim and Sigri labored on. Helva never spoke, but her hands were strong and comradely in his. They calmed him, brought back his confidence, so that hope began to rise again. And they brought something else, a dim something he didn't understand.

Krim stirred, stretching cramped muscles. "We've cracked it! Now all we need is time."

Helva's fingers tightened suddenly. Langham listened, then sprang up. "Hide the linen!" he whispered. "Someone's coming!"

Footsteps and torchlight; many men, armed. The door grated open, and Itzan stood grinning at them, jeweled arms folded above his paunch.

"God wants to see you," he said. "These quakes you're making upset his dinner, demon, and I'm to punish you by death, right in the Lotus Hall.Yes, all of you; but the tall demon first!"The

Lotus Hall was crowded with men, sitting at long trestle tables down both sides of the vast room. The air was heavy with wine and the rich odors of food, and the harpers, over against the dais, played wild, throbbing music. In the cleared space between the tables a man danced near-naked with shining swords.

There were no women. And above the feasting and the dancer, a tower of ebony rising from a pale green base, Xacul sat and brooded, fondling the marmoset.

The music broke, the dancer stopped, the feasters were silent. Xacul's eyes, dark-veiled flames set in a Grecian mask of jet, dwelt on Coh Langham and the writhing splendor of Kukulcan.

"Demon," he said softly, "you dare too much.You mock me with these quakes. It is only because they fear me more than the earth-shock that my people stay at this feast; and I must show them that no demon is mightier than I.

"Slay him, Itzan!"

Coh Langham leaped forward. "Why Itzan?" he cried. "Why not you, Xacul?"

A gasp ran around the room. Xacul smiled and held out his right Langham saw that it was splashed to the elbow with dried blood.

"This was the blood of a king," murmured Xacul. "Three are left; the Southern and the Middle Kings, and the King of Kings, the Sun of Mu himself. To these three only will I bend my hand:'

"Then I will prophesy!" cried Langham. A chance, perhaps; anything to gain time. "These little quakes are only the forerunners. Mu dies with the morning sun, and you with it, Xacul. The Eternal has sent me to warn you. Let us go, and perhaps He will have mercy."

Xacul's eyes were veiled. He stroked the marmoset, and whispered, "Slay him, Itzan!"

Coh Langham saw Helva's face, saw reflected in it what was in his own heart. He knew then that he loved her. Now that he knew his mistake, now that he could live, he couldn't die! Xacul was mad, and the only way to break him was to break his godship, to show his crazed mind a greater power. And Langham groaned. Even if Itzan didn't kill him, he couldn't see a way to win freedom from Xacul.

The harps struck a wild chord as Itzan strode forward, and in the same instant the ground roared and shook beneath them. The harps were abruptly silent, though the player's hands still plucked the strings, save for a weird, scattered disharmony.

Langham felt a shivering inside his ears and staggered dizzily. All over the room men swayed for a split second. Then the earth was silent and the dizziness was gone.

"The earthquake," Langham thought. Then he looked at the harps and a fierce light burst in his scarred hawk face.

He smiled as he whipped off his belt and stood to meet Itzan, theLord of the Earthquake

thong around his tattooed hand, the great buckle swinging free. If he could win this fight, there was a way, perhaps.

Itzan came, vast shoulders hunched, sword swinging. Langham took a deep breath. Everything he had learned of fighting out there on the edges of the world he was going to need now.

They were alone between the tables, ringed with staring, nervous faces, the floor jarring under them and a rolling of thunder in the distance — thunder that Langham recognized as a volcano in eruption.The time was growing desperately short.

Itzan's sword swung high, to end the fight with a single stroke. Langham crouched under it like a cat, sprang aside and leaped past, aiming a slashing blow that took Itzan under the ear.The cross-breed staggered and swore. He hadn't realized the portent of that heavy buckle. He came in again more warily, but Langham, vastly quicker of foot, cut him twice about the face before his next blow was aimed.

Itzan grinned suddenly. His head sank like a boxer's between his shoulders. His left arm, shielded with broad bracelets, came up to protect his face, and his long blade whistled as it swung. Langham's only target now was the thick ridge of muscle that ran across his shoulders. His only choice was to fall back before that murderous sword.

Back and back, leaping and dodging, seeking desperately for an opening, while the palace-pyramid groaned and shuddered almost with the regularity of a man's heartbeats and the tense-faced watchers drew closer to panic. Xacul, on his lotus throne, neither moved nor spoke.

Langham tripped suddenly, went to one knee and crouched there, panting as though spent, and Itzan, sure now of victory, paused for one instant with his sword upraised for the death-stroke, while his laughter wheezed and bubbled in his throat. And Langham's right arm swung like a striking snake.

The heavy buckle caught Itzan's heaving belly fair, stopping his laughter in a grunt of pain. His sword rang on the rock, but Langham was not beneath it. His lithe body shot in against Itzan's knees, crashing him backward to the floor, and in the instant that he lay half-stunned, Langham's belt was around his throat, Langham's knees were crushing his chest, and the iron muscles were straining across Langham's back.

FOR the space of three long breaths, the Lotus Hall was silent.Then there sounded a snap like a twig breaking, and Coh Langham rose laughing from the body of Itzan, with Kukulcan sweat-shining on his heaving chest.

"I've killed your butcher, Xacul," he cried. "Naga protects me. Now is my blood worth your spilling?"

Xacul's answer whispered across the nervous quiet. "I was a hunter, and in the hot green forests I learned my strength. I am master of the trees, for I cut down the mightiest to build my shelter. I am master of men, for I have broken the strongest in my hands. I am master even of the beasts, for —" and he touched the five great scars on his breast — "I have killed the black leopard alone and weaponless. And one day I stood on a spur of rock while a mountain burst and fires flowed around me and the ground was shaken and split, and I was not harmed. And I knew then that I was master of all things. I am God!"

"Yet," said Langham, "I will show you a greater power, And any man who touches me to prevent me, shall die as Itzan died!" He swung about, crying, "Helva!"

She came, straight and unafraid across the shuddering stone, her hair a golden banner in the torch-flames. Coh Langham gripped her shoulders, and she paled before the urgency in his face.

"I don't know whether you play the harp," he said. "But go and play it, girl! Wait for the earthquakes and strike only the low notes. Strike them hard!" Taking his handkerchief, he ripped it apart and thrust half of it into her hand. "Stuff your ears with this. If you feel dizzy, hang onto something or lie on the floor. But don't stop hitting those strings!"

She went, and the harpers fled before Langham's imperious gesture. Langham yelled in English, "Krim! Stuff your ears with cloth, and make Sigri do it too.Watch yourselves!"

There was a sudden roaring shock that nearly threw I Hat.Lord of the Earthquake

Great cracks opened in the walls and floor, and there was sound outside as of heavy things bounding and falling. Panic, hovering over the men at the tables, caught them now by the throat. God or no God, Xacul's authority, already weakened by Langham's unpunished challenge, lost its grip on them. They surged out like maddened cattle for the streets, leaving only trampled wreckage.

For an instant Langham thought he saw the way clear to escape; probably the soldiers that filled the halls had already run away. Then Xacul strode by him like a black colossus, and before Langham could gather his party and break for the door, it was barred and Xacul stood before it, arms folded across his scarred chest, the marmoset hugging his shoulder.

Langham gasped. He had not realized Xacul's size. Now, standing straight and on a level with him, he saw that Xacul's height was close to seven feet and that his shoulders were broader by four hands' breadth than burly Simon Krim's. To this giant, who had killed a black leopard unarmed, physical assault such as he and Krim could offer would be merely the slappings of children,

"Play, Helva!" he shouted. "Play!"

Low thunder drummed in the distance where volcanoes burst. The earthquakes boomed along the fault beneath them. And Helva's fingers swept the harp-strings into thrumming life.

The low notes met and mingled. And Xacul said softly:

"You are strong, demon.You are worthy of death at my hands."

Langham said, "The Snake protects me! Without arms I'll overthrow you, make you helpless as a babe to stand erect! You are no god, Xacul, and I'll prove it!"

IN HIS heart Coh Langham prayed — prayed desperately that what had happened once might happen again.

Back and back he went before Xacul's slow advance, across the cracked and rocking lotus floor. Krim stood white-faced in the shadows with Sigri leaning against him. Helva bent across the harp-strings. And the muted thunder, the earth-deep drumroll surged and echoed against the music.

Back back, praying that the harp would not be drowned, praying that the palace would not be thrown down, praying that Helva should strike the right chord before Xacul's hand took his throat and crushed it.

"Louder, Helva! Louder and deeper!" He didn't know whether she could hear him; the sounds were dim in his muffled ears.

Back and back he went across the shuddering stones, until the steps of the dais caught his heels and tripped him, so that he lay against them, watching Xacul's black face bend over him. And suddenly Helva's hands found a chord, a chord that met and silenced the low, dull thunder and was itself silenced. From the harp-strings broke a wild disharmony, so close to the two men that even through the cloth in his ears Langham heard it, and felt the vast shuddering of silent noise in the air.

Again and again, under Helva's strong brown hands that voiceless chord surged out. Great eddies of tortured air whirled about them, silent echoes were flung thundering from the walls and ceiling. Langham's head was filled with a rushing dizziness, a sense of sound beating its wings to be heard. He saw Helva's body sag against the harp, but her hands never faltered on the strings.

Xacul stopped, his eyes wide and burning, and the marmoset shrieked on his shoulder. His hands went to his head, and he swayed.

"You're beaten, Xacul!" shouted Langham. "I have overthrown you.You are no God, only a man. A man, Xacul, a man!"

Xacul fell, sprawling on the riven stones. He tried to rise, and fell again, helpless as a baby. Langham saw his face. There was terror in it, but most of all a great crushing despair.

Coh Langham rose and stood over him, fighting for balance, and somehow there was no joy in his triumph. He looked at Xacul's mighty body thrown in useless beauty on the stones, at his eyes that were blank and cold and fixed on a black and hideous distance.

"I am no god," Xacul whispered. "I am no god. I am no god!"

Helva fell beside the harp. The horrible compression, the shuddering of leashed sound was gone, leaving only the muttering of the earth and the far volcanoes. Langham picked her up, carried her toward the door. A shock stronger than any before struck as the four went out, and Langham, looking back through the veil of dust that fell from cracking walls, saw Xacul still lying on the broken lotus paving, with the little marmoset huddled at his throat.

CHAPTER VI

BACK THROUGH TIME

THE pyramid was rocking dangerously as they fled up the ramp to where the flying ships were kept. The end was near. Langham held Helva until she found her feet. She whispered, "What did we do?"

Langham told her, jerkily and without pride, as they struggled upward through a hell of cracking walls and falling rock and dust.

"You remember how the harps sounded when Itzan came out to fight me, and how the low notes were blanked out when the quake struck? Everyone in the hall was dizzy for a minute. I thought it was the quake. Then I realized that the noise of the earth, which wasn't very strong, had neutralized...look out!"

He held her as a mass of rock fell from the ceiling, almost blocking the passageway. They climbed over, Krim helping the feverish Sigri, and Langham went on.

"It neutralized the sound of the harp-strings, as any two notes in the same phase will neutralize each other. The vibrations didn't quite match; the disharmony we heard was the sum of the difference between the notes. But between the 'different notes' and the tremendous silent vibrations, the air in the hall was set in motion in a freakish way. The vibrations in the air apparently transmitted themselves to the lymph in the utriculus of the ear. That's the fluid that presses on the balance hairs and tells us which way is up. The balance centers were so confused that we nearly fell.

"I thought that what happened — God! Feel that jar! We've got to hurry! — might happen again, so I sent you to the harp and prayed. You finally hit it right. Xacul's balance centers were completely deranged. Of course, when he fell as I told him he would, and he saw me standing, his faith in himself was broken." Lang-ham's mouth made a grim line above his scarred chin. "He was mad, and deadly. I had to do it. But I can't help feeling..."

They came out onto the flat top, under a moon as veiled and turgid as the sun had been, and stopped involuntarily. From west to east the northern sky was filled with flame where volcanoes burst, a vast leaping glare that flooded the whole country. In its light the land shook like a troubled sea, filled with the crash of falling buildings and the shrieks of little beings that ran and were swallowed up. Deep in the earth there were great drums booming, answered with thunder and dry lightning from low-scudding clouds, and from somewhere, far off, came a great rushing of water as the sea engulfed the lowlands.

Coh Langham thought of the age-old symbol of the lotus drowned, and was filled with a longing and a tight-throated pity.

The parapet broke away with part of the roof. Langham leaped for the nearest ship, giving Krim a hand with Sigri while Helva cranked furiously at the anti-gravity globe. The car shot upward, and Langham, looking back, saw the pyramid collapse onto the ruins of the palace like a child's castle of pebbles undermined by the sea.

Hot, sulphurous wind tore at him as he raised the directional globe. Krim and Sigri were lost again in their private world, huddled over the linen in the light of the larger globe. Langham smiled, but he was no longer bitter. He knew now what he wanted.

He took Helva in his arms, down on the floor of the pitching ship; his scarred hawk face was gentle, and the restlessness was gone from his eyes. "Helva," he said, "I can't leave you."

Her wind-whipped hair caressed him. "You must. There is no other way." Her hands tightened suddenly on his wrists, and her face was hidden.

"There may be a way," he whispered. "Kiss me, and let me think."

On westward, they went, above the deathbed of a continent, over toppling hills and riven fields and lakes of sudden fire. Dawn was pale through the sprouting flames when they sighted the pyramid, miles away but still standing.

Krim raised his shaggy head, and said wearily, "We've done it. We can run the time machine."

"Will it hold four, Sigri?" asked Langham.Lord of the Earthquake

Sigri's dark eyes went wide in his white face. "Easily. Why?"

"Well," said Coh Langham slowly, "it seems I've made a mess of my life in one time. I'd like to try righting it in another,You see, I've just discovered I was born to be an archeologist, and it's seldom one can go back to his ruins when they were new! I think I know Krim well enough to know he won't pass up the chance either. I hope not, because I'm going to need him, to teach me the things I need to know. Later, perhaps, when we've written a book about Mu that'll knock the greybeards out of their complacency, we'll go back to our own time. I'd like Helva to see London and the Rhine and Switzerland...."

He stopped at the sight of Krim's face, and laughed. Then he held out his hand. Krim took it and crushed it without speaking.

Helva's hands were tight on Langham's shoulders. "What are you saying? You can't come with us. Sigri says it would mean destruction, for us and everyone!"

"Sigri's theory has too many holes in it. He says that the large, the important things must not be altered. Who can judge what an 'important' thing is? Sometimes the smallest things change continents. And surely if the big things happened, the little things did too, and can't be changed by so much as the cutting of a fingernail.

"He says that he and Helva must go through the Hole again, because it was done before, or suffer dire consequences. I don't think so, except that they'd surely be killed with the rest of the Murians if they stayed. I don't think so because no other part of their lives has exactly coincided with the lives of the first two who made the Hole. Therefore, if some things could be altered on the 'ribbon of time,' so could others."

DAWN brightened where the land burned itself out. The pyramid loomed closer. Langham went on.

"I think this is nearer right, Sigri. I think that instead of one ribbon wound on the spool of the universe, there are many, existing in different space-time continuums as people exist in different room's, without conflict. I think that each given time has a problematical future, a 'might-have-happened; and that if one goes back in time, one simply starts another ribbon winding on the cosmic spool toward another future, without disturbing the one, or the many, that already exist.

"In other words, Sigri, instead of reliving happened time, you have simply come to a similar point on the new ribbon that the first Sigri started.Your future hasn't already been lived; it's as problematical as mine or Krim's.

"How about it, Sigri? Does it appeal to your sense of logic?"

"Yes," answered the Murian thoughtfully. "Yes, it does. As I say, I'm no scientist. But I'm willing to take the chance." His brilliant dark eyes went to Helva. The girl's smile was glorious. Sigri held out a hesitant hand.

"This means friendship, doesn't it? After what you saved us from, Coh, I could be nothing but your friend. You, Krim; we are friends already!"

Langham felt, for the first time in his life, almost insanely happy as he sent the ship plunging down.

The ground groaned and split about them as they dashed for the doorway. White, staggering, Sigri led them to a strange machine in the dark interior; a circular platform surmounted by a vast corkscrew spiral of metal.

"On the platform!" he shouted, and threw a switch on a complex control-board, A prism began to whirl within the coil.

Helva's upturned face smiled at him in the coruscating brilliance. Langham had a fleeting glimpse of stone walls split and falling beyond a swirl of alien light. Then he was flying through blind, whirling space to start another ribbon winding on the cosmic spool.


No Man's Land in Space

Amazing Stories, July 1941


I

The angry clamor rang through the narrow, stifling streets. In his headquarters, which were roofless and brick-walled like all the houses in the outlaw town of Sark, Geoffrey Dana heard it as it swelled and surged closer.

His dark, satanically pointed face hardened, his light eyes narrowed and grew colder still.

Loren, the Venusian, jerked aside the fiber matting at the doorway. Heavy, acrid ground vapors sucked in around his feet. Dana caught the added grimness in his bitter young face, the veiled defiance in his blue eyes.

"More trouble?" asked Dana. Beyond the Venusian he could see men crowding around his doorway, silent and ill at ease now that they were here.

Loren nodded his wheat-straw head. Two men came past him with a stretcher, and Dana rose, tall and deceptively slender in his white spun-glass coverall. The darkness of the asteroid's night seemed to pour in with the bitter air.

Dana knew what he was going to see before he looked. In the last seven days five of his men had been brought to him this way. Six more had vanished. And his little kingdom of wolves, already sullen and restless because the Earth-Venus war had knocked their looting into a cocked hat, were getting ugly about it.

"Thompson the Earthman," said Dana softly, his steel-grey head bent. The corpse was big and powerful. Yet it had a curiously pale fragility, a transparency.

"Bled empty, like the others," said Loren. "Dana, the men . . ."

"Ah, yes. The men." Dana went to the doorway, staring out over the grumbling, uneasy crowd. "Well," he snapped. "What do you want?"

"You know what we want!" A big Venusian swamp-lander, condemned for piracy on three worlds, shouted it. "Where are our men going? What kills them? And what are you doing about it?"

"If you don't like what I'm doing about it," said Dana silkily, "you can always leave Sark."

Well hidden in the back, someone, a Martian by his accent, yelled, "You can't get out of it that way, Dana!"

"No," growled the Venusian pirate. "You know damn well this asteroid is the only place in the System our hides are safe. But we've got a right . . ."

"A right!" The lamplight from his table cut sharp planes on Dana's pointed face, laid black shadows in the scars, of living as much as of battle, about his thin mouth and cold grey eyes.

"You bleat about protection," he said. "Who gives it to you? Who found this asteroid beyond Interplanetary Law? Who built this city, where you can run to cover? I've saved all your necks, and don't forget it."

A mutter of assent ran through the crowd. Dana took his advantage.

"I know this war is making things tough. Blockades and space-torpedoes are too much competition for good piracy. The big-shots are staying close to home, so there's no kidnapping, and there's damned little trading in valuables even on Mars. You know how my secret service works. The minute there's anything stirring anywhere, you'll know about it. In the meantime . . ."

"We wait," said the Venusian, and spat. "Blasted Earthmen! If they hadn't been so stubborn, we'd have fat cargo ships . . ."

"Earthmen!" an angry voice cried. "If you bloody insolent Venusians hadn't wanted so much . . ."

Men began to shout, dropping from lingua franca into their own tongues. Groups milled, split, formed into factions. Fists were doubled, and a few knives came out. Dana forbade guns.

"Stop it!" Dana roared. "Stop it, I say!" His voice softened, but it carried to the last man in the crowd.

"Listen, all of you. You're not Martians, or Venusians, or Earthmen any longer. Get that, and remember it. Your worlds have kicked you out. Forget them, because they're gone.

"I've banned war news. The first man who listens to it, the first man who starts trouble over the war, gets a poisoned needle in his neck. Sark is my world. I built it, and I'll run it.

"Hear that, you scum? We have no nationality. We're gone geese here on Sark, with no law, no hope, and no god but me!"

He let it sink in, watching them with cynical amusement. Then he turned quietly to Loren.

"Where did you find the body?"

"Out by No Man's Land," returned the Venusian sullenly.

"Oh," said Dana, and smiled like a wolf. To the men he said, "Go and get armed. Form into posses and fan out to cover the whole circle of the town. I'll give you action, if that's what you want."

They went. Dana turned inside, reaching down his heavy needle-guns, loaded with deadly poison instead of the harmless anesthetic he allowed his men.

Loren the Venusian stood waiting beside the stretcher, his flat, drilled shoulders stubborn. The bearers had gone. Dana, settling the guns on his lean hips, studied the corpse.

Like the five other bodies brought to him in the last seven days, Thompson the Earthman had a hole in his throat. A neat, clean hole whose edges were white as though with compression. His body was drained of blood.

Bending closer, Dana caught a faint pungency mingling with the acid reek of the air. That, too, had been on the five other bodies. It had a nagging familiarity.

He shook his steel-grey head impatiently, and looked up at Loren.

"I'm waiting," he said.

Loren looked steadily over Dana's shoulder.

"Thompson and Neta the Venusian had a quarrel in one of the dives," he said. "They went out to No Man's Land to settle it."

"And," continued Dana evenly, "when you followed to back up our countryman, you found Thompson dead. Where's Neta?"

"Gone."

Dana nodded.

"Six dead, seven vanished. You forgot, didn't you, Loren?"

Rebellious blue eyes suddenly met Dana's.

"Forgot what?"

"That the outskirts of town are forbidden after dark, until we clear up this mystery. What was the fight about, Loren?"

The Venusian's eyes didn't flicker, and his mouth set. Dana's lean fingers tightened over his gun-butts, but he didn't draw. Then someone moved in the shadows by the door, and a voice said,

"He won't tell you, Dana."

Daddy Gibbs came into the circle of light, a little unsteady on his feet, as always. Frowsy white hair straggled into faded blue eyes that had, at times, an almost childlike clarity.

Yet Daddy Gibbs, in his heyday, had looted thirty-one of the proudest liners in space in one year.

Dana scowled. He was in no mood to fool with the old man now.

"I don't have to be told, Daddy," he snapped, and stepped closer to Loren. "Someone's been listening to war news," he said silkily. "It was the war, wasn't it, Loren?"

"Yes, damn it!" The young Venusian's space-burned face was suddenly ablaze. "Venus is at war. I can't help caring! Neither could you, an Earthman, if you were a man instead of a damned cold-blooded snake!"

The knotted veins stood out on Dana's forehead, but he said quietly,

"You're getting away with it this time. There's trouble brewing here, and I need every man I can trust. I know just how far I can trust you. I know you were cashiered from the Venusian Space Fleet, and I know why.

"You needn't jump. No man lands on Sark unless I know his background. And my secret service has ways of finding out.

"So I'm letting you go, this time. But not again, Loren. Remember that. Not again."

He hadn't noticed Daddy Gibbs heading for the televisor. Now it blared sharply.

" . . .struck again. The Venusian forces were driven back with heavy losses, but not before Terran cities had suffered from long range bombing. Retaliation . . ."

Geoffrey Dana said with dangerous calm,

"Shut it off, Daddy."

But Gibbs, urged on by a chronic overdose of tequin, was leaning against the table, weeping.

"Earth," he muttered. "Beautiful green Earth."

"Mars," blared the announcer, "following her traditional policy, is remaining neutral . . ."

"Until she sees which side is winning," snapped Dana. "Shut it off, you drunken fool!"

The announcer went on unperturbed.

"So far Earth is holding her own. Military experts give her an even chance, provided Mars does not actively ally herself with Venus. However, many neutral observers believe this is only a matter of time, since Mars has a high stake in Venusian water."

"Earth," moaned Daddy Gibbs. "Why did I ever leave her?"

Dana's hand choked the announcer off in mid-sentence. Fighting down a black fury which surprised even him, he whispered,

"If you weren't a drunken old man, Daddy, you'd be dead. Ordinarily I can put up with your baiting. But not now."

"All right, Dana." Daddy Gibbs hiccupped and wiped his nose on a dirty shirtsleeve. "If you hate Earth so much . . ."

"Hate Earth!" roared Dana. "I don't give a damn for Earth, except that this war is making trouble for me! Come on, Loren. We can get out there before those drunken louts get organized."

Daddy Gibbs said, very clearly and steadily,

"You're a liar."

The sheer effrontery of it stopped Dana. He stared at Daddy.

"You must be very drunk," he said. Daddy laughed, looking like an ancient, mischievous child.

"I am. In vino, veritas. I've found you out, Dana. You're still an Earthling. just like Loren's a Venusian. If you weren't, you wouldn't get so mad at me."

The black fury welled up in Dana, brought the blood hot and blinding back of his cold eyes. It was as though Daddy tried to bind him to something, bridle the freedom that had been the cynical watchword of his life.

His lean hand closed cruelly on the neck of Daddy's dirty shirt.

"I have forgotten Earth," he said, so low and quiet that Loren, watching hawk-like from the doorway, shivered. "And if you want to live, Daddy, you'd better forget, too."

He dropped the old man and strode out, leaving Loren to follow.

II: THE BEAST

Geoffrey Dana had good control of himself. Following Loren's gesture, running at an easy lope, his rage was quickly downed.

He had a certain affection for Daddy Gibbs, just as he had for Loren. They were different from the usual mob that inhabited his kingdom. He couldn't break them as he could the others. They'd die, but they wouldn't bend.

For that reason, it was perfectly possible that he might have to kill Loren. Unless he could forget Venus and the war, the boy was going to be an impulsive and rebellious trouble-maker. He'd done a crazy, sentimental thing and been exiled for it, but he still loved his world, and longed to be fighting for it.

Dana knew his polyglot wolves, and he was going to have peace on Sark if he had to kill to get it.

Shrugging that aside, Dana put all his attention on the deadly, puzzling thing that threatened his kingdom.

Seven of his men had vanished without a trace from these black streets, during the hours when the people of Sark took advantage of the relative coolness to pleasure themselves in the dives.

Fights and killings were no unusual things on Sark. The corrosive pools of No Man's Land had taken many a body, But seven in one week, coupled with the six dead men, made natural causes impossible.

Sweat beaded his face, and the taste of it on his lips was bitter. The sluggish south-polar breeze whispered through the roofless houses, keeping them comparatively free of fumes, but here in the streets the acid reek was choking.

Loren coughed and swore, and Dana grinned.

"Don't be too hard on the climate," he said, "It's what keeps anyone else from prospecting, colonizing, or claiming. It keeps us safe from Interplanetary Law, my boy."

Loren grunted. They were well into the outskirts now, and the sound of their running steps had an empty ring.

"What's behind all this, Dana?" demanded the Venusian.

"I don't know." Dana's satanic face darkened. "But by the gods of space, I'll find out. And when I do, someone will drown in the Ashi Geyser!"

He meant it, cruelly, and Loren shot him a quick glance.

"Were you born without a heart?" he asked quietly.

Dana spoke without stopping, his cold grey eyes intent on the deserted houses.

"The heart, as Voltaire once said, is a muscle. Sentiment got you kicked out of the Fleet — you should have let your brother take his own rap. Learn your lesson, Loren. Only fools are soft."

He didn't bother to see how his advice was taken. The last crumbling houses of the town showed No Man's Land through their broken ranks, and Dana's right-hand gun came out of its holster.

"Is this where you found Thompson?"

Loren's wheat-straw head nodded in the starshine.

"Dana!" he said suddenly. "Could it be Jordan Andrews?"

Dana followed Loren's half-seen gesture. Beyond the houses lay Sark's equatorial belt, the barren waste that gave it its Martian name — Bitter. Pitted with sullen, fuming pools and geyser basins, hung with choking vapor, it was the outlet for the corrosive flux that filled the half-hollow worldlet, boiling up in deadly fury from the furnace core.

Looming on a rise of higher ground in the heart of No Man's Land, the tight grey citadel of the Andrews Chemical Works thumbed its nose at Dana's kingdom. Its smug righteousness was a sore point with Dana's men, but Dana, the realist, had suffered it to exist.

It was nothing to him if Jordan Andrews wanted to sink every last Universal Credit he owned into building that chemical plant, to try, by tapping one of the asteroid's vast underground lakes of acid, to recoup his broken fortune.

He had let Andrews build it without disturbing the armed ship that had protected him. He left unmolested the freighters that called thrice yearly to leave supplies and pick up cargo.

Sark was unclaimed, beyond Interplanetary Law. Dana well knew that the Interplanetary Control would give its soul for an excuse to move in on Sark and do away with his kingdom.

An act of violence against Jordan Andrews might conceivably give them a pretext. Dana wasn't giving it. And presently, he thought, Andrews would fail and go home.

Now Geoffrey Dana shook his head.

"Andrews has nothing to do with this. What would he want with seven of my black sheep? And the dead men, with all their blood sucked out?" An involuntary shiver touched him.

"No, it isn't Andrews. It's something — queer. Those men were strong and tough, yet they died without a struggle."

He tensed sharply, iron-grey head erect.

"Listen!"

Across the uneasy silence of No Man's Land came the muffled crack of heavy needle guns in action.

"Andrews!" Loren exclaimed. "What in hell. . ."

Dana's lean cheeks creased in a wolfish smile. There were six men out there; Andrews and five assistants, cooped up in their air-conditioned fortress.

"Probably," he said softly, "their own purity became unbearable. All right, let's get busy. Don't get too far away from me, show your light as little as possible, and be careful."

Loren nodded and moved away. Dana permitted himself a puzzled scowl in Andrews' direction. The firing had grown ragged. Abruptly it stopped.

Dana shrugged and went on.

He would have had no warning at all, but for the brick that fell beside him from the top of a crumbling wall. Leaping away, he had just time to see a vast unhuman shape rise against the stars and hurtle down upon him.

His gun barked once before an arm like a python whipped about his body and pinned his elbow to his side. Lashing out savagely with his left against a bulk that glimmered ghostly white, Dana felt thick soft hair under his knuckles, and beneath that an armor of iron muscle.

His needles had either failed to penetrate the thick coat, or were harmless to this nameless creature. The sickness of futility came to Dana as he felt the impact of sheer size, the vast unhurried strength of the thing.

And then he caught the odor — the peculiar, pungent smell that had clung to the six corpses.

"My God!" he whispered. "This is it!"

Again memory stirred, urgently, but the arm around his body was slowly crushing the air from his lungs. Drawn close against a tremendous chest, smothered by soft fur, Dana bent his lean body and clawed out blindly with his free hand.

He had no leverage for striking. Instead, his fingers found a small round head, groped . . .

Something in him contracted with a chill stab of horror.

On that blank, round ball there was nothing — no ears, no eyes, no nose. Nothing but a three-sided puckering in the center of the front surface that drew open with a suggestion of razor fangs beneath soft bare flesh, and nuzzled his groping palm in a sucking motion, like an unclean kiss.

He cried out hoarsely and wrenched away, but the strength of the thing was incredible. A second arm wrapped him, held him closer, pressed him into the pungent mat of fur.

As though activated by special nerves, the fur puffed out like a cat's tail, enveloping his face, closing mouth and nose and eyes. The pungent smell grew stronger.

Dana fought with silent viciousness. He was weakening. Was he going to find out where the vanished men went? Or would Loren find him, drained dry, with a hole in his throat?

Most of all, what was this horror, and how had it got to Sark? There was no native life here save moss and scaly lizards.

His lungs burned, his temples throbbed, his crushed ribs stabbed with pain. Then the constricting arms loosened sharply, forcing breath into him. The warm, heavy scent of the creature went deep into him. A soothing dusk settled over his brain.

In a last lucid flash, he knew why the men died without fighting.

Dimly he felt the ground shake under him, heard a queer high-pitched whistling that deepened into a deafening roar. The crushing arms loosened as the furry body jerked, then dropped him altogether.

Dana fell heavily, caught through blurred eyes a glimpse of the monster vanishing into a crumbling house some distance away, its shapeless paws over its head.

Lying there gasping the hot, bitter air, Dana laughed weakly.

"Thanks," he whispered. "Thanks, you damned little ball of fire!"

Out in No Man's Land, the Ashi Geyser hurled its fearful corrosive spout high in the air.

III: DEATH BLOW

Getting groggily to his feet, Dana found the gun he had dropped in the struggle. The weird anesthetic was wearing off. Cautiously, he approached the house into which the thing had gone — and stood staring into a deserted room.

The beast had vanished.

Through the bull-roar of the Ashi the sound of voices reached him, and the thud of running feet.

"Dana! Geoffrey Dana!"

It was Daddy Gibbs' voice, and it had a note of urgency.

Dana shouted, and flares began to bob along between the houses. Daddy's white haystack of hair emerged from the hot dark. The old man had been running hard.

"Dana!" he gasped. "Something important. . . what's happened?"

"One of Satan's special imps jumped me a moment ago," said Dana dryly. "The Ashi went up and scared it off."

Daddy shook his head solemnly.

"God saved you, Dana, for a very special duty."

Dana's hard smile flashed.

"I don't think I've done enough for God so that He should bother much about me. What duty?"

Daddy beckoned to someone behind him. A tall Terro-Venusian half-breed stepped forward, his eyes alight with keen excitement.

Dana swore.

"Varno! What are you doing here?"

"I landed just after you left," said the tall man rapidly. "I have news, Dana, the biggest news of the century. I couldn't trust it to the code band — too many military spies. So I took a chance and came."

"Well?" said Dana, still scowling. Varno was the head of his Venusian intelligence department. He had them on every planet — men not yet known to the authorities, who kept tabs on everything that might be turned into profit for Dana's outlaw empire.

They knew what ships carried cargo worth looting, what men of importance could dig up big ransom money, what trader in jewels might be safely robbed, who could be blackmailed.

They were the coordinators of the vast network of crime Dana ruled. And when things got too hot, there was Sark for a refuge. Dana was no piker. He worked in high places, and there was plenty of grease for greedy palms to see that the pleas of the Interplanetary Control for the destruction of Sark went unheeded.

"The news had better be important," said Dana grimly. "You had my orders to stick with Venus."

"It is," said Varno, his eyes glittering. "Listen. Have you ever heard of Faruk of Venus?"

"He's a scientist," put in Daddy Gibbs.

"And a good one," said Varno. "He's been condemned as a renegade by all the scientific foundations for perverting discoveries to his own ends. But now he's working on a secret weapon, which Venus says will end the war. And Mars, because of it, is right on the edge of jumping in against Earth."

"You know what that will mean, Dana," said Daddy urgently.

"Earth knows," Varno went on. "They almost got the secret, and the scientist. So Venus sent him into space in a camouflaged ship, to let him finish his experiments in peace on some asteroid."

Dana's cold eyes glittered. He was beginning to get the idea.

"How did you get all this?"

"We had something on one of the Venusian High Command, and blackmailed it out of him. No one knew just where Faruk was going, but it narrowed down to this general sector of space. Now, if we could find Faruk.

"We could sell him for enough to make up what the five months of this blasted war have cost us!" Dana's wolf smile cut deep vertical scars in his lean cheeks. "The highest bidder — and every world would pawn its soul to get him, if you're right about the weapon."

"I am," said Varno. "Nobody knows what it is, but it exists, all right." He frowned briefly. "Funny thing. We do know that Faruk was using a Lunar primate in his experiments, and I can't see how that ties in with military weapons."

Dana stiffened, his memory jarred to sudden life. Lunar primate! That pungent odor clinging to the corpses. No wonder it had seemed familiar! Once, in his almost forgotten childhood, he had seen a Lunar primate in a zoo, and screamed with the nightmare for a week.

Understanding came with a rush. That huge, pale-furred body spawned in the cold black caves of Earth's moon, the tiny, featureless head.

"They don't need eyes," said Dana half to himself. "They use infra-red pits, like pit-vipers, to detect the heat frequencies of their prey. The airs thin, so they have sensitive diaphragms instead of external ears, judging their distance from objects by reflection of sound waves. That's why he dropped me when the Ashi went up. Any loud noise causes pain."

He cracked one lean fist into the other palm.

"That explains the throat-wounds and the blood being drawn. The primates put their victims to sleep with that anesthetic stink and the fluffy fur, and then suck 'em dry. They rarely kill by crushing, because that lets the blood leak out, but when they're angry or frightened . . .

"By the gods of space!" he whispered, his pale eyes widening. "That means — Great Lucifer, it means Faruk is here! Here on Sark. He's using my men for food for his beast, and for . . ."

Seeing Varno's blank face, he sketched the situation rapidly. The half-breed swore with incredulous joy.

"The nerve of him!" he said. "And yet, Sark would just suit him. If he needs men in his experiments — though I'm damned if I see why - he'd have to go where there were some. Sark is only habitable in certain limits — he'd be safer than on some asteroid with prospectors snooping around. And it's beyond the Law. He can do as he pleases."

"But not beyond my law," said Dana.

Daddy Gibbs gripped his arm.

"Dana, you can't do what you're planning! If you capture Faruk, you can't sell him to enemies of Earth!"

"Oh, shut up," snarled Dana. "Well, now we know what we're up against. We'll find where he's hiding, and then . . . Where's Loren?"

"Loren!" Daddy spun around to study the eagerly listening men. "He's not here. He's been listening. Dana, he'll warn that Venusian, save him from you. You've got to stop him. Venus mustn't have that weapon!"

Dana's pointed face hardened.

Loren wanted desperately to go back to Venus. If he could save the life of this scientist for his world, he could get reinstatement as his reward.

If he warned Faruk, helped him escape, he robbed Dana of a fortune. Dana well knew the law of his kind. When the king-wolf slips, the pack is eager to pull him down. And the pack was already ugly and short of temper.

If this rich morsel was snatched from under their noses, it was the end of his rule.

"Spread out," he said quietly to the men. "Find Loren."

It was Daddy who found his prints leading into the same house into which the Lunar ape had vanished, not five feet from where they had spoken. They didn't come out — but Loren was gone.

Then, like the blow of a cosmic hammer, a roaring shock broke the silence.

Thrown to his knees by a convulsive lurch of the earth, Dana saw a vast flame burst up from No Man's Land.

"Andrews!" he gasped, watching huge blocks of concrete geyser upward like pebbles into the first of the dawn.

Swearing in forty different dialects, the men stared out at that column of flame. It flared, died, flared again, and subsided to a sullen rolling of smoke.

Dana, remembering the unexplained gunfire of a short while ago, scowled in thought. He wasn't much of a chemist, but he knew that the acids and other compounds stored in their pure state could cause trouble.

Still, it was unlikely that the chemical tanks had let go of themselves.

Dana shook his head. No time now for conjecture. No Man's Land writhed. Choking fumes shot in plumes of burning steam from active blowholes. The baked earth shivered, and Dana realized that the explosion had set off subterranean disturbances that might have hideous consequences.

The town of Sark was built on the one solid plateau on the asteroid. If that should break, develop fissures . . .

The Ashi went up suddenly, followed by the smaller geysers, spouting wildly, their internal pressure upset by the force of the explosion. Basins overflowed, sending seething torrents of acid to claw at the edges of the plateau.

"Back into the town!" yelled Dana. "Get into the houses, or you'll suffocate!"

The men, with Varno, turned and ran. Dana, coughing in the bitter mist, grabbed Daddy Gibbs and started to follow. The ground leaped under him, and behind them the Ashi roared up and up.

A second shock threw both men down. Dana's skin burned, his lungs were stabbed with pain. They had to get back into the higher part of town quickly, or not at all.

And he reflected bitterly that if Sark was really breaking up, every man on it was doomed. There were no ships but Varno's little two-seater, not even the battered tramp that brought supplies every two months.

Daddy Gibbs made a queer, high-pitched sound.

"My God, Dana!" he choked. "Look!"

Dana swore savagely, a cold stricture tightening round his heart.

A few feet away the brick pavement was cracked wide in a fissure that stretched as far as he could see, cutting them off irrevocably from the town.

IV: INTO THE PIT

The house beside them was their only hope. Fuming rivulets crawled up the street in the new blaze of the sun. The clouds grew thicker. There was just a bare chance that the breeze-created vacuum inside the walls would remain breathable, and that the bricks would hold back the flood.

Then he remembered the Lunar ape, and Loren. Loren's footprints led inside and vanished, as the ape's had done. Hustling Daddy inside, Dana stooped and examined the dust of the floor.

There was only one explanation. It answered the question of how the ape had caught his victims, coming from nowhere and disappearing as though into thin air.

With a twinge of excitement, he found what he was looking for.

"A trap-door, Daddy," he said, touching the marks of other fingers in the dust. Loren must have seen the ape go down here, and have followed, knowing that he'd find the scientist.

Dana shuddered, thinking what Loren might find down there in the honeycomb of black tunnels under Sark, if the walls of the acid lakes gave way.

He took his hands away and said, "No. Later, if and when this earthquake stops."

The air by the floor was bitter, but still breathable - for how long, he didn't know. There was a hissing sound outside, like the voices of many snakes; acids, flowing in from the gorged pools.

"What a rotten death," Dana grunted.

Daddy looked at him.

"I'm not worried about dying. It's Earth I'm thinking about."

"Blast it!" snapped Dana. "Can't you forget Earth?" A rush of impatient anger surged in him, and he added, "And who the hell are you to be preaching?"

Daddy grinned.

"'They that be whole need not a physician'," he quoted. "I've had a lot of time to think since I washed up on your beach, Dana. Besides, I'm not preaching. Just remembering.

"Remembering how the moon used to shine, and how the parks smelled after a rain. And snow. How we used to curse the snow! Drifts piled against the buildings, and the wind like a knife." He coughed into the dust, and swore. "But a clean knife, Dana. None of this hell-fired acid."

Dana felt the stinging sweat drip from his face into the dust, listened to the growing hiss of the acid. Swift rage drew his lips back like a wolf's.

"So what?" he grated. "I'm hunting down the Venusian. Earth can buy him, if he wants. Isn't that enough?"

Every shudder of Sark under his body had an echo in his heart. Sark was his, built with his brain and strength, ruled with his power. He was surprised to find how much he minded losing it.

"No," said Daddy quietly. "It's not enough."

Dana's dark, murderous face should have stopped him, but he only blinked and licked dry lips.

"Wish I had a drink. No, Dana, I want you to admit the truth. Admit you're an Earthling. Otherwise . . ."

Dana's voice was silkily soft.

"I'll sell to the highest bidder. Venus, Earth, or Mars."

The bull-roar of the Ashi almost drowned Daddy's words.

"You're an Earthman, Dana. Don't let your hardness trick you into doing something you'll regret."

The cords stood out on Dana's forehead. Again that feeling of being bound, that attempt at shackling his free choice, woke the dark anger in him.

He whispered, "Shut up," and turned his head away.

What he saw stiffened him in cold horror. Rising through the trapdoor, between them and the door, were the tiny head and vast silvery shoulders of the Lunar primate!

Dana heard Daddy scuff to his knees, letting go a sharp breath that broke in a cough. Through the thickening mist he saw the blank, featureless ball swivel on its neckless mount, sensing the vibrations of living bodies.

Round, hairless lips writhed back to emit a whistling roar. Razor fangs clicked. Then it hurtled up with incredible speed, throwing itself toward the men.

Dana fired without hope, remembering his former encounter, and waited grimly. This would be a battle to the death. The ape, muscles twitching, was goaded to madness by the heat, the tainted air, and the convulsive heaving of the earth.

He was conscious of Daddy standing beside him, cursing or praying - he couldn't tell which — in a flat monotone. As a purely reflex action, he jammed his left-hand gun back into the holster and let the other buck itself empty in his palm.

The beast didn't stop. The needles were futile. Arms like silver tree-trunks wrapped the two of them close against stifling fur. A wave of musky odor came through the acid reek.

Daddy fought, tearing at the white fur with futile hands. Dana watched the vast arm tighten, heard the slow, deliberate crunch of Daddy's bones.

The old man turned his head, just for a flashing instant, Dana saw his eyes as the pain left them — clear and untroubled.

Daddy's lips framed the one word, "Earth!" Then he was dead, and the beast held him high, like a rag doll, roaring.

Dana heard the thud of the body striking the floor. A smoking little river crawled in through the door. The beast stood still, shaking, Dana half forgotten in his arms.

Then, with what was almost a whimper, it turned and bolted through the trapdoor, dropping down into utter dark.

Dana, held like a forgotten toy, fought down a swift surge of panic. The air was thick and bitter, hot with a dead, terrible heat. The ape ran with incredible speed through the blind corridors, which had once been blow-holes for the molten core of Sark.

In the subterranean silence, Dana could hear far-off concussions, dull and ominous, and sometimes the ape staggered as the floor trembled under him.

Sark was breaking up.

The ape, Dana guessed, was heading for the Venusian's hide-out, whither he had been trained to bring victims - for what purposes he still couldn't guess. If the scientist had not already fled, his ship offered Dana a mode of escape.

Remembering Daddy, he smiled grimly. If there was any way of salvaging anything from the wreck, he was going to do it. His plan would have to be slightly modified, that was all.

The great underground lakes heaved in their beds. Dana heard the distant hiss and surge of them against their walls. When one of those walls should fissure, it would mean death for any living thing caught in the flooded tunnels.

In spite of the heat, the sweat turned cold on Dana's body.

He wondered if Loren had managed to find his countryman. If the ape didn't get where it was going soon, it wouldn't matter. The explosion had set off successive breakdowns in the half-hollow structure of the asteroid.

He thought of his men, crouching in the mud-brick houses, waiting, or fighting for Varno's little ship. There was a woman he remembered, too - a slim Martian with wicked green eyes. All of them, trapped and waiting for death.

Bitter sweat ran into his mouth as he cursed in silent fury.

V: FARUK

Abruptly there was light, a radium torch in a small natural cave. The beast plunged through a curtained doorway in the far wall and stood still, whimpering.

Dana saw a natural cave, radium-lighted, fitted with the barest comforts, an operating table and considerable scientific paraphernalia, and what seemed to be an intricate radio transmitter. Trays of chemicals kept the air reasonably clear.

A man lay on the operating table, his skull half shaven. Two flat discs lay beside surgical instruments of the most advanced type.

Against the wall sat seven men — the seven who had vanished from Sark. They sat like sleepers, with closed eyes, and their heads, too, were shaven and marked with three red scars, across the temples and the top of the skull.

In one side of the cave was a cage of heavy metal bars. This held five men, packed close together, watching tensely what went on in the room.

Beside the operating table, the razor still in his hand, stood a man in a stained surgeon's smock. The light caught on his sharp cheekbones and ruthless jaw, glinted angry copper in his eyes, set like sparks deep under a bald, magnificent brow.

Facing the man, his needle-gun rock-steady in his hand, was Loren.

The ape dropped Dana and crouched shivering at the feet of the man in the surgeon's smock, whom Dana knew to be Faruk, the renegade Venusian scientist. The man's hand dropped automatically to one vast shoulder, and he shot a fierce glance at Dana. Loren, never shifting his aim, jerked his head toward the disturbance, and his blue eyes widened.

"Dana!" he gasped. Then, "Get your hands up, and turn around!"

Dana shrugged and obeyed, his mind racing. Loren had managed to find his countryman. But he had him at bay. What had changed him so, from a patriotic defender to a captor?

Had he misjudged Loren? Was the Venusian, in the final pinch, as cynical as Dana himself?

"You too," snapped Loren to Faruk. "Get over beside Dana. Keep away from the transmitter. And if you turn the ape on me, I'll get you before he gets me."

Watching out of the corner of his eye, Dana saw Loren sidle over toward the cage and reach down a key ring hanging on the wall. Never taking his gaze from his prisoners, he fumbled for the padlock key and handed it to a gaunt, grey haired man in the cage.

"Open it," he said. "Come out, stay behind me so as not to block my gun, and get into the ship. I'll come after you."

Dana knew the man in the cage from his pictures. It was Jordan Andrews. The other five, including the man on the table, must be his assistants. They all looked pretty groggy, as though the effects of anesthetic needles were just wearing off.

Dana glanced at the man beside him, absently fondling the ape. A little pulse was beating ominously under the heavy jaw, and the eyes were narrowed but not afraid.

Under cover of the clanking padlock, Dana whispered, "Those are anesthetic needles."

The scientist shot him a quick, searching look.

"The swine said they were poison," he muttered. "Look out for yourself, then!"

His order to the ape was quite inaudible to Dana, but the beast's sensitive diaphragms heard. Silently he whirled and shot toward Loren, arms outstretched.

Jordan Andrews was outside the cage. He tried to get back in, but the press was too great. He tumbled out, followed by the others, whose forward momentum was too great to stop, even though they saw the huge primate bearing down on them.

Loren fired, fast and straight, but the needles slid harmlessly off the thick fur. The scientist had flung himself out of sight behind the radio transmitter. The ape roared and swung its arms.

Then it stopped, its sensory pits baffled by the nearness of Jordan Andrews and his men. Loren sprang aside, shouting to Andrews, and the beast shook its head, whimpering.

Dana's wolf smile flashed briefly. His own poison-loaded gun sprang into his palm.

"Drop your gun, Loren!" he shouted. "You, call off your ape."

Everything froze to tableau stillness as the scientist blew inaudibly on a silver whistle. The ape crouched, shaking its head and roaring softly. Loren dropped his gun close to his foot, his dark young face dangerous under the pale-blond tousled hair.

Faruk stood up slowly, his hands resting over the controls of the transmitter, sweeping the room with his angry copper gaze.

"The ape," he said softly, "will stay where it is, ready to spring. Now —" Dull thunder drowned his words, and the rock floor jarred. Dana's keen ears caught a faint crack! and a sibilant hiss, as of an awakened cobra.

"That damned explosion started something," he said between his teeth. "What caused it?"

"Andrews," said Faruk evenly. "He opened his chemical tanks in the hope of trapping my men in the tunnel, but he was unsuccessful.

"Unfortunately, my men lack self-determination, which is essential in circumstances. This lack of balance is the chief flaw I'm trying to eliminate. They didn't shut off the flow of chemicals, which mixed with drastic results."

He indicated the operating table.

"I wasn't anticipating either the explosion or its results."

Dana's cold light eyes swung to Jordan Andrews.

"I should," he said, "have killed you the day you landed here."

"Don't be a fool, Dana!" Loren broke in. "Andrews was fighting for his life. This rotten murdering swine.

"I had use for Jordan Andrews," said Faruk quietly. "Which is no one's business but my own."

"He was going to make me work for him." Andrews' gaunt, shrewd face was grim. "Use my chemical knowledge to help him make those —" he pointed to the seven who sat against the wall —"or become one of them along with my men."


Andrews' eyes met Dana's, and the outlaw sensed the strength that had kept the manufacturer fighting when his life was broken and gone.

"If you kill this man, Dana," said Andrews slowly, "you'll have done one decent thing to justify your life."

Dana's mirthless smile cut deep vertical scars in his cheeks.

"And you, Mr. Andrews, have just snuffed a thousand-odd lives out of existence. This asteroid is breaking up."

Faruk shrugged.

"They'll be a small loss, Dana. What's your game?"

The veins stood clear on the outlaw's forehead, but his voice was level. Almost too level.

"The same as yours. Escape."

"Doesn't your conscience hurt, leaving your men to die alone?"

"Not in the least," said Dana, and knew abruptly that he lied.

Again the floor jarred, and the ape moaned, cringing. The time was short.

"My gun is loaded with poison," Dana said quietly. "I want your ship, Faruk, and you, unarmed. Quite frankly, you're a valuable property, and I intend making the most of you. If you behave yourself, you'll probably be none the worse off.

"If you don't, I shall take your ship and leave you here to die. Is that clear?"

Jordan Andrews said,

"What about us?"

"Nobody asked you to come to Sark," Dana returned coldly. "Well?"

The Venusian stared at the muzzle of Dana's gun, and abruptly the truculent light went out of his eyes. His shoulders sagged wearily, and he sank down on the stool back of the transmitter.

"Everything's gone wrong," he sighed, and dropped his head dejectedly between his hands.

Dana's jaw tightened. He hated whining above all things.

"Get up," he said. "Get up and come on."

"Dana!" It was Loren, and Dana was a little startled. The sullen, repressed mask was gone from the Venusian's young face. It was ablaze with urgency, with some deep emotion.

"Dana, don't take this man back!"

Dana laughed mockingly. He was backing toward the only other doorway in the cave, which he knew must lead to Faruk's ship, keeping Loren and Andrews and the four men covered.

"Not even to Venus?" he said. "Where's your patriotism, Loren?"

"It's because I love Venus that I say it," returned Loren quietly. "Do you know what the secret weapon is?"

Dana didn't, and said so.

"Come on, blast you!" he snapped at the scientist.

"Listen to me, Dana! Why do you think I turned against my countryman? Why do you think I want to rob my world of the certainty of victory? Because I won't have Venus go down in history as a world of monsters!

"If Venus can gain power honorably, well and good. But to rule the System with his weapon, to see my people enslaved . . ."

"It may not go to Venus," Dana told him, "so relax."

Jordan Andrews took one step forward, and Dana read danger in his gaunt face.

"It mustn't go to Earth, Dana. It mustn't go anywhere."

Faruk's voice broke in suddenly, changed from its former dejection, ringing with harsh strength.

"It will go to Venus, you Earthling dogs! And you, Loren — renegade. Venus will rule the System — and I will rule Venus!"

Things happened, suddenly, bewilderingly. Faruk was safe behind the transmitter. The ape lurched forward as the cave heaved and shuddered. Loren ducked for his gun and sent a stream of needles searching for Dana, who had thrown himself flat behind a metal chair.

Someone screamed. Men surged forward, fell back before the threat of Dana s gun. The ape caught one hapless man and swung him high, its round mouth wide to a whistling roar.

Dana swore viciously. He should have known that a man with a jaw like that wouldn't crumple so easily.

What was he doing there, silent behind the transmitter?

Loren's voice rose sharply high above the bedlam.

"Look out! Here they come!"

The seven sleepers had awakened.

VI: THE FINAL CHOICE

Dana glimpsed them, beyond the charging body of the ape. They went like beasts crouched for the kill, their faces distorted with sheer animal blood-lust.

All were armed with their own anesthetic-loaded guns. The scars on their shaven heads flushed darkly in the radium light. Dana felt a sudden chill sweep over him.

What was this secret weapon?

The Lunar ape stood erect and roaring. His victim was quite still now. The seven men that had been Dana's advanced.

There was a sudden silence in the cave. Then one of Andrews' men cried out and broke for the door. He wobbled helplessly to his knees, his voluntary centers deadened under a hail of needles from the guns of the seven who marched across the room like a sickle of doom.

Loren's gun barked. Dana saw the glittering needles spray into the oncoming line, lodging in unprotected faces and necks — and the anesthetic had no effect!

Dana knew that drug — a powerful preparation of Earthly hashish and the sister Venusian drug. It paralyzed the voluntary centers instantaneously, disorganizing thought and leaving the victim helpless but with no lasting impairment.

Yet it was useless against these "subjects" of Faruk's experiment!

Loren's voice rose, shouting his name.

"Dana! Will you sell the Solar System into slavery to these?"

A singing silver rain of needles swept over Jordan Andrews and his remaining men. They fell, just as Dana opened up.

Shooting from a bad angle, he saw his first volley miss, go past them toward the operating table. The second caught the nearest man.

He went down, and Dana shouted. They weren't immune to poison!

Loren was barricaded behind an overturned metal table, holding his useless fire.

"Dana," he cried. "For God's sake, think what this will mean to Earth, as I'm thinking of Venus! I'll take you wherever you want to go - if you'll not let Faruk live."

Dana's wolf smile scarred his cheeks.

"Sorry", he said. "I'm neither patriotic nor virtuous."

His accurate fire had brought down three more of the seven. Now, as though under definite orders, the remaining four charged him.

Lying tense, his gun jolting in his palm, Dana's mind raced.

Those metal discs beside the instruments on the operating table. The scars on skull and temple. The immunity to drugs, but not to poison. The sudden bursting of lifelessness into a savage urge for destruction.

And the scientist, out of sight behind his transmitter.

Bits of the puzzle that had plagued him these last seven days began to fall into place.

The ape had brought men to the scientist. Faruk had performed some bizarre operation, turning the men into servants, who in turn went out to gather more men. Thus he had subjects for experiment, and a growing army for attack or defense.

Attack! That was it. These four men, oblivious to the deaths of their comrades, ignoring his fire, came rushing on.

He thought of legions of these creatures, manning ships, aircraft, mechanized land units, formed into battalions of infantry, ploughing with unconcerned ferocity into, over, and through all defenses, simply because they knew no fear — nothing but the command to kill.

Two more were down, and his clip was running out. There would be no time to reload. If one of those anesthetic needles caught him, he might as well be dead.

The thunder of dissolution all through the asteroid was growing louder. The hiss of acid increased as the pressure of the lake widened the fissure in its walls. The time was perilously short.

Dana gripped his protecting chair and rose.

They were almost on top of him. The heavy metal frame smashed the head of the leader like a rotten melon. The other, surprised by the sudden move, leveled his gun for a finishing shot.

Dana dropped his hands to the floor and pivoted in a perfect savatte kick. The gun went flying. Straightening his bent body like a spring, Dana drove the man's jaws together so that his teeth splintered.

It was strange to do this to men whose necks he had saved. Men who had drunk and gambled with him. How many men on Earth would be faced with the same necessity?

How many in the whole Solar System, for that matter? How many worlds would be wrecked, as Sark had been wrecked, to satisfy ambition — Faruk's, or that of the world that bought his secret?

"The hell with it!" snarled Geoffrey Dana.

Just in time he saw Loren's wheat-straw head raised, and dodged the shot.

The man with the splintered teeth was coming up again, his expression unchanged except for the torn and bloody mouth. Dana caught up the chair and swung it again, and saw metal circles in the wreckage of the man's skull as he went down.

Those metal discs. The radio transmitter. And then he glimpsed Faruk's head upraised, and saw the helmet, with the wires running from the crest . . .

Radio-telepathic control! Surgical destruction of the voluntary centers of the brain, amplifying discs, and an especially tuned transmitter linked to the mind of the leader. Better than robots, because the raw human material was cheaper, more plentiful, more adaptable. Dana felt suddenly sick.

Without stopping the arc of his swing, Dana hurled the chair. It swept over the top of Loren's barricade, knocked him backward. His gun went off at the ceiling. And Dana followed the chair.

The cave jolted convulsively. A deep booming roar broke out, a splintering sound, a rush of liquid. The wall of the lake had given way. The ape screamed as Dana wrenched the gun from the stunned Loren's hand.

"Come on, damn you!" he roared at Faruk.

The Venusian rose slowly. His copper eyes were veiled, and Dana saw his lips move silently.

The cave was filled with thunder. A crack opened above the doorway leading to the ship, widened ominously.

Dana knew the ape was coming. He forestalled it, doing the only thing he could do. He leaped straight for the vast silver shoulders, clinging with his left arm around the blind head.

Even in that moment, Dana felt pity for the brute. It surprised him that he did. The ape roared, and he fired into its throat, tearing open the great veins.

It strangled and flung him off, and fell like a stricken tree. Dana saw swift, raging sorrow cross Faruk's face, and wondered that a man who could invent such a horrible form of warfare could feel affection for anything.

He backed into the doorway. Dust sifted down from the crack above his head. Loren was rising to his knees. He didn't say anything, but his eyes spoke. Andrews and his men moaned and stirred on the heaving floor.

Earth-men. Sheep, trapped by the wolves.

The air was suddenly choking, bitter with acid fumes. Dana could hear the rush and surge of tons of liquid, out beyond the inner cave.

The two men faced him — Loren and Faruk. And Dana hesitated. Raged, cursed himself, and hesitated.

Quite unbidden, Daddy Gibbs' peaceful, dying face flashed across his memory. There was that same inner peace in Loren's face now, even knowing that he had lost.

Both he and Daddy Gibbs had done their best.

The dead men on the floor stirred eerily as the quivering earth shook them. Men with metal discs in their heads, who could rule the System. Rule, and destroy. Destroy worlds that other men loved, as he was discovering he loved Sark.

With Faruk in his hands, Dana could bargain for almost anything. Loren had had the same chance. He had thrown it away, because he wouldn't see his world disgraced and enslaved.

Sark rocked in agony. Dana was filled with sweeping rage that laid the veins like knotted cords on his forehead.

First Sark, and then — Earth?

All planets are Earth to someone.

Deliberately, Dana aimed and pulled the trigger. Faruk fell without a cry, over the body of his ape.

Dana sprang for the nearest of Jordan Andrews' men.

"Hurry up," he snapped. "Help me get them into the ship."

Again Loren didn't speak, but Dana saw his eyes and smiled.

A sardonic smile, because he had violated his own code of never thinking of anyone but himself.

The air was strangling when they got the last of the semi-conscious men into Faruk's ship, which lay ready for flight on a ridge close above the cave.

"Let's go," said Loren. "The whole crust is breaking . . . My God! We forgot the man on the operating table! He's still alive, under anesthesia."

Dana shook his head and started to speak. But he stopped.

He could just see the walls of Sark over the short curve of the horizon — walls that crumbled and fell. Smoking rivers of acid rolled over them, and fierce, chaotic winds brought him faint screams.

An empire of wolves, built with his brain and heart, to prey upon the sheep. The planets were closed to him. With the destruction of Sark, his empire would crumble. There was no place where he might rebuild it.

His era was over, the last of the outlaw kingdoms of the System.

Going back would mean only imprisonment, the triumph of enemies he had held at bay for a lifetime. He was an exile now, from life itself.

"Get in the ship," he said. "I'll get the man. Oh, cut the heroics, blast you!"

He took Loren's impulsively offered hand. "Make for Earth. Andrews still has enough influence to help you. And it's a damned nice world."

Then he turned abruptly back into the passage to the cave.

The far wall had fallen, blocking the mouth of the tunnel through which the ape had come. Rivulets of acid seeped through. The crack above the outer door groaned as he entered, split wider.

A stone fell from the block in the tunnel, followed by a corrosive spout. There was a racking shudder, stronger than any before, and the whole wall collapsed behind Dana, shutting him in beyond hope of escape.

He stood among the dead, watching the acid spout claw away the stones around it and form a growing lake on the floor.

He felt suddenly very tired. Closing his cold grey eyes to ease the burn of the air, he ran lean fingers through his grey hair and sighed.

Then he laughed harshly.

"I hope you're satisfied, Daddy," he said. "I hope the devil mixes brimstone with your tequin!"

The acid was lapping toward his boots. The town of Sark must be gone now, a heap of bricks and dissolving bodies.

He climbed up on the operating table, fastidiously unwilling to be consumed until the last moment, and took his heavy gun out of its holster. There were still a few needles in the clip.

By this time Loren and his cargo of humans would be safely away. Dana's hard smile flashed in the radium light. For once, the wolves were giving the sheep a break.

The ironic side of it struck him, and he chuckled.

"It will," he murmured, "give the Solar System an awful bellyache to know that I'm the spotless hero who saved it from a fate worse than death. Ha! Wonder if they'll erect a monument to me — or dedicate a new gallows?

"Move over," he added, giving the body beside him a shove. It rolled over, exposing what Loren had not seen; the buried needles of Dana's first volley, that had overshot Faruk's human robots and killed the hapless man.

He lay down, raising the heavy gun to his temple. The bark of it was drowned in the roaring hiss of acid, pouring through the broken barricade.



A World is Born

Comet Stories, July 1941


Mel Gray flung down his hoe with a sudden tigerish fierceness and stood erect. Tom ard, working beside him, glanced at Gray's Indianesque profile, the youth of it hardened by war and the hells of the Eros prison blocks.

A quick flash of satisfaction crossed Ward's dark eyes. The he grinned and said mockingly, "Hell of a place to spend the rest of your life, ain't it?"

Mel Gray stared with slitted blue eyes down the valley. The huge sun of Mercury seared his naked body. Sweat channeled the dust on his skin. His throat ached with thirst. And the bitter landscape mocked him more than Wade's dark face.

"The rest of my life," he repeated softly. "The rest of my life!"

He was twenty-eight.

Wade spat in the damp black earth. "You ought to be glad, helping the unfortunate, building a haven for the derelict . . . ."

"Shut up!" Fury rose in Gray, hotter than the boiling springs that ran from the Sunside to water the valleys. He hated Mercury. He hated John Moulton and his daughter Jill, who had conceived this plan of building a new world for the destitute and desperate veterans of the Second Interplanetary War. "I've had enough 'unselfish service'," he whispered. "I'm serving myself from now on."

Escape. That was all he wanted. Escape from these stifling valleys, from the snarl of the wind in the barren crags that towered higher than Everest into airless space. Escape from the surveillance of the twenty guards, the forced companionship of the ninety-nine other veteran-convicts.

Wade poked at the furrows between the sturdy hybrid tubers. "It ain't possible, kid. Not even for 'Duke' Gray, the 'light-fingered genius who held the Interstellar Police at a standstill for five years'." He laughed. "I read your publicity."

Gray stroked slow, earth-stained fingers over his sleek cap of yellow hair. "You think so?" he asked softly.

Dio the Martian came down the furrow, his lean, wiry figure silhouetted against the upper panorama of the valley; the neat rows of vegetables and the green riot of Venusian wheat, dotted with toiling men and their friendly guards.

Dio's green, narrowed eyes studied Gray's hard face.

"What's the matter, Gray? Trying to start something?"

"Suppose I were?" asked Gray silkily. Dio was the unofficial leader of the convict-veterans. There was about his thin body and hatchet face some of the grim determination that had made the Martians cling to their dying world and bring life to it again.

"You volunteered, like the rest of us," said the Martian. "Haven't you the guts to stick it?"

"The hell I volunteered! The IPA sent me. And what's it to you?"

"Only this." Dio's green eyes were slitted and ugly. "You've only been here a month. The rest of us came nearly a year ago, because we wanted to. We've worked like slaves, because we wanted to. In three weeks the crops will be in. The Moulton Project will be self-supporting. Moulton will get his permanent charter, and we'll be on our way.

"There are ninety-nine of us, Gray, who want the Moulton Project to succeed. We know that that louse Caron of Mars doesn't want it to, since pitchblende was discovered. We don't know whether you're working for him or not, but you're a troublemaker.

"There isn't to be any trouble, Gray. We're not giving the Interplanetary Prison Authority any excuse to revoke its decision and give Caron of Mars a free hand here. We'll see to anyone who tries it. Understand?"

Mel Gray took one slow step forward, but Ward's sharp, "Stow it! A guard," stopped him. The Martian worked back up the furrow. The guard, reassured, strolled back up the valley, squinting at the jagged streak of pale-grey sky that was going black as low clouds formed, only a few hundred feet above the copper cables that ran from cliff to cliff high over their heads.

"Another storm," growled Ward. "It gets worse as Mercury enters perihelion. Lovely world, ain't it?"

"Why did you volunteer?" asked Gray, picking up his hoe.

Ward shrugged. "I had my reasons."

Gray voiced the question that had troubled him since his transfer. "There were hundreds on the waiting list to replace the man who died. Why did they send me, instead?"

"Some fool blunder," said Ward carelessly. And then, in the same casual tone, "You mean it, about escaping?"

Gray stared at him. "What's it to you?"

Ward moved closer. "I can help you?"

A stab of mingled hope and wary suspicion transfixed Gray's heart. Ward's dark face grinned briefly into his, with a flash of secretive black eyes, and Gray was conscious of distrust.

"What do you mean, help me?"

Dio was working closer, watching them. The first growl of thunder rattled against the cliff faces. It was dark now, the pink flames of the Darkside aurora visible beyond the valley mouth.

"I've got—connections," returned Ward cryptically. "Interested?"

Gray hesitated. There was too much he couldn't understand. Moreover, he was a lone wolf. Had been since the Second Interplanetary War wrenched him from the quiet backwater of his country home an eternity of eight years before and hammered him into hardness—a cynic who trusted nobody and nothing but Mel 'Duke' Gray.

"If you have connections," he said slowly, "why don't you use 'em yourself?"

"I got my reasons." Again that secretive grin. "But it's no hide off you, is it? All you want is to get away."

That was true. It would do no harm to hear what Ward had to say.

Lightning burst overhead, streaking down to be caught and grounded by the copper cables. The livid flare showed Dio's face, hard with worry and determination. Gray nodded. "Tonight, then," whispered Ward. "In the barracks."

Out from the cleft where Mel Gray worked, across the flat plain of rock stripped naked by the wind that raved across it, lay the deep valley that sheltered the heart of the Moulton Project.

Hot springs joined to form a steaming river. Vegetation grew savagely under the huge sun. The air, kept at almost constant temperature by the blanketing effect of the hot springs, was stagnant and heavy.

But up above, high over the copper cables that crossed every valley where men ventured, the eternal wind of Mercury screamed and snarled between the naked cliffs.

Three concrete domes crouched on the valley floor, housing barracks, tool-shops, kitchens, store-houses, and executive quarters, connected by underground passages. Beside the smallest dome, joined to it by a heavily barred tunnel, was an insulated hangar, containing the only space ship on Mercury.

In the small dome, John Moulton leaned back from a pile of reports, took a pinch of Martian snuff, sneezed lustily, and said,

"Jill, I think we've done it."

The grey-eyed, black-haired young woman turned from the quartzite window through which she had been watching the gathering storm overhead. The thunder from other valleys reached them as a dim barrage which, at this time of Mercury's year, was never still.

"I don't know," she said. "It seems that nothing can happen now, and yet . . . . It's been too easy."

"Easy!" snorted Moulton. "We've broken our backs fighting these valleys. And our nerves, fighting time. But we've licked 'em!"

He rose, shaggy grey hair tousled, grey eyes alight.

"I told the IPA those men weren't criminals. And I was right. They can't deny me the charter now. No matter how much Caron of Mars would like to get his claws on this radium."

He took Jill by the shoulders and shook her, laughing.

"Three weeks, girl, that's all. First crops ready for harvest, first pay-ore coming out of the mines. In three weeks my permanent charter will have to be granted, according to agreement, and then . . . .

"Jill," he added solemnly, "we're seeing the birth of a world."

"That's what frightens me." Jill glanced upward as the first flare of lightning struck down, followed by a crash of thunder that shook the dome.

"So much can happen at a birth. I wish the three weeks were over!"

"Nonsense, girl! What could possibly happen?"

She looked at the copper cables, burning with the electricity running along them, and thought of the one hundred and twenty-two souls in that narrow Twilight Belt—with the fierce heat of the Sunside before them and the spatial cold of the Shadow side at their backs, fighting against wind and storm and heat to build a world to replace the ones the War had taken from them.

"So much could happen," she whispered. "An accident, an escape . . . ."

The inter-dome telescreen buzzed its signal. Jill, caught in a queer mood of premonition, went to it.

The face of Dio the Martian appeared on the screen, still wet and dirty from the storm-soaked fields, disheveled from his battle across the plain in the chaotic winds.

"I want to see you, Miss Moulton," he said. "There's something funny I think you ought to know."

"Of course," said Jill, and met her father's eyes. "I think we'll see, now, which one of us is right."

The barracks were quiet, except for the mutter of distant thunder and the heavy breathing of exhausted men. Tom Ward crouched in the darkness by Mel Gray's bunk.

"You ain't gonna go soft at the last minute, are you?" he whispered. "Because I can't afford to take chances."

"Don't worry," Gray returned grimly. "What's your proposition?"

"I can give you the combination to the lock of the hangar passage. All you have to do is get into Moulton's office, where the passage door is, and go to it. The ship's a two-seater. You can get her out of the valley easy."

Gray's eyes narrowed in the dark. "What's the catch?"

"There ain't none. I swear it."

"Look, Ward. I'm no fool. Who's behind this, and why?"

"That don't make no difference. All you want . . . . ow!" 

Gray's fingers had fastened like steel claws on his wrist. "I get it, now," said Gray slowly. "That's why I was sent here. Somebody wanted me to make trouble for Moulton." His fingers tightened agonizingly, and his voice sank to a slow drawl. "I don't like being a pawn in somebody else's chess game."

"Okay, okay! It ain't my fault. Lemme go." Ward rubbed his bruised wrist. "Sure, somebody—I ain't sayin' who—sent you here, knowin' you'd want to escape. I'm here to help you. You get free, I get paid, the Big Boy gets what he wants. Okay?"

Gray was silent, scowling in the darkness. Then he said, "All right. I'll take a chance."

"Then listen. You tell Moulton you have a complaint. I'll . . . ."

Light flooded the dark as the door clanged open. Ward leaped like a startled rabbit, but the light speared him, held him. Ward felt a pulse of excitement beat up in him.

The long shadows of the guards raised elongated guns. The barracks stirred and muttered, like a vast aviary waking.

"Ward and Gray," said one of the guards. "Moulton wants you." Gray rose from his bunk with the lithe, delicate grace of a cat. The monotony of sleep and labor was ended. Something had broken. Life was once again a moving thing.

John Moulton sat behind the untidy desk. Dio the Martian sat grimly against the wall. There was a guard beside him, watching.

Mel Gray noted all this as he and Ward came in. But his cynical blue eyes went beyond, to a door with a ponderous combination lock. Then they were attracted by something else—the tall, slim figure standing against the black quartz panes of the far wall.

It was the first time he had seen Jill Moulton. She looked the perfect sober apostle of righteousness he'd learned to mock. And then he saw the soft cluster of black curls, the curve of her throat above the dark dress, the red lips that balanced her determined jaw and direct grey eyes.

Moulton spoke, his shaggy head hunched between his shoulders.

"Dio tells me that you, Gray, are not a volunteer."

"Tattletale," said Gray. He was gauging the distance to the hangar door, the positions of the guards, the time it would take to spin out the combination. And he knew he couldn't do it.

"What were you and Ward up to when the guards came?"

"I couldn't sleep," said Gray amiably. "He was telling me bedtime stories." Jill Moulton was lovely, he couldn't deny that. Lovely, but not soft. She gave him an idea.

Moulton's jaw clamped. "Cut the comedy, Gray. Are you working for Caron of Mars?"

Caron of Mars, chairman of the board of the Interplanetary Prison Authority. Dio had mentioned him. Gray smiled in understanding. Caron of Mars had sent him, Gray, to Mercury. Caron of Mars was helping him, through Ward, to escape. Caron of Mars wanted Mercury for his own purposes—and he could have it.

"In a manner of speaking, Mr. Moulton," he said gravely, "Caron of Mars is working for me."

He caught Ward's sharp hiss of remonstrance. Then Jill Moulton stepped forward.

"Perhaps he doesn't understand what he's doing, Father." Her eyes met Gray's. "You want to escape, don't you?"

Gray studied her, grinning as the slow rose flushed her skin, the corners of her mouth tightening with anger.

"Go on," he said. "You have a nice voice."

Her eyes narrowed, but she held her temper.

"You must know what that would mean, Gray. There are thousands of veterans in the prisons now. Their offenses are mostly trivial, but the Prison Authority can't let them go, because they have no jobs, no homes, no money.

"The valleys here are fertile. There are mines rich in copper and pitchblende. The men have a chance for a home and a job, a part in building a new world. We hope to make Mercury an independent, self-governing member of the League of Worlds."

"With the Moultons as rulers, of course," Gray murmured.

"If they want us," answered Jill, deliberately missing the point. "Do you think you have the right to destroy all we've worked for?"

Gray was silent. Rather grimly, she went on.

"Caron of Mars would like to see us defeated. He didn't care about Mercury before radium was discovered. But now he'd like to turn it into a prison mining community, with convict labor, leasing mine grants to corporations and cleaning up big fortunes for himself and his associates.

"Any trouble here will give him an excuse to say that we've failed, that the Project is a menace to the Solar System. If you try to escape, you wreck everything we've done. If you don't tell the truth, you may cost thousands of men their futures.

"Do you understand? Will you cooperate?"

Gray said evenly, "I'm my own keeper, now. My brother will have to take care of himself."

It was ridiculously easy, she was so earnest, so close to him. He had a brief kaleidoscope of impressions—Ward's sullen bewilderment, Moultons angry roar, Dio's jerky rise to his feet as the guards grabbed for their guns.

Then he had his hands around her slim, firm throat, her body pressed close to his, serving as a shield against bullets.

"Don't be rash," he told them all quietly. "I can break her neck quite easily, if I have to. Ward, unlock that door."

In utter silence, Ward darted over and began to spin the dial. At last he said, "Okay, c'mon."

Gray realized that he was sweating. Jill was like warm, rigid marble in his hands. And he had another idea.

"I'm going to take the girl as a hostage," he announced. "If I get safely away, she'll be turned loose, her health and virtue still intact. Good night."

The clang of the heavy door had a comforting sound behind them.

The ship was a commercial job, fairly slow but sturdy. Gray strapped Jill Moulton into one of the bucket seats in the control room and then checked the fuel and air gauges. The tanks were full.

"What about you?" he said to Ward. "You can't go back."

"Nah. I'll have to go with you. Warm her up, Duke, while I open the dome."

He darted out. Gray set the atmosphere motors idling. The dome slid open, showing the flicker of the auroras, where areas of intense heat and cold set up atmospheric tension by rapid fluctuation of adjoining air masses.

Mercury, cutting the vast magnetic field of the Sun in an eccentric orbit, tortured by the daily change from blistering heat to freezing cold in the thin atmosphere, was a powerful generator of electricity.

Ward didn't come back.

Swearing under his breath, tense for the sound of pursuit in spite of the girl, Gray went to look. Out beyond the hangar, he saw a figure running.

Running hard up into the narrowing cleft of the valley, where natural galleries in the rock of Mercury led to the places where the copper cables were anchored, and farther, into the unexplored mystery of the caves.

Gray scowled, his arrogant Roman profile hard against the flickering aurora. Then he slammed the lock shut.

The ship roared out into the tearing winds of the plain. Gray cut in his rockets and blasted up, into the airless dark among the high peaks.

Jill Moulton hadn't moved or spoken.

Gray snapped on the space radio, leaving his own screen dark. Presently he picked up signals in a code he didn't know.

"Listen," he said. "I knew there was some reason for Ward's running out on me."

His Indianesque face hardened. "So that's the game! They want to make trouble for you by letting me escape and then make themselves heroes by bringing me in, preferably dead."

"They've got ships waiting to get me as soon as I clear Mercury, and they're getting stand-by instructions from somebody on the ground. The somebody that Ward was making for."

Jill's breath made a small hiss. "Somebody's near the Project . . . "

Gray snapped on his transmitter.

"Duke Gray, calling all ships off Mercury. Will the flagship of your reception committee please come in?"

His screen flickered to life. A man's face appeared—the middle-aged, soft-fleshed, almost sickly innocent face of one of the Solar System's greatest crusaders against vice and crime.

Jill Moulton gasped. "Caron of Mars!"

"Ward gave the game away," said Gray gently. "Too bad."

The face of Caron of Mars never changed expression. But behind those flesh-hooded eyes was a cunning brain, working at top speed.

"I have a passenger," Gray went on. "Miss Jill Moulton. I'm responsible for her safety, and I'd hate to have her inconvenienced."

The tip of a pale tongue flicked across Caron's pale lips.

"That is a pity," he said, with the intonation of a preaching minister. "But I cannot stop the machinery set in motion . . . ."

"And besides," finished Gray acidly, "you think that if Jill Moulton dies with me, it'll break John Moulton so he won't fight you at all."

His lean hand poised on the switch.

"All right, you putrid flesh-tub. Try and catch us!"

The screen went dead. Gray hunched over the controls. If he could get past them, lose himself in the glare of the Sun . . .

He looked aside at the stony-faced girl beside him. She was studying him contemptuously out of hard gray eyes.

"How," she said slowly, "can you be such a callous swine?"

"Callous?" He controlled the quite unreasonable anger that rose in him. "Not at all. The war taught me that if I didn't look out for myself, no one would."

"And yet you must have started out a human being."

He laughed.

The ship burst into searing sunlight. The Sunside of Mercury blazed below them. Out toward the velvet dark of space the side of a waiting ship flashed burning silver.

Even as he watched, the flare of its rockets arced against the blackness. They had been sighted.

Gray's practiced eye gauged the stranger's speed against his own, and he cursed softly. Abruptly he wheeled the ship and started down again, cutting his rockets as the shadow swallowed them. The ship was eerily silent, dropping with a rising scream as the atmosphere touched the hull.

"What are you going to do?" asked Jill almost too quietly.

He didn't answer. Maneuvering the ship on velocity between those stupendous pinnacles took all his attention. Caron, at least, couldn't follow him in the dark without exhaust flares as guides.

They swept across the wind-torn plain, into the mouth of the valley where Gray had worked, braking hard to a stop under the cables.

"You might have got past them," said Jill.

"One chance in a hundred."

Her mouth twisted. "Afraid to take it?"

He smiled harshly. "I haven't yet reached the stage where I kill women. You'll be safe here—the men will find you in the morning. I'm going back, alone."

"Safe!" she said bitterly. "For what? No matter what happens, the Project is ruined."

"Don't worry," he told her brutally. "You'll find some other way to make a living."

Her eyes blazed. "You think that's all it means to us? Just money and power?" She whispered,"I hope they kill you, Duke Gray!"

He rose lazily and opened the air lock, then turned and freed her. And, sharply, the valley was bathed in a burst of light.

"Damn!" Gray picked up the sound of air motors overhead. "They must have had infra-red search beams. Well, that does it. We'll have to run for it, since this bus isn't armed."

Gray had a hunch. He opened the switch, and the face of John Moulton appeared on the screen. It was white and oddly still.

"Our guards saw your ship cross the plain," said Moulton quietly. "The men of the Project, led by Dio, are coming for you. I sent them, because I have decided that the life of my daughter is less important than the lives of many thousands of people.

"I appeal to you, Gray, to let her go. Her life won't save you. And it's very precious to me."

Caron's ship swept over, low above the cables, and the grinding concussion of a bomb lifted the ship, hurled it down with the stern end twisted to uselessness. The screen went dead.

Gray caught the half stunned girl. "I wish to heaven I could get rid of you!" he grated. "And I don't know why I don't!"

But she was with him when he set out down the valley, making for the cliff caves, up where the copper cables were anchored.

Caron's ship, a fast, small fighter, wheeled between the cliffs and turned back. Gray dropped flat, holding the girl down. Bombs pelted them with dirt and uprooted vegetables, started fires in the wheat. The pilot found a big enough break in the cables and came in for a landing.

Gray was up and running again. He knew the way into the explored galleries. From there on, it was anybody's guess.

Caron was brazen enough about it. The subtle way had failed. Now he was going all out. And he was really quite safe. With the broken cables to act as conductors, the first thunderstorm would obliterate all proof of his activities in this valley. Mercury, because of its high electrical potential, was cut off from communication with other worlds. Moulton, even if he had knowledge of what went on, could not send for help.

Gray wondered briefly what Caron intended to do in case he, Gray, made good his escape. That outpost in the main valley, for which Ward had been heading, wasn't kept for fun. Besides, Caron was too smart to have only one string to his bow.

Shouts, the spatter of shots around them. The narrow trail loomed above. Gray sent the girl scrambling up.

The sun burst up over the high peaks, leaving the black shadow of the valley still untouched. Caron's ship roared off. But six of its crew came after Gray and Jill Moulton.

The chill dark of the tunnel mouth swallowed them. Keeping right to avoid the great copper posts that held the cables, strung through holes drilled in the solid rock of the gallery's outer wall, Gray urged the girl along.

The cleft his hand was searching for opened. Drawing the girl inside, around a jutting shoulder, he stopped, listening.

Footsteps echoed outside, grew louder, swept by. There was no light. But the steps were too sure to have been made in the dark.

"Infra-red torches and goggles," Gray said tersely. "You see, but your quarry doesn't. Useful gadget. Come on."

"But where? What are you going to do?"

"Escape, girl. Remember? They smashed my ship. But there must be another one on Mercury. I'm going to find it."

"I don't understand."

"You probably never will. Here's where I leave you. That Martian Galahad will be along any minute. He'll take you home."

Her voice came soft and puzzled through the dark.

"I don't understand you, Gray. You wouldn't risk my life. Yet you're turning me loose, knowing that I might save you, knowing that I'll hunt you down if I can. I thought you were a hardened cynic."

"What makes you think I'm not?"

"If you were, you'd have kicked me out the waste tubes of the ship and gone on. You'd never have turned back."

"I told you," he said roughly, "I don't kill women." He turned away, but her harsh chuckle followed him.

"You're a fool, Gray. You've lost truth—and you aren't even true to your lie."

He paused, in swift anger. Voices, the sound of running men, came up from the path. He broke into a silent run, following the dying echoes of Caron's men.

"Run, Gray!" cried Jill. "Because we're coming after you."

The tunnels, ancient blowholes for the volcanic gases that had tortured Mercury with the raising of the titanic mountains, sprawled in a labyrinthine network through those same vast peaks. Only the galleries lying next the valleys had been explored. Man's habitation on Mercury had been too short.

Gray could hear Caron's men circling about through connecting tunnels, searching. It proved what he had already guessed. He was taking a desperate chance. But the way back was closed—and he was used to taking chances.

The geography of the district was clear in his mind—the valley he had just left and the main valley, forming an obtuse angle with the apex out on the wind-torn plain and a double range of mountains lying out between the sides of the triangle.

Somewhere there was a passage through those peaks. Somewhere there was a landing place, and ten to one there was a ship on it. Caron would never have left his men stranded, on the off chance that they might be discovered and used in evidence against him.

The men now hunting him knew their way through the tunnels, probably with the aid of markings that fluoresced under infra-red light. They were going to take him through, too.

They were coming closer. He waited far up in the main gallery, in the mouth of a side tunnel. Now, behind them, he could hear Dio's men. The noise of Caron's outfit stopped, then began again, softly.

Gray smiled, his sense of humor pleased. He tensed, waiting.

The rustle of cloth, the furtive creak of leather, the clink of metal equipment. Heavy breathing. Somebody whispered,

"Who the hell's that back there?"

"Must be men from the Project. We'd better hurry."

"We've got to find that damned Gray first," snapped the first voice grimly. "Caron'll burn us if we don't."

Gray counted six separate footsteps, trying to allow for the echoes. When he was sure the last man was by, he stepped out. The noise of Dio's hunt was growing—there must be a good many of them.

Covered by their own echoes, he stole up on the men ahead. His groping hand brushed gently against the clothing of the last man in the group. Gauging his distance swiftly, he went into action.

One hand fastened over the fellow's mouth. The other, holding a good-sized rock, struck down behind the ear. Gray eased the body down with scarcely a sound.

Their uniforms, he had noticed, were not too different from his prison garb. In a second he had stripped goggles, cap, and gun-belt from the body, and was striding after the others.

They moved like five eerie shadows now, in the queer light of the leader's lamp. Small fluorescent markings guided them. The last man grunted over his shoulder,

"What happened to you?"

"Stumbled," whispered Gray tersely, keeping his head down. A whisper is a good disguise for the voice. The other nodded.

"Don't straggle. No fun, getting lost in here."

The leader broke in. "We'll circle again. Be careful of that Project bunch—they'll be using ordinary light. And be quiet!"

They went, through connecting passages. The noise of Dio's party grew ominously loud. Abruptly, the leader swore.

"Caron or no Caron, he's gone. And we'd better go, too."

He turned off, down a different tunnel, and Gray heaved a sigh of relief, remembering the body he'd left in the open. For a time the noise of their pursuers grew remote. And then, suddenly, there was an echoing clamor of footsteps, and the glare of torches on the wall of a cross-passage ahead.

Voices came to Gray, distorted by the rock vaults.

"I'm sure I heard them, just then." It was Jill's voice.

"Yeah." That was Dio. "The trouble is, where?"

The footsteps halted. Then, "Let's try this passage. We don't want to get too far into this maze."

Caron's leader blasphemed softly and dodged into a side tunnel. The man next to Gray stumbled and cried out with pain as he struck the wall, and a shout rose behind them.

The leader broke into a run, twisting, turning, diving into the maze of smaller tunnels. The sounds of pursuit faded, were lost in the tomblike silence of the caves. One of the men laughed.

"We sure lost 'em!"

"Yeah," said the leader. "We lost 'em, all right." Gray caught the note of panic in his voice. "We lost the markers, too."

"You mean . . . ?"

"Yeah. Turning off like that did it. Unless we can find that marked tunnel, we're sunk!"

Gray, silent in the shadows, laughed a bitter, ironic laugh.

They went on, stumbling down endless black halls, losing all track of branching corridors, straining to catch the first glint of saving light. Once or twice, they caught the echoes of Dio's party, and knew that they, too, were lost and wandering.

Then, quite suddenly, they came out into a vast gallery, running like a subway tube straight to left and right. A wind tore down it, hot as a draught from the burning gates of Hell.

It was a moment before anyone grasped the significance of that wind. Then someone shouted,

"We're saved! All we have to do is walk against it!"

They turned left, almost running in the teeth of that searing blast. And Gray began to notice a peculiar thing. The air was charged with electricity. His clothing stiffened and crackled. His hair crawled on his head. He could see the faint discharges of sparks from his companions.

Whether it was the effect of the charged air, or the reaction from the nervous strain of the past hours, Mel Gray began to be afraid.

Weary to exhaustion, they struggled on against the burning wind. And then they blundered out into a cave, huge as a cathedral, lighted by a queer, uncertain bluish light.

Gray caught the sharp smell of ozone. His whole body was tingling with electric tension. The bluish light seemed to be in indeterminate lumps scattered over the rocky floor. The rush of the wind under that tremendous vault was terrifying.

They stopped, Gray keeping to the background. Now was the time to evade his unconscious helpers. The moment they reached daylight, he'd be discovered.

Soft-footed as a cat, he was already hidden among the heavy shadows of the fluted walls when he heard the voices.

They came from off to the right, a confused shout of men under fearful strain, growing louder and louder, underscored with the tramp of footsteps. Lights blazed suddenly in the cathedral dark, and from the mouth of a great tunnel some hundred yards away, the men of the Project poured into the cave.

And then, sharp and high and unexpected, a man screamed.

The lumps of blue light were moving. And a man had died. He lay on the rock, his flesh blackened jelly, with a rope of glowing light running from the metal of his gun butt to the metal buttons on his cap.

All across the vast floor of that cavern the slow, eerie ripple of motion grew. The scattered lumps melted and flowed together, converging in wavelets of blue flame upon the men.

The answer came to Gray. Those things were some form of energy-life, born of the tremendous electric tensions on Mercury. Like all electricity, they were attracted to metal.

In a sudden frenzy of motion, he ripped off his metal-framed goggles, his cap and gun-belt. The Moultons forbade metal because of the danger of lightning, and his boots were made of rubber, so he felt reasonably safe, but a tense fear ran in prickling waves across his skin.

Guns began to bark, their feeble thunder all but drowned in the vast rush of the wind. Bullets struck the oncoming waves of light with no more effect than the eruption of a shower of sparks. Gray's attention, somehow, was riveted on Jill, standing with Dio at the head of her men.

She wore ordinary light slippers, having been dressed only for indoors. And there were silver ornaments at waist and throat.

He might have escaped, then, quite unnoticed. Instead, for a reason even he couldn't understand, he ran for Jill Moulton.


The first ripples of blue fire touched the ranks of Dio's men. Bolts of it leaped upward to fasten upon gun-butts and the buckles of the cartridge belts. Men screamed, fell, and died.

An arm of the fire licked out, driving in behind Dio and the girl. The guns of Caron's four remaining men were silent, now.

Gray leaped over that hissing electric surf, running toward Jill. A hungry worm of light reared up, searching for Dio's gun. Gray's hand swept it down, to be instantly buried in a mass of glowing ropes. Dio's hatchet face snarled at him in startled anger.

Jill cried out as Gray tore the silver ornaments from her dress. "Throw down the guns!" he yelled. "It's metal they want!"

He heard his name shouted by men torn momentarily from their own terror. Dio cried, "Shoot him!" A few bullets whined past, but their immediate fear spoiled both aim and attention.

Gray caught up Jill and began to run, toward the tube from which the wind howled in the cave. Behind him, grimly, Dio followed.

The electric beasts didn't notice him, His insulated feet trampled through them, buried to the ankle in living flame, feeling queer tenuous bodies break and reform.

The wind met them like a physical barrier at the tunnel mouth. Gray put Jill down. The wind strangled him. He tore off his coat and wrapped it over the girl's head, using his shirt over his own. Jill, her black curls whipped straight, tried to fight back past him, and he saw Dio coming, bent double against the wind.

He saw something else. Something that made him grab Jill and point, his flesh crawling with swift, cold dread.

The electric beasts had finished their pleasure. The dead were cinders on the rock. The living had run back into the tunnels. And now the blue sea of fire was glowing again, straight toward the place where they stood.

It was flowing fast, and Gray sensed an urgency, an impersonal haste, as though a command had been laid upon those living ropes of flame.

The first dim rumble of thunder rolled down the wind. Gripping Jill, Gray turned up the tunnel.

The wind, compressed in that narrow throat of rock, beat them blind and breathless, beat them to their bellies, to crawl. How long it took them, they never knew.

But Gray caught glimpses of Dio the Martian crawling behind them, and behind him again, the relentless flow of the fire-things.

They floundered out onto a rocky slope, fell away beneath the suck of the wind, and lay still, gasping. It was hot. Thunder crashed abruptly, and lightning flared between the cliffs.

Gray felt a contracting of the heart. There were no cables.

Then he saw it—the small, fast fighter flying below them on a flat plateau. A cave mouth beside it had been closed with a plastic door. The ship was the one that had followed them. He guessed at another one behind the protecting door.

Raking the tumbled blond hair out of his eyes, Gray got up.

Jill was still sitting, her black curls bowed between her hands. There wasn't much time, but Gray yielded to impulse. Pulling her head back by the silken hair, he kissed her.

"If you ever get tired of virtue, sweetheart, look me up." But somehow he wasn't grinning, and he ran down the slope.

He was almost to the open lock of the ship when things began to happen. Dio staggered out of the wind-tunnel and sagged down beside Jill. Then, abruptly, the big door opened.

Five men came out—one in pilot's costume, two in nondescript apparel, one in expensive business clothes, and the fifth in dark prison garb.

Gray recognized the last two. Caron of Mars and the errant Ward.

They were evidently on the verge of leaving. But they looked cheerful. Caron's sickly-sweet face all but oozed honey, and Ward was grinning his rat's grin.

Thunder banged and rolled among the rocks. Lightning flared in the cloudy murk. Gray saw the hull of a second ship beyond the door. Then the newcomers had seen him, and the two on the slope.

Guns ripped out of holsters. Gray's heart began to pound slowly. He, and Jill and Dio, were caught on that naked slope, with the flood of electric death at their backs.

His Indianesque face hardened. Bullets whined round him as he turned back up the slope, but he ran doubled over, putting all his hope in the tricky, uncertain light.

Jill and the Martian crouched stiffly, not knowing where to turn. A flare of lightning showed Gray the first of the fire-things, flowing out onto the ledge, hidden from the men below.

"Back into the cave!" he yelled. His urgent hand fairly lifted Dio. The Martian glared at him, then obeyed. Bullets snarled against the rock. The light was too bad for accurate shooting, but luck couldn't stay with them forever.

Gray glanced over his shoulder as they scrambled up on the ledge. Caron waited by his ship. Ward and the others were charging the slope. Gray's teeth gleamed in a cruel grin.

Sweeping Jill into his arms, he stepped into the lapping flow of fire. Dio swore viciously, but he followed. They started toward the cave mouth, staggering in the rush of the wind.

"For God's sake, don't fall," snapped Gray. "Here they come!"

The pilot and one of the nondescript men were the first over. They were into the river of fire before they knew it, and then it was too late. One collapsed and was buried. The pilot fell backward, and the other man died under his body, of a broken neck.

Ward stopped. Gray could see his face, dark and hard and calculating. He studied Gray and Dio, and the dead men. He turned and looked back at Caron. Then, deliberately, he stripped off his gun belt, threw down his gun, and waded into the river.

Gray remembered, then, that Ward too wore rubber boots, and had no metal on him.

Ward came on, the glowing ropes sliding surf-like around his boots. Very carefully, Gray handed Jill to Dio.

"If I die too," he said, "there's only Caron down there. He's too fat to stop you."

Jill spoke, but he turned his back. He was suddenly confused, and it was almost pleasant to be able to lose his confusion in fighting. Ward had stopped some five feet away. Now he untied the length of tough cord that served him for a belt.

Gray nodded. Ward would try to throw a twist around his ankle and trip him. Once his body touched those swarming creatures . . . .

He tensed, watchfully. The rat's grin was set on Ward's dark face. The cord licked out.

But it caught Gray's throat instead of his ankle!

Ward laughed and braced himself. Cursing, Gray caught at the rope. But friction held it, and Ward pulled, hard. His face purpling, Gray could still commend Ward's strategy. In taking Gray off guard, he'd more than made up what he lost in point of leverage.

Letting his body go with the pull, Gray flung himself at Ward. Blood blinded him, his heart was pounding, but he thought he foresaw Ward's next move. He let himself be pulled almost within striking distance.

Then, as Ward stepped aside, jerking the rope and thrusting out a tripping foot, Gray made a catlike shift of balance and bent over.

His hands almost touched that weird, flowing surf as they clasped Ward's boot. Throwing all his strength into the lift, he hurled Ward backward.

Ward screamed once and disappeared under the blue fire. Gray clawed the rope from his neck. And then, suddenly, the world began to sway under him. He knew he was falling.

Someone's hand caught him, held him up. Fighting down his vertigo as his breath came back, he saw that it was Jill.

"Why?" he gasped, but her answer was lost in a titanic roar of thunder. Lightning blasted down. Dio's voice reached him, thin and distant through the clamor.

"We'll be killed! These damn things will attract the bolts!"

It was true. All his work had been for nothing. Looking up into that low, angry sky, Gray knew he was going to die.

Quite irrelevantly, Jill's words in the tunnel came back to him. "You're a fool . . . lost truth . . . not true to lie!"

Now, in this moment, she couldn't lie to him. He caught her shoulders cruelly, trying to read her eyes.

Very faintly through the uproar, he heard her. "I'm sorry for you, Gray. Good man, gone to waste."

Dio stifled a scream. Thunder crashed between the sounding boards of the cliffs. Gray looked up.

A titanic bolt of lightning shot down, straight for them. The burning blue surf was agitated, sending up pseudopods uncannily like worshipping arms. The bolt struck.

The air reeked of ozone, but Gray felt no shock. There was a hiss, a vast stirring of creatures around him. The blue light glowed, purpled.

Another bolt struck down, and another, and still they were not dead. The fire-things had become a writhing, joyous tangle of tenuous bodies, glowing bright and brighter.

Stunned, incredulous, the three humans stood. The light was now an eye-searing violet. Static electricity tingled through them in eerie waves. But they were not burned.

"My God," whispered Gray. "They eat it. They eat lightning!"

Not daring to move, they stood watching that miracle of alien life, the feeding of living things on raw current. And when the last bolt had struck, the tide turned and rolled back down the wind-tunnel, a blinding river of living light.

Silently, the three humans went down the rocky slope to where Caron of Mars cowered in the silver ship. No bolt had come near it. And now Caron came to meet them.

His face was pasty with fear, but the old cunning still lurked in his eyes.

"Gray," he said. "I have an offer to make."

"Well?"

"You killed my pilot," said Caron suavely. "I can't fly, myself. Take me off, and I'll pay you anything you want."

"In bullets," retorted Gray. "You won't want witnesses to this."

"Circumstances force me. Physically, you have the advantage."

Jill's fingers caught his arm. "Don't, Gray! The Project . . ."

Caron faced her. "The Project is doomed in any case. My men carried out my secondary instructions. All the cables in your valley have been cut. There is a storm now ready to break.

"In fifteen minutes or so, everything will be destroyed, except the domes. Regrettable, but . . ." He shrugged.

Jill's temper blazed, choking her so that she could hardly speak.

"Look at him, Gray," she whispered. "That's what you're so proud of being. A cynic, who believes in nothing but himself. Look at him!"

Gray turned on her.

"Damn you!" he grated. "Do you expect me to believe you, with the world full of hypocrites like him?"

Her eyes stopped him. He remembered Moulton, pleading for her life. He remembered how she had looked back there at the tunnel, when they had been sure of death. Some of his assurance was shaken.

"Listen," he said harshly. "I can save your valley. There's a chance in a million of coming out alive. Will you die for what you believe in?"

She hesitated, just for a second. Then she looked at Dio and said, "Yes."

Gray turned. Almost lazily, his fist snapped up and took Caron on his flabby jaw.

"Take care of him, Dio," he grunted. Then he entered the ship, herding the white-faced girl before him.

The ship hurtled up into airless space, where the blinding sunlight lay in sharp shadows on the rock. Over the ridge and down again, with the Project hidden under a surf of storm-clouds.

Cutting in the air motors, Gray dropped. Black, bellowing darkness swallowed them. Then he saw the valley, with the copper cables fallen, and the wheat already on fire in several places.

Flying with every bit of his skill, he sought the narrowest part of the valley and flipped over in a racking loop. The stern tubes hit rock. The nose slammed down on the opposite wall, wedging the ship by sheer weight.

Lightning gathered in a vast javelin and flamed down upon them. Jill flinched and caught her breath. The flame hissed along the hull and vanished into seared and blackened rock.

"Still willing to die for principle?" asked Gray brutally.

She glared at him. "Yes," she snapped. "But I hate having to die in your company!"

She looked down at the valley. Lightning struck with monotonous regularity on the hull, but the valley was untouched. Jill smiled, though her face was white, her body rigid with waiting.

It was the smile that did it. Gray looked at her, her tousled black curls, the lithe young curves of throat and breast. He leaned back in his seat, scowling at the storm.

"Relax," he said. "You aren't going to die."

She turned on him, not daring to speak. He went on, slowly.

"The only chance you took was in the landing. We're acting as lightning rod for the whole valley, being the highest and best conductor. But, as a man named Faraday proved, the charge resides on the surface of the conductor. We're perfectly safe."

"How dare you!" she whispered.

He faced her, almost angrily.

"You knocked the props out from under my philosophy. I've had enough hypocritical eyewash. I had to prove you wrong. Well, I have."

She was quiet for some time. Then she said, "I understand, Duke. I'm glad. And now what, for you?"

He shrugged wryly.

"I don't know. I can still take Caron's other ship and escape. But I don't think I want to. I think perhaps I'll stick around and give virtue another whirl."

Smoothing back his sleek fair hair, he shot her a sparkling look from under his hands.

"I won't," he added softly, "even mind going to Sunday School, if you were the teacher."


Retreat to the Stars

Astonishing Stories, November 1941


Arno was just entering the big common hall when the lights blinked. One-two. One-two. That meant ships landing on the icy field outside. And ships meant only one thing this time. Ralph's squadron had come back.

He stopped beside the doorway to let the mob stream through from the dormitories, workshops and kitchen. Everything stopped when those lights blinked, except the ceaseless hammering from the place where the rebels labored on their great ship. Arno watched them come; the men whose drawn lots had said No, the erect, brazen women, the children, the old and the maimed.

They would make my world like that! thought Arno. The hate, unveiled for a brief moment, made his straight, strong features like marble. Those people, streaming into the big, barren hall to wait, breathless, until the ships landed and brought news of the raid—they would bring their dissonance into his ordered, patterned world; their restlessness, their pagan heresies, their eternal striving.

It made him feel savagely good, that tall blond man standing in the shadow, to know that through him, the State held their destiny to its own pleasure.

Marika came striding from the workshop, the sweat and grime of labor dark on her naked arms and legs. Arno noted her broad shoulders, her wide brow and clear, authoritative eyes, with distaste. The women of these incorrigibles offended him far more than the men. And yet Marika, dressed in her brief leather kirtle, her tawny mane falling heavy on her shoulders . . . .

Arno hated himself for having to control even the slightest impulse toward Marika. There should be none in him. And yet . . . .

"They're back, Arno!" she said. "Ralph's back!"

She caught his arm, and they fought their way together toward the doors on the far side. The spy, his mask of friendship slipped easily into place, still could not stop the question that rose so often in his mind.

"It would matter a lot, wouldn't it, if Ralph didn't come back?"

"It would matter everything!" said Marika softly. "Everything. But he has, this time. If anything ever happens to him, I'll know."

Arno wondered how, and shook his head mentally for the thousandth time. The mechanics of this barbaric relationship between men and women he accepted, but he could not understand. Though he was only twenty-five, he had already given the State three sons and a daughter, and he couldn't conceive of either one of his appointed mates caring more for him than he did for them. If his life should be snuffed out, it wouldn't change their lives any. Woman's sole duty was the bearing of children and the keeping of the living quarters, wherever the State saw fit to send her.

* * *

The hall was full now, silent as nearly seven thousand people can make a place. The distant clangor from the mysterious ship-building echoed loudly.

Arno could follow the operations outside as clearly as though he saw them; battered ships roaring in one after the other from the dark space, landing on the frigid, airless field, being towed by ancient tugs into the camouflaged dome of the hangar.

Arno well knew how the ships of the Tri-State, combing the Solar System for this last outpost of anarchy, had passed by the savage Trojans, over the very structures that housed their quarry.

A slender, dark girl with a child in her arms came to Marika, and again Arno, acknowledging her shy smile with a friendly, "Hello, Laura," was stricken with the wastefulness of these rebels. They cheerfully coddled and supported people unable to do their full share of work—women like Laura, crippled men who should have been eliminated as deterrent factors.

Laura said, "I'm frightened, Marika. I'm always frightened, for fear Karl . . . . He has come back, hasn't he, Marika?"

"Of course!" Marika took woman and child in the curve of one sturdy arm. "Listen. That's the lock opening."

The crowd surged forward just a bit. Heavy double doors swung back. And there was Ralph, with his men shouldering through behind him.

Ralph, fighting leader of the rebels, was neither tall, nor handsome, nor powerfully built. One's eyes slid past him, were caught somehow, forced back to see the compact, challenging strength of him, the tough, indestructible something that looked from his reckless blue eyes, spoke in his harshly vibrant voice, laughed from his cynical mouth. And once seeing, they never forgot.

Ralph wasn't laughing now. The crowd knew the instant he came in that something was wrong. He was white with weariness, his stubbled jaw set and ugly. Arno felt a little pulse of excitement stir in his heart; he knew so well what was coming.

A wave of sound swept the hall, people shouting questions, names. Ralph raised his hand, and the clamor died.

"We lost three ships," he said quietly, but the words rang to the far corners. "Vern, Parlo, and Karl. The raid was a failure."

There was a moment of utter silence. Arno saw Laura's white face, saw Marika's strong arm ease her sudden fall. Somewhere a woman sobbed, a child sent up a wail.

Then a man, one of the weary, hard-driven scientists, shouted, "But damn it, Ralph, this is the third time! We've got to have supplies, equipment, if we're to go on!"

"You'll get them," said Ralph. The stubborn fire of his gaze swept them. "Go easy on what you have. We'll try again."

He turned to Marika, his men mingling with the crowd.

"Poor kid," he muttered, looking down at Laura. "I wish it had been . . . ."

"No!" blazed Marika. "Never wish it had been you! It may be soon enough." She kissed him, with a strange, bitter fierceness.

Ralph smiled.

"Black becomes you," he said mockingly. "Don't you want to be a hero's widow?" He stopped her lips with another kiss. Laura's boy was squalling. Ralph gave him to Marika and picked up the white, still girl. "Come on. I want food and a shave. Arno, will you get Frane and Father Berrens and bring them along?"

"Of course." A small flame of triumph was burning behind Arno's mask. Ralph had lost three ships, thirty men—ships and men he could ill afford to lose. Fools, to think they could defy the State! The scar on his temple, placed there by Tri-State's skillful surgeons, reddened with the flow of blood to his brain, and he put his hand up to hide it, lest it betray him. That scar kept him from being assigned to fighting duty, kept him at base, where the information was.

Before he found the two men who, with Ralph, controlled the destinies of the Trojan base, therefore of all the rebels in the System, Arno retired to his own small room. Concealed in the heavy buckle of his belt was a tiny, incredibly powerful radio, operating on a tight beam that changed synchronization automatically every fourth second. Only the receiver of the People's Protector, back on Terra, could catch that beam.

Arno gave his call letter and waited until the cold, precise voice of the People's Protector, head of all the anti-revolution activities of the Tri-State, answered him.

Then he said, "They are much upset over the failure of the raid. They need supplies, metal especially, for fuel and repairs. I am being drawn daily more close to the heart of things; Ralph and Marika are particularly friendly. I will transmit information as I receive it."

"You have not yet found the secret of the ship they build?"

"No. They guard that carefully."

"Nor the location of their planetary headquarters?"

"No."

"These things are most important. The destruction of these anarchists must be complete, to the last man." The Protector's voice altered just the faintest trifle from its emotionless inflexibility. "You are in a unique position. The State would find it most difficult, under the circumstances, to replace you. Remember your duty, your faith, and be cautious. There must be no failure."

The contact broke with a click, and Arno was conscious of a small, uneasy twinge. Strange that in these eight months he hadn't quite realized that. Accustomed from birth to consider himself merely a more or less efficient cog in a machine, replaceable at a moment's notice, he hadn't quite understood how his status had changed. He had a moment of positive vertigo, as though the firm ground on which he stood had suddenly given way.

And then he recovered himself. There would be no failure. The State had classified him as Brain-type 1-04, best adapted to this type of work. The State had assigned and trained him. He couldn't fail. All he had to do was follow orders.

* * *

Twenty minutes later he sat in the cubicle that served Ralph and Marika as home. Frane, the head of the scientific group, sat on a metal chair taken from a wrecked ship; a stringy, tired man with grey hair. Berrens, civilian chief, occupied the table. He was a priest of their pagan religion, and wore a bit of cloth about his throat to show it. His big frame showed the universal signs of underfeeding, but his chin and eyes were stubborn, his mouth twisted in a smile that wouldn't die. Ralph, with his usual restlessness, paced the floor, puffing savagely at a battered pipe.

That left Arno to sit with Marika on the worn remains of a couch. She had changed her working leather for a carefully mended dress of sultry red that offended Arno's eye, yet provoked a buried something in him. Time and again he found his gaze straying back to her. She was so different from the colorless, broad-hipped women of his world. He could feel the unwomanly strength of her, see it in the sweeping lines of her body.

She never took her eyes off Ralph. What strange thing was it that made a woman look at a man like that?

Ralph swung about abruptly. "Sorry, Arno. Council of war. Come and have dinner with us."

"Right." Arno smiled and rose.

Marika jumped up too.

"I'll go with you. I'm anxious about Laura."

The door closed behind them, shutting them out of that council. Arno felt a moment of rage. If only he could get at the heart of things, instead of relying on generalities picked up from Marika, with an occasional specific bit about the raids.

Marika sighed and thrust back her tawny mane with work-hardened fingers. "It must have been wonderful in the old days! To have lived in real houses, walked on real earth, with sunlight and real air! To have had pretty clothes and silk stockings, and something to do besides work and worry and shake hands with Death every morning!"

Her vehemence startled him. "Why, Marika . . . ."

"Two thousand years ago. Why couldn't I have been born two thousand years ago?"

* * *

The strangeness of it came over Arno—how Marika could look back to the Twentieth Century as day before darkness, and he as darkness before dawn. In the Twenty-first Century the last Terran rebels had fled to Venus, and from there to Mars, and from there to the state where they were now. The all-encompassing strength of the State had followed them, driving out their heresies, their anarchies, their haphazard individualism.

Now there was peace and system everywhere, except for the hidden plague-spots on the planets and this barren asteroid, which, through him, the Tri-State would soon destroy.

"I wonder," said Marika, softly, "what it would be like to be full fed, and full clothed, and to kiss your husband goodbye knowing that he'd live to be kissed hello?"

Her mouth quivered, and there were tears on her lashes. Arno's heart gave a strange, sudden leap, quite beyond his comprehension. He downed it firmly.

"What will Ralph do now?"

"Do!" said Marika savagely. "He'll go out again, and again, and again, until he dies, like Karl." She stopped and faced him, almost defiantly under the dim radium light. "I've got to cry, Arno. I've held it in and held it in, but I can't hold it any longer. We're fighting a losing battle, Arno. Ralph's going to die for it. All of us. And just once, I've got to stop being brave!"

And all at once she was crying, with her hands painfully tight on his arms and her tawny head thrust hard against his shoulder. In spite of himself, some tiny crack was made in the armor surrounding his brain, and he saw this place as she saw it; a tomb of dead hope, dead glory, dead life. What made them struggle on, knowing this?

He found his hands on Marika, his arms around her. He didn't remember putting them there. She was like an animal, warm and vitally alive.

He caught his hands away, shaken with sudden fear. It was as though he recoiled from the brink of a chasm, from the unknown. He stood silently while she cried herself out, still silently when she had her breath again and moved away from him. His arms ached where her fingers had gripped.

Marika dashed an arm across reddened eyes and swore. "Damn me for a sniveling ass! But I feel better. Guess a woman's got to be one once in a while, even if she is a mechanic! Don't tell Ralph, and—well, thanks, Arno."

He watched her go, down the corridor to Laura's home. Her red dress was almost black in that light, her hair dull gold. Arno tried to think about that meeting back there, about his duty. But his eyes followed Marika.

* * *

On the other side of the locked door, Ralph paced restlessly in a cloud of smoke.

"Something's wrong," he said. "With that new invisible paint, we should have been safe, since the ships are non-magnetic. But they took us in the back, as though they knew where to look."

Both men eyed him sharply. "You know what you're saying?"

"I know!" Ralph rumpled his short brown hair with impatient fingers. "It's incredible that one of our own people . . . . No, Tri-State may have planted a spy."

"A possibility. Remote, but a possibility." Father Berrens shook his head wearily.

"If there's a spy," said Frane grimly, "we'll have to catch him quickly. We need supplies."

"How long can we last without them, Frane?"

"Three weeks, possibly a day or two longer. No more."

"Good God." Ralph's strong-boned face tightened; the knowledge took him like a blow over the heart. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"You were doing your best," said Father Berrens gently. "We didn't want to make it harder."

"Three weeks! My God, has it come so close to the end? To fight for two thousand years, and now . . . .Three weeks!"

Berrens managed a smile. "You'll make a successful raid."

"But if I don't! If I don't!" Ralph paced savagely. Responsibility, weariness, a sense of futility weighed on him like a leaden cloud. The room was silent for a long moment. Then, "The ship, Frane. You've got to have it finished in ten days."

Frane nodded. "I'll triple the shifts. I'll have to strip the domes for the metal."

"Anything, as long as we can still breathe. But get that ship finished!"

"Perhaps," said Frane somberly, "it would be better to call the people in from the planetary bases, without waiting."

"No! This Solar System belongs to us. I'm not going to surrender it without fighting!"

"But we've fought so long, Ralph." Father Berrens' voice was infinitely tired. "The Tri-State has twenty centuries of rigid weeding and training behind it. It's hard to break through that wall. And their people are at least housed and fed. When a man's belly is full it's hard to stir him, even if his brain and soul are starved."

"Granted. But damn it . . . ." Ralph came to a truculent stand, his eyes reckless and uncompromising. "We've got to hang on! Their machine is running down of its own weight. They've lost their best brains to us; that, or purged them. They're beginning to stagnate, and stagnation means retrogression. Without their science they wouldn't have stood two centuries. Now even their science is failing them. They've produced nothing new in the last ninety years.

"If we can just hang on a little longer . . . ."

Frane's mouth shut hard. "You can't fight without men and weapons."

"We can do with the men we have. And I'll bring you the metal you need. Give me four hours to sleep, and I'll go out again. This time I'll try Titan."

"Titan! You're mad, Ralph! It's the strongest mining center in the System. You'll be destroyed!"

"Perhaps. But that needn't worry anyone but me. I'm going alone, in the old Sparling."

Ralph knew, as well as the others, that he had one chance in a thousand. The Sparling was a relic of other days, an intricate fighting mechanism capable of being controlled by one man and equipped with tractor beams for hauling prizes back to base. But it needed a super-man to fly it. It was tricky and temperamental and capable of an infinite variety of misdeeds. That was why they hadn't built any more after the first ten. They lost nine in a month.

Ralph went on. "They won't be looking for me near Titan. There'll be less chance of detection with one ship. If I'm not back in ten days, start loading."

Berrens said, "Try once more with the squadron."

"There isn't time if we fail. And the way the last three raids have gone, there isn't much use anyway. Understand, I want no one to know where I've gone, or when. Not even Marika."

"But," said Frane, "if there is a spy here, Tri-State knows the location of the base. Why don't they simply bomb us out of the sky?"

"They want information," said Ralph grimly. "But they may bomb us yet. However, that's something we'll just have to pray about. Find the spy if you can. But get ready, and don't wait for me!"

Father Berrens shook his head. Barring a miracle, they'd never in three weeks catch a spy clever enough to have evaded all their safeguards and actually penetrated the base.

"It seems a case for prayer," he admitted. "We'll try, Ralph. Be careful—and for all our sakes, come back."

* * *

It was more than four hours later that Arno, checking a series of reports for the commissary and exulting over the shortness of supplies, looked up to see Marika standing by his desk. She was white and rigid, her hands locked tight, every bone in her face gauntly clear. "Arno," she said, "Ralph's gone. He wouldn't tell me where, but I checked his men. He's gone alone, and I found out that the old Sparling is missing. Arno, I'm afraid."

Ralph gone on a lone raid! He'd have to tell the Protector. He'd play out his part as Marika's good friend until he could get rid of her, and then . . . .

What was it that made a woman look that way about a man? What barbaric emotion was it that the State had taken out of its people?

He had lived among these rebels for eight months, and viewed them as impersonally as a scientist views a microbe. He had been a coldly efficient machine, carrying out orders in the most effective way possible to him. He had not understood these people, nor wished to understand them. His whole devotion had been to the State, the will of the State, the needs of the State.

But the machine that was Arno suddenly was not responding as it should. Things were growing in him, impulses, the strangeness and power of which frightened him, the more so because they were inexplicable by his philosophy.

"Arno," whispered Marika, "I'm frightened. I've been frightened too often. I'm not strong any more. Ralph's gone. He's going to die."

She's a rebel, thought Arno. She sets herself above the State. He told himself that it was only because he had a part to play that he stepped forward. Her arms went out to him, quite naturally, like a child that needs comforting. He felt the life flowing through her, meeting something that leaped in himself. Her lips were close to his, cut full and clear in the marble of her face.

He kissed her. And was stricken with horror, with self-hatred. He had never kissed a woman before. It was treachery—a weakening to the individual, a subtle challenge to the State.

He broke roughly away and left her standing, staring after him.

Arno locked his door and took the radio from his belt. Twice he started to send out his call letter, and twice he stopped. He was aghast at his own hesitancy, but Marika's face kept coming between him and the radio. What would she do if Ralph didn't come back? Would she be like Laura, like so many of the women who lost their men? Why did he care? He felt unsteady, lost, shaken.

The tiny thing in his hand looked up at him accusingly, and it steadied him. These rebels and their barbarisms were no concern of his. The State had given him certain orders. The entire end and aim of his life was to serve the State, without question or thought.

The words of the Creed, taught from infancy, came to him. "I believe in the State, which protects me, and deny all faiths but this, that my life may be spent in obedience and service."

What greater end could a man have than to serve the State?

Arno's voice was steady as he spoke to the People's Protector.

"The war leader has gone on a lone raid in an obsolete ship—a Sparling. Destination unknown, but the rebels are desperate for supplies."

"All mines will be warned," said the Protector. "Continue to follow orders."

* * *

Frane was as good as his word. Shifts were tripled, taking every available man, woman and youth. Even Arno, still pleading his simulated head injury, was pronounced fit for light work and sent to the hangar. Because of the need for haste, much of the veil of secrecy was discarded. Only the ultimate purpose of the ship and the design of the engines were kept quiet.

Arno gasped at his first sight of the ship. It was enormous. He estimated that it could hold fully ten thousand people and concentrated supplies. There was nothing like it, even in the trade lanes of the Tri-State.

Gossip was rife among the people, of course. These rebels were terribly lax; anyone might talk as he pleased. All kinds of rumors circulated. The ship was a weapon of offense. It was going to destroy the planets. It was going to become a floating world. It was going to haunt the space-lanes, picking off the State ships.

Arno reported all this, but got no nearer to the truth. Nine days passed with no word from Ralph. There was no ship-to-base radio, because of the danger of triangulation and subsequent discovery of the Trojan base. Rations were cut. Fuel for light and heat was cut to a minimum, but the food synthesizers clacked and roared incessantly. The domes were stripped of everything metallic save the walls themselves and the pumping units. Forges worked day and night. Endless streams of men and women labored, carrying, welding, hammering, fitting. Sleep was reduced to four-hour periods, pitifully inadequate for exhausted bodies.

And on the tenth day, it was finished.

Men dropped in their tracks to rest. Frane and Father Berrens spoke to Marika beneath the huge loom of the ship, and Arno, who took care never to be far from his source of information, overheard.

There wasn't much to overhear.

Frane said dully, "Ten days. I'll have to begin calling them in."

Marika, too tired even for emotion, stared at them. "Ralph's not coming back, is he?"

Father Berrens put a hand on her shoulder. "It's not too late to hope. We don't leave for nearly two weeks yet."

Arno kept his eyes from Marika's face. Call who in? Leave for where? He must watch, and report carefully. The Rebels were planning some desperate attempt; the State must be warned.

He remembered the Protector's words: There must be no failure.

* * *

The Sparling hung motionless, an invisible mote in utter darkness. Saturn wheeled its flashing rings against infinity. Ralph, cramped with fourteen days of close confinement, red-eyed with lack of sleep, hunched over a telescopic view-plate in the midst of a bewildering tangle of instruments.

He was following Titan, watching the rocket flares of ore carriers as they took off. For the ten days he had hung here not one had been sufficiently under-convoyed so that he might have the faintest chance of succeeding.

"There must be a spy at base," he said aloud, for the hundredth time. The sound of his harsh voice echoing against metal was some relief for the ghastly silence. "He's not getting intimate information, but he doesn't need it. Just general movements, and the Tri-State can blanket everything. Oh, God, give Frane and Berrens the wit not to let him sabotage that ship!"

Ralph's cynical mouth twisted to a short laugh. "He can't sabotage it. Short of an atomite bomb, he can't touch it, and he couldn't have got an atomite bomb past the searchers when he entered base. The only thing he can do . . . ."

He shook his thoughts savagely away from that possibility. Mustn't for a second let himself believe that. Somehow, they'd get through all right. God wouldn't let them down, not after all the centuries they'd fought.

Gnawing hunger forced his attention away from the view-plate. He let one of his meager supply of food capsules dissolve slowly, thinking of the things he'd read about in the old books. Real steaks, fresh vegetables, juicy fruits. The concentrate broke through to his tongue. He swallowed hurriedly, cursing.

Through the view-plates he could see Earth, Venus and Mars, flying in wide-flung orbits about the tiny, distant Sun. He'd been born on Trojan base. He'd never seen sunlight, or blue skies, or grass, or breathed air that didn't come from a chemical tank. All those things the State had taken from his people, except for the gallant handful that lived and preached in hiding on the planets.

"Someday," said Ralph softly, "we'll have them back."

His reckless blue eyes, the fire of them dulled with weariness, went back to Titan. The chronometer clacked off the hours. Five ore carriers went out into the void, heavily convoyed. Inevitably, sleep overtook him. When he woke, the fifteenth day was gone.

"I've got to go, if I'm going with them. Four days to get back." He cursed bitterly. It was hard to give up after all this time. Hard to be beaten because of a few tons of metal. Unwillingly, his hand went out to the starting lever.

And then he stiffened. A streak of flame shot across the view-plate, up from Titan. An ore carrier, with only a three-ship convoy! A chance! A mad, tempting chance!

* * *

Too tempting. Why, having sent six fighters out with the others, cut the guards to three? A trap, perhaps. They couldn't know he was here, but they might be doing the same thing at all mines. And then again, they might have relaxed vigilance, thinking he'd given up.

He thought of that ship at base and all it meant to him. He thought of Marika. Most of all, he thought of Marika. And then he looked at those three worlds that had once been theirs, and at the ore carrier that meant they might have them again. He knew he was right about the Tri-State. If they could only hold on . . . .

"Come on, sweetheart," he whispered to the Sparling. "Let's see what you can do!"

Like a wild meteor he plunged down on that ore carrier, his hands flying over the banks of keys before him. One convoy ship burst into flame under his ray. Another shot fused the tubes of the carrier, so that she hurtled on at constant velocity, a mere hulk.

The Sparling bucked dangerously under his hands. He cursed it, whirled it toward another fighter. The third was maneuvering for a tube shot. Ralph's heat-ray raked out. The fighter, hulled, reeled away as her men died in the vacuum.

The Sparling wrenched frantically aside, and the stern shot took her briefly in the ribs instead. In spite of himself, Ralph screamed with the searing heat. Half blinded, he fought the ship to safety, and then he poised for his final attack.

And then he saw them—Tri-State ships pouring out from bases on Saturn's moons. It had been a trap! No chance to fight now. No chance to hitch a tractor beam to that ore carrier. Just run. Run—and pray!

The Sparling danced perversely. Ralph cursed it, cursed the man who invented it, cursed himself for a fool. A mad angle shot fused the tubes of the remaining fighter.

A beam raked his hull, heating it cherry-red, and then he was free.

He poured speed into the Sparling, but she wobbled. One of those heat-beams had damaged some filament in her intricate controls. He could hear a change in the rhythmic vibration of the ship, and she handled more and more sluggishly. The Tri-State ships were coming up fast.

For just a moment he sat quite still, staring at his hands spread over the keys. After all, he'd known this day would come. He'd chosen this career of his own free will, knowing that. It hurt like hell, now that it was here—knowing Marika was waiting, knowing about the ship. But . . . .

He could afford it now. He swallowed his remaining capsules and opened the cock on the oxygen tank. He'd go out at least with a full belly and his lungs full of air.

Swinging the bucking Sparling around, he headed back toward Saturn and that flight of ships.

His mouth twisted, and his harsh voice said, quite conversationally, "Hold the airlocks open, God. Here comes a free man."

* * *

The eighteenth day had come and gone. The domes were cold, almost too cold to endure. The air was thin. One pump had stopped entirely, worn out, so that ten thousand men, women and children huddled gasping in the hangar and the workshops. Hidden in a far corner behind a massive pillar, Arno was speaking in a low voice.

"They're all here. All the people from the planetary bases. The last ship came in an hour ago. The purpose of the big ship is still unknown, but all loading has been completed. They're waiting for Ralph, but they must do what they plan to do within the next two days. Fuel is almost gone."

Then he asked, because he couldn't help it, "Is Ralph dead?"

"Yes." The voice of the People's Protector was precise, cold. "There is no need to know the purpose of the ship. Since all the Rebel population of the System is collected in the Trojan base, it can be destroyed at once."

Arno nodded. That meant a fleet, of course, and bombs. His work was done.

"How will I be taken off, Excellency?"

There was just the faintest note of surprise in the Protector's voice. "Taken off? The task for which the State chose and prepared you is done. The State has no further use for you."

The tiny radio in Arno's hand was abruptly silent. He stood staring at it, with a spinning cloud across his eyes.

But of course. He'd given three sons and a daughter to the State. He'd done his job. He was a specialized cog; he wouldn't fit anywhere else. And the State had no dearth of cogs.

Terra was the nearest Tri-State base—a two-hour trip for their fast bombers at the present orbital intersection. Two hours. The rebels would wait until the last minute for Ralph, who was dead. That meant at least another day.

Two hours! If only it had been at once! The waiting, the tension—!

The bombs would destroy the domes, shatter them to cosmic dust, and the asteroid with them. Two thousand years of agitation would end, and there would be peace in the Tri-State.

The whirling cloud steadied as Arno saw the truth, the logical, inescapable truth. He himself was nothing. His usefulness to the State was ended. What matter if he died?

He was still staring at the useless radio. Now he saw the hand that held it—a strong, young hand, corded with sinews, the healthy blood ruddy under the skin.

His hand. The Tri-State directed it, but he felt the pain if it was injured.

The radio smashed on the floor, but he didn't notice it. He was looking at his body as though he had never seen it before, running his fingers along the hard curve of his thighs, feeling the breath lift his lungs, hearing the beat of his blood along his veins. Then he looked out, across the vast, barren dome, with those ten thousand men, women and children waiting under the loom of the ship.

A group of young men were singing off to his right, an old, old forbidden song about a girl named Susannah. Here and there a family—that anarchistic word never heard in the Tri-State—pressed close together, talking softly. Arno searched their faces. Some were happy, some sad, some frightened, some eager, but each face was different. There was no unit of so many males, so many females, so many young. There were ten thousand people.

Arno caught fiercely at his creed. And then he realized that these people had a creed too, and served it with their lives. Like Karl, and Ralph. Ralph—on whose return ten thousand people waited.

* * *

Two hours! How would these people feel if they knew that in two hours they would die? Maybe they did know. They knew the ship meant something strange. They guessed it might mean something impossible. But they were going.

The State chose . . . the State prepared . . . the State has no further use . . . .

Arno put his hands to his head to stop its blasphemy, and his touch only made him more conscious of his own flesh.

He plunged out into that sea of humanity, stumbling over legs, catching at shoulders.

Bodies, and eyes that looked at him, and brains behind them! He could feel the tension that filled the dome, feel the queer life-wave that always comes with a large crowd.

Marika's tawny head and broad shoulders rose against the black mass of the hull, and Arno went toward her. Men cursed him as he stumbled over them, but he had to get to Marika. He didn't know why, only that he had to.

He saw Laura beside her. Laura had her son clasped in her arms. She spoke to Marika. Then she kissed the boy and smiled.

Arno thought, I gave three sons to the State, but I never kissed them. It was a duty.

Duty! It was his duty now to die for the State. That duty had been so well understood he'd never thought of it subjectively. How had these rebels poisoned him, that he found it strange now?

He was close to Marika now.

She was pale, and her face was lined, but she asked, "What's the matter, Arno? You look ill."

"I—I don't know."

He stared at her, and suddenly he knew what was the matter with him. He'd read all about it in the forbidden books given him to prepare him for this duty. He was in love.

Out in space, Tri-State bombers were thundering up. His duty was plain before him. And he was in love—in love, like a pagan rebel!

Marika's strong hand caught his ragged tunic, shook him. "What's the matter, Arno? Tell me!"

He couldn't meet her eyes. And then Father Berrens' voice rang out over the audio system, and every head in that vast place turned to listen.

"It is time," said the priest quietly, "to explain why we've called you here, and why we've built this ship. We have kept it secret for two reasons. We wished to take no chance of having our purpose reported to the Tri-State, and we saw no reason to upset all our people while there was still a chance that we wouldn't have to use it. Now . . . ."

Bombers, thought Arno. How long now?

Father Berrens went on. "We'll wait till the last minute for Ralph, but we must be prepared. In four hours we'll begin shipping you. Please listen, and try to understand. Have courage and faith! We need them both now, more than ever before.

"For two thousand years we've fought against tyranny, against regimentation, against the destruction of God and man as an individual. We've been weak; the State has been strong. We waited too long in the beginning. Now, just as it began to seem we might have a chance, just as the machine of the State was bogging down in the mire of its own creation, we learned we might have to go—because of a few tons of metal.

"If there is truly a spy among you, I congratulate him. The State should reward him well. Our men have died trying, but we have no metal. All that's left is flight—or death at the hands of the State."

Arno heard him through a haze. The minutes ticked away with his heartbeats. His heartbeats—which the State could destroy but not control.

* * *

Marika's hand was half throttling him. Laura was standing motionless beyond her, the child held tight, whimpering. He could feel those ten thousand people, listening, waiting.

"Don't wait any longer for Ralph," he said.

He didn't want to say it. It was because Marika was looking at him so.

Her hand tightened. "Why not, Arno?"

"I—nothing. It's foolish, that's all."

"Foolish! When he's out there, alone, trying . . . . Arno! What do you know?"

Her hands were hurting his arms now, as they had that day she cried in the hall.

In a little while even pain would be gone.

The State has no further use . . . .

But suppose he did? Suppose he, Arno, wanted his body, wanted to know what it felt like to love a woman and father a child that was his own and not a cog in a machine? He looked wildly away from Marika, putting up a last battle for his belief, his religion.

And he saw ten thousand people—waiting.

He met Marika's eyes.

"Ralph's dead," he said. "I killed him. I killed Karl and all the others. I'm the spy."

She fell away from him. Laura cried out, a strange, high-pitched wail, and Father Berrens stopped talking.

"Ralph!" whispered Marika. "Ralph . . . . But I knew it. A spy!"

Arno gasped, stricken with horror at what he had done, lost in the chaos of shattering standards. He could still destroy them. He had only to keep still about the bombers, and it wouldn't matter.

Ten thousand people . . . . Frane and Berrens and Laura . . . . Marika, with a cold, terrible something growing in her eyes, something he had put there because he'd killed Ralph. His own mates would never miss him. They'd bear children patiently for some other unsmiling cog in the machine of State.

Marika. Always Marika. She was his downfall, and his answer. She was everything. Looking at her, watching what was growing back of her eyes, Arno shivered with awe and bitter longing. If only he could have known, before . . . .

"Father Berrens!" he shouted.

It seemed the words came out of themselves. And though some stubborn part of himself recoiled in horror, he spoke more words and more words. When he was finished, Berrens' face was grim, his voice unfamiliarly harsh as he issued orders.

There was chaos about Arno, and then a kind of frenzied order. In a world miles beyond him, lines of men and women formed and streamed into the ship through vast ports. But all he could see was Marika.

It would be nice to believe, as the rebels believed, that a man lived after his body died.

That was blasphemy in the State. But it would be nice.

Father Berrens came up, breathing hard. "Time! Time! But we may do it. God helping, we may do it!"

Then Berrens was shouting, "Marika!"

He couldn't stop her. The gun she had taken from Frane's belt was already aimed. Arno saw it coming.

The poisoned needle made a fiery prick over his heart.

He had a last glimpse of Marika's broad-browed face, her tawny mane lying heavy on her wide shoulders. She was like a thing of stone. She watched him fall, dispassionately, as she would have watched a roach die in strangling powder. Then she turned and went steadily into the ship.

A dark mist rolled across his brain, dulled the sound of exodus. Through it he heard Laura's voice.

"But Father! All the planets are closed to us. Where can we go?"

"For the time, we've lost the planets, yes. But the ship was built to go beyond them. My daughter, the stars still remain."



Child of the Green Light

Super Science Stories, February 1942


Son felt the distant, ringing shiver of the metal under him. The whole close-packed mass of broken hulks shifted slightly with the impact, turning wheel-like around the shining Light.

Son half rose. He'd been sprawled full length on the crest of the wheel, trying to make the Veil get thin enough to see through. They had both seen that it was thinner than ever, and Aona, on the other side of it, had danced for him, a misty shifting light beyond the queer darkness.

Several times he thought he had almost seen her outlines.

He could hear her mind now, tickling his brain with impish thought-fingers.

She must have heard his own thought change, because she asked, "What is it, Son? What's happened?"

"Another ship, I think." Son rose lazily, the green Light from below rippling around him like clear water.

He looked out over his domain, feeling the savage sun-fire and the spatial cold of the shadows touch his naked body with little whips of ecstasy. His face was a boy's face, handsome and bright-eyed. His fair head burned like a torch in the blinding glare.

The sun made a blazing canopy across half the sky. The rest was open space, velvet dark and boundless, flecked with the little fires of the stars.

Between sun and space lay the wheel, built of space ships that lay side by side, over and under and sometimes through, broken and bent and dead, bound close by the power of the Light.

The Light, lying below Son's naked feet at the very heart of the wheel, burning green through the packed hulks—the Light that was his bridge to Aona.

Son's blue eyes, unshaded, looked for the wreck. He knew it would be a wreck. Only one ship in the wheel, the one in which his memories began, was whole.

Then he stood quite still, staring, feeling every muscle tense and tighten.

He saw the ship, lying high on the outer rim of the wheel. It was not broken. Tubes burned red at the front end. There was a door opening in the side. Things began to come out of it.

Things shaped like Son, only thick and clumsy, with queer gleaming bulbs on their heads.

A strange contracting shiver ran through Son. Since sound and breath had gone, and the effigies that lay in his ship had ceased to move, nothing had stirred on the wheel but Son himself.

In the broken ships there was never anything but scraps of odd substance, scattered as though by some bursting inner force. Son and Aona had talked idly of living beings, but Son hadn't bothered his head about them much.

He was Himself. He had the sun, and space, and Aona. It was sufficient.

Aona said impatiently, "Well, Son?"

"It's a ship," he answered, with his mind. "Only it isn't wrecked. Aona, there are living things coming out of it."

He stood staring at the Veil, and the misty light beyond.

"Aona," his mind whispered. "In my head I'm cold and hot all at once. I want to go and do, but I don't know where or what. What's the matter with me, Aona?"

"It's fear," she told him softly. "I have it, too."

Son could feel it, pulsing from her mind. In all the years of life he had never felt it before. Now it had him by the throat.

Aona cried, "What if these creatures should harm you, or the Light?"

"You have said that nothing in this universe could harm me now. And"—Son shivered—"no one would do what has to be done to destroy the Light."

"But these creatures—we don't know what knowledge they may have. Son, if anything should happen . . ."

Son raised his arms to the darkness.

"I don't want you to be afraid, Aona. Tear away the Veil!"

"I can't, darling. You know neither of us can, until the Veil of itself passes behind you."

"How long, Aona?"

She laughed, with an attempt at her old sweet teasing. "How long is 'long' in your world, Son? How long have you lived? How long have we talked? No one knows. Only, the Veil grows thinner every time we meet, every time we talk like this.

"Stay by the Light, Son. Don't let anyone harm it!"

Son's blue eyes narrowed. "I love you," he said quietly. "No one shall harm the Light."

"I'll stay with you," she said. "They won't be able to see—yet."

Son turned and went, across the tumbled plain of dead ships, with Aona's misty light following beyond the blurred and pulsing dark.

* * *

There were seven of the invaders. They stood in a close knot beside their ship, staring at the green fire of the Light. Three of them began to dance clumsily. The others placed shapeless hands on each other's shapeless shoulders and shook and pounded.

Son's eyes were as sharp as the spear-points of the stars. He lay behind a steering-jet housing, watching, and he saw with shock that there were faces under the glittering helmets.

Faces very like his own.

There were three round, smooth faces. They belonged to the ones who danced. There was one deeply lined face with bushy eyebrows and a framing straggle of white hair. Then there were two others, which Son sensed to be of different races.

One was round and green and small, with shining eyes the color of space, and a mouth like a thin wound. The other differed from the first three only in subtle points of line and shape, but its face was like a mask beaten out of dark iron, with deep-set, sullen eyes.

The seventh face drove all the others out of Son's mind. It was bronzed and grim and strong, with some driving inner force about it that was like the pulse Son felt beating in space, when he lay on the crest of the wheel watching the sun and the burning stars.

This last man seemed to be the leader. He turned to the others, his mouth moving. Then the mouths of the others moved also. Presently five of the invaders turned. Son thought they were going away again.

But two of them—the white-haired one and the one with the dark, vital face—started together, out across the broken plain of ships. And Son tensed where he lay.

They were heading toward the heart of the wheel, where the glow of the Light danced like the fire-veils of the sun.

Who knew what knowledge, what powers they might have? Son called to Aona, and followed, keeping out of sight, his blue eyes narrowed and hard.

They were almost over the Light when Son heard the first human thought-voice, as though the power of the Light brought it out. It was faint and indistinct. He could catch only fragments.

" . . . here, inside Mercury's orbit . . . heat! . . . found it, after five years . . ."

That was the bronzed man speaking. Then—

"Yes, thank God! Now if we can . . ."

Son wished the voices were clearer. There was a terrible, disturbing urgency about them.

The invaders paused where the green light was strongest, at the heart of the wheel.

The mind of the grim, dark man said, "Down there."

He started to lower himself into a crevice between two hulls. And Son, driven by a sudden stab of anger, leaped up.

He came striding across the searing metal, naked and erect and beautiful, his fair head burning in the sunlight.

He flung up one corded arm, and his mind cried out, "No! You can't go down."

The invaders straightened, staring. The face of the bronzed, strong man went white, the lines of it blurring into slackness. The white-haired man swayed on his feet.

"The radiation's getting me, Ransome," he whispered. "I'm having hallucinations."

"No. No, I see it, too." The eyes of the bronzed man burned into Son's. "A man, naked in open space."

He stumbled forward, his gaze fixed on the powerful body outlined against the stars.

Son watched him come, conscious of a curious pulsing excitement. Anger, resentment, fear for the Light, and something else. Something like the first time he had spoken to Aona through the Veil.

The bronzed man stopped before him. His lips moved in that queer way they had. Son heard his mind speaking, faintly.

"What are you?"

"I am Son," he answered simply. "What do you want with the Light?"

Again he heard the faint mind-voice. "You can't understand me, of course. I don't know what you are, god or demon, but don't try to stop us! For God's sake, don't make it any harder!"

"But I do understand. You can't go down there."

Ransome turned. "Dick," he said, "Lord only knows what this—this creature is, or what it will do. But we've got to get down there and study this thing. If it tries to stop us, I'll kill it."

Dick nodded his white head. His face was lined and very tired. "Surely nothing will stop us now," he said. "Not now."

"I'll cover you," said Ransome. Dick slid down into the crevice. The bronzed man drew something from his belt and waited.

Son stepped forward, anger and fear cording his muscles.

The dark man said, "I don't want to kill you. I have no right to kill you, because of what you are. But that thing down there is going to be destroyed."

Son stopped, quite still. A great flaming pulse shot through him. And then he gathered himself.

The spring of his corded thighs carried him full over the crack down which the white-haired man had gone. One long arm reached down. The hand closed angrily on smooth glass.

The helmet shattered. Son had a momentary glimpse of a lined, weary face upturned, faded eyes staring in unbelieving horror. Then the flesh of the face split into crimson ribbons, and the body under the space suit altered strangely.

* * *

Son got up slowly, feeling strange and unsteady in his thoughts. He hadn't wanted to destroy the man, only to make him come back.

He became aware, then, of Ransome, standing with a metal thing in his hand, staring at him with eyes like the savage, dying red stars.

"It didn't touch him," Ransome's mind was saying. "A heat ray strong enough to fuse steel, and it didn't touch him. And Dick's dead."

Ransome hurled the gun suddenly into Son's face.

"Do you know what you've done?" his mind shouted. "Dick was a physicist—about the only one with any knowledge that hasn't died of old age. He might have found the way to destroy that thing. Now, if our weapons don't work on it . . .

"The effect is accelerating. Every child born since the Cloud is horribly susceptible. There isn't any time any more for any thing. There won't be anyone to follow us, because now there's no time to learn."

Ransome stepped close to Son. His head was thrown back, his face a grim, hard mask streaked suddenly by little shining things that ran from those savage eyes.

"You don't know what that means, do you? You don't know how old Dick was, with his white hair and his wrinkles. Thirty-six! Or me. I'm nineteen—nineteen. And my life is already half gone.

"All over the Solar System it's like that, because of this hellish thing that came in the Cloud. We've hunted the System over for five years, all of us that could, for a thing that wouldn't react to any test or show on any instrument. And when we found it.

He stopped, the veins knotted across his forehead, a little muscle twitching in one lean cheek.

Then, very calmly, he said, "Get him, boys."

Son jerked around, but it was too late. The five who had stayed in the ship were all around him. For a long time Son had been conscious only of these two men, and the strange confusion in his mind—a confusion made worse, somehow, by those mysterious crystal drops running from Ransome's eyes. They caught him, somewhere, deep.

Ropes of light metal fell around him. He fought like a Titan in the naked blaze of the sun. But they were experts with their ropes. They caught his wrists and ankles, dividing his power, baffling him with tenuous cords of elastic strength.

Son knew that his mass was still sufficiently in phase to be subject to such laws as gravity and tension. He fought. But presently he was spread-eagled on the burning metal, helpless.

The man with the face like beaten metal and the sullen eyes said, "We were watching from the ship. We thought we must be crazy when we saw this—man standing out here. Then we thought you might need help."

He stopped, staring at Son. "The heat ray didn't touch him."

"No," said Ransome quietly. "That's how he got Dickson."

The one with the queer green face snapped, "Dickson's dead?"

Ransome nodded. "Down in the crack there. We were trying to get down to study the light. He—it didn't want us to go."

The green-faced one said, "My God!"

"Quite. Arun, you and one of the boys guard the ship. Teck, you mount guard here with the other. Greenough, come with me."

One of the round-faced ones stepped forward. His eyes were light blue, oddly empty in spite of their brightness. He looked down at the crevice where Dickson's body was, and his mind said, "I'm afraid. I don't want to go down there. I'm afraid."

"Come on, Greenough," Ransome snapped. His lips started to move again, and stopped abruptly.

Son caught the thought, "Got to hurry. God knows what this radiation will do to us, right on top of it."

"Sir," said Greenough jerkily, "what if there are more like him down there?"

Ransome turned his grim, hard face on the boy. Son felt again that force, the strength that pulsed between the stars.

"Well," said Ransome, "what if there are?"

He turned and slid down into the crevice.

Greenough closed his pale, scared eyes, licked his lips, and followed.

* * *

Teck, the man with the sullen eyes, laughed—a biting mind-sound as hard as his jaw-line. "Hell of a gunnery officer."

Arun said absently, "He's only eleven." His eyes, purple-black and opaque as a dark nebula, swung jerkily from Son to the crevice where Dickson lay, and back again.

Teck was a big man, as big as Son, but Arun topped him by a foot. He was very slender, moving with a queer rubbery grace.

"What if we can't do it?" he said suddenly. "What if our weapons won't work on it any more than they did on him?"

"Then," answered Teck evenly, "the last generation of mankind will die of old age within fifty years." His sullen gaze roved over Son, over and over, and his mind was whispering to itself.

"Mutation," he said abruptly "That's it. Complete change of cellular structure, metabolism, brain tissue, everything. Mutation in the living individual. I wonder how long . . ."

"Look at that green light," whispered Arun. "Remember how it filled the whole sky when we came into the Cloud? Cosmic dust, the scientist said. Temporary effect. But it stayed, when the Cloud went."

His long thin arms came up in a blind sort of gesture. "We were millions of miles away, then. What will it do to us now?"

Teck studied his hands. "We're not aging, anyway. Concentrated effect is probably different. Feel anything?"

"Deep. Deep inside me. I—"

"Your cellular structure is different from ours, anyway."

Arun swayed slightly, watching the green light pulse up from below. Beads of sweat ran down his face.

"Yes," he whispered. "Different. You know how the Cloud affected us on Tethys. If our life-span were not almost three times as long as your—"

He bent suddenly over Son, and more of the queer shining things were trickling out of his eyes.

"For five years we've watched our people die, hunting for this thing. Dickson was our only chance. And you, you damned freak—"

He lifted his long arms again, as though to cover his head. "I'll get back to the ship now," he said abruptly, and turned.

Teck hesitated for a heartbeat, scowling at Arun. Then he stepped in front of him, the thing they called a heat gun in his hand.

"Sit down, Arun."

"You heard Ransome's orders." The Tethysman was trembling.

"In the Martian Drylands, where I come from," murmured Teck, "men sometimes get what we call esht—desert-fear. They take other men's water and vaards, and run away. You're the engineer, Arun, and even without me to do the navigating . . . . Sit down, Arun."

The Tethysman sat, a fluid folding of thin length. The two round-faced boys stood by, not moving nor speaking, the fear so strong in their minds that Son could hear it shouting.

He saw and heard all this with a small part of his brain. Most of it was thinking of the Light and the men working their way down to the queer hole where it lay among the tangled ships.

This talk of age and years and dying and humanity meant nothing to him. In all his universe there was only himself, the wheel, the sun, the distant stars, and Aona. There was no day or night, no time.

He was angry and afraid, full of hatred and resentment and a queer tearing at his throat, as though he had lost some vital part of him—the Light. Were they going to take the horrible way of destruction that Aona had told him of? Or did they know another way?

He tensed his corded body against the metal ropes, and his mind cried out, "Aona!" as though he were seeing her vanish forever beyond the Veil.

* * *

The Martian said, softly, "He used to be human. I wonder . . ." He leaned forward suddenly. "Can you hear me?"

Son answered, "Yes." He was beginning to realize something. The mouth-movements of these men had something to do with speaking, and their clearest, loudest thoughts came with them.

Teck must have caught the motion of his eyes, for he cried out.

"Yes! But you can't speak, because you don't breathe air. Probably lost both lungs and vocal cords. You must be a telepath. I'll bet that's what you are!"

The Martian's dark-iron mask of a face was eager; his sullen eyes full of little sparks.

"You hear me think, is that it? Nod your head once, if you do."

Son hesitated, studying the men with narrow eyes. If he talked with them, he might find out how much they knew. He nodded.

Teck was quite still for a moment. Arun sat rigid, staring with eerie purple eyes at the Light.

"How long have you been here?" asked Teck.

Son shook his head.

"Where did you come from?" Again Son shook his head, and Teck asked, "You know no other place than this?"

Again the negative.

Teck drew a long breath.

"You must have been born here, then. In one of the first ships swept up by the magnetic force of this thing as it passed through the Solar System. Then your ship cannot have been wrecked. Probably the counter-pull of some planet saved it, as our new Elker drive saved us."

His deep eyes blazed. "Your body was the same as mine, once. How long would it take to change me to a being like you?"

Arun got up suddenly. "I've got to get back to the ship."

Teck's gun hand was steady. "Sit down!"

Arun's thought rose tightly. "But I've got to! Something's wrong—" Teck's gun thrust forward menacingly. Arun sat down again, slowly. The green light wavered around him, making his face curiously indistinct.

Teck's thought hammered at Son.

"You know what the light is?"

Son hesitated, sending Aona a rapid question.

Her mind said, "No! Don't tell, Son. It might help them destroy it."

He shook his head. "No."

Teck's lips drew back. "You're lying," he said, and then whirled around, his dark hard face taut.

Arun had risen, and the single wild shriek in his mind stabbed Son's brain so that he writhed in his shackles.

The two boys backed off, their faces white and staring. Even Teck drew back a bit, and his gun hand trembled.

Arun was changing. Son watched tensely, forgetting for a moment even his agony of fear for the Light.

The lines of the green, smooth face of the Tethysman blurred and shifted in the green light, like something seen under water. Strange writhing tremors shook his body.

His mind cried out with his moving lips: "Something's happening to me. Oh, God! And all for nothing."

He staggered forward. His eyes were night-black and luminous, horribly steady in that blurred face, fixed on Son.

Son knew, lying there chained, that he was in deadly peril. Because Arun was on his own plane, though a little past him.

"All for nothing—mankind lost," wailed the thought-voice. "I'm going blind. No. No! I'm seeing—through . . . "

His scream shivered cold as space along Son's nerve-channels. The tall rubbery form loomed over him, bending closer . . .

* * *

One of the boys fainted quietly, rolling like an ungainly bundle into a deep shaft between two wrecks. Teck caught his breath.

"I'm not through with him yet," he muttered, and raised his gun.

The glassite helmet melted and ran. The head and the glowing purple eyes beneath it were untouched.

And then no one moved, nor spoke. Arun's head and face quivered, merging imperceptibly into the blurred darkness of the Veil.

Aona cried out suddenly, "He's coming through!" And then, "No! The change was too swift. Too many atoms in transition. He's caught . . ."

Shivering against Son's mind, like the single wild shaft of a distant comet, came Arun's thought.

"No, not here! Not here—between!"

And then he was gone. His space suit crumpled down, quite empty.

Teck swayed, the dark hardness of his face bleached and rigid. "What did he mean—'between'?"

Son lay quite still, hearing Aona sob beyond the Veil. He knew. Aona had told him. Between universes—the darkness, the nothingness, the nowhere. He felt the cold dark crawling in his mind.

Teck laughed suddenly, biting and defiant. His deep eyes were fixed on Son, sprawled like a young god in the raw blaze of the sun.

"By the gods," he whispered, "it's worth the risk!"

Greenough came stumbling up out of the crevice.

He looked more like a child than ever. His round face was dazed and bewildered, screwed up strangely. Even to Son, there was something terrible and unholy in that child's shallow-eyed face on a man's strong body.

Teck drew a slow breath. Son felt a dark, iron strength in him, different from the strength of the bronzed Ransome, that was like the beat of space itself, but great, too. Great, and dangerous.

"What did you find out?" asked Teck. "Where's Ransome?"

Son's brain burned within him with fear, though he saw that the green Light was still unchanged.

"Down there," said Greenough, and whimpered. He blinked his eyes, moving his head and pawing at his helmet as though to clear it.

"I only looked at it a minute. It was too little and too big all at once, and I was frightened."

Teck caught him by the shoulders and shook him roughly. "Looked at what?" he demanded. "What's happened?"

"At the light," said Greenough, in a far-away voice. "We found it inside a ship. We could look right through the metal. I only looked a minute because I was frightened. I was frightened, I was . . ."

Teck's strong hands snapped his teeth together. "What was it?"

Greenough's shallow eyes wandered to his. "Ransome says it's part of another universe. He's still there, looking. Only . . ."

Greenough's voice broke in a little hiccough. "Only he can't see any more."

Son felt a great surge of relief. The Light was safe, so far.

Greenough slipped suddenly from Teck's hands, sitting wide-legged on the battered hull.

"I'm scared," he said. "I want Mama." Big slow drops ran down his cheeks, and again Son was stirred by something deep and strange.

Teck turned slowly to Son. "He was six years old when the Cloud came. You can build a man's body in eleven years, but not his brain." He was silent, looking down with deep, intense eyes.

* * *

He spoke, after a bit, slowly and deliberately.

"So it's part of another universe. Diluted by distance, its radiation speeds human metabolism, causing swift age. Concentrated, it changes the human organism into an alien metabolism, alien flesh.

"Slim almost made it through, but his peculiar chemical balance destroyed him. You must be in the same transition stage, but much slower, being passed by the changing of your basic vibratory rate into another space-time continuum."

Son couldn't hide the sudden flicker in his eyes. He hated this dark Martian suddenly, this man who guessed so much.

"So it's true," said Teck. "Confirmation of the old conception of coexisting universes on different vibratory planes. But how would you know, unless—unless you can talk to that other universe?"

He laughed at the bitter look in Son's blue eyes.

"Afraid, aren't you? That means you have something to hide, or protect." He dropped suddenly to one knee, catching his fingers in Son's fair hair.

"Look at me. I want to watch your eyes. You do know what that light is, and how it can be destroyed. If I could get a body like yours, and still not cross over . . .

"Do you feed on the green light, or the sun?"

The question came so quickly that Son's eyes flicked to the canopy of fire overhead, before he could stop them. Teck sat back on his heels with a long, slow sigh.

"That's all I needed," he murmured. "Your friends on the other side evidently can't help you, or you'd be free now." He rose abruptly. "Greenough! You, there, sailor! Help me get this loose hull-section over here."

The two pale, empty-eyed boys rose obediently and helped. The heavy metal plates, uptilted by the force of the original crash, were not far from Son. They had only to heat the bottom with cutting torches and bend it.

Son lay, then, in black, utter dark.

"Now then," said Teck. "Back to the ship, both of you."

The boys stumbled off across the broken ships. Son could see them, out in the glare beyond his prison shadow. Teck waited until their backs were well turned.

The beam of his heat gun flickered briefly, twice. Two crumpled shapes fell and were still. Teck turned, smiling tightly.

"No need to have a whole race of supermen." He inspected the spiderweb of metal ropes that bound Son, and nodded, satisfied.

"When you get hungry enough for energy, you'll tell me how to destroy the light. And then—" His hard dark face was cut deep with triumph, his eyes fierce with dreams.

"After I destroy the light, the aging process will stop. People will start to live again. And I'll be virtually a god, untouchable, impervious."

He laughed, softly and deep within him, rolling Son's head with his foot.

"You wouldn't know what that means, would you? Think it over while I'm down taking care of Ransome!"

He turned and slid down into the crevice.

Son cried out in anguish, "Aona!"

* * *

The Veil, the darkness that was everywhere and nowhere, that was all though the wheel and yet not of it, shimmered and swirled.

"Son! Son, what has happened?"

His mind had been too busy to tell her before. Now he hesitated, thinking of Teck clambering down to kill the man with the strength of the stars in him; thinking of Arun's agony and Greenough's fear and the tired face of the man he had killed; thinking most of all of the strange shining drops that ran from their eyes.

"Aona, what is age?"

"We had it, long ago. The legends hardly remember, except that it was ugly, and sad."

"What are years?" He tried to give her the thoughts as he had taken it from their minds. But the idea was so alien to him, the time-concept so vague in itself, that he couldn't make himself clear.

She said, "I don't know, Son."

"And Aona—what is death?"

"No one knows that, Son. It's like sleep, only one never wakens. But we live so long before it comes, there's time for everything. And even in the little part of our universe that's left, there are so many worlds to see."

Already, there in the shadow, he was hungry for the sun. He would starve for energy if he couldn't get free. He gathered himself to try . . .

And then, quite suddenly, it happened. The thing he'd waited all his life for. He looked into the shimmering blur of the Veil and cried, "Aona! Aona! I can see you!"

He surged against his ropes, aflame inside him with a joy like the fire of the sun itself.

The Veil was still there, hiding most of Beyond. But it was closer and thinner. He could see the slim silver shaft of her standing against soft blurred colors, could almost see the luminous brightness of her eyes.

"Oh, darling," she cried. "Almost!"

Everything, all memory of the invaders and their alien troubles, left Son's mind. He stared hungrily into the Veil, watching the pale blur of her face steady, become clear.

"You're beautiful," he whispered. "Beautiful as a blue star."

"And you . . . Oh Son, go down to the Light. The force is strongest there. The Veil will pass more quickly."

"But I can't. I'm tied." He told her briefly what had happened.

She laughed. "You've changed since then. The ratio has changed. More of your atoms are vibrating in phase with my universe than with yours. From now on the change will be very swift. Try again!"

He tried, pitting his strength against the ropes. Slowly their resistance slackened. His wrists and ankles slid through them, as though they were heavy smoke.

He rose and shook himself, and looked once more at the wheel and the stars and the blazing sun. Then he turned to Aona, and a pulse of joy rose in him until he thought surely his head would burst.

He plunged downward, toward the Light.

* * *

He found that he had no need to clamber though the broken ships. The matter of their metal walls resisted him as water resists a swimmer, no more. He went downward through the green light that grew stronger as he went, until it was like the water at the bottom of a green lake.

Aona followed, running on little white feet across pale blue grass, with a great sweep of sky growing clearer behind her. Her silver draperies whipped in something she had called a wind. Her eyes were silvery, too, tilted with impish piquancy, and there was a crest of some feathery stuff on her head, burning red-gold like his own sun.

His mind shouted to hers and hers laughed back, and the barrier between their universes was growing thin.

It was almost a shock to Son to see Teck crawling through a doorway in the wrecked saloon of a liner, just above the Light itself.

Ransome crouched on the deck before him, his back turned, quite still.

The Martian's hard lips smiled. He drew his heat gun.

Son stopped, the sheer happiness of the moment shattered. His dark hatred for this man came back, his instinctive loathing of what the fingers of his mind had brushed against in Teck's brain. Also, dimly, it had to do with Ransome.

Hardly realizing what he was doing, he sprang at Teck.

His arm sheared harmlessly through the matter of Teck's helmet and head. Son realized then that he had no more power over the stuff of his universe.

But Teck started and cried out, and his aim was spoiled. The heat beam flicked across Ransome's shoulder, melting a little hole in the fabric of his space suit.

The Martian's sullen, fiery eyes were wide.

"You've changed," he whispered. "Like Arun. I can see through you."

Then, furiously he shouted, "Damn you! Look out!"

He lurched sideways, but he was just too late. A searching tongue of heat ranged across him, across Son and the metal wall behind him, leaving a little molten trail. It rose and fell methodically, weaving a net of death across that whole space.

Teck's space suit collapsed. Son witnessed again, this time with a curious satisfaction, the disruption of an alien organism.

Alien. Yes. And yet . . .

He turned to see Ransome crouched on one knee, holding the shoulder of his suit with one hand and the heat gun—not firing now—in the other.

His eyes were open, but they didn't see. Son knew what had happened. Ransome had looked too long at the Light, and the distances, the planes and angles and curves of it had pulled his sight too far.

Son said, "He's dead."

Ransome nodded. "I heard his mind die. This thing down here—I can hear you, too. I couldn't, up there."

A strange, subtle thrill crept along Son's consciousness. Something in him reached out to that mind, strong even now, strong as the pulse-beat of space.

"You're not bad," said Ransome. "You just don't understand. I don't suppose you could, although you were human once."

He dropped the gun, as though it didn't matter any more. "I'm going to die, you know. There's a hole in my suit. In a few minutes the air will leak out. But there's no time here, is there? And you've forgotten what air is, or why I need it."

The bronzed, grim face smiled, but it was not humorous. "So humanity dies, because one of its sons has no conception of time."

* * *

"Son!" It was Aona calling, peering through the thinning Veil.

Ransome lifted his head. "Who's that?"

Son said, "It's Aona. She's waiting for me." His surroundings were getting indistinct.

The Veil was passing.

"Aona. Someone you love. Son—that's what she called you, isn't it? Son, what is this light? Where did it come from?"

The strength of Ransome's mind was bright and terrible. It was like the fire of a dying star.

"It's—Aona, you tell him." Son's thoughts were strangely chaotic.

"It's a part of my universe," she said slowly. There was a quality of stillness in her thought, a subtle forerunner of fear. "Something happened, in one small corner of space, to the electrical tension that holds the fabric of the universe together. There was a release of energy so unthinkably vast . . ."

Her burning crest drooped as she shivered. "Scraps of our universe were hurled right through the walls of vibration that separate us from other space-time continua. Only a very little bit of ours survived.

"The bit of our universe in yours, vibrating at a different basic rate, makes a sort of bridge between us, by altering atomic speeds. Son has changed almost completely. Only a few of his atoms now vibrate in phase with your universe."

Ransome nodded. "And that alien vibration is destroying us. Can't you take it back?"

Aona shook her glowing head. "We could not possibly generate enough energy to draw it back." Her silvery, tilted eyes went to Son, and the terror in them stabbed him.

"I hear you," said Ransome softly. "Then there is a way."

Aona whispered, "Yes."

All Son's being went out to her. And yet, some tiny scrap of his mind clung to Ransome's, as though to something he must not lose.

"I don't understand," he said slowly. "Years, age, time—they mean nothing."

"No." Ransome's grim dark head strained back in his helmet. His face was veined and glistening with sweat.

"Think of it this way. You love Aona. She's beautiful—I can hear that in your mind. Suppose that now, while you looked at her, she were to wither and crumple and die . . ."

He broke off, as though fighting for strength. Not the pulsing strength of his mind, but the power of his body. When his thought came again, it was weaker.

"Look at your own body, Son. Think of it, now, growing weak and ugly and bent."

He staggered up suddenly, his eyes like the last embers of a dying sun, fixed on nothingness.

"You're mankind's only hope, Son. Son. Remember the people who called you that. They were human. Remember. Son—of humanity."

Ransome's suit collapsed with a rush. Son shut his eyes.

"Son," he whispered. "His thought said—" He couldn't phrase it clearly, only that it meant coming from something, being a part of it, as he, already, was part of Aona.

And Aona whispered, "I feel it growing in your mind. Oh, Son . . ."

He could see the flowers around her feet now, the distant fires of some great sun. A strange tremor shook his body, a shifting and changing. The Veil was thinner.

"Son, they're not your people any longer. You couldn't even understand."

"No. No, but I could feel." He turned abruptly. "There's something I have to do. Quickly."

He plunged off, rushing through the dissolving matter of his universe. Up, and into the ship he thought of as his, though he had left it long ago. He hated it, down here away from the sun.

Aona followed him, her feet like little white stars in the grass.

* * *

Things grew dimmer, more vague. Son had only to wait, to put off thinking until it was too late. But something drove him on.

Presently he stood in the cabin of his ship, looking down at the still effigies. The people who had called him Son.

He shivered with something more than the shock of change. These still faces—Dickson's face, and Arun's, and Ransome's.

These still shapes, that had touched him and called him Son and shed queer shining drops from their eyes.

Something caught at him, wrung him so that he cried out.

"I don't want to. Aona, I don't want to. But I must!"

Her thought was a mere tremor across his mind. "I think I knew, when he spoke to you. I try to think, if they were my people, suffering and dying—"

"I don't want to, Aona. But he said—Son of humanity."

Only to postpone, to wait until it was too late. The Veil was so thin. Son beat his hands together, very softly. Then, blindly, he rushed back toward the Light.

Something had got hold of him, was driving him. He knew it was right. But he wanted to fight it, to hold it off until it couldn't hurt him.

And he was afraid.

He stopped in the ship above the Light, where Ransome lay dead. He raised his corded arms and cried, "No! I can't. I don't understand!"

He saw Aona watching him on her shining hilltop, not moving or speaking. And slow silver drops rolled from her tilted eyes and down her cheeks.

Then he knew. Then he was calm and steady, and not very much afraid. Because he understood why the bright drops had rolled from the eyes of the strange men.

He smiled at Aona. He took a long, sweeping look at the sun and the sky and the blowing grass, and the silver shaft of her standing in the midst of it.

Then he went slowly down toward the Light.

He knew what would happen. Aona had told him. Most of his substance was in her universe now. Part of it was still in his own. But there were atoms in him just changing. Atoms that were—Between.

Because of the atoms that matched its own, he could penetrate the Light. The atoms in transition would set up a vibration in the Light that had not been in Son, because of the balancing pull of two universes.

The vibratory balance of the Light would be destroyed, because Son's universe had no hold on it. It would be pushed back through the wall of that universe, but not back to its own.

A little green roundness that could be held in his hand, that yet was not round at all and that stretched into soaring distance. Color and line and form that melted and flowed and were not.

Son went, without stopping, straight into the heart of the Light.

For an instant, or an eternity, he was lost in chaos. He knew nothing—whether he moved or was still, whether he saw the black-green rushing darkness or whether it was only the picture of his own fear.

He didn't fight. He caught only two things to him in his mind—Ransome's strength and Aona, standing on her shining hilltop.

An instant, or an eternity. And then there was stillness, a cessation. Son opened his eyes and looked about—at the space Between.


The Sorcerer of Rhiannon

Astounding Science Fiction, February 1942


He had been without water for three days. The last of his concentrated food, spared by the sandstorm that had caught him away from his ship and driven him beyond all hope of finding it, rattled uselessly in his belt pouch, because his throat refused to swallow.

Now Max Brandon stood on a dune of restless ocher dust, watching the coming of another storm.

It rolled crouching across the uneasy distances of the desert, touched blood-red above by the little far sun of Mars. Brandon heard the first faint keening of it above the thin whine of the eternal winds that wander across the dead sea bottoms.

Brandon's sharp-cut face, handsome with its sea-blue eyes and bronzed skin, and the thin scars of battle that enhanced rather than marred, creased into a grin.

"So the grave-robber is going to be buried instead this time," he whispered. The skirling wind blew ocher dust in his eyes and mouth, the gold-brown stubble of beard.

"All right," he said to the storm. "See if you can make me stay down." He waved a mocking hand at it and staggered down into the hollow.

To himself, he said ironically, "There's no one here to see your act, Brandy. No pretty ladies, no interplanetary televisors. The storm doesn't care. And you're going to die, dead, just like ordinary mortals."

His knees buckled under him, flung him headlong in the stifling dust. The simplest thing to do would be just to lie there. Drowning in these Martian sea bottoms was just like drowning in the sea. All you had to do was breathe.

He thought of all the ships that had foundered when there was water here, and how his bones would join theirs in the end. Red dust, blowing forever in the wandering wind.

His white grin flashed briefly. "I always said, Brandy, that you knew too much to take advice."

Everybody had advised him not to come. Jarthur, head of the Society for the Preservation of Martian Relics. Sylvia Eustace. And Dhu Kar of Venus.

Jarthur wanted to put him in the Phobos mines for looting, which was bad. Sylvia wanted to marry him, which was worse. And Dhu Kar, his best competitor and deadliest enemy, wanted to get to the Lost Islands first, which was worst of all.

"So I came," Brandon reflected. "Right in the middle of the stormy season. And here, apparently, I stay."

But he couldn't stay down. Something drove him up onto his feet again, something that wouldn't listen to what his reason was saying about its being no use.

He went on, part of the time on hands and knees, to nowhere, with the Martian desert-thirst burning him like living fire, and the first red-dun veils of the storm blowing past him.

He began to see things in the clouds. Ships in full sail, the ancient high-prowed Martian galleys. He could hear the thrumming of their rigging, knowing with the last sane scrap of his mind that it was his own blood drumming in his ears.

The wind screamed over him and the red dust rolled like water. It was dark, and the galleys rushed by faster and faster. They got clearer, so that he knew that he was going, and still he wouldn't lie down.

And then, through those fleeing phantom ships, he saw a wreck tossing.

Her masts were gone, her hull canted, her high-flared bow thrust up in a last challenge to the wind. Max Brandon knew, because he could see so clearly the wide-winged bird that made her figurehead, that he was almost dead.

His dust-filled eyes lost even the phantom ships. He wondered distantly why he should imagine a wreck among them. The wind hurled him on. He fell. And, driven by some blind, dogged stubbornness, struggled up again.

The wind flung him with spiteful viciousness against something. Something solid. Something hard and unmoving, in the heart of the restless Martian desert.

It hurt. He went down and would have stayed there, but for the stubborn thing that lashed him on.

There was metal under his hands, singing with the impact of the storm. He looked up, forcing himself to see. A deck slanted down to him, bare of everything but the stumps of broken masts.

He stared at the ship, not believing his sight. But his aching body told him it was there. He thumped it with his hand, and it rang thinly.

It wasn't any use, really, because he had no water. But the thing that had driven him kicked him now up over the broken rail and along the canting deck to the broad cabin in the stern.

Feeble and distant, his heart was pounding with excitement. A ship, sunk ages ago in the Sea of Kesh, sailing through the red clouds of the storm—

It was impossible. He was delirious. But the closed door of the cabin was before him, and he tried to open it.

There was no catch.

He grew angry. He'd come this far. He wouldn't be balked. He drew himself erect, his tawny hair whipping in the storm, and roared at the door, commanding it to open.

It did. Max Brandon walked through, and it closed silently.

There was soft light in the cabin, and a faint choking pungency. A table of Martian teak inlaid with gold stood in the center of a room shaped to the curve of the galley's stern, furnished in somber richness.

A man sat in a carven chair beside the table. He was fair and slight in a plain black robe, with no ornament but a curious band of gray metal about his head, bearing the figure of a wide-winged bird.

His face was gentle, grave, rather young. Only in the strong lines about his mouth and the fathomless darkness of his eyes was there any hint—

Of what? Max Brandon, dying on his feet, knew that the man wasn't there. Simply wasn't, because he couldn't be.

He looked alive, but he was too rigid, and his eyes didn't wink. Didn't wink or move, staring at the girl who sat facing him.

She was hardly more than a child, with the supple strength of a sleeping deer in the long lines of her, and the stamp of a burning, vital pride still on her clear-cut face.

She wore a short white tunic with a jeweled girdle, and the cloth was no whiter than her skin. Her eyes looked at the man, unconquered even in death.

They were golden, those eyes, clear and rich as pure metal. Her hair grew low in a peak between them, swept back and down and hung rippling over her shoulders.

Max Brandon stared at it, swaying on his feet, feeling the blood swell and throb in his throat.

Her hair was blue.

Blue. The deep, living blue of an Earthly sea, with tints of cobalt in its ripples and the pale color of distance where it caught the light.

He followed it down across her white arms, and then he saw the shackles on her wrists. Her hands lay on the table, slim and strong, and on the thumb of the left one was a ring with a dull-blue stone.

Brandon's brain burned with more than thirst.

"The Prira Cen!" he whispered, "The Blue Hairs, the oldest race of Mars. Half mythical. They were almost extinct when the Sorcerers of the Lost Islands were the governing brain of the planet, and that was forty thousand years ago!"

A wave of blackness closed over him, as much from that staggering thought as from his desperate weakness. He fought it off, clinging to life for just that one instant longer—

Something sparkled dully on the table, close by the arm of the man in black. A small, transparent bottle, filled with amber liquid.

Somehow he crossed the deck. The bottle was sealed with some curious substance. He struck the neck off against the table.

A drop of the fluid splashed on his hand. It tingled as though charged with a strong current, but Brandon was beyond caring. He drank.

It was strong, burning and cooling all at once. Some of the madness died out of Brandon's eyes. He stood for a moment looking at that beautiful, incredible, impossible girl with the sea-blue hair.

A racing bolt of flame went through him suddenly, a queer shivering agony that had a perverse pleasure in it. He felt his mind rocking in its bed like an engine with a broken shaft, and then there was darkness and a great silence.

He came to sprawled in a heap of dust. For a moment he thought he was back in the desert again. Then the madness that had happened swept back, and he got up, blinking into utter darkness. The light mechanism must have failed at last.

Dust rose and choked him. He blundered into a corner of the table, and something fell behind him with a dry, soft whoosh. He couldn't see the door at all. When he finally found it with his hands, there was no catch.

Blind panic shook him for a moment, until he remembered how he had got in. A little incredulously, he shouted at the door.

"Open!"

It didn't budge. And Brandon stood in the darkness like a trapped rat.

From somewhere, quite unbidden, a thought came.

"Set your hands on it and push. It will come open."

He did. His palms barely touched the metal, his muscles had hardly gathered for the effort. The door broke from its hinges and fell with a thin clash on the deck.

Pale Martian daylight flooded the cabin. Brandon saw now that the cushions and hangings had crumbled to dust. The teakwood table still stood, but its grain was splitting and softening. The man in black had vanished completely, save for the gray metal circlet that lay in a scatter of dust on the floor.

Brandon knew now what had fallen behind him. His gaze darted to the woman, and his heart contracted with a faint stab of pain.

There was only a naked skeleton, beautiful even now in its curved white perfection. The shackles, the blue stone of the thumb ring glinted dully on fleshless bones, the jeweled girdle burned across a splintered pelvis.

That little puff of air he had let in must have done it. Whatever mechanism had controlled the door—he made a wild guess at some seleno-cell sensitive to thought currents instead of light—had gone with the rest.

Remembering the faint pungent odor, he wondered if that had had anything to do with preserving the bodies.

The cabin appeared to be hermetically sealed. The metal of the ship was some unfamiliar alloy, incredibly strong to resist the ages of immersion on the sea floor, and the further ages of dryness and wind and rubbing sand.

It was worn thin as paper under his fingers, but uncorroded.

They had had knowledge, those ancient scientists of the Lost Islands, that no one had ever found again. That was why men lost their lives in the desert, hunting for them.

Brandon looked forward along the deck. The storm had nearly buried the ship again, but the wings of the bird on the high prow still gleamed defiantly

He grinned half derisively at the thick pulse of excitement beating in him. He was lionized as a dashing explorer, publicly cursed and secretly patronized by scientific men, the darling of wealthy collectors—all because of the archaeological treasures he stole from under the noses of planetary governments.

All this gave him money and fame and adoring fans, mostly feminine. It gave him the continual heady excitement of dancing on the edge of disaster. It gave him glamour and a gay flamboyant theatricalism, in all of which he reveled.

But underneath all that was the something that drew him to the old forgotten places and the lost and buried things. The poignant something that was real and sincere and that he didn't understand at all.

Only that he loved catching glimpses through the veil of time, finding the scraps of truth that lay solid under legends.

He went back into the cabin. The gray metal circlet he scooped out of the dust and set jauntily on his gold-brown hair. He paused over the skeleton of the woman, reluctant to touch it, but he wanted the girdle.

He reached for it. And then, oddly, he took the dull-blue ring instead.

He put it on his ring finger and was suddenly giddy. He gulped a food tablet and felt better. The woman's skeleton had fallen into grayish powder, broken by his slight touch.

He picked the girdle out of it and clasped it around his lean waist and turned to search the cabin.

There were chests of scrolls acid-etched on thin metal that blackened and flaked as he looked at them. The letters he did glimpse were older than any he had ever seen.

There were instruments and gadgets of utterly inexplicable design, far too many to carry. The frailer ones were ruined, anyway. He stuffed a few of the more enduring into his pockets and went out.

At the broken door he paused with a small, unpleasant shiver. To break down a door simply by touching it—

Then he grinned. "Duck up, Brandy. This metal is so thin that a baby could knock holes in it."

As though in mocking answer, the port rail crumpled, sending a flood of red sand across the deck. The bird on the prow trembled, and for an instant Brandon thought it was going to fly.

It fell into the dust, and was buried.

He got away from there, and watched the ship die her final death in the dry red sea, And then he said to himself:

"Now what? No water, precious little food, no idea of where I am. Speaking of water-"

That stuff in the bottle had certainly been potent. It had revived him like a shot of adrenalin. But now—

He was thirsty again.

He tried to ignore it, making his plans. He had thought he was near the Lost Islands when he landed. In fact, he'd landed because he thought he saw the outline of dry harbors and stone quays.

"But I didn't. And the position of the Lost Islands is only conjecture, anyway. No two authorities agree."

He stood there, his scarred, handsome face twisted into a defiant grin that he knew was as hollow as his stomach, the wide-winged bird on the gray circlet glittering above his forehead. Then he forced himself to shrug jauntily and start off across the ocher sand.

Thirst grew in him with the arid touch of dust. The wind whined at him, and presently he heard a voice in it. He knew it was delirium, and refused to listen.

The spurt of strength the strange amber fluid had given him drained away. He fell in the blowing dust and cursed it in a choking whisper. And the voice said:

"Strike it with your hand."

He did, because he thought it was his own desire speaking. He struck the side of the dune before him, weakly, with his doubled fist.

There was a flash and a small thunderclap, and water ran.

He caught it in his cupped hands and drank like an animal, splashing himself, sobbing. Then he got up and stood staring at the wet place in the dust and his wet hands.

He backed off, slowly, his blue eyes widening and paling in a stricken face. He shuddered and passed a hand across his damp beard.

"Merciful heavens!" he whispered. And gripped hard at the rising terror in him.

"The power isn't yours," said a gentle thought voice in his brain. "It's merely transmitted through your body."

Brandon closed his eyes and held his clenched fists against his temples.

"No," he said. "I'll die decently of thirst if I have to. But I won't go mad."

"You're not mad," said the voice. "Don't be frightened."

The last was faintly condescending, which made Brandon angry. He threw his head back, so that he looked rather like the bird of prey on his circlet.

"Who are you?" he demanded. "And where?"

"I am Tobul, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. My body is dust. But the essential frequencies that activated that body are in you."

"That's witchcraft," said Brandon curtly, "and that's madness."

"Witchcraft to the ignorant," murmured the voice coolly. "Simple science to the learned. Life is essentially a matter of electrical frequencies, a consumption and emission of energy. There is nothing strange about charging metal with electrical life. Why should there be anything strange in charging any other substance with any other phase of the basic stuff of the universe?"

Brandon looked at the restless desert, tasted the dust on his tongue, listened to the wailing wind.

He pulled a hair from his tawny beard, and felt the hurt of it. He took a deep breath.

"All right," he said. "How did you get into me?"

But the voice whispered now, and not to him.

"Desolation," it said. "Death and desolation. The sea, the clouds, the strength and power of life, all gone. Is this truly Mars?"

Max Brandon felt a wrenching sadness, go through him, and then a swift stab of fear, very faint, like things in a half-forgotten dream.

"I must get to Rhiannon," said the voice of Tobul. "At once."

There was no emotion in it now. Brandon sensed an iron control, an almost barbarian strength.

"Rhiannon," he repeated. "I never heard—You said Tobul, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms?"

Brandon sat down, because his knees wouldn't hold him.

"Rhiannon," he whispered. "That's the ancient name for the Lost Islands. And 'Lord of the Seven Kingdoms' was the title of the sorcerer-scientist who ruled half Mars, from his seat in Rhiannon."

Ancient things. Things deeply buried, nearly forgotten, clouded by superstition and legend. Forty thousand years—

Brandon sat still, just clinging to his sanity. At length he repeated quietly:

"How did you get into me?"

"When the ship sank, so suddenly that nothing could be done, I transferred my essential to a bottle of liquid prepared for the purpose—a faintly radioactive suspension medium. Those were troubled times—one went prepared.

"The collective frequencies that form my consciousness remained there unharmed, until you drank the liquid. Fortunately it was not poisonous, and you gave me easy entry into a satisfactory host."

A picture of the man at whose side the bottle had been came back to Brandon—the fair, grave face and the impenetrable eyes. That man, dead forty thousand years.

Brandon ran his tongue over dry lips. "When are you going to get out of me?"

"Probably never. I should have to build another body, and the secret of that is known only. . . Brandon!"

It was as though a hand gripped his brain. The impact of that will was terrifying. Brandon felt his mind stripped naked, probed and searched and shaken, and then dropped,

"Her jeweled girdle he took," murmured Tobul, "and my circlet, and some instruments. The girdle is only metal and jewel—look at your hands!"

Brandon looked, raging, but unable to help himself.

"The blue ring, Brandon, that you took from her thumb, is it there?"

It glinted dully in the sun. Brandon looked at it and said simply: "I don't understand. What ring?"

Tobul whispered: "His eyes don't see, he has no memory. Yet I can't be sure. I was faint with the effort of breaking the door, after so many centuries of quiescence. She may have blanked his mind. But it's a chance I must take.

"Brandon, we go to Rhiannon."

Brandon got up, and there was something ominous in the set of his broad shoulders.

"Just a minute," he said evenly. "I want to find the Lost Islands, too. This possession business has its fascinating angles, I'll admit, so I'm trying to be tolerant of you. But I won't be ordered about."

"Take the instrument out of your left-hand pocket and look at it." Tobul's voice was utterly without emotion.

"Do you hear me, Tobul? I won't have the privacy of my mind invaded. I won't be ordered—"

He stopped. Again the hand of that iron will closed on his brain. The sheer calm strength of it numbed him, as though he had been an ant trying to stem an avalanche.

He fought, until sweat ran down the channels of his face and his lean body ached, fought to keep his hand from reaching into his pocket for the instrument.

But the dark iron power of Tobul's mind rolled in on him, wrapped and crushed and smothered him with a slow, patient ease.

Trudging over the ocher waste, following the mysterious, quivering needle in Tobul's instrument, Max Brandon still could grin.

"Brandy, Brandy," he murmured. "I always said drinking would get you into trouble!"

Two chill Martian nights passed, and two days. Brandon got used to drawing water from the dust with a blow of his fist. It pleased him, like a small boy with a firecracker.

Tobul, in a rare fit of communicativeness, said it was simply a matter of releasing mental energy which caused oxygen and hydrogen to unite from the air. The blow was only a means of directing the mental concentration.

The Lord of the Seven Kingdoms had withdrawn himself utterly. Brandon felt no discomfort, nothing different from his usual tough health. Only when he tried to disobey the pointing of the compass, he was forced back to obedience.

It galled him, but there was nothing he could do. It was terrible to think of living out his life as host for a parasitic intelligence. It outraged his pride, his individuality.

And yet, to have contact with a mind forty thousand years old; to be taken to the Lost Islands of Rhiannon, the greatest archaeological mystery of Mars—

He asked about the compass. Tobul answered absently.

"It obeys a directional impulse from the vault." And then, even more distantly: "The vault is still there, safe, in all this."

For a fleeting instant, through his own excitement at the mention of a vault, Brandon caught the unguarded sorrow of Tobul, looking through an alien's eyes at the withered mummy of his world.

More and more, as he accustomed himself to his strange condition, Brandon's mind went back to the girl with blue hair, sitting proud in her shackles across from Tobul.

"Who was she?" he asked.

The leashed fury of Tobul's answer startled him.

"The most dangerous creature on Mars. In a short time I should have destroyed her. But, somewhere, her mind lives as mine does, and defies me—Brandon! Go on!"

But Brandon stood still, with a curious chilly crinkle to his spine.

"Sorry," he said. "But the compass is shot."

Tobul's armor dropped, then, for an instant. Brandon felt what a lost planet must feel, torn from its sun. He never forgot it.

"Kymra! Somehow, she has gone before me—Go on, Brandon!"

Brandon shrugged and went. "May as well die walking as sitting," he said. "It may not be Kymra of the Prira Cen, though. It may be just plain Dhu Kar of Venus, which is worse!"

And then, just before the swift sunset, a flier came droning low over the ocher sand, swinging in wide circles, searching.

Brandon danced like a madman on the top of a dune, obeying Tobul's command as well as his own urge. The flier came down.

A tall, slender figure in grease-stained flying togs leaped from the port and ran toward him in a cloud of dust.

"Brandy!" yelled a clear voice. "Brandy, you idiot!"

"Good Lord!" said Brandon. "Sylvia."

She swept into his arms, kissed him, cursed him, and shook him all at once.

"Are you all right? What happened? I've been hunting for three days."

He helped her off and grinned into her eager gamin face, framed in a perpetually tousled mop of curly black hair, set with eyes as sea-blue and adventurous as his own, and smudged slightly with grease.

"Syl," he said, "for once I'm glad to see you."

"Some day," she grinned back, "you'll realize my sterling worth and marry me. Then I shan't have to fight mom about being a glamour girl, and pop about you being a bandit hunting the Eustace cash—"

"And I won't be able to rob graves in peace—"

She was suddenly pressed against him, gripping his arms with painful fingers, making choking, sounds at his shoulder.

"Oh, Brandy," she whispered. "I thought you were dead."

Tobul spoke harshly in Brandon's mind. "Hurry. Get into the flier. We'll try to find Rhiannon from the air. Hurry!"

Brandon was apprehensive about that, because of the compass suddenly going dead. If Kymra of the Blue Hair was really there ahead of them, it meant trouble for Tobul, which meant trouble for Max Brandon, and, consequently, for Sylvia.

He hesitated, and Sylvia said, "Brandy, you'd better give up hunting for the Lost Islands. Jarthur is hopping mad, because you know what relics from there would mean to Mars, and Dhu Kar—"

"Dhu Kar?" snapped Brandon.

"He left the day after you did, as soon as he found out. And Jarthur went storming off with a bunch of policemen, to look for both of you. Of course," she added hopefully, "they may have got lost in a sandstorm."

Brandon shook his head. "It's a big desert, and they may not have been fools like me. I got too far away from my ship."

If it was Dhu Kar who had broken into the vault at Rhiannon, that meant trouble, too. The Venusian played for keeps. Brandon had skirmished with him before, and he knew.

And yet, if he could help it, he wasn't going to let that semi-human pirate from the Venusian coal swamps steal Rhiannon from him.

He stood there, thinking these things, his profile hawk-clear with the wide-winged bird glittering above it, the red sunlight caught in his fair beard and shaggy hair, looking rather like a Viking.

And Sylvia Eustace, with a curiously puzzled look in her blue eyes, took the ring from Brandon's finger and put it on her own. Then she said calmly:

"Come on, Brandy. We're going to Rhiannon."

He followed her, not noticing the ring. Tobul, grim and silent inside him, seeing only through his eyes, knew nothing of it, either.

The flier was small, fast, lovingly worked over and expertly handled. Sylvia went directly to the controls. Brandon scowled, trying to plot the most likely course, combining his own conjectures of the position of the Lost Islands with the way shown by Tobul's compass.

Sylvia sent the ship hurtling upward. When he started to speak, she cut him short.

"I think I know the way."

He stared at her. "Nobody does. It's all guesswork."

"Well," she snapped, "can't I guess, too?"

He shrugged and sat back in the padded seat. Sylvia's tall, boyish form, the despair of her society-loving mother, hunched over the controls. The flier shivered with the thrust of power from the rockets, and the thin, cold air screamed along the hull.

Sylvia always flew fast, but there was a tenseness about her now that was unlike her.

"We can't do much looking at this pace," he said mildly.

"I tell you, I've studied up on it and I know the way!" There was an imperious bugle note in her voice that startled him.

Then she glanced at him. Just for an instant her eyes were puzzled and frightened and altogether Sylvia's. But that was gone in a flash, and the ship rushed on, racing the rising moons.

In the third hour before dawn, with little Phobos rushing ahead of them and Diemos a ball of cold fire overhead, Brandon saw a shadow more solid than the shifting dunes.

Sylvia put the ship down. "We're there," she said. Then she laughed and shook him by the shoulders, and her blue eyes sparkled.

"Think of it, Brandy! The Lost Islands. And we'll see them together!"

"Yes," said Brandon, and the lines of his scarred brown face were deeper. He was thinking: "Funny she knew the way." There came before him suddenly the picture of a reckless, vital face set with unconquerable golden eyes, and hair like a living waterfall.

Tobul said softly: "I see what is in your mind. Kymra may have taken her, as I took you. I dare take no chances. Kill her."

"No!"

Sylvia looked at him, startled. He gripped his seat with corded hands, and argued desperately.

"It wouldn't do any good! If Kymra is in Sylvia, she'd only go back into—wherever she was before."

"Into some inanimate thing, Brandon. Perhaps in that state she could be forced— She would be helpless to move, as we both were in the ship. The cohesive frequencies of a disembodied intelligence undergo a violent change under solar bombardment, unless protected by some denser matter."

"I won't!" whispered Brandon.

He clung to the seat, fighting the inexorable command of Tobul's mind. He looked at Sylvia's eager, vital face, and his heartstrings knotted in him like the straining muscles of his body.

It was futile. Slowly he drew the small needle gun he always carried and slid the clip of poisoned needles into place. He raised it and aimed, at the girl who neither moved nor spoke.

He fired.

The needles vanished in midair with little bright spurts of flame. And Sylvia laughed,

"Tobul," she said, and the ringing bugle note that was not Sylvia's was in her voice again. "Not that easily, Tobul! I'll fight you, just as I fought in the old days, to the last ditch!"

As though of its own volition, Brandon's voice came, gentle and strange to his ears, with a feel of barbaric iron under the velvet.

"That vault is all that is left to me of Mars, Kymra. It is mine by right of conquest and the blood my people shed."

"Barbarian!" Sylvia tossed her head like a war horse scenting battle. "What is in that vault is mine by right of having built it, and the blood my people shed defending it! The secret of the things you stole from us lies locked in my brain. The things of your own borrowed civilization you shall not have, either.

"This dusty shell is still Mars, and though my race is dead, its people are still mine. I'll not have them misruled by a dog of a nomad, with only four centuries of borrowed culture behind him!"

Brandon felt a blind stab of rage through Tobul's guard, and some of the velvet sloughed away from the iron ring in his voice.

"Borrowed or not, I have the knowledge. The need to rule is as strong in me as it is in you, woman of the Prira Cen!

"Your people were soft with age and culture. You conquered us, yes, because you knew more. But our blood was strong. We took what we wanted and used it against you, and we were not bound by scruples about blood-letting!

"I'm beginning to find myself again. From what I have taken from this man's mind, I see that Mars needs new rule, new strength, the knowledge that I can give it. Mars can live again. But in my way, Kymra! The way of strength and manhood."

"The way of stupid, blundering beasts," said Sylvia, her voice deep with some powerful emotion. "You slaughtered the Prira Cen, the kindliest, wisest, gentlest race on Mars, because you were jealous of our knowledge. You called it 'foreign domination,' though we never killed a man of your people, and did you more good in ten years than you yourselves could have done in a century.

"Because we kept our race pure, you were jealous of us. Because we kept the secret of our one deadly weapon, you feared us, though we did it for your own protection."

"We crushed you without it," said Tobul.

"Only because we waited, not wanting to destroy you, and were betrayed. You were taking me to Rhiannon in chains, Tobul, but I tell you that no torture you could devise could have forced me to tell the secret of that weapon. Nor," she added with deliberate malice, "another secret, which you would like now, but cannot have."

Tobul did not answer her. Silently in Brandon's mind he said, "Take the small tube from your right-hand pocket."

The vise-grip of Tobul's will on his made even a pretense of resistance impossible. Brandon dropped the useless needle gun and did as he was told.

"She has nothing but the power of her mind," murmured Tobul. "She can't fight the strength of the projector long. Fire, Brandon!"

With some foreign knowledge, he pressed a stud. A faint beam of light leaped out, splattering in blazing incandescence against the barrier of force Kymra had built around Sylvia's body.

It burned and blazed, and the force wall held stubbornly, and Sylvia's blue eyes stared at him through the fire.

"You, too, Brandy?" she said, and now the voice was her own. "She made me understand, all in a flash. She can't hold out long. It's all so mad! Brandy, she's weakening. Brandy, can't you do something!"

He couldn't, though the sweat of agony needled his face. Out of some dim distance he sensed a growing heat and glare and thought it was from the clashing energies before him, until he realized it was in the wrong direction.

The stern plates of the cabin were glowing cherry-red.

Somehow he found his voice. "The fuel tanks!" he yelled. "Got to get out. Somebody's got a heat beam on us."

Miraculously, those two warring intelligences understood. The blazing battle of force broke off. The hull plates paled—

They ran. With all their strength they leaped through the port and pelted over the desert, trailing crazy shadows from the double moons.

Light gravity and long legs took them barely out of danger. Brandon threw Sylvia flat just as the tanks let go. A thundering, howling wind swept over them with a solid wall of dust, and a vast flame pillared up into the sky.

For an incredibly long moment it painted every detail of the scene in wicked crimson—the gaunt, worn shell of a volcanic cone dead and buried for unnumbered centuries and bared capriciously now by the restless sand, a few Cyclopean blocks of Terellan marble cut to shapeless lumps by the passing years, tumbled about a gaping hole.

Directly in front of the hole was a big, fast, convertible spaceship. From it had come the heat beam.

"Dhu Kar," said Brandon, coughing dust.

"Why does this Dhu Kar wish to kill you?" asked Tobul.

"For the same reasons I'd like to kill him," returned Brandon grimly. "Except that he's a vandal and a swine, and I'm a very charming fellow. Wait a bit. You'll see."

He got up, and Sylvia, as usual, scrambled up before he could help her. Her face was pale and a little frightened, but her blue eyes danced.

"I've always wanted real adventure," she said, with a shaky little laugh. "I'm getting it!"

They went toward the spaceship. And up out of the black pit, looking like a misshapen demon in the light of the double moons, came a squat shape bearing a burden—a radio-controlled robot carrier.

Brandon felt the tendrils of Tobul's mind reaching out to search the mind of the man who blocked his way to the vault.

"He's looting my vault," whispered Tobul. "My vault, built and sealed against time forty thousand years ago. This outland dog!"

"And what he can't carry away he'll destroy, partly to cover his tracks, mostly to keep anyone else from profiting." Brandon's tawny head came up. "Let me handle Dhu Kar myself."

"I can't afford to risk your body, Brandon."

Brandon said angrily: "Look here, Tobul—"

The iron hand of Tobul's will closed on his mind. He shrugged, and went on in silence, Sylvia's firm shoulder close to his.

Dhu Kar of Venus came out of the air lock of his ship.

He loomed hugely in the shifting light. The fish-belly white of his face and hands gleamed sharply out of the dark furs he wore against the Martian chill. He was bareheaded, according to the custom of his people, his snowy hair intricately coiled.

He held a needle gun in his hand, and his eyes were cold little chips of moonlight in his broad white face.

"Didn't know you had a woman aboard, Brandon," he said. His voice was harsh and slurring. "Yes, I recognize you, Miss Eustace. I'm glad you weren't harmed."

"He'll be happy to take you home, darling, for a small consideration. Say a million credits or so."

Brandon was advancing slowly, poised on the balls of his feet. Dhu Kar grinned.

"How right you are, Brandon. For once you're bringing me business instead of getting it away. But you can relax, Brandon. You won't have to worry about it."

He raised his gun slightly. Sylvia cried out and made a move toward Brandon. The gun hissed softly.

The needles splattered harmlessly against a wall of force, just as Brandon's had done back in the ship. And Sylvia Eustace turned and ran.

"I'm not doing this, Brandy," she yelled, her long legs flashing through the dust. "Are you all right?"

"All right!" he yelled back, and rushed after her, impelled by Tobul's furious command to get to the vault tunnel first.

Dhu Kar was staring from his gun to the running man in open-mouthed amazement. Then his jaw shut hard. The girl didn't matter—he could catch her. But Brandon—

If something was wrong with his gun, he'd try something else. He fumbled in a capacious pocket, and his powerful arm flexed.

The gas capsule burst just at Brandon's feet, Tobul, concentrating every effort on catching Kymra, was caught off guard. Before he could stop himself, Brandon had breathed enough of it to drop him dazed in the sand.

He floundered away to windward, and realized that Tobul, associated as he was with Brandon's physical medium, was momentarily affected, too.

Sylvia's flying form vanished into the pit mouth. Dhu Kar laughed and ran toward Brandon, very light and swift for such a big man.

Brandon got to his feet and stood swaying, lost in a roaring mist, his hands raised blindly, waiting.

A pair of vast white hands came out of the darkness toward his throat. He caught them. He fought to hold them off, but his sinews were water.

The hands got closer. There was a face behind them now, broad and pale and contentedly smiling. Brandon's white teeth showed through his tawny beard. He gulped the clean desert air and scourged his lagging strength into his arms, to hold those hands away.

But the stuff he'd breathed sent a black tide swirling through his brain. The hands and the smiling face were drowned in it.

The wide-winged bird on his circlet gleamed in the cold light of Diemos; the lines of his scarred, handsome face were deep and strong. He dropped Dhu Kar's wrists.

The last desperate backlash of his strength went into his forward surge, the thrust of his hands, to Dhu Kar's throat.

The Venusian laughed and flung him off. Brandon crumpled on the sand, and looked up at death. He was grinning, the reckless grin that women sighed at on the televisor screens.

Some little mocking imp in his blacked-out brain whispered: "No audience, Brandy! You can quit."

But he didn't. And death came down in two white hands.

And vanished, in a sudden, coruscating puff of light.

Tobul's voice spoke, through the stifling darkness in his mind. The velvet was all gone from it now. It was clean, barbaric steel.

"I was affected only for an instant. I could have saved you this. But Kymra was gone then, and I wanted to see how men fight today.

"That circlet you wear was the crown of my fathers, when they were nomads living on raided herds and stolen grain. Keep it, Brandon. And believe me when I say I regret having to use your body. I shall try not to do it violence."

Brandon felt a tingling fire sweep through him, and quite suddenly the effects of the gas were gone. Some vibration Tobul freed, stimulating the natural processes of his body to instantaneous reaction. He got up.

"Tobul," he said, "did you say that Kymra knew the secret of building a body for you?"

"Yes. But there is no way now of forcing her to do it. The girl fights well, for all she's a Blue Hair."

"I'll find a way," said Brandon.

Tobul's voice came deep and strong in his brain.

"I admire you, Brandon. I wish to help you all I can. But this fight is between Kymra and me. We are of opposing races, opposing creeds. The will, the actual need to rule is inherent in both of us, as the need to breathe is in you. Not the will merely for power, but for the guidance of millions of people to what we believe is a better way of life.

"We have different ways, Kymra and I. There is not room on Mars for both of them.

"We will go, Brandon. Down into the vault. Kymra is there ahead of me, but I still have some powers. One of us will not come out."

Brandon went, down into the Stygian shadow of the tunnel. Somewhere ahead was Sylvia, and Kymra of the Prira Cen, and the powerful things in the vault he could only guess at.

Behind him, outside, was sleeping Mars, resigned to the slow advance of death, living out its little days in peace.

Behind him, too, long after the tunnel roof had killed all sound from beyond, four ships came flashing down through the moonlight, drawn by the great pyre of Sylvia's flier.

Jarthur, president of the Society for the Preservation of Martian Relics, looked out at the worn stump of the volcano—a tall, weedy man with sad Martian eyes and semi-military authority.

"These things are all we have left," he said to an assistant. "These bones and shards of our history. And even these the outlanders strip from us."

He flipped open the intership radio connection.

"Cover this area thoroughly. Issue orders that everyone found here is to be arrested. If they resist, fire. Anesthetic needles. No one is to be allowed to escape."

It was cold in the tunnel, and musty with the dead smell of time. It was dark, too, but Brandon had no trouble finding his way. The square passageway, sheathed in metal of the same forgotten alloy as Tobul's ship, ran straight ahead and down.

Tobul explained it, answering Brandon's question.

"Those were troubled times. I knew that Rhiannon might be destroyed at any time. So I built this vault, sheathed in metal that will not corrode and is harder than the finest steel. It's air-tight, and filled with a preservative gas—or was, before the Venusian broke in.

"In it I had placed the sum of our knowledge, science and arts and pleasures, and with them the two secrets we took from the Prira Cen but could not use—the machine of regeneration and the weapon.

"They're still here, waiting. They mean the rule of Mars."

Presently Brandon came to massive metal doors that barred his way. The controls were locked from the inside. Tobul said:

"The projector, Brandon. The same one."

He pressed the stud. The faint beam of light focused on the door. The metal glowed, wavered, and crumbled away into fine powder.

"It upsets molecular cohesion, reducing the metal to fine particles of its original elements," Tobul explained.

Brandon shuddered, thinking what would have happened to Sylvia. The beam ate and ate into the door, crumbling a hole around the massive controls.

It went through nearly a solid foot of metal, and went dead.

"Age," snarled Tobul. "And all this time, Kymra—" He broke off. "Put your hands in the hole, Brandon."

He obeyed, remembering the cabin door on the ship and wondering if he'd be destroyed by Kymra's secret weapon as soon as he entered, or whether he'd live long enough to say goodbye to Sylvia.

The weakened metal went through, under the power impulse from Tobul's brain. The massive valves swung back—

Brandon stood frozen on the threshold.

The vault stretched away into gleaming distances filled with machines, with racks of metal scrolls and objects of a million shapes and sizes. All the life and learning of ancient Mars, the scientific powers of the Sorcerers of Rhiannon, preserved by the foresight of one man.

But it wasn't that sight, tremendous as it was, that set the blood hammering into Brandon's throat and wrists.

Directly across from the door, as though brought in just before it was closed, was a huge glass cabinet set in an intricate web of coils. These shimmered in a halo of light, at once subdued and fierce.

Beneath the cabinet were several self-sealing metal containers. On the floor of it, inside, were trays and bowls of chemicals.

Above these, in the very center of the soft, deep glow, a shimmering thing stood, already vaguely formulated.

Witch fires danced over the chemicals, whirling upward in a spiral of incandescence. As though painted by a rapid brush, line and color took shape—

The fires died down, the glass door opened, and a girl stepped out.

A tall, long-limbed girl, naked as the moon and as white. She moved with a vital grace, and her eyes were like bits of living gold, proud, unconquerable, meeting Brandon's own.

And her hair was blue, rippling down over her shoulders like the curl of a living wave over foam white coral.

Brandon heard a long, quivering sigh through his mind, and Tobul said:

"Kymra."

The girl nodded and turned to a curious thing raised on a metal tripod. It seemed to be mainly a crystal prism forming the core of a helix, which was of some material midway between crystal and metal—partially transparent, and made up of countless intricate facets.

The helix broke at its lower end into a score of shining strands which fanned out into a circle.

Sylvia Eustace spoke suddenly from where she stood, at one side of Kymra and a little behind her.

"What are you going to do?"

Kymra's voice was very grave when she answered. Her golden eyes watched Brandon with somber regret.

"I am going to kill," she said quietly.

Her clear, muted voice rang softly from the metal vault, heavy with regret.

"For the first time one of the Prira Cen is going to take life willfully. I'm sorry, Max Brandon, that you must be the innocent victim—doubly sorry because of what I have read in this girl's mind.

"But you—and I—are less important than Mars."

Tobul, speaking aloud through Brandon's throat, said harshly: "So you have had to come to my way at last."

She shook her head, that glorious shining hair like the forgotten sea that had lapped this island.

"No, Tobul. Because I take no pride in it, only sorrow. If my people had seen in time that they must deal with your barbarians as they would with a horde of wild beasts, humanely but firmly—" Her white shoulders shimmered through the shadowy blue.

"But they didn't," said Tobul, and his voice held a bitter satisfaction. "You'll be all alone, Kymra, in an alien world."

"No. You're not the only one who looked ahead, Tobul! My seven wisest councilors took refuge in sensitized stones, which you brought here to this vault. They knew that I would live, as they do. It was the thought-impulses of their minds that led me here, after Dhu Kar broke your sending mechanism moving it.

"Their atomic patterns are inherent in the frequencies of their consciousness. That's the secret of building bodies, Tobul. Given the consciousness and the necessary chemicals, that machine can create an identical replica, as you see in me.

"Sylvia, my dear," she added gently, "it will be quite painless. If I had any other sure weapon to use against Tobul's strength, I would, and then rebuild Brandon's body. But this force projects the consciousness into some unknown dimension, just as solar rays will. It cannot be recalled."

Her hands dropped out of sight below the prism. Brandon could see the ripple of firm muscles along her arms as she went through some complicated operation.

"Goodbye, Tobul," she said softly. "Strange that we must end like this, in a world so different from the one we knew."

The prism began to glow with some queer perversion of light that seemed rather luminous darkness. It ran along the facets of the helix, faster and faster, stranger, darker, more dazzling.

Brandon felt every drop of blood in him stop for a second, and then race on again, with the swirl of that mad, black luminosity. A cold terror caught him, a thing that hadn't come at all when Dhu Kar's hands were at his throat.

He felt Tobul's being surge within him, fierce and rebellious and bitter. Not afraid, much. Only ragingly sad at his defeat, and the thought of his people being ruled by Kymra of the Prira Cen.

"Negative energy," said Kymra's voice, ringing through the great vaulted rooms like a muted bugle. "It taps the power of the galactic wheel itself, turning against the cohesive force of space. Energy so close to the primal warp of creation that it needs only the slightest charge to push it over into the negative—the opposite balance that everything possesses."

The grave, sad voice beat against Brandon's ears.

"There is no defense against it, Tobul. All your force screens and projectors are worse than useless. They attract now, instead of repelling. Do you wonder we kept this weapon secret?"

The little threads of blackness spiraled out into a cone, and grew.

Brandon's heart thundered in his throat. The mocking devil in his brain laughed because the reckless grin was on his lips, playing to the audience—Sylvia's stricken eyes.

He was sorry for Sylvia. She'd be alone now, in an alien world of wealth and decorum, that only he could have taken her out of.

Alone, in an alien world—

Brandon swallowed his heart. A sudden, desperate hope flared in him. Useless, but he had to try. The thing that had driven him through the desert made him try.

He started to cry out, "Kymra!" And Tobul's will clamped his tongue to silence.

"I will not beg for life," he said.

Things happened then, all at once. Sylvia made a long-legged leap forward, into the path of that blackness that ribboned and twisted out from the helix. In a second it would have touched her. But Brandon, moving instinctively, so that Tobul had no time to catch his conscious thought and block it, flung himself against her.

She went sprawling over out of harm's way. Kymra caught her breath sharply and started to move the projector to a new focus. And Brandon, looking up, cried suddenly:

"Jarthur!"

He stood there, the tall, thin Martian with the sad eyes. He had a needle gun in his hand, and six or seven black-clad policemen just behind him.

He stared, momentarily stunned, at the vault and Kymra, with the blue hair cascading over her naked shoulders.

Kymra made a sharp movement. The dark light in the prism changed. The black cone unraveled itself, back into the helix. Brandon's heart gave a wild shudder of relief. Kymra was reluctant to take innocent lives.

He scrambled up, sensing Tobul's dangerous alertness. Jarthur, forcing himself to steadiness in spite of his amazement, said:

"Max Brandon, you're under arrest."

Tobul acted with the swiftness of his barbarian ancestors. With anesthetic needles splattering in flames from his force shield, he charged into the middle of Jarthur's group.

The shock of Brandon's immunity demoralized them. Tobul's mind put forth tendrils of iron force.

"Surround me," he said. "Walk forward,"

Brandon saw the look in Jarthur's eyes, midway between nightmare and reluctant acceptance of insanity. Then he obeyed. Tobul moved forward, surrounded by a living shield.

Kymra stood irresolute behind the projector, reluctant even then to destroy more of her people. And then Sylvia moved.

She uncoiled from the floor with every ounce of her lithe strength, hurtling into Kymra. Kymra's mental force shield must have been momentarily dispersed by the shock of Jarthur's entrance and Tobul's sudden maneuver.

Sylvia crashed into her, knocking her away from the projector. She yelled, "Brandy! Do something!" But it was Tobul who flung away his unwilling protectors and gained the control board behind the projector.

Kymra rose, dignified and beautiful even then, standing beside the regenerator.

"It's no use, Tobul," she said. "You can't use it."

Brandon heard his voice say softly:

"You forgot the girl. She was where she could see your hands—and she didn't blank her mind to what she saw."

Tobul's hands moved over the intricate controls. Almost as an afterthought, he said to Jarthur, through Brandon's mouth:

"You are no longer needed. Go."

Jarthur's sad eyes became furious.

"See here, Brandon! I don't know what kind of madness this is—probably some secret you've stolen from this place. But you're through looting. I'm going to send you to Phobos if I die doing it!"

"You will," said Tobul calmly, and shrugged. "Please yourself."

Kymra said steadily: "You don't know how to control the force. Every living thing beyond its focus will be destroyed, and part of the inanimate substance, before you can stop it even by smashing the projector."

"You said yourself, Kymra, that Mars is more important than any of us."

The prism began to glow with its queer, black light.

And Brandon said desperately: "Tobul!"

"I'm sorry to cheat you of your body, Brandon. But this must be done."

Black rage suddenly took Brandon's mind, drowning out even the flashes of Jarthur's needles dying against the force screen.

"You fool!" he snarled. "Can't you see that the world has changed? The things you're fighting over don't exist anymore!"

"Silence, Brandon!"

The black threads were weaving themselves again around the focus of the projector, twisting out toward Kymra of the Prira Cen. In a few seconds they'd blast her out of existence, and the regenerator with her—and Brandon's only chance to get rid of Tobul and be a normal man again.

He could foresee Tobul's mind moving to silence his own. His hands were free from the projector now.

With a characteristic flourish, he ripped the circlet from his head and held it up.

"By this crown, Tobul, I've earned the right to speak!"

The mocking imp in Brandon's brain whispered: "Every inch the hero!" And behind it he could feel the struggle in Tobul's mind.

It seemed an eternity before the quiet, curt answer came. "Speak, then."

Brandon spoke, aloud, to Kymra as much as to Tobul.

"You say that Mars is your first consideration, and I believe you. But you still live in the past. Can't you see that the war between Tobul's people and the Prira Cen is as dead as the dust of your bodies?

"What right has either of you to rob Mars of the other? The two of you, working together as balancing forces instead of enemies, could make Mars the greatest planet in the System. You could give her water again, and the air she's losing, the courage and will to live that she's lost.

"You could bring her the knowledge of the Lost Islands and the Prira Cen—complete, not in half-forgotten fragments. Kymra's councilors are invaluable to all humanity. What right have you, Tobul, to destroy them?

"The world has changed. With each of you, the other is the only link to the world you knew. There can be no real companionship for you with anyone else.

"What human would mate with someone forty thousand years old? Yet you're both young. Think of that, for a minute. To live for well-nigh endless years with no one to speak to, no understanding, only awe and fear and perhaps hate?

"For Heaven's sake, Tobul, if you're the brave man, the great man you believe yourself to be, face this out and see the truth in it!"

The little black threads wove out and out, and Kymra's eyes were burning gold, proud and steady.

Sylvia spoke up furiously. "He's right, you know. You're just fooling yourselves. You don't care who you hurt as long as you don't have to share your power!"

"That's not true," said Kymra gently. And Tobul echoed: "No—"

Brandon felt Tobul's mind gather into itself, thinking. For an instant his body was free from compulsion. He raised his foot and sent the projector crashing to the floor.

It shattered, became meaningless, shining fragments. But the fragments lay about a gaping hole, where the little black worms had gnawed.

Jarthur had stopped the useless firing. His eyes were dazed, bewildered, but his back was stubbornly straight.

"I don't understand," he said. "I may be only playing into your hands, Brandon. But if there are really beings from the past who can help Mars to live again—I beg them both to do it."

Tobul whispered in Brandon's mind: "What is all this to you, Brandon? You, an Earthman."

He shrugged. "I'm a human being, too. And I think I'm seeing what I've always wanted to see. The thing that, subconsciously, has drawn me to hunt up the old, forgotten places. I'm seeing the past—the past that is as real as the future or the present—come into its own."

"You're a looter, Brandon," said Jarthur harshly.

"But I've never destroyed anything. Oh, I'm not excusing myself. And I'm beginning to see the error of my ways."

"Perhaps," said Tobul shrewdly, "because this looks more exciting?"

Kymra said softly: "Your barbarian ancestors, Tobul, prided themselves on being honest with themselves. Let us be."

Brandon could feel the struggle that went on in Tobul's mind. It seemed to him that the whole universe had stopped breathing, waiting. And at last, reluctantly, Tobul said:

"Brandon speaks the truth. Much as I hate it, it is the truth. Blast you, Brandon, why did I give you my crown to wear?"

"You may have it back." Brandon was suddenly weak, almost hysterical with relief. "I don't want much—"

"Much?"

"Well, my body has served as your draft animal. I'm giving up a profitable career of grave robbing in order to act as your ambassador, your link between the past and the present—"

"Ambassador!" said Kymra, turning her imperious, golden gaze on him. "Who has asked you?"

"Hm-m-m," said Brandon. "You'll need a personal diplomat, too. Can't expect love and kisses all in one minute, after forty thousand years—know anybody who could do it better?"

Kymra looked at Brandon's handsome head cocked back, with the wide-winged bird glittering above it and his white teeth gleaming. She laughed.

"You're mad, as well as insolent. But—Tobul?"

"Why not? Kymra, you will restore my body, of course. But before I leave this Brandon, there is something I want to do—to tame him."

Brandon's heart gave a swift, little jerk of apprehension. He stammered: "What—" But the iron grip of Tobul's will was on his mind.

He found himself walking over to Sylvia. He found himself taking her in his arms, and whispering something, and then—

"So that," said Tobul, "is how it's done now. The world hasn't changed so much!"

Child of the Sun

Planet Stories, Spring 1942


Eric Falken stood utterly still, staring down at his leashed and helpless hands on the controls of the spaceship Falcon.

The red lights on his indicator panel showed Hiltonist ships in a three-dimensional half-moon, above, behind, and below him. Pincer jaws, closing fast.

The animal instinct of escape prodded him, but he couldn't obey. He had fuel enough for one last burst of speed. But there was no way through that ring of ships. Tractor-beams, criss-crossing between them, would net the Falcon like a fish.

There was no way out ahead, either. Mercury was there, harsh and bitter in the naked blaze of the sun. The ships of Gantry Hilton, President of the Federation of Worlds, inventor of the Psycho-Adjuster, and ruler of men's souls, were herding him down to a landing at the lonely Spaceguard outpost.

A landing he couldn't dodge. And then . . . .

For Paul Avery, a choice of death or Happiness. For himself and Sheila Moore, there was no choice. It was death.

The red lights blurred before Falken's eyes. The throb of the plates under his feet faded into distance. He'd stood at the controls for four chronometer days, ever since the Hiltonists had chased him up from Losangles, back on Earth.

He knew it was because he was exhausted that he couldn't think, or stop the nightmare of the past days from tramping through his brain, hammering the incessant question at him. How?

How had the Hiltonists traced him back from New York? Paul Avery, the Unregenerate recruit he went to get, had passed a rigid psycho-search—which, incidentally, revealed the finest brain ever to come to the Unregenerate cause. He couldn't be a spy. And he'd spoken to no one but Falken.

Yet they were traced. Hiltonist Black Guards were busy now, destroying the last avenues of escape from Earth, avenues that he, Falken, had led them through.

But how? He knew he hadn't given himself away. For thirty years he'd been spiriting Unregenerates away from Gantry Hilton's strongholds of Peace and Happiness. He was too old a hand for blunders.

Yet, somehow, the Black Guards caught up with them at Losangles, where the Falcon lay hidden. And, somehow, they got away, with a starving green-eyed girl named Kitty . . . .

"Not Kitty," Falken muttered. "Kitty's Happy. Hilton took Kitty, thirty years ago. On our wedding day."

A starving waif named Sheila Moore, who begged him for help, because he was Eric Falken and almost a god to the Unregenerates. They got away in the Falcon, but the Hiltonist ships followed.

Driven, hopeless flight, desperate effort to shake pursuit before he was too close to the Sun. Time and again, using precious fuel and accelerations that tried even his tough body, Falken thought he had escaped.

But they found him again. It was uncanny, the way they found him.

Now he couldn't run any more. At least he'd led the Hiltonists away from the pitiful starving holes where his people hid, on the outer planets and barren asteroids and dark derelict hulks floating far outside the traveled lanes.

And he'd kill himself before the Hiltonist psycho-search could pick his brain of information about the Unregenerates. Kill himself, if he could wake up.

He began to laugh, a drunken, ragged chuckle. He couldn't stop laughing. He clung to the panel edge and laughed until the tears ran down his scarred, dark face.

"Stop it," said Sheila Moore. "Stop it, Falken!"

"Can't. It's funny. We live in hell for thirty years, we Unregenerates, fighting Hiltonism. We're licked, now. We were before we started.

"Now I'm going to die so they can suffer hell a few weeks more. It's so damned funny!"

* * *

Sleep dragged at him. Sleep, urgent and powerful. So powerful that it seemed like an outside force gripping his mind. His hands relaxed on the panel edge.

"Falken," said Sheila Moore. "Eric Falken!"

Some steely thing in her voice lashed him erect again. She crouched on the shelf bunk against the wall, her feral green eyes blazing, her thin body taut in its torn green silk.

"You've got to get away, Falken. You've got to escape."

He had stopped laughing. "Why?" he asked dully.

"We need you, Falken. You're a legend, a hope we cling to. If you give up, what are we to go on?"

She rose and paced the narrow deck. Paul Avery watched her from the bunk on the opposite wall, his amber eyes dull with the deep weariness that slackened his broad young body.

Falken watched her, too. The terrible urge for sleep hammered at him, bowed his grey-shot, savage head, drew the strength from his lean muscles. But he watched Sheila Moore.

That was why he had risked his life, and Avery's, and broken Unregenerate law to save her, unknown and untested. She blazed, somehow. She stabbed his brain with the same cold fire he had felt after Kitty was taken from him.

"You've got to escape," she said. "We can't give up, yet."

Her voice was distant, her raw-gold hair a detached haze of light. Darkness crept on Falken's brain.

"How?" he whispered.

"I don't know . . . Falken!" She caught him with thin painful fingers. "They're driving you down on Mercury. Why not trick them? Why not go—beyond?"

He stared at her. Even he would never have thought of that. Beyond the orbit of Mercury there was only death.

Avery leaped to his feet. For a startled instant Falken's brain cleared, and he saw the trapped, wild terror in Avery's face.

"We'd die," said Avery hoarsely. "The heat . . ."

Sheila faced him. "We'll die anyway, unless you want Psycho-Change. Why not try it, Eric? Their instruments won't work close to the Sun. They may even be afraid to follow."

The wiry, febrile force of her beat at them. "Try, Eric. We have nothing to lose."

Paul Avery stared from one to the other of them and then to the red lights that were ships. Abruptly he sank down on the edge of his bunk and dropped his broad, fair head in his hands. Falken saw the cords like drawn harp-strings on the backs of them.

"I . . . can't," whispered Falken. The command to sleep was once more a vast shout in his brain. "I can't think."

"You must!" said Sheila. "If you sleep, we'll be taken. You won't be able to kill yourself. They'll pick your brain empty. Then they'll Hiltonize you with the Psycho-Adjuster.

"They'll blank your brain with electric impulses and then transmit a whole new memory-pattern, even shifting the thought-circuits so that you won't think the same way. They'll change your metabolism, your glandular balance, your pigmentation, your face, and your fingerprints."

He knew she was recounting these things deliberately, to force him to fight. But still the weak darkness shrouded him.

"Even your name will be gone," she said. "You'll be placid and lifeless, lazing your life away, just one of Hilton's cattle." She took a deep breath and added, "Like Kitty."

He caught her shoulders, then, grinding the thin bone of them. "How did you know?"

"That night, when you saw me, you said her name. Perhaps I made you think of her. I know how it feels, Eric. They took the boy I loved away from me."

He clung to her, the blue distant fire in his eyes taking life from the hot, green blaze of hers. There was iron in her. He could feel the spark and clash of it against his mind.

"Talk to me," he whispered. "Keep me awake. I'll try."

Waves of sleep clutched Falken with physical hands. But he turned to the control panel.

The bitter blaze of Mercury stabbed his bloodshot eyes. Red lights hemmed him in. He couldn't think. And then Sheila Moore began to talk. Standing behind him, her thin vital hands on his shoulders, telling him the story of Hiltonism.

"Gantry Hilton's Psycho-Adjuster was a good thing at first. Through the mapping and artificial blanking of brain-waves and the use of electro-hypnotism—the transmission of thought-patterns directly to the brain—it cured non-lesional insanity, neuroses, and criminal tendencies. Then, at the end of the Interplanetary War . . ."

Red lights closing in. How could he get past the Spaceguard battery? Sheila's voice fought back the darkness. Speed, that was what he needed. And more guts than he'd ever had to use in his life before. And luck.

"Keep talking, Sheila. Keep me awake."

" . . . Hilton boomed his discovery. The people were worn out with six years of struggle. They wanted Hiltonism, Peace and Happiness. The passion for escape from life drove them like lunatics."

He found the emergency lever and thrust it down. The last ounce of hoarded power slammed into the rocket tubes. The Falcon reared and staggered.

Then she shot straight for Mercury, with the thin high scream of tortured metal shivering along the cabin walls.

Spaceshells burst. They shook the Falcon, but they were far behind. The ring of red lights was falling away. Acceleration tore at Falken's body, but the web of sleep was loosening. Sheila's voice cried to him, the story of man's slavery.

The naked, hungry peaks of Mercury snarled at Falken. And then the guns of the Spaceguard post woke up.

"Talk, Sheila!" he cried. "Keep talking!"

"So Gantry Hilton made himself a sort of God, regulating the thoughts and emotions of his people. There is no opposition now, except for the Unregenerates, and we have no power. Humanity walks in a placid stupor. It cannot feel dissatisfaction, disloyalty, or the will to grow and change. It cannot fight, even morally.

"Gantry Hilton is a god. His son after him will be a god. And humanity is dying."

There was a strange, almost audible snap in Falken's brain. He felt a quick, terrible stab of hate that startled him because it seemed no part of himself. Then it was gone, and his mind was clear.

He was tired to exhaustion, but he could think, and fight.

Livid, flaming stars leaped and died around him. Racked plates screamed in agony. Falken's lean hands raced across the controls. He knew now what he was going to do.

Down, down, straight into the black, belching mouths of the guns, gambling that his sudden burst of speed would confuse the gunners, that the tiny speck of his ship hurtling bow-on would be hard to see against the star-flecked depths of space.

Falken's lips were white. Sheila's thin hands were a sharp unnoticed pain on his shoulders. Down, down . . . . The peaks of Mercury almost grazed his hull.

A shell burst searingly, dead ahead. Blinded, dazed, Falken held his ship by sheer instinct. Thundering rockets fought the gravitational pull for a moment. Then he was through, and across.

Across Mercury, in free space, a speeding mote lost against the titanic fires of the Sun.

* * *

Falken turned. Paul Avery lay still in his bunk, but his golden eyes were wide, staring at Falken. They dropped to Sheila Moore, who had slipped exhausted to the floor, and came back to Falken and stared and stared with a queer, stark look that Falken couldn't read.

Falken cut the rockets and locked the controls. Heat was already seeping through the hull. He looked through shaded ports at the vast and swollen Sun.

No man in the history of space travel had ventured so close before. He wondered how long they could stand the heat, and whether the hull could screen off the powerful radiations.

His brain, with all its knowledge of the Unregenerate camps, was safe for a time. Knowing the hopelessness of it, he smiled sardonically, wondering if sheer habit had taken the place of reason.

Then Sheila's bright head made him think of Kitty, and he knew that his tired body had betrayed him. He could never give up.

He went down beside Sheila. He took her hands and said:

"Thank you. Thank you, Sheila Moore."

And then, quite peacefully, he was asleep with his head in her lap.

* * *

The heat was a malignant, vampire presence. Eric Falken felt it even before he wakened. He was lying in Avery's bunk, and the sweat that ran from his body made a sticky pool under him.

Sheila lay across from him, eyes closed, raw-gold hair pushed back from her temples. The torn green silk of her dress clung damply. The starved thinness of her gave her a strange beauty, clear and brittle, like sculptured ice.

She'd lived in alleys and cellars, hiding from the Hiltonists, because she wouldn't be Happy. She was strong, that girl. Like an unwanted cat that simply wouldn't die.

Avery sat in the pilot's chair, watching through the shaded port. He swung around as Falken got up. The exhaustion was gone from his square young face, but his eyes were still veiled and strange. Falken couldn't read them, but he sensed fear.

He asked, "How long have I slept?"

Avery shrugged. "The chronometer stopped. A long time, though. Twenty hours, perhaps."

Falken went to the controls. "Better go back now. We'll swing wide of Mercury, and perhaps we can get through." He hoped their constant velocity hadn't carried them too far for their fuel.

Relief surged over Avery's face. "The size of that Sun," he said jerkily. "It's terrifying. I never felt . . ."

He broke off sharply. Something about his tone brought Sheila's eyes wide open.

Suddenly, the bell of the mass-detector began to ring, a wild insistent jangle.

"Meteor!" cried Falken and leaped for the Visor screen. Then he froze, staring.

It was no meteor, rushing at them out of the vast blaze of the Sun. It was a planet.

A dark planet, black as the infinity behind it, barren and cruel as starvation, touched in its jagged peaks with subtle, phosphorescent fires.

Paul Avery whispered, "Good Lord! A planet, here? But it's impossible!"

Sheila Moore sprang up.

"No! Remember the old legends about Vulcan, the planet between Mercury and the Sun? Nobody believed in it, because they could never find it. But they could never explain Mercury's crazy orbit, either, except by the gravitational interference of another body."

Avery said, "Surely the Mercurian observatories would have found it?" A pulse began to beat in his strong white throat.

"It's there," snapped Falken impatiently. "And we'll crash it in a minute if we . . . Sheila! Sheila Moore!"

The dull glare from the ports caught the proud, bleak lines of his gypsy face, the sudden fire in his blue eyes.

"This is a world, Sheila! It might be a world for us, a world where Unregenerates could live, and wait!"

She gasped and stared at him, and Paul Avery said:

"Look at it, Falken! No one, nothing could live there."

Falken said softly, "Afraid to land and see?"

Yellow eyes burned into his, confused and wild. Then Avery turned jerkily away.

"No. But you can't land, Falken. Look at it."

Falken looked, using a powerful search-beam, probing. Vulcan was smaller even than Mercury. There was no atmosphere. Peaks like splinters of black glass bristled upward, revolving slowly in the Sun's tremendous blaze.

The beam went down into the bottomless dark of the canyons. There was nothing there, but the glassy rock and the dim glints of light through it.

"All the same," said Falken, "I'm going to land." If there was even a tiny chance, he couldn't let it slip.

Unregeneracy was almost dead in the inhabited worlds. Paul Avery was the only recruit in months. And it was dying in the miserable outer strongholds of independence.

Starvation, plague, cold, and darkness. Insecurity and danger, and the awful lost terror of humans torn from earth and light. Unless they could find a place of safety, with warmth and light and dirt to grow food in, where babies could be born and live, Gantry Hilton would soon have the whole Solar System for his toy.

There were no more protests. Falken set the ship down with infinite skill on a ledge on the night side. Then he turned, feeling the blood beat in his wrists and throat.

"Vac suits," he said. "There are two and a spare."

They got into them, shuffled through the airlock, and stood still, the first humans on an undiscovered world.

* * *

Lead weights in their boots held them so that they could walk. Falken thrust at the rock with a steel-shod alpenstock.

"It's like glass," he said. "Some unfamiliar compound, probably, fused out of raw force in the Solar disturbance that created the planets. That would explain its resistance to heat."

Radio headphones carried Avery's voice back to him clearly, and Falken realized that the stuff of the planet insulated against Solar waves, which would normally have blanketed communication.

"Whatever it is," said Avery, "it sucks up light. That's why it's never been seen. Only little glimmers seep through, too feeble for telescopes even on Mercury to pick up against the Sun. Its mass is too tiny for its transits to be visible, and it doesn't reflect."

"A sort of dark stranger, hiding in space," said Sheila, and shivered. "Look, Eric! Isn't that a cave mouth?"

Falken's heart gave a great leap of hope. There were caves on Pluto. Perhaps, in the hidden heart of this queer world . . . .

They went toward the opening. It was surprisingly warm. Falken guessed that the black rock diffused the Sun's heat instead of stopping it.

Thin ragged spires reared overhead, stabbing at the stars. Furtive glints of light came and went in ebon depths. The cave opened before them, and their torches showed glistening walls dropping sheer away into blackness.

Falken uncoiled a thousand-foot length of synthetic fiber rope from his belt. It was no larger than a spider web, and strong enough to hold Falken and Avery together. He tied one each of their metal boots to it and let it down.

It floated endlessly out, the lead weight dropping slowly in the light gravity. Eight hundred, nine hundred feet. When there were five feet of rope left in Falken's hand it stopped.

"Well," he said. "There is a bottom."

Paul Avery caught his arm. "You aren't going down?"

"Why not?" Falken scowled at him, puzzled. "Stay here, if you prefer. Sheila?"

"I'm coming with you."

"All right," whispered Avery. "I'll come.'" His amber eyes were momentarily those of a lion caught in a pit. Afraid, and dangerous.

Dangerous? Falken shook his head irritably He drove his alpenstock into a crack and made the rope fast.

"Hang onto it," he said. "We'll float like balloons, but be careful. I'll go first. If there's anything wrong down there, chuck off your other boot and climb up fast."

They went down, floating endlessly on the weighted rope. Little glints of light fled through the night-dark walls. It grew hot. Then Falken struck a jog in the cleft wall and felt himself sliding down a forty-five-degree offset. Abruptly, there was light.

Falken yelled, in sharp, wild warning.

The thing was almost on him. A colossus with burning eyes set on foot-long stalks, with fanged jaws agape and muscles straining.

Falken grabbed for his blaster. The quick motion over-balanced him. Sheila slid down on him and they fell slowly together, staring helplessly at destruction charging at them through a rainbow swirl of light.

The creature rushed by, in utter silence.

Paul Avery landed, his blaster ready. Falken and Sheila scrambled up, cold with the sweat of terror.

"What was it?" gasped Sheila.

Falken said shakily, "God knows!" He turned to look at their surroundings.

And swept the others back into the shadow of the cleft.

Riders hunted the colossus. Riders of a shape so mad that even in madness no human could have conceived them. Riders on steeds like the arrowing tails of comets, hallooing on behind a pack of nightmare hounds . . . .

Cold sweat drenched him. "How can they live without air?" he whispered. "And why didn't they see us?"

There was no answer. But they were safe, for the moment. The light, a shifting web of prismatic colors, showed nothing moving.

They stood on a floor of the glassy black rock. Above and on both sides walls curved away into the wild light—sunlight, apparently, splintered by the shell of the planet. Ahead there was an ebon plain, curving to match the curve of the vault.

Falken stared at it bitterly There was no haven here. No life as he knew it could survive in this pit. Yet there was life, of some mad sort. Another time, they might not escape.

"Better go back," he said wearily, and turned to catch the rope.

The cleft was gone.

Smooth and unbroken, the black wall mocked him. Yet he hadn't moved more than two paces. He smothered a swift stab of fear.

"Look for it," he snapped. "It must be here."

But it wasn't. They searched, and came again together, to stare at each other with eyes already a little mad.

Paul Avery laughed sharply. "There's something here," he said. "Something alive."

Falken snarled, "Of course, you fool! Those creatures . . . ."

"No. Something else. Something laughing at us."

"Shut up, Avery," said Sheila. "We can't go to pieces now."

"And we can't just stand here glaring." Falken looked out through the rainbow dazzle. "We may as well explore. Perhaps there's another way out."

Avery chuckled, without mirth. "And perhaps there isn't. Perhaps there was never a way in. What happened to it, Falken?"

"Control yourself," said Falken silkily, "or I'll rip off your oxygen valve. All right. Let's go."

They went a long way across the plain in the airless, unechoing silence, slipping on glassy rock, dazzled by the wheeling colors.

Then Falken saw the castle.

It loomed quite suddenly—a bulk of squat wings with queer, twisted turrets and straggling windows. Falken scowled. He was sure he hadn't seen it before. Perhaps the light . . .

They hesitated. Icy moth-wings flittered over Falken's skin. He would have gone around, but black walls seemed to stretch endlessly on either side of the castle.

"We go in," he said, and shuddered at the thought of meeting folk like those who hunted the flaming-eyed colossus.

Blasters ready, they went up flat titanic steps. A hall without doors stretched before them. They went down it.

* * *

Falken had a dizzy sense of change. The walls quivered as though with a wash of water over them. And then there were doors opening out of a round hall.

He opened one. There was a round hall beyond, with further doors. He turned back. The hall down which they had come had vanished. There were only doors. Hundreds of them, of odd shapes and sizes, like things imperfectly remembered.

Paul Avery began to laugh.

Falken struck him, hard, over the helmet. He stopped, and Sheila caught Falken's arm, pointing.

Shadows came, rushing and wheeling like monstrous birds. Cold dread caught Falken's heart. Shadows, hunting them . . .

He choked down the mad laughter rising in his own throat. He opened another door.

Halls, with doors. The shadows swept after them. Falken hurled the doors open, faster and faster, but there was never anything beyond but another hall, with doors.

His heart was gorged and painful. His clothing was cold on his sweating body. He plunged on and on through black halls and drifting shards of light, with the shadows dancing all around and doors, doors, doors.

Paul Avery made a little empty chuckle. "It's laughing," he mumbled and went down on the black floor. The shadows leaped.

Sheila's eyes were staring fire in her starved white face. Her terror shocked against Falken's brain and steadied it.

"Take his feet," he said harshly. "Take his feet."

They staggered on with their burden. And presently there were no more doors, and no roof overhead. Only the light and the glassy walls, and the dancing shadows.

The walls were thin in places. Through them Falken saw the dark colossus with its flaming eyes, straining through the spangled light. After it came the hounds and hunters, not gaining nor falling back, riding in blind absorption.

The walls faded, and the shadows. They were alone in the center of the black plain. Falken looked back at the castle.

There was nothing but the flat and naked rock.

He laid Avery down. He saw Sheila Moore fall beside him. He laughed, one small, mad chuckle. Then he crouched beside the others, his scarred gypsy face a mask of living stone.

Whether it was then, or hours later that he heard the voice, Falken never knew. But it spoke loudly in his mind, that voice. It brought him up, his futile blaster raised.

"You are humans," said the voice. "How wonderful!"

Falken looked upward, sensing a change in the light.

Something floated overhead. A ten-foot area of curdled glory, a core of blinding brilliance set in a lacy froth of fire.

The beauty of it caught Falken's throat. It shimmered with a sparkling opalescence, infinitely lovely—a living, tender flame floating in the rainbow light. It caught his heart, too, with a deep sadness that drifted in dim, faded colors beneath the brilliant veil.

It said, clearly as a spoken voice in his mind:

"Yes. I live, and I speak to you."

Sheila and Avery had risen. They stared, wide-eyed, and Sheila whispered, "What are you?"

The fire-thing coiled within itself. Little snapping flames licked from its edges, and its colors laughed.

"A female, isn't it? Splendid! I shall devise something very special." Colors rippled as its thoughts changed. "You amaze me, humans. I cannot read your minds, beyond thoughts telepathically directed at me, but I can sense their energy output.

"I had picked the yellow one for the strongest. He appeared to be so. Yet he failed, and you others fought through."

Avery stared at Falken with the dawn of an appalled realization in his amber eyes. Falken asked of the light:

"What are you?"

The floating fire dipped and swirled. Preening peacock tints rippled through it, to be drowned in fierce, proud scarlet. It said: "I am a child of the Sun."

It watched them gape in stunned amazement, and laughed with mocking golden notes.

"I will tell you, humans. It will amuse me to have an audience not of my own creating. Watch!"

A slab of the glassy rock took form before them. Deep in it, a spot of brilliance grew:

It was a Sun, in the first blaze of its virile youth. It strode the path of its galactic orbit alone. Then, from the wheeling depths of space, a second Sun approached.

It was huge, burning with a blue-white radiance. There was a mating, and the nine worlds were born in a rush of supernal fire.

And there was life. Not on the nine burning planets. But in free space, little globes of fire, bits of the Sun itself shocked somehow to intelligence in the vast explosion of energy.

The picture blurred. The colors of the floating light were dulled and dreamy.

"There were many of us," it sighed. "We were like tiny Suns, living on the conversion of our own atoms. We played, in open space . . . ."

Dim pictures washed the screen, glories beyond human comprehension—a faded vision of splendor, of alien worlds and the great wheeling Suns of outer space. The voice murmured:

"Like Suns, we radiated our energy. We could draw strength from our parent, but not enough. We died. But I was stronger than the rest, and more intelligent. I built myself a shell."

"Built it!" whispered Avery. "But how?"

"All matter is built of raw energy, electron and proton existing in a free state. With a part of my own mass I built this world around myself, to hold the energy of the Sun and check the radiation of my own vitality.

"I have lived, where my race died. I have watched the planets cool and live and die. I am not immortal. My mass grows less as it drains away through my shell. But it will be a long, long time. I shall watch the Sun die, too."

The voice was silent. The colors were ashes of light. Falken was stricken with a great poignant grief.

Then, presently, the little malicious flames frothed to life again, and the voice said.

"My greatest problem is amusement. Here in this black shell I am forced to devise pleasures from my own imagination."

Falken gasped. "The hunters, the cleft that vanished, and that hellish castle?" He was suddenly cold and hot at once.

"Clever, eh? I created my hunt some eons ago. According to my plan the beast can neither escape nor the hunters catch him. But, owing to the uncertainty factor, there is one chance in some hundreds of billions that one or the other event may occur. It affords me endless amusement."

"And the castle?" said Falken silkily. "That amused you, too."

"Oh, yes! Your emotional reactions . . . . Most interesting!" Falken raised his blaster and fired at the core of the light.

Living fire coiled and writhed. The Sun-child laughed.

"Raw energy only feeds me. What, are there no questions?"

Falken's voice was almost gentle. "Do you think of nothing but amusement?"

Savage colors rippled against the dim, sad mauves. "What else is there, to fill the time?"

Time. Time since little frozen Pluto was incandescent gas.

"You closed the opening we came through," said Avery abruptly.

"Of course."

"But you'll open it again? You'll let us go?"

The tone of his voice betrayed him. Falken knew, and Sheila.

"No," said Sheila throatily. "It won't let us go. It'll keep us up here to play with, until we die."

Ugly dark reds washed the Sun-child. "Death!" it whispered. "My creatures exist until I bid them vanish. But death, true death—that would be a supreme amusement!"

* * *

A DESPERATE, helpless rage gripped Falken. The vast empty vault mocked him with his dead hopes. It jeered at him with solid walls that were built and shifted like smoke by the power of this lovely, soulless flame.

Built, and shifted . . .

Sudden fire struck his brain. He stood rigid, stricken dumb by the sheer magnificence of his idea. He began to tremble, and the wild hope swelled in him until his veins were gorged and aching.

He said, with infinite care, "You can't create real living creatures, can you?"

"No," said the Sun-child. "I can build the chemicals of their bodies, but the vital spark eludes me. My creatures are simply toys activated by the electrical interplay of atoms. They think, in limited ways, and they feel crude emotions, but they do not live in the true sense."

"But you can build other things? Rocks, soil, water, air?"

"Of course. It would take a great deal of my strength, and it would weaken my shell, since I should have to break down part of the rock to its primary particles and rebuild. But even that I could do, without serious loss."

There was silence. The blue distant fires flared in Falken's eyes. He saw the others staring at him. He saw the chances of failure bulk over him like black thunderheads, crowned with madness and death.

But his soul shivered in ecstasy at the thing that was in it.

The Sun-child said silkily, "Why should I do all this?"

"For amusement," whispered Falken. "The most colossal game you have ever had."

Brilliant colors flared. "Tell me, human!"

"I must make a bargain first."

"Why should I bargain? You're mine, to do with as I will."

"Quite. But we couldn't last very long. Why waste your imagination on the three of us when you might have thousands?"

Avery's amber eyes opened wide. A shocked incredulity slackened Sheila's rigid muscles. The voice cried:

"Thousands of humans to play with?"

The eager greed sickened Falken. Like a child wanting a bright toy—only the toys were human souls.

"Not until the bargain is made," he said.

"Well? What is the bargain? Quick!"

"Let us go, in return for the game which I shall tell you."

"I might lose you, and then have nothing."

"You can trust us," Falken insisted. He was shaking, and his nerves ached. "Listen. There are thousands of my people, living like hunted beasts in the deserts of the Solar System. They need a world, to survive at all. If you'll build them one in the heart of this planet, I'll bring them here.

"You wouldn't kill them. You'd let them live, to admire and praise you for saving them. It would amuse you just to watch them for some time. Then you could take one, once in a while, for a special game.

"I don't want to do this. But it's better that they should live that way than be destroyed."

"And better for you, too, eh?" The Sun-child swirled reflectively. "Breed men like cattle, always have a supply. It's a wonderful idea . . ."

"Then you'll do it?" Sweat dampened Falken's brow.

"Perhaps . . . Yes! Tell me, quickly, what you want!"

Falken swung to his stunned and unbelieving companions. He gripped an arm of each, painfully hard.

"Trust me. Trust me, for God's sake!" he whispered. Then, aloud, "Help me to tell it what we need."

There was a little laughing ripple of golden notes in the Sun-child's light, but Falken was watching Sheila's eyes. A flash of understanding crossed them, a glint of savage hope.

"Oxygen," she said. "Nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide . . . ."

"And soil," said Falken. "Lime, iron, aluminum, silicon . . . ."

* * *

They came to on a slope of raw, red earth, still wet from the rain. A range of low hills lifted in the distance against a strange black sky. Small tattered clouds drifted close above in the rainbow's light.

Falken got to his feet. As far as he could see there were rolling stretches of naked earth, flecked with brassy pools and little ruddy streams. He opened his helmet and breathed the warm wet air. He let the rich soil trickle through his fingers and thought of the Unregenerates in their frozen burrows.

He smiled, because there were tears in his hard blue eyes.

Sheila gave a little sobbing laugh and cried, "Eric, it's done!" Paul Avery lifted dark golden eyes to the hills and was silent.

There was a laughing tremble of color in the air where the Sun-child floated. Small wicked flames drowned the sad, soft mauves. The Sun-child said:

"Look, Eric Falken. There, behind you."

Falken turned—and looked into his own face.

It stood there, his own lean body in the worn vac suit, his own gypsy face and the tangle of frosted curls. Only the eyes were different. The chill, distant blue was right, but there were spiteful flecks of gold, a malicious sparkle that was like . . . .

"Yes," purred the Sun-child. "Myself, a tiny particle, to activate the shell. A perfect likeness, no?"

A slow, creeping chill touched Falken's heart. "Why?" he asked.

"Long ago I learned the art of lying from men. I lied about reading minds. Your plan to trick me into building this world and then destroy me was plain on the instant of conception."

Laughing wicked colors coiled and spun.

"Oh, but I'm enjoying this! Not since I built my shell have I had such a game! Can you guess why I made your double?"

Falken's lips were tight with pain, his eyes savage with remorse at his own stupidity.

"It—he will go in my ship to bring my people here."

He knew that the Sun-child had picked his unwitting brain as cleanly as any Hiltonist psycho-search.

In sudden desperation he drew his blaster and shot at the mocking likeness. Before he tripped the trigger-stud a wall of ebon glass was raised between them. The blast-ray slid away in harmless fire and died, burned out.

The other Falken turned and strode away across the new land. Falken watched him out of sight, not moving nor speaking, because there was nothing to do, nothing to say.

The lovely wicked fire of the Sun-child faded suddenly.

"I am tired," it said. "I shall suckle the Sun, and rest."

It floated away. For all his agony, Falken felt the heart-stab of its sad, dim colors. It faded like a wisp of lonely smoke into the splintered light.

Presently there was a blinding flash and a sharp surge of air as a fissure was opened. Falken saw the creature, far away, pressed to the roof of the vault and pulsing as it drank the raw blaze of the Sun.

"Oh, God," whispered Falken. "Oh, God, what have I done?"

Falken laughed, one harsh wild cry. Then he stood quite still his hands at his sides, his face a mask cut deep in dark stone.

"Eric," whispered Sheila. "Please. I can't be brave for you all the time."

He was ashamed of himself then. He shook the black despair away with cynical fatalism.

"All right, Sheila. We'll be heroes to the bitter end. You, Avery. Get your great brain working. How can we save our people, and, incidentally, our own skins?"

Avery flinched as though some swift fear had stabbed him. "Don't ask me, Falken. Don't!"

"Why not? What the devil's the matter . . . ." Falken broke off sharply. Something cold and fierce and terrifying came into his face. "Just a minute, Avery," he said gently. "Does that mean you think you know a way?"

"I . . . For God's sake, let me alone!"

"You do know a way," said Falken inexorably. "Why shouldn't I ask you, Paul Avery? Why shouldn't you try to save your people?"

Golden eyes met his, desperate, defiant, bewildered, and pitiful all at once.

"They're not my people," whispered Avery.

They were caught, then, in a strange silence. Soundless wheeling rainbows brushed the new earth, glimmered in the brassy pools. Far up on the black crystal of the vault the Sun-child pulsed and breathed. And there was stillness, like the morning of creation.

Eric Falken took one slow, taut step, and said, "Who are you?"

The answer whispered across the raw red earth.

"Miner Hilton, the son of Gantry."

* * *

Falken raised the blaster, forgotten in his hand. Miner Hilton, who had been Paul Avery, looked at it and then at Falken's face, a shield of dark iron over cold, terrible flame.

He shivered, but he didn't move, nor speak.

"You know a way to fight that thing," said Falken, very softly, in his throat. "I want to kill you. But you know a way."

"I—I don't know. I can't . . ." Golden tortured eyes went to Sheila Moore and stayed there, with a dreadful lost intensity.

Falken's white teeth showed. "You want to tell, Miner Hilton. You want to help us, don't you? Because of Sheila!"

Young Hilton's face flamed red, and then went white. Sheila cried sharply, "Eric, don't! Can't you see he's suffering?"

But Falken remembered Kitty, and the babies who were born and died on freezing rock, without sun or shelter. He said, "She'd never have you, Hilton. And I'll tell you this. Perhaps I can't force out of you what you know. But if I can't, I swear to God I'll kill you with my own hands."

He threw back his head and laughed suddenly "Gantry Hilton's son—in love with an Unregenerate!"

"Wait, Eric." Sheila Moore put a hand on his arm to stop him, and went forward. She took Miner Hilton by the shoulders and looked up at him, and said, "It isn't so impossible, Miner Hilton. Not if what I think is true."

Falken stared at her in stunned amazement, beyond speech or movement. Then his heart was torn with sudden pain, and he knew, with the clarity of utter truth, that he loved Sheila Moore.

She said to Miner Hilton, "Why did you do this? And how?"

Young Hilton's voice was flat and strained. He made a move as though to take her hands from his shoulders, but he didn't. He stared across her red-gold head, at Falken.

"Something had to be done to stamp out the Unregenerates. They're a barrier to complete peace, a constant trouble. Eric Falken is their god, as—as Sheila said. If we could trap him, the rest would be easy. We could cure his people.

"My father couldn't do it himself. He's old, and too well-known.

"He sent me, because mine is the only other brain that could stand what I had to do. My father has trained me well.

"To get me by the psycho-search, my father gave me a temporary brain pattern. After I was accepted as a refugee, I established mental contact with him . . . ."

"Mental contact," breathed Falken. "That was it. That's why you were always so tired, why I couldn't shake pursuit."

"Go on," said Sheila, with a queer gentleness.

Hilton stared into space, without seeing.

"I almost had you in Losangles, Falken, but you were too quick for the Guards. Then, when we were trapped at Mercury, I tried to make you sleep. I was leading those ships, too.

"But I was tired, and you fought too well, you and Sheila. After that we were too close to the Sun. My thought waves wouldn't carry back to the ships."

He looked at Falken, and then down at Sheila's thin face.

"I didn't know there were people like you," he whispered. "I didn't know men could feel things, and fight for them like that. In my world, no one wants anything, no one fights, or tries . . . And I have no strength. I'm afraid."

Sheila's green eyes caught his, compelled them.

"Leave that world," she said. "You see it's wrong. Help us to make it right again."

In that second, Falken saw what she was doing. He was filled with admiration, and joy that she didn't really care for Hilton—and then doubt, that perhaps she did.

Miner Hilton closed his eyes. He struck her hands suddenly away and stepped back, and his blaster came ready into his hand.

"I can't," he whispered. His lips were white. "My father has taught me. He trusts me. And I believe in him. I must!"

Hilton looked where the glow of the Sun-child pulsed against ebon rock. "The Unregenerates won't trouble us anymore."

He raised the muzzle of his blaster to his head.

* * *

It was then that Falken remembered his was empty. He dropped it and sprang. He shocked hard against Hilton's middle, struck him down, clawing for his gun arm. But Hilton was heavy, and strong.

He rolled away and brought his barrel lashing down across Falken's temple. Falken crouched, dazed and bleeding, in the mud.

He laughed, and said, "Why don't you kill me, Hilton?"

Hilton looked from Falken's uncowed, snarling face to Sheila. The blaster slipped suddenly from his fingers. He covered his face with his hands and was silent, shivering.

Falken said, with curious gentleness, "That proves it. You've got to have faith in a thing, to kill or die for it."

Hilton whispered, "Sheila!" She smiled and kissed him, and Falken looked steadfastly away, wiping the blood out of his eyes.

Hilton grasped suddenly at the helmet of his vac-suit. He talked, rapidly, as he worked.

"The Sun-child creates with the force of its mind. It understands telekinesis, the control of the basic electrical force of the universe by thought, just as the wise men of our earth understood it. The men who walked on the water, and moved mountains, and healed the sick.

"We can only attack it through its mind. We'll try to weaken its thought-force, destroy anything it sends against us."

His fingers flashed between the helmet radio and the repair kit which is a part of every vac suit, using wires, spare parts, tools.

"There," said Hilton, after a long time. "Now yours."

Falken gave him his helmet. "Won't the Sun-child know what we're doing?" he asked, rather harshly.

Hilton shook his fair head. "It's weak now. It won't think about us until it has fed. Perhaps two hours more."

"Can you read its thoughts?" demanded Falken sourly.

"A very little," said Hilton, and Sheila laughed, quietly.

Hilton worked feverishly. Falken watched his deft fingers weaving a bewildering web of wires between the three helmets, watched him shift and change, tune and adjust. He watched the Sun-child throb and sparkle as the strength of the Sun sank into it. He watched Sheila Moore, staring at Hilton with eyes of brilliant green.

He never knew how much time passed. Only that the Sun-child gave a little rippling sigh of light and floated down. The fissure closed above it. Sheila caught her breath, sharp between her teeth.

Hilton rose. He said rapidly,

"I've done the best I can. It's crude, but the batteries are strong. The helmets will pick up and amplify the energy-impulses of our brains. We'll broadcast a single negative impulse, opposed to every desire the Sun-thing has.

"Stay close together, because if the wires are broken between the helmets we lose power, and it's going to take all the strength we have to beat that creature."

Falken put on his helmet. Little copper discs, cut from the sheet in the repair kit and soldered to wires with Hilton's blaster, fitted to his temples. Through the vision ports he could see the web of wires that ran from the three helmets through a maze of spare grids and a condenser, and then into the slender shaft of a crude directional antenna.

Hilton said, "Concentrate on the single negative, No."

Falken looked at the lovely shimmering cloud, coming toward them.

"It won't be easy," he said grimly, "to concentrate."

Sheila's eyes were savage and feral, watching that foam of living flame. Hilton's face was hidden. He said, "Switch on your radios."

Power hummed from the batteries. Falken felt a queer tingle in his brain.

The Sun-child hovered over them. Its mind-voice was silent, and Falken knew that the electrical current in his helmet was blanking his own thoughts.

They linked arms. Falken set his brain to beating out an impulse, like a radio signal, opposing the negative of his mind to the positive of the Sun-child's.

* * *

Falken stood with the others on spongy, yielding soil. Dim plant-shapes rose on all sides as far as he could see, forming an impenetrable tangle of queer geometric shapes that made him reel with a sense of spatial distortion.

Overhead, in a sea-green sky, three tiny suns wheeled in mad orbits about a common center. There was a smell in the air, a rotting stench that was neither animal or vegetable.

Falken stood still, pouring all his strength into that single mental command to stop.

The tangled geometric trees wavered momentarily. Dizzily, through the wheeling triple suns, the Sun-child showed, stabbed through with puzzled, angry scarlet.

The landscape steadied again. And the ground began to move.

It crawled in small hungry wavelets about Falken's feet. The musky, rotten smell was heavy as oil. Sheila and Hilton seemed distant and unreal, their faces hidden in the helmets.

Falken gripped them together and drove his brain to its task. He knew what this was. The reproduction of another world, remembered from the Sun-child's youth. If they could only stand still, and not think about it . . . .

He felt the earth lurch upward, and guessed that the Sun-child had raised its creation off the floor of the cavern.

The earth began to coil away from under his feet.

* * *

For a giddy instant Falken saw the true world far below, and the Sun-child floating in rainbow light.

It was angry. He could tell that from its color. Then suddenly the anger was drowned in a swirl of golden motes.

It was laughing. The Sun-child was laughing.

Falken fought down a sharp despair. A terrible fear of falling oppressed him. He heard Sheila scream. The world closed in again.

Sheila Moore looked at him from between two writhing trees.

He hadn't let her go. But she was there. Hairy branches coiled around her, tore her vac-suit. She shrieked . . . .

Falken cried out and went forward. Something held him. He fought it off, driven by the agony in Sheila's cry.

Something snapped thinly. There was a flaring shock inside his helmet. He fell, and staggered up and on, and the hungry branches whipped away from the girl.

She stood there, her thin white body showing through the torn vac-suit, and laughed at him.

He saw Miner Hilton crawling dazed on the living ground, toward the thing that looked like Sheila and laughed with mocking golden motes in its eyes.

A vast darkness settled on Falken's soul. He turned. Sheila Moore crouched where he had thrown her from him, in his struggle to help the lying shell among the trees.

He went and picked her up. He said to Miner Hilton, "Can we fix these broken wires?"

Hilton shook his head. The shock of the breaking seemed to have steadied him a little. "No," he said. "Too much burned out."

"Then we're beaten." Falken turned a bitter, snarling face to the green sky, raised one futile fist and shook it. Then he was silent, looking at the others.

Sheila Moore said softly, "This is the end, isn't it?"

Falken nodded. And Miner Hilton said, "I'm not afraid now." He looked at the trees that hung over them, waiting, and shook his head. "I don't understand. Now that I know I'm going to die, I'm not afraid."

Sheila's green eyes were soft and misty. She kissed Hilton, slowly and tenderly, on the lips.

Falken turned his back and stared at the twisted ugly trees. He didn't see them. And he wasn't thinking of the Unregenerates and the world he'd won and then lost.

* * *

Sheila's hand touched him. She whispered, "Eric . . ."

Her eyes were deep, glorious green. Her pale starved face had the brittle beauty of wind-carved snow. She held up her arms and smiled.

Falken took her and buried his gypsy face in the raw gold of her hair.

"How did you know?" he whispered. "How did you know I loved you?"

"I just—knew."

"And Hilton?"

"He doesn't love me, Eric. He loves what I stand for. And anyway . . . I can say this now, because we're going to die. I've loved you since I first saw you. I love you more than Tom, and I'd have died for him."

Hungry tree branches reached for them, barely too short. Buds were shooting up underfoot. But Falken forgot them, the alien life and the wheeling suns that were only a monstrous dream, and the Sun-child who dreamed them.

For that single instant he was happy, as he had not been since Kitty was lost.

Presently he turned and smiled at Hilton, and the wolf look was gone from his face. Hilton said quietly, "Maybe she's right, about me. I don't know. There's so much I don't know. I'm sorry I'm not going to live to find out."

"We're all sorry," said Falken, "about not living." A sudden sharp flare lighted his eyes. "Wait a minute!" he whispered. "There may be a chance . . . ."

He was taut and quivering with terrible urgency, and the buds grew and yearned upward around their feet.

"You said we could only attack it through its mind. But there may be another way. Its memories, its pride . . . ."

He raised his scarred gypsy face to the green sky and shouted, "You, Child of the Sun! Listen to me! You have beaten us. Go ahead and kill us. But remember this. You're a child of the Sun, and we're only puny humans, little ground-crawlers, shackled with weakness and fear.

"But we're greater than you! Always and forever, greater than you!"

The writhing trees paused, the buds faltered in their hungry growth. Faintly, very faintly, the landscape flickered. Falken's voice rose to a ringing shout.

"You were a child of the Sun. You had the galaxy for a toy, all the vast depths of space to play in. And what did you do? You sealed yourself like a craven into a black tomb, and lost all your greatness in the whimsies of a wicked child.

"You were afraid of your destiny. You were too weak for your own strength. We fought you, we little humans, and our strength was so great that you had to beat us by a lying trick.

"You can read our minds, Sun-child. Read them. See whether we fear you. And see whether we respect you, you who boast of your parentage and dream dreams of lost glory, and hide in a dark hole like a frightened rat!"

* * *

For one terrible moment the alien world was suffused with a glare of scarlet—anger so great that it was almost tangible. Then it greyed and faded, and Falken could see Sheila's face, calm and smiling, and Hilton's fingers locked in hers.

The ground dropped suddenly. Blurred trees writhed against a fading sky, and the suns went out in ebon shadow. Falken felt clean earth under him. The rotting stench was gone.

He looked up. The Sun-child floated overhead, under the rocky vault. They were back in the cavern world.

The Sun-child's voice spoke in his brain, and its fires were a smoldering, dusky crimson.

"What was that you said, human?"

"Look into my mind and read it. You've thrown away your greatness. We had little, compared to you, but we kept it. You've won, but your very winning is a shame to you, that a child of the Sun should stoop to fight with little men."

The smoldering crimson burned and grew, into glorious wicked fire that was sheer fury made visible. Falken felt death coiling to strike him out of that fire. But he faced it with bitter, mocking eyes, and he was surprised, even then, that he wasn't afraid.

And the raging crimson fire faded and greyed, was quenched to a trembling mist of sad, dim mauves.

"You are right," whispered the Sun-child. "And I am shamed."

The ashes of burned-out flame stirred briefly. "I think I began to realize that when you fought me so well. You, Falken, who let your love betray you, and then shook your fist at me. I could kill you, but I couldn't break you. You made me remember . . ."

Deep in the core of the Sun-child there was a flash of the old proud scarlet.

"I am a child of the Sun, with the galaxy to play with. I have so nearly forgotten. I have tried to forget, because I knew that what I did was weak and shameful and craven. But you haven't let me forget, Falken. You've forced me to see, and know.

"You have made me remember. Remember! I am very old. I shall die soon, in open space. But I wish to see the Sun unveiled, and play again among the stars. The hunger has torn me for eons, but I was afraid. Afraid of death!

"Take this world, in payment for the pain I caused you. My creature will return here in Falken's ship and vanish on the instant of landing. And now . . . ."

The scarlet fire burned and writhed. Shafts of joyous gold pierced through it. The Sun-child trembled, and its little foaming flames were sheer glory, the hearts of Sun-born opals.

It rose in the rainbow air, higher and higher, rushing in a cloud of living light toward the black crystal of the vault.

Once more there was a blinding flash and a quick sharp rush of air. Faintly, in Falken's mind, a voice said, "Thank you, human! Thank you for waking me from a dying sleep!"

A last wild shout of color on the air. And then it was gone, into open space and the naked fire of the Sun, and the rocky roof was whole.

Three silent people stood on the raw red earth of a new world.



Out of the Sea

Astonishing Stories, June 1942


CHAPTER ONE

THE HORDES FROM BELOW

ANYONE but Webb Fallon would have been worried sick. He was down to his last five dollars and quart of Scotch. His girl Madge had sketched him categorically in vitriol, and married somebody else. His job on the Los Angeles Observer was, like all the jobs he'd ever had, finally, definitely, and for all time,cancelled.

Being Webb Fallon, he was playing a fast game of doubles on the volley-ball court at Santa Monica Beach, letting the sun and the salt air clear off a hangover.

When he came off the court, feeling fine and heading for the water, big Chuck Weigal called to him.

"So the Observer finally got wise to you, huh? How come?"

Fallon grinned, his teeth white against the mahogany burn of his hard, lean oval face. His corded body gleamed in the hot sun, and his slanting grey-green eyes were mockingly bright.

"If you must know," he said, "I was busy drowning my sorrows on the night of the big quake, two weeks ago. I didn't know anything about it until I read the papers next morning. The boss seemed to think I was a little – er – negligent."

Weigal grunted. "I don't wonder. A quake as bad as the 'Frisco one, and you sleep through it! Phew!"

Fallon grinned, and went on. About half-way down the beach a bright yellow bathing suit caught his eye. He whistled softly and followed it into the water. After all, now that Madge was gone....

He knew the girl by sight. Fallon had an eye for blonde hair and Diana-esque figures. That was one thing Madge and he had fought about.

The girl swam like a mermaid. Fallon lengthened his stroke, came up beside her, and said, "Hello."

She blinked salt water out of sapphire blue eyes and stared. "I know you," she said. "You're Webb Fallon."

"I'm flattered."

"You needn't be. I know a girl named Madge, too."

"Oh." Fallon's grey-green eyes narrowed. His lean face looked suddenly ugly, like a mean dog. Or more like a wolf, perhaps, with his thin straight lips and slanting eyes.

"What did Madge tell you about me?" he asked softly.

"She said you were no good." The blue eyes studied his face. "And," added the girl deliberately, "I think she was right."

"Yeah?" said Fallon, very gently. He hadn't yet got over his cold rage at being jilted for a dull, prosperous prig. The girl's face was like a mask cut out of brown wood and set with hard sapphires. He made a tigerish, instinctive movement toward it.

A wave took them unawares, knocked them together and down in a struggling tangle. They broke water, gasping in the after-swirl. Then, quite suddenly, the girl screamed.

It was a short scream, strangled with sea-water, but it set the hairs prickling on Fallon's neck. He looked past the girl, outward. Something was rising out of the sea.

WEBB FALLON, standing shoulder-deep in the cold water, stared in a temporary paralysis of shock.The thing simply couldn't be.

There was a snout armed with a wicked sword. That and the head behind it were recognizable as those of a swordfish. But the neck behind them was long and powerful, and set on sloping shoulders. Members like elongated fins just becoming legs churned the surface. A wholly piscene tail whipped up gouts of spray behind the malformed silver body.

Fallon moved suddenly. He grabbed the girl and started towardOut of the Sea

shore. The Thing emitted a whistling grunt and surged after them.

Waves struck them; the aftersuck pulled at their legs. They floundered, like dreamers caught in nightmare swamps. And Fallon, through the thrashing and the surf and the sea-water in his ears, began to hear other sounds.

There was a vast stirring whisper, a waking and surging of things driven up and out. There were overtones of cries from unearthly throats. Presently, then, there were human screams.

Fallon's toes found firm sand. Still clutching the girl, he splashed through the shallows. He could hear the wallowing thunder of creatures behind them, and knew that they had to run. But he faltered, staring, and the girl made a little choked sound beside him.

The shallow margin of the sea was churned to froth by a nightmare horde. The whole broad sweep of the beach was invaded by things that, in that stunned moment, Fallon saw only as confused shadows.

He started to run, toward the hilly streets beyond the beach. The creature with the swordfish snout was almost on them. A fish, out of the sea! It reared its snaky neck and struck down.

Fallon dodged convulsively. The sword flashed down and buried itself in the sand not five inches from his foot.

It never came out of the sand. A tailless, stub-legged thing with three rows of teeth in its shark-like jaws fastened onto the creature's neck, and there was hot mammalian blood spilling out.

They ran together, Fallon and the girl. The summer crowds filling the beaches, the promenade, the hot-dog stands and bath-houses, were fighting in blind panic up the narrow streets to the top of the bluff. It was useless to try to get through. Fallon made for an apartment house.

Briefly, in clear, bright colors, he saw isolated scenes. A starfish twenty feet across wrapping itself around a woman and her stupefied child. A vast red crab pulling a man to bits with its claws. Something that might once have been an octopus walking on four spidery legs, its remaining tentacles plucking curiously at the volley-ball net that barred its way.

The din of screaming and alien cries, the roar of the crowds and the slippery, thrashing bodies melted into dull confusion. Fallon and the girl got through, somehow, to the comparative safety of the apartment house lobby.

They found an empty place by a bay window and stopped. Fallon's legs were sagging, and his heart was a leaping pain. The girl crumpled up against him.

They stared out of the window, dazed, detached, like spectators watching an imaginative motion-picture and not believing it.

THERE was carnage ouside, on the broad sunlit beach. Men and women and children died, some caught directly, others trampled down and unable to escape. But more than men were dying.

Things fought and ate each other. Things of mad distortion of familiar shapes. Things unlike any living creature. ormal creatures grown out of all sanity. But all coming, coming, coming, like a living tidal wave.

The window went in with a crash. A woman's painted, shrieking face showed briefly and was gone, pulled away by a simple marine worm grown long as a man.The breeze brought Fallon the stench of blood and fish, drowning the clean salt smell.

"We've got to get out of here," he said. "Come on."

The girl came, numbly. Neither spoke. There was, somehow, nothing to say. Fallon took down a heavy metal curtain rod, holding it like a club.

The front doors had broken in. People trampled through in the blind strength of terror. Fallon shrugged.

"No way to get past them," he said. "Stay close to me. And for God's sake, don't fall down."

The girl's wet blonde head nodded. She took hold of the waistband of his trunks, and her hand was like ice against his spine.

Out through broken doors into a narrow street, and then the crowd spread out a little, surging up a hillside. Police sirens were beginning to wail up in the town.

Down below, the beaches were cleared of people. And still the things came in from the sea. Fallon could see over the Santa Monica Pier now, and the broad sweep of sand back of the yacht harbor was black with surging bodies.

Out of the Sea

Most of the yachts were sunk. The bell-buoy had stopped ringing.

The sunlight was suddenly dim. Fallon looked up. His grey-green eyes widened, and his teeth showed white in a snarl of fear.

Thundering in on queer heavy wings, their bodies hiding the sun, were beasts that stopped his heart in cold terror.

They had changed, of course. The batlike wings had been broadened and strengthened. They must, like the other sea-born monsters, have developed lungs.

But the size was still there! Five to ten feet in wing-spread – and behind, the thin, deadly, whip-like tails.

Rays! The queer creatures that fly batlike under water – now thundering like giant bats through the air!

There were flying fish wheeling round them like queer rigid birds.They had grown legs like little dragons, and long tails.

A pair of huge eels slid over the rough earth, pulled down a man and fought over the body. Policemen began to appear, and there was a popping of guns. The sirens made a mad skirling above the din.

Some of the rays swooped to the crowded beach. Others came on, scenting human food.

Guns began to crack from the cliff-tops, from the windows of apartment houses. Fallon caught the chatter of sub-machine guns. One of the rays was struck almost overhead.

It went out of control like a fantastic plane and crashed into the hillside, just behind Fallon and the girl. Men died shrieking under its twenty-foot, triangular bulk.

It made a convulsive leap.

The girl slipped in the loose rubble, and lost her hold on Fallon. The broad tentacles on the ray's head closed in like the horns of a half moon, folding the girl in a narrowing circle of death.

FALLON raised his iron curtain rod. He was irrationally conscious, with a detached fragment of his brain, of the girl's sapphire eyes and the lovely strength of her body. Her face was set with terror, but she didn't scream. She fought.

Something turned over in Fallon's heart, something buried and unfamiliar. Something that had never stirred for Madge. He stepped in. The bar swung up, slashed down.

The leathery skin split, but still the feelers hugged the girl closer. The great ray heaved convulsively, and something whistled past Fallon's head. It struck him across the shoulders, and laid him in dazed agony in the dirt.

The creature's tail, lashing like a thin long whip.

Webb Fallon got up slowly. His back was numb. There was hot blood flooding across his skin. The girl's eyes were blue and wide, fixed on him. Terribly fixed. She had stopped fighting.

Fallon found an eye, set back of one of the tentacles. He set the end of the iron rod against it, and thrust downward....

Whether it was the rod, or the initial bullet, Fallon never knew, but the tentacles relaxed. The girl rose and came toward him, and together they went up the hill.

They were still together when sweating volunteers picked them up and carried them back into the town.

Fallon came to before they finished sewing up his back. The emergency hospital was jammed. The staff worked in a kind of quiet frenzy, with a devil's symphony of hysteria beating up against the windows of the wards.

They hadn't any place to keep Fallon. They taped his shoulders into a kind of harness to keep the wound closed, and sent him out.

The girl was waiting for him in the areaway, huddled in a blanket. They had given Fallon one, too, but his cotton trunks were still clammy cold against him. He stood looking down at the girl, his short brown hair unkempt, the hard lines of his face showing sharp and haggard.

"Well," he said. "What are you waiting for?"

"Thank you.Y ou saved my life."

"You're welcome," said Fallon. "Now you'd better go before I contaminate you."

"That's not fair. I am grateful, Webb. Truly grateful."

Fallon would have shrugged, but it hurt. "All right," he said wearily. "You can tell Madge what a little hero I was."

"Please don't leave me," she whispered. "I haven't any place to go. All my clothes and money were in the apartment."

He looked at her, his eyes cold and probing. Brief disappointment touched him, and he was surprised at himself. Then he went deeper, into the clear sapphire eyes, and was ashamed — which surprised him even more.

"What's your name?" he asked. "And why haven't you fainted?" "Joan Daniels," she said. "And I haven't had time."

Fallon smiled. "Give me your shoulder, Joan," he said, and they went out.

CHAPTER TWO

CATASTROPHE — OR WEAPON?

SANTA MONICA was a city under attack. Sweating policemen struggled with solid jams of cars driven by wild-eyed madmen. Horns hooted and blared. And through it all, like banshees screaming with eldritch mirth, the sirens wailed.

"They'll declare martial law," said Fallon. "I wonder how long they can hold those things back?"

"Webb," whispered Joan, "what are those things?"

Strangely, they hadn't asked that before.

They'd hardly had time even to think it.

Fallon shook his head. "God knows. But it's going to get worse. Hear that gunfire? My apartment isn't far from here. We'll get some clothes and a drink, and then..."

It was growing dark when they came out again. Fallon felt better, with a lot of brandy inside him and some warm clothes. Joan had a pair of his slacks and a heavy sweater.

He grinned, and said, "Those never looked as nice on me."

Soldiers were throwing up barricades in the streets. The windows of Corbin's big department store were shattered, the bodies of dead rays lying in the debris. The rattle of gunfire was hotter, and much closer.

"They're being driven back," murmured Fallon.


A squadron of bombers droned over, and presently there was the crump and roar of high explosives along the beaches. The streets were fairly clear now, except for stragglers and laden ambulances, and the thinning groups of dead.

Fallon thought what must be happening in the towns farther south, with their flat low beaches and flimsy houses. How far did this invasion extend? What was it? And how long would it last?

He got his car out of the garage behind the apartment house. Joan took the wheel, and he lay down on his stomach on the back seat.

His back hurt like hell.

"One good thing," he remarked wryly. "The finance company won't be chasing me through this. Just go where the traffic looks lightest, and shout if you need me."

He went to sleep.

It was morning when he woke. Joan was asleep on the front seat, curled up under a blanket. She had spread one over him, too. I smiled, and looked out.

'Hie first thing he noticed was the unfamiliar roar of motors overhead, and the faint crackling undertone of gunfire. They were still under siege, then, and the defenders were still giving ground.

They were parked on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine. Crowds of white-faced, nervous people huddled along the streets. The only activity was around the newsboys.

Fallon got out, stiff and cursing, and went to buy a paper. An extra arrived before he got there. The boy ripped open the bundle, let out a startled squawk, and began to yell at the top of his lungs.

A low, angry roar spread down the boulevard. Fallon got a paper, and smiled a white-toothed, ugly smile. He shook Joan awake and gave her the paper.

"There's your answer. Read it."

She read aloud: Japs Claim Sea Invasion Their Secret Weapon!

"Only a few minutes ago, the Amalgamated Press recorded an official broadcast from Tokyo, declaring that the fantastic wave of monsters which have sprung from the ocean at many points along the Western Coast was a new war-weapon of the Axis which would cause the annihilation of American and world-wide democratic civilization.

"The broadcast, an official High Command communique, said in part: 'The Pacific is wholly in our hands. American naval bases throughout the ocean are useless, and the fleet where it still exists is isolated. In all cases our new weapon has succeeded. The Pacific states, with the islands, come within our natural sphere of influence. We advise them to submit peacefully"'

Joan Daniels looked up at Fallon. At first there was only stunned pallor in her face. Then the color came, dark and slow.

"Submit peacefully!" she whispered. "So that's it. A cowardly, fiendish, utterly terrible perversion of warfare — something so horrible that it..."

"Yeah," said Fallon. "Save it."

He was leafing through the paper. There was a lot more — hurried opinions by experts, guesses, conjectures, and a few facts.

Fallon said flatly. "They seem to be telling the truth. Fragmentary radio messages have come in from the Pacific. Monsters attacked just as suddenly as they did here, and at about the same time.They simply clogged the guns, smothered the men, and wrecked ground equipment by sheer weight of numbers."

Joan shuddered."You wouldn't think..."

"Mo," grunted Fallon. "You wouldn't!" He flung the paper down. "Yah! Not an eyewitness account in the whole rag!"

Joan looked at him thoughtfully. She said, "Well...!"

"They fired me once," he snarled. "Why should I crawl back?" "It was your own fault,Webb. You know it."

He turned on her, and again his face had the look of a mean dog. "That," he said, "is none of your damned business."

She faced him stubbornly her sapphire eyes meeting his slitted grey-green ones with just a hint of anger.

"You wouldn't be a bad sort, Webb," she said steadily, "if you weren't so lazy and so hell-fired selfish!"

Cold rage rose in him, the rage that had shaken him when Madge told him she was through. His hands closed into brown, ugly fists. loan met him look for look, her bright hair tangling over the collar of his sweater, the strong brown curves of cheek and throat catching the early sunlight. And again, as it had in that moment on the cliff, something turned over in Fallon's heart.

"What do you care," he whispered, "whether I am or not?"

For the first time her gaze flickered, and something warmer than the sunlight touched her skin.

"You saved my life," she said. "I feel responsible for you."

Fallon stared. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed. "You fool," he whispered. "You damned little fool!"

He kissed her. And he kissed her gently, as he had never kissed Madge.

They got breakfast. After that, Fallon knew, they should have gone east, with the tense, crawling hordes of refugees, But somehow he couldn't go. The distant gunfire drew him, the stubborn, desperate planes.

They went back, toward the hills of Bel Air. After all, there was plenty of time to run.

Things progressed as he had thought they would. Martial law was declared. An orderly evacuation of outlying towns was going forward. Fallon got through the police lines with a glib lie about an invalid brother. It wasn't hard — there was no danger yet the way he was going, and the police were badly overburdened.

Fallon kept the radio on as he drove. There was a lot of wild talk —it was too early yet for censorship. A big naval battle east ofWake IsHand, another near the Aleutians. The defense, for the present, was getting nowhere.

Up on the crest of a sun-seared hill, using powerful glasses from his car, Fallon shook his head with a slow finality.

The morning mists were clearing. He had an unobstructed view of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the vast bowl of land sloping away to the sea. The broad boulevards to the east were clogged with solid Hack streams. And to the west...To the west there were barricades. There were clouds of powder smoke, and fleets of low-flying planes. And there was something else. Something like a sluggish, devouring tide, lapping at the walls of the huge M-G-M studios in Culver City, swamping the tarmac at Clover field, flowing resistlessly on and on.

Bombs tore great holes in the restless sea, but they flowed in upon themselves and were filled. Big guns ripped and slashed at the swarming creatures. Many died. But there were always more. Many, many more.

The shallow margin of the distant ocean was still churned to froth. Still the things came out of it, surging up and on. Fighting, spawning, dying — and advancing.

Joan Daniels pressed close against him, shuddering. "It just isn't possible,Webb! Bombers, artillery, tanks, trained soldiers. And we can't stop them!" She stiffened suddenly "Webb!" she cried, "Look there!"

Where the bombers swooped through the smoke, another fleet was coming. A fleet of flat triangular bodies with batlike wings, in numbers that clouded the sun. Rays, blind and savage and utterly uncaring.

Machine guns brought them down by the hundred, but more of them came. They crashed into heavy ships, fouled propellers, broke controls.

Joan looked away. "And there are so few planes," she whispered.

Fallon nodded. "The whole coast is under attack, remember, from Vancouver to Mexico. There just aren't enough men, guns, or planes to go round. More are coming from the east, but..." He shrugged and was silent.

"Then — then you think we'll have to surrender?"

"Doesn't look hopeful, does it? Japan in control of the Pacific, and this here. We'll hold out for a while, of course. But suppose these things come out of the sea indefinitely?"

"We've got to assume they can." Joan's eyes were dark and very tired. "What's to prevent Japan from loaning her weapon to her friends? Think of these things swarming in over England."

"War," said Fallon somberly. "A hell of a long, rotten war."

He leaned against the car, his grey-green eyes half closed. The breeze came in from the sea, heavy with the stench of amphibian bodies. The radio droned on. The single deep line between Fallon's straight brows grew deeper. He began to talk, slowly, to Joan.

"The experts say that the Little Brown Brothers must have some kind of a movable projector capable of producing rays which upset the evolutionary balance and cause abnormal growth. Rays like hard X-rays, or the cosmic rays that govern reproduction.

"California Tech has dissected several types of monsters. They say I hat individual cell groups are affected, causing spontaneous growth in living individuals, and that metabolism has been enormously speeded, so that life-cycles which normally took years now take only a few weeks.

"They also say that huge numbers — the bulk of these creatures

mutants, new individuals changed in the egg or the reproductive cell. All these monsters are growing and spawning at a terrific tempo. Billions of eggs, laid and hatched, even with the high mortality rate.

"They're evolving, at a fantastic rate of speed. They're growing legs and lungs and becoming mammals. They're coming out of the Sea, just as our ancestors did millions of years ago. They're coming last, and they're hungry."

He fixed the girl suddenly with a bright, sharp stare.

"Do you think a thing as big as that is man-made?" There was a grim, stony weariness in her face. "The Japanese say so. What other explanation is there?"

"But," said Fallon, "why not South America, too?"

"They were probably afraid the monsters might get out of hand and tackle their own people," said Joan bitterly.

"Maybe." Again Fallon's eyes were distant. Then he clapped his hands sharply and sprang up. "Yes! Got it, Joan!"

The quick motion ripped at the wound across his back. He swayed and caught her shoulder, but he didn't stop talking.

"EinarBjarnsson! He was my last job. I interviewed him the day before the quake. I want to see him, Joan. Ow!"

She took his wrists, half frightened. "What is it, Webb?"

"Listen," he said softly. "Remember the radio calls from the islands? The monsters came out of the west here, didn't they? Well, out here they came out of the east!" Fallon explained, as he sent the car screaming perilously along winding mountain roads. Einar Bjarnsson was an expert on undersea life. He had charted tide paths and sub-sea 'rivers,' mapped the continental shelves and the great deeps.

Bjarnsson's recent exploration had been in the Pacific, using a specially constructed small submarine. His findings on deep-sea phenomena had occupied space in scientific journals and the Sunday supplements of newspapers throughout the world.

Two days before the big quake Einar Bjarnsson returned to the place he called home — a small bachelor cabin on a hilltop, crammed with scientific traps and trophies of his exploring. Webb Fallon drew the assignment of interviewing him.

"I was pretty sore at Madge, then," Fallon confessed, "and I had a ferocious hangover. The interview didn't go so well. But I remember Bjarnsson mentioning something about a volcanic formation quite close to the Pacific coast — something nobody had noticed before. It was apparently extinct, and the only thing that made it notable was its rather unusual conformation."

Joan stared at him. "What's that got to do with anything?"

Fallon shrugged. "Maybe nothing. Only I recall that the epicenter of the recent quake was somewhere in the vicinity of Bjarnsson's volcano. I remember that damned quake quite well, because it cost me my job."

Joan opened her mouth and closed it again, hard. Fallon grinned. "You were going to tell me it wasn't the quake, but my own bad character," he said mockingly.

There was something grim in the upthrust lines of her jaw "I can't make you out, Webb," she said quietly "Sometimes I think there's good stuff in you — and then I think Madge was right!"

Fallon's dark oval face went ugly, and he didn't speak again until Bjarnsson's house came in sight.

CHAPTER THREE

BJARNSSON'S SUBMARINE

FALLON stopped the car and got out stiffly, feeling suddenly tired and disinterested. He hesitated. Why bother with a crazy hunch? The rolling crash of gunfire was getting closer. Why not forget the whole thing and go while the going was good?

He realized that Joan was watching him with sapphire eyes grown puzzled and hard. "Damn it!" he snarled. "Stop looking at me as though I were a bug under glass!"

Joan said, "Is that Bjarnsson in the doorway?"

For the third time Fallon's hands clenched in anger. Then he turned sharply, white about the lips with the pain it cost him, and strode up to the small rustic cabin.

Einar Bjarnsson remembered him. He stood aside, a tall stooped man with massive shoulders and a gaunt, cragged face. Coarse fair hair shot with grey hung in his eyes, which were small and the color of frozen sea-water.

He said, in a deep, slow voice, "Come in. I have been watching through my telescope. Most interesting. But it gets too close now I am surprised you are here. Duty to your paper, eh?"

Fallon let it pass. He might get more out of Bjarnsson if the explorer thought he was still with the Observer. And then the thought struck him — what was he going to do if his hunch was right?

othing. He had no influence. The statesmen were handling things. Suppose Japan did take the Pacific States? Suppose there was a war? He couldn't do anything about it. Let the big boys worry. There'd be a beach somewhere that he could comb in peace.

He made a half turn to go out again. Then he caught sight of a map on the far wall — a map of the Pacific.

Something took him to it. He put his finger on a spot north and east of the Hawaiian Islands. And even then he couldn't have said why lie asked his question.

"Your volcanic formation was about here, wasn't it, Bjarnsson?" The tall orseman stared at him with cold shrewd eyes. "Yes. Why?"

"Look here." Fallon drew a rough circle with his fingertip, touching the Pacific Coast, swinging across the ocean through the Gilberts and the Marshalls, touching Wake, and curving up again to Vancouver.

"The volcanic formation is the center of that circle," Fallon said. "It was also the epicenter of the recent quake, according to Cal-Tech seismologists. That's what gave me the hunch. The monsters seem to be fanning out in a circle from some central point located about there."

"That is already explained," said Bjarnsson. "The Japanese may have their projector located there. And why not?"

"No reason at all," Fallon admitted. "You mentioned, in your interview, something about a Japanese ocean survey ship coming up just as you left.That ship might still have been near there at the time of the quake, mightn't it?"

"It is possible. Go on."There was a little sharp flame flickering in Bjarnsson's eyes.

Fallon said, "Could these super-evolutionary rays be caused by volcanic action?"

Bjarnsson's grey-blond shaggy brows met, and the flame was sharper in his eyes. "Fantastic. But so is this whole affair....Yes! If an area of intense radioactivity were uncovered by an earth-shift, the sea and all that swims in it might be affected."

"Ah!" Fallon's lips were drawn in a tight grin. "Suppose the officers of the Japanese ship saw the beginnings of the effect. Suppose they radioed home, and someone did some quick thinking. Suppose, in short, that they're lying."

"Ja," whispered Bjarnsson. "Let us think."

"I've already thought," said Fallon. "Two weeks would give them time to arrange everything. The important thing is this — if the force is man-made, even destroying the projector won't do any good. They'll have others. But if it were a natural force, the psychological aspect of the thing alone would be tremendous. There'd be a chance of doing something."

The explorer's deep light eyes glinted. "Our people would fight better if it was something they could fight." He swung to the big telescope mounted in the west windows. "Bah! It gets worse. Those creatures, they don't know when they are dead. And the way they come! We must go soon."

HE SWUNG back to Fallon. "But how to find out if you are right?" "You have a submarine," said Fallon.

"So has the Navy."

"But they're all needed. Yours can go where the big ones can't – and go deeper.These monsters are all heading for land, which means hey gravitate to the surface.You might get through below."

"Yes." Bjarnsson strode up and down the cluttered room. "We could take a depth charge. If we found the volcano to be the cause, we might close the fissure.

"Time, Fallon! That is the thing. A few days, a few weeks, and the sheer pressure of these hordes will have forced the defenders back to the mountains and the deserts. Civilian morale will break."

He stopped, making a sharp gesture of futility. "I am forgetting. The radiations, Fallon. Without proper insulation, we would evolve like the sea-things.And it would take many days to make lead armor for us, even if we could get anyone to do the work."

"Radiations," said Fallon slowly. "Yeah. I'd forgotten that. Well, that hat stops that. Projector or volcano, you'd never reach it."

He brushed a hand across his eyes, all his brief enthusiasm burned away. He was getting like that. He wished he had a drink.

"Probably all moonshine, anyway," he said. "Anyhow, there's nothing we can do about it."

"Nothing!" Joan Daniels spoke so sharply that both men started. "You mean you're not even going to try?"

"Bjarnsson can pass the idea along for what it's worth."

"You know what that means, Webb! The idea would be either laughed at or pigeonholed, especially with the Jap propagandists doing such a good job.The government's got a war on its hands. Even if someone did pay attention, nothing would be done until too late. It never is."

She gripped his arms, looking up at him with eyes like sea-blue swords.

"If there's a bare chance of saving them, Webb, you've got to take it!"

Fallon looked down at her, his wolf's eyes narrowed.

"Listen," he said. "I'm not a fiction hero. We've got an Army, a Navy, an air force, and a secret service. They're getting paid for risking their necks. Let them worry. I had a hunch, which may not be worth a dime. I passed it along. Now I'm going to clear out, before anything more happens to me."

Joan's face was cut, sharp and bitter, from brown wood. Her eyes had fire in them, way back.

"Your logic," she whispered, "is flawless."

"I saved your life," said Fallon brutally. "What more do you want?"

The color drained from the brown wood, leaving it marble. Only the angry fires in her eyes lived, in the pale hard stone.

"You're remembering how I kissed you," said Fallon, so softly that he hardly spoke at all. "I don't know why I did. I don't know why I came here. I don't know..."

He stopped and turned to the door. Bjarnsson, very quietly, was picking up the phone. Fallon took the knob and turned it.

"I am sorry," said a quiet, sibilant voice. "You cannot leave. And you, sir – put down that telephone."

A SMALL neat man with a yellow face stood on the threshold. He was holding a small, neat, efficient-looking automatic. Fallon backed into the room, hearing the click of the cradle as the phone went down.

"You are Einar Bjarnsson?" The question was toneless and purely rhetorical. The black eyes had seen the whole room in one swift flick. "I am Kashimo," said the man, and waited.

"Fallon," Webb said easily. "This is Miss Daniels. We just dropped in for a chat. Mind if we go now?"

"I am afraid..." said Kashimo, and spread his hands. "I have been discourteous enough to eavesdrop.You have an inventive mind, Mr. Fallon. An inaccurate mind, but one that might prove disturbing to our plans."

"Don't worry," grunted Fallon. "I have no business whatsoever, and I attend to it closely. Your plans don't matter to me at all."

"Indeed." Kashimo studied him with black, bright eyes. "You are either a liar or a disgrace to your country, Mr. Fallon. But I may not take chances. You and the young lady I must, sadly, cancel out."

"And I?" Bjarnsson asked.

"You come with us," said Kashimo. Fallon saw four other small neat men outside, close behind their leader in the doorway.

He said, "What do you mean, 'cancel out'?" He knew, before Kashimo moved his automatic.

Kashimo said, "Mr. Bjarnsson, please to move out of the line of fire."

No one moved. The room was still, except for Joan's quick-caught breath. And then motion beyond the west windows caught Fallon's eye. A colder fear crawled in his heart, but his voice surprised him, it was so steady.

"Kashimo. Look out there."

The bright black eyes flicked warily aside. They widened sharply, and the cords went slack about the jaw. Fallon sprang.

He had forgotten the wound across his back. The shock of his hody striking Kashimo turned him sick and faint. He knew that the Hittle man fell, staggering the others so close behind him.

He knew that Joan Daniels was shouting, and that Bjarnsson had aught up an ebony war-club and was using it. Shots boomed in his cars. But one sound kept him from fainting — the thunder of slow reIentless giant wings.

He got up in unsteady darkness. A round sallow face appeared. He struck at it. Bone cracked under his knuckles, and the face vanished. Fallon found a wall and clung to it.

Hands gripped his ankle — Kashimo's hands. Bjarnsson was outside mopping up. Fallon braced himself and drew his foot back. His toe caught Kashimo solidly under the angle of the jaw

"Joan," said Fallon. The wings were thundering closer. Joan didn't answer. A sort of queer panic filled Fallon.

"Joan!" he cried. "Joan!"

"Here I am,Webb." She came from beyond the door, with a heavy little idol in her hand. It had blood on it. Her golden hair was tumbled and her neck was bleeding where a bullet had creased it.

Fallon caught her. He felt her wince under his hands. He didn't I, now quite what he wanted, except that she must be safe.

He only said, "Hurry, before those things get here."

The throb of wings was deafening. Bjarnsson came in, swinging his club. His cragged face was bloody, but his pale eyes blazed.

"Good man, Fallon," he grunted. "All right, let's go. There's a cave below here. Take their guns, young lady. We'll need them."

The sky beyond the west windows was clogged with huge black shapes. Fallon remembered the smashed windows of the department store in Santa Monica. "Joan," he said, "come here."

He put his arm around her shoulders. He might have walked all right without her, but somehow he wanted her there.

THEY dropped down the other side of the hill into a little brush-choked cleft. There was a shallow cave at one end.

"There go my windows," said Bjarnsson, and cursed in Swedish. "In with you, before those flying devils find us."

They were well hidden. Chances were the rays would go right over them — after they'd finished off Kashimo and his men. Bjarnsson said softly, "What did they want with me, Fallon?"

"There's only one thing they couldn't get from somebody else," returned Fallon. "Your submarine."

"Yes. The mechanisms are of my own design. They would need me to operate it. Does that mean we are right about the volcano?"

"Maybe. They'd have made plans to control it, of course. Or they may want your ship merely as a model."

There was silence for a while. Outside, heavy wings began to beat again. They came perilously low, went over, and were gone.

Einar Bjarnsson said quietly, "I'm going to take the chance, Fallon. I'm going to try to get my ship through."

"What about the radiations?"

"If Kashimo was planning to use the ship, he'll have arranged for that. Anyway, I'm going to see." His ice-blue eyes stabbed at Fallon."I can't do it alone."

Joan Daniels said, "I'll go."

Bjarnsson's eyes flicked from one to the other. Fallon's face was dark and almost dangerous.

"Wait a minute," he said gently.

Joan faced him. "I thought you were going away."

"I've changed my mind!" Looking at her, at her blue, unsympathetic eyes, Fallon wondered if he really had. Perhaps the stunning shock of all that had happened had unsettled him.

Joan put both hands on his shoulders and looked straight into his eyes. "What kind of a man are you, Webb Fallon?"

"God knows," he said. "Where do you keep your boat, Bjarnsson?"

"In a private steel-and-concrete building at Wilmington. Some of the improvements are of interest to certain people. I keep them locked safely away. Or so I thought."

Fallon rose stiffly "Kashimo didn't come in a car, that's certain. He'd have been arrested on sight. Any place for a plane to land near here?"

The explorer shook his head. "Unless it could come straight down." Fallon snapped his finger. "A helicopter! That's it."

He led the way out.They found the 'copter on a small level space beyond the shoulder of the hill. Fallon nodded.

"Ingenious little chaps.The ship's painted like an Army plane. Any pilot would think it was a special job and let it severely alone." He turned abruptly to Joan.

"Take my car," he told her. "Get away from here, fast. Find someone in authority and make him listen — just in case."

She nodded. "Webb, why are you going?"

"Because there isn't time to get anyone else," he told her roughly. "Because there's a story there..."

He stopped, startled at what he had said. "Yes," he said slowly "a story. My story. Oh hell, why did you have to come along?"

He put his hands suddenly back of her head and tilted her face up, his fingers buried in the warm curls at the base of her neck.

"I was all set," he whispered savagely "I knew all the answers. And then you showed up. If you hadn't, I'd be halfway to Miami by now. I'd still be sure of myself. I would't be so damned confused, thinking one way and feeling another..."

She kissed him suddenly, warmly "I'll make somebody listen," she said. "And then I'll wait — and pray."

Then she was gone. In a minute he heard the car start.

"Come on," he snarled at Bjarnsson. "I remember you said you fly"

CHAPTER FOUR

A DEAD MAN COMES BACK

IT WAS a nightmare trip. The battle below was terribly clear. Twice they dodged flights of the giant rays, saved only because the scent of food kept the attention of the brutes on the ground.

The harbor basin at Wilmington was choked with slippery, struggling beasts. There was hardly a sign of shipping. Bjarnsson made for the flat top of a square building, completely surrounded.

A flight of rays went over just as they landed. A trap door in the roof raised and was slammed shut again.

"Ow," said Fallon grimly, and jumped out.

They were almost to the trap when a ray sighted them. Fallon shot it through the eye, but others followed. Bjarnsson wrenched up the trap. A surprised yellow face peered up, vanished in a crimson smear.

Bjarnsson hauled the body out and threw it as far as he could.The rays fought over it like monstrous gulls over a fish head.

Fallon retched and followed Bjarnsson down.

There were three other men in the building. One tried to shoot it out and was killed. The others were mechanics, with no stomachs for the guns.

They looked over the sub, a small stubby thing of unusual design, and Bjarnsson nodded his gaunt shaggy head.

"These suits of leaded fabric," he said. "One big, for me. The other smaller, for Kashimo, perhaps. Can you get into it?"

Fallon grunted. "I guess so. Hey! Look there."

"Ha! A depth charge, held in the claws I use for picking specimens from the ocean floor. They have prepared well, Fallon." "Yon know what that means!" Fallon was aware of a forgotten, surging excitement. His palms came together with a ringing crack.

"I was right! Kashimo was going to hold you here until the Government capitulated. Then he was going out to shut off the power. There's no projector, Bjarnsson. It was the volcano. If we can close that fissure while there's still resistance, we'll have 'em licked!"

Bjarnsson's ice-blue eves fixed Fallon with a sharp, unwavering stare, and he spoke slowly, calmly, almost without expression.

"It will take about three days to get there, working together. One fit of cowardice or indecision, one display of nerves or temper may destroy what slight chance we have!"

"You mean," said Fallon, "you wish you had someone you could depend on." He smiled crookedly. "I'll do my best, Bjarnsson."

They struggled into the clumsy lead armor and shuffled into the small control room of the submarine. Everything had been prepared in advance. In a few seconds, automatic machinery was lowering the sub into its slip.

Water slapped the hull. Bjarnsson started the motors. They went forward slowly, through doors that opened electrically.

Ballast hissed and snarled into the tanks.

Bjarnsson said, "If we can get through this first pack, into deep water, we may make it." He pointed to a knife-switch. "Pull it."

Fallon did. Nothing seemed to happen. Bjarnsson sat hunched over the controls, cold blue eyes fixed on the periscope screen. Fallon had a swift, horrible sense of suffocation — the steel wall of the sub curving low over his helmeted head, the surge of huge floundering bodies in the water outside.

Something struck the hull. The little ship canted. Fallon gripped his seat with rigid, painful hands. Bjarns-son's armored, unhuman shoulders moved convulsively with effort. Fallon felt a raw panic scream rising in his throat...

HE CHOKED it back. Heavy muffled blows shook the submarine. The motors churned and shook. Fallon was afraid they were going to stop. Sweat dripped in his eyes, misted his helmet pane.

The screws labored on. Fallon heard the tanks filling, and knew that they were going deeper. The blows on the hull grew fewer, far-

Wet between. Fallon began to breathe again.

Einar Bjarnsson relaxed, just a little. His voice came muffled by his helmet. "The worst, Fallon — we're through it."

Fallon's throat was as dry as his face was wet. "But how?"

"Sometimes, in the deeps, one meets creatures. Hungry creatures, as large even as this ship. So I prepared the hull. That switch transforms us into a travelling electric shock, strong enough to discourage almost anything. I hoped it would get us through."

Thinking of what might have happened, Fallon shut his jaw hard. His voice was unnaturally steady as he asked, "What now?"

"Now you learn to operate the ship, in case something should happen to me." Bjarnsson's small blue eyes glinted through his helmet pane. "Too bad there is not a radio here, Fallon, so that you might broadcast as we go. As it is, I fear the world may miss a very exciting story"

"For God's sake," said Fallon wearily, and he wasn't swearing. "Let's not make this any tougher. Okay. This is the master switch..."

In the next twenty-four hours, Fallon learned to handle the submarine passably well. Built for a crew of two, the controls were fairly simple, once explained. Nothing else was touched. The only extra switch that mattered was the one that released the depth charge.

For an endless, monotonous hell, Fallon stood watch and watch about with Bjarnsson, one at the controls, one operating the battery of observation 'scopes, never sleeping. They saved on oxygen as a precaution, which added to the suffocating discomfort of the helmet-filters.

Black, close, nerve-rasping hours crawled by, became days. At last, Fallon, bent over the 'scope screen, licked the sweat from his thin lips and looked at Bjarnsson, a blurred dark hulk against the dim glow of the half-seen instrument panel.

Fallon's head ached. The hot stale air stank of oil. His body was tired and cramped and sweat-drenched, and the wound across his shoulders throbbed. He looked at the single narrow bunk.

There was nothing out there in the water but darkness. Even the deep-sea fish had felt the impulse and avoided the sub. Fallon got up.

"Bjarnsson," he said, "I'm going to sleep."

The explorer half turned in his seat.

"Ja?" he said quietly.

"There's nothing out there," growled Fallon. "Why should I sit and glare at that periscope?"

"Because," Bjarnsson returned with ominous gentleness, "there might be something. We will not reach the volcano for perhaps ten hours. You had better watch."

Fallon's hard jaw set. "I can't go any longer without sleep." Bjarnsson's cragged face was flushed and greasy behind his helmet, but his eyes were like glittering frost.

"All the whisky and the women," he whispered. "They make you soft, Fallon. The girl would have been better."

A flashing glimpse of Joan as she had looked in the car that morning crossed the eye of Fallon's mind — the tumbled fair hair and the sunlight warm on throat and cheek, and her voice saying, "You wouldn't be bad, Webb...so lazy and so hell-fired selfish!"

He cursed and started forward. The dark blur of Bjarnsson rose, I dotting out the green glow. And then the panel light rose in a shuddering arc.

Fallon thought for a moment that he was fainting. The low curve of the hull spun about. He knew that he fell, and that he struck something, or that something struck him. All orientation was lost. His helmet rang against metal like a great gong, and then he was sliding down a cluttered slope.

A blunt projection ripped across his back. Even through the leaded suit, the pain of it made him scream. He heard the sound as a distant, throttled echo.Then even the dim green light was gone.

THE screen flickered abominably. It showed mostly a blurred mob of people, trampling back and forth.Then it steadied and there was a picture, in bright, gay colors.

A starfish twenty feet across wrapping itself around a woman and her stupefied child.

"We saw that, said Fallon. "On the beach. Remember?"

He thought Joan answered, but there was another picture. A vastOut of the Sea

red crab, pulling a man to bits with its claws. And after that, the shrieking woman outside the broken window, dragged down by a worm.

"Wonder who got those shots?" said Fallon. Again Joan answered, but he didn't hear her. The pictures moved more rapidly. Rays, black against the blue sky. Planes falling. Guns firing and firing and choking to silence. People, black endless streams of them, running, running, running.

Joan pulled at him. Her face was strangely huge. Her eyes were as he had first seen them, hard chips of sapphire. And at last he heard what she was saying.

"Your fault, Webb Fallon. This might have been stopped. But you had to sleep. You couldn't take it. You're no good, Webb. No good. No good..."

Her voice faded, mixed somehow with a deep throbbing noise. "Joan!" he shouted. "Joan!" But her face faded too. The last he could see was her eyes, hard and steady and deeply blue.

"Joan," he whispered. There was a sound in his head like the tearing of silk, a sensation of rushing upward. Then he was quite conscious, his face pressed forward against his helmet and his body twisted, bruised and painful.

The first thing he saw was Einar Bjarnsson sprawled on the floor plates.A sharp point of metal had ripped his suit from neck to waist, laying his chest bare.

For a moment of panic horror, Fallon sought for tears in his own suit.There were none. He relaxed with a sob of relief, and looked up at the low curve of the hull.

It was still whole. Fallon shuddered. What product of abnormal evolution had attacked them in the moment that he had looked away? Strange he hadn't seen it coming, before.

The dim, still bulk of Einar Bjarnsson drew his gaze. Crouched there on his knees, it seemed to Fallon that the whole universe drew in and centered on that motionless body.

"I killed him," Fallon whispered. "I looked away I might have seen the thing in time, but I looked away. I killed him."

For a long time he couldn't move. Then, like the swift stroke of a knife, terror struck him.

He was alone under the sea.

He got up. The chronometer showed an elapsed time of nearly two hours. The course, held by an Iron Mike, was steady. The beast hat had attacked them must have lost interest.

Fallon clung to a stanchion and thought, harder than he had ever thought in his life.

He couldn't go on by himself. There had to be two men, to gauge distances, spot the best target, control the sub in the resultant blast. Why couldn't he forget the volcano? There were lots of islands in the Pacific, beyond the affected sphere.

He could stay drunk on palm wine as well as Scotch.

He'd never see Joan again, of course. Joan, accusing, hard-eyed, contemptuous. Joan, condemning him for murder...

Fallon laughed, a sharp, harsh bark. "Joan, hell! That was my own mind, condemning me!"

His gaze went back to Bjarnsson's body, rolling slightly with the motion of the ship. It boiled down to that. Murder. His careless, selfish murder of Bjarnsson. The murder of countless civilians. War, hitter, brutal, desperate.

Fallon drew a long, shuddering breath. His head dropped forward his helmet, and his slanting wolf's eyes were closed. Then he turned and sat down at the controls.

The single forward 'scope field gave him vision enough to steer. Anything might attack from the sides or the stern — another beast grown incredibly huge, but not yet a lung breather.

Alone, he probably wouldn't succeed. He wouldn't live to know whether he had or not. His gloved hands clenched over the levers hat would change the course, send him away to safety.

Savagely he forced his hands away. He gripped the wheel. Time slid by him, black and silent as the water outside. And then... Something moved in the dark behind him.

Slowly, slowly, Fallon rose and turned. The veins of his lean face were like knotted cords. The hard steel of the hull held him, tight and close, smothering.Blurred, faint movement. The soft scrape of metal against metal.

He had been so sure Bjarnsson was dead. He'd been dazed and sick, he hadn't looked closely. But he'd been sure. Bjarnsson, lying so still, with his suit ripped open.

His suit ripped open. Volcanic rays would be seeping into his flesh. Rays of change — perhaps they even brought the dead to life.

There was a grating clang, and suddenly Fallon screamed, a short choked sound that hurt his throat.

Bjarnsson's face looked at him. Bjarnsson's face, with every gaunt bone, every vein and muscle and convolution of the brain traced in lines of cold white fire.

The shrouding leaden suit slipped from wide, stooped shoulders. The heart beat in pulses of flame within the glowing cage of the ribs. The coil and flow of muscles in arm and thigh was a living, beautiful rhythm of light.

"Fallon," said Einar Bjarnsson. "Turn back."

The remembered voice, coming from that glowing, pulsing throat, was the most horrible thing of all.

Fallon licked the cold sweat from his lips. "o," he said. "Turn back, or you will be killed."

"It doesn't matter," whispered Fallon. "I've got to try"

Bjarnsson laughed. Fallon could see his diaphragm contract in a surge of flame, see the ripple of the laughter.

A wave of anger cut across Fallon's terror, cold and sane.

"I did this to you, Bjarnsson," he said. "I'm trying to make up for it. I thought you were dead. Perhaps, if you put your armor back on, we can patch it up somehow, and it may not be too late."

"But it is too late. So, you blame yourself, eh?"

"I left my post. Otherwise, you might have dodged that thing."

"Dodged it?"Tiny sparkles of light shot through Bjarnsson's brain. "Oh, ja. Perhaps."And he laughed again. "So you will not turn back? ot even for the beautiful Joan?"

Fallon's eyes closed, but the lines of his jaw were stern with anger. "Do you have to torture me?"

"Wait," said Bjarnsson. "Wait a little.Then I will know"

His voice was suddenly strange. Fallon opened his eyes. The glowing fire in the explorer's body was growing brighter, so that it blurred the lines of vein and bone and sinew.

"No," said Bjarnsson. "No need for torture. Turn back, Fallon." God, how he wanted to! "No," he whispered. "I've got to try." Bjarnsson's voice came to him, almost as an echo.

"We were fools, Fallon. Fools to think that we could stop this thing with a single puny bomb. Kashimo was a fool, too, but he was a gambler. But we, Fallon, you and I – we were the bigger fools."

"The kind of fools," said Fallon doggedly, "that men have always been. And damn it, I think I'd rather be the fool I am than the smart guy I was!"

Bjarnsson's laughter echoed in his helmet. Fallon had a moment's eerie feeling that he heard with his brain instead of his ears.

"Wonderful, Fallon, wonderful! You see how circumstance makes us traitors to ourselves? But there is no need for heroics. You can turn back, Fallon."

The lines of Bjarnsson's body were quite gone. He loomed against the darkness as a pillar of shining mist. Fallon's weary eyes were dazzled with it.

"No," he muttered stubbornly "No!"

Bjarnsson's voice rolled in on him suddenly, soul-shaking as an organ.

Voice – or mind? A magnificent, thundering strength.

"This is evolution, Fallon. So shall we be, a million million years from now. This is living, Fallon. It is godhood! Take off your suit, Fallon! Grow with me!"

"Joan," said Fallon wearily "Joan, dearest."

Cosmic laughter, shuddering in his mind. And then,

"Turn back, Fallon. In an hour it will be too late."

The shining mist was dimming, drawing in upon itself. And at the core, a tiny light was growing, a frosty white flame that seared Fallon's brain.

"Turn back! Turn back!"

He fought, silently. But the light and the voice poured into him. Abruptly, something in him relaxed. He'd been so long without rest.

He knew, very dimly, that he turned and changed the course, back toward the coast of California.

FROM somewhere, out of the gulfs between the stars, a voice spoke to him as he lay sprawled across the control panel.

"There was no need for you to die, Fallon. Now, I can see much. It was no monster that struck us, but the first shock of a series of quakes, which will close the fissure far better than any human agency Therefore, what happened to me was not your fault.

"And I am glad it happened. I, Bjarnsson, was growing old. I had nothing but science to hold me to Earth. Now my knowledge is boundless, and I am not confined by the fetters of the flesh. I am Mind – as some day we will all be.

"You will be safe, Fallon.The invasion will fail as the power is shut off, and America can deal with any further dangers. Marry Joan, and be happy

"I don't know about myself, yet. The possibilities are too vast to be explored in a minute. I am not dead, Fallon. Remember that! But—" and here Fallon heard an echo of Bjarnsson's harsh, mocking laughter – "if you should ever cease to be a fool and become again a smart guy I shall find a way to send you back along evolution, to a stupid ape!

"I go now, Fallon. Skoal! And will you name your first-born Einar? I can see that it will be a son!"




Cube from Space

Super Science Stories, August 1942


CHAPTER ONE

Coffin Ship

He'd been falling toward Jupiter for a long time. He knew that, because he could feel the thickness of his red beard against the curve of his helmet. It was hard to remember why, hard to think of anything except the sharp, exquisite agony of breathing.

He raised his head with a blind, instinctive defiance. The slight movement set him spinning slowly. He watched the moving stars with savage blue eyes, and cursed them.

He was an infinitely tiny thing against all that empty, star-shot vastness—a red-haired man, dying in a vac suit.

Almost as sheer reflex action, he opened the oxygen jet. There was no response. "Empty," he mumbled. "Empty." He cursed it. His head throbbed, and the throbbing went down and burned in his throat and lungs.

He tried to remember why he was here, to take his mind off the strangling. Ships, spaceguard ships—very dimly that memory came back. The dirty sons had finally trapped him. He'd fought them, but there were too many, and he'd gone into the deadly Belt to lose them.

"Wouldn't follow," he whispered, and laughed. "No guts. Planet-bred, and soft. They couldn't follow Red!"

But it hadn't mattered. Ships weren't built to buck the Belt. His automatic deflectors burned out from the overload. He got lost. And then there was a crash.

He'd bailed out. There was no way of telling where he was until, miraculously, his hand rockets kicked him free of the asteroids. Then he saw Jupiter, and knew that he was in that vast gulf that no ship had yet penetrated.

He knew then that he was finished. There would be no one to pick him up. He couldn't get back. He'd live just as long as his air held out.

Now there was no more air.

Red hated dying. He hated meeting something he couldn't beat, either by cleverness or sheer strength. But he grinned, his strong teeth gleaming white in the tangle of his red beard.

"I lasted—" he whispered, "longer than any planet-bred man." He laughed out at space, the black fire-shot immensity of it. "You couldn't drive me crazy, anyway. Not me, Red!"

The stars were getting blurred. There were great drums beating in his head. His face was twisted; the cords of his throat were like bundled wires. He clenched his fists, gathering the last shreds of his strength.

Death was going to have to fight for him.

It was then that the black cube drifted past, between him and the golden blaze of Jupiter.

Its gravitational field pulled him, broke his slow aimless arc toward Jupiter. The motion jarred his dull brain a little. It was hard to see, harder still to think. But the sharp perfection of that black mass spurred him.

It was man-made. He could see the rivets on it, the studded outline of an airlock on the nearest face.

His lungs strained against the thick, foul air. Sweat ran from his hair roots, into his eyes and mouth. It was agony to move.

But he forced his hands to find the rocket lanyards at his belt, to fumble the little things to a grip and fire them.

There wasn't much charge left in them. He'd used it all getting away from the Belt. But there was enough—just enough.

He clawed for the outer handle of the lock door. He could hardly see it, and his hand didn't belong to him anymore. But the handle moved smoothly on its delicate balances.

He clawed his way inside, grinning with the exquisite torture of it. The door closed automatically behind him. A dull reddish light came on overhead. Dimly he heard the hiss of air.

He pawed the latch of his helmet open. Air rushed into his lungs. It had a queer taste to it, but it was air, and breathable.

Red lay there a long time. Part of it he was unconscious. But his lungs stopped hurting and the drums stopped battering his head. After a while he sat up, viciously thirsty, shaky, but alive.

It was then that the first chill of fear crawled over him.

* * *

He looked at the walls of rusty black metal, the way the rivet heads were cut, the mechanism of the lock door. It wasn't Martian work, nor Venusian, nor Terran.

Besides, all the Triangle ships were round or cigar-shaped, never cubed. And this was the Jovian Gulf, where no Triangle ship had ever come.

He got up very quietly, and shucked the clumsy vac suit. He flexed his great thick-muscled body, testing it, and was fairly satisfied. There was a heavy blaster on the suit belt. He took it in a huge, scarred fist with hairs standing on it like red-gold wires against the burn of space.

Very carefully he opened the inner door of the lock, his blue eyes narrowed and ugly under red brows.

A light came on, like the one in the lock, showing a narrow passage. Red padded down it on his soft Martian sandals. It was so still he could hear the rustle of his tunic, blue-green Venusian spider-silk, rumpled and open over his hairy chest.

The passage came to a square well, cross-braced with girders, with balconies of black metal above and below, connected by ladders. They were dark, but far down below there was light, a dim rusty-red glow.

There was a sound in the well too, a queer, soft, steady sound, almost like breathing, as a giant might breathe in his sleep.

Red started down. Suddenly, clear and sharp in his brain, a voice said, "Stop!"

Telepathy was nothing new to Red. He'd worked with Martian Low-Canalers in the glory holes. He sprang away from the ladder head and got his back against the wall, looking around, his blaster up.

There was light in his eyes then, a stabbing blue-white dagger of it. He made a sharp animal cry of pain and covered his eyes with his free hand. But the light speared through the flesh, and his optic nerves contracted in agony.

He snarled and fired blindly out into the well. He heard, with his ears, a hard little laugh. The light burned into his closed eyes, stabbed his brain with searing blades.

He fired again, uselessly. The pain got him in the stomach. He was already weak from what he'd been through. He tried to hold his ground, but his head turned, and then his shoulders and his whole body, trying to escape the light.

It followed, ruthlessly. He retched, and his knees gave. His blaster made a distant ringing clang on the balcony floor.

The voice said, "Drop the weapon over the edge."

Red gripped it, stubbornly, and the light was intensified. Nothing shut it out. His whole brain was seared with it.

"In one more minute," said the voice, "you will be blind."

Red pushed the blaster over the edge. It struck a girder, and then, distantly, something that rang. A great bellowing roar echoed up the well, a sound that made Red's heart skip a beat.

The light was gone then. He crouched, trembling, breathing hard, with the sweat salty in his mouth, letting the blessed darkness flow through him. There was no sound. The cords of Red's jaw knotted in anger, but he was afraid.

He was no fool. And he knew he couldn't fight that light.

When he could begin to see again he squinted out into the dim well.

Something moved between the rusty girders, and the voice said in his mind, "Here, in front of you."

* * *

At first Red saw only a faint, fuzzy glow. It focused slowly into a small metal disc, perhaps three feet across, hovering in the well. Above it, apparently growing out of its center, was the upper body of a man. It was not really a man—manlike, but not human. Red felt that in the nerves of his skin, the prickling of his hair roots. He stared with hard, wary blue eyes.

There were shoulders, narrow but powerful, and long wiry arms ending in strong, slender hands with seven fingers. There was a head, magnificently domed, and a face that was rather too small, though the features were beautiful and cut with uncompromising strength.

Crowning that splendid skull was a crest of something soft and feathery that shimmered iridescently. The whole creature glowed with a faint, pulsing phosphorescence.

The eyes that watched Red were long and opalescent, slightly tilted. They burned with little flickering points of fire. Red shivered suddenly.

There was an eagerness about those eyes, a hunger and a towering, driving hope, almost as though Red were a symbol.

He said sullenly, "What are you?"

The creature laughed. Its teeth were pointed like a cat's and its tongue was blue.

"So there is life in this solar system—human life!" The feathery crest rose and began to pulse with rippling light, as though the hairs were hollow and filled with fire.

There was a stirring down below. Red looked down. Little shining discs began to pour up through the well, rushing with a strange, excited eagerness between the girders.

There were ten of them presently, hovering in front of the red-haired man. Some were older than the first; one was younger. But all had the same opalescent eyes and the same terrible, fierce hope.

Red caught the thought of one. "Is it possible, after all this time . . . Korah! Is it possible?"

The first one smiled. "We'll make it possible. You, human! There's no life in this gulf. How did you get into our airlock?"

Red told him, briefly. His body was strung tight and his nerves ached. He was in a trap, and he couldn't see a way out.

Korah's opal eyes narrowed. "The lawmen of your people chased you, eh? That means you're an outcast. What's your name?"

"Red. I never had another."

"We have just entered your solar system. Tell me about the inner planets."

Scowling, Red told him. Then he demanded, "What are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing here?"

Korah's face was a hard white mask. "We were a great people once. We came from the world of another star. For more time than your little brain could conceive we have drifted across interstellar space, fighting, in this iron coffin, to keep alive."

His sinewy hands gripped the rim of his floating disc and there was a look in his eyes that made Red's heart jerk.

"All this time," whispered Korah. "All this darkness and loneliness and suffering, these maimed bodies, because of a man. A human, Red, a human like you."

He caught something swiftly and raised it, a queer thick tube aimed at Red. "I ought to blind you," he said softly. "I ought to burn the brain in your stupid skull!"

One of the older creatures caught his arm. "Wait. This man was sent to us. Let's try to use him."

He floated closer. His fine-cut face had deep, grim lines in it, and his eyes were infinitely tired—but not soft.

He said, "Red, is there any place on these three worlds you speak of where we could land, colonize, and live unnoticed until—until we have regained our strength?"

"No. You'd be spotted the moment you got into the space lanes beyond the Belt. They'd either take you in or blow you apart. Besides, all the usable land is already being used."

"And there's no other place?"

"Listen," said Red. "What is all this? And what is in it for me?"

"Your life," said Korah evenly. "If you're of no use to us, we'll use you as a slave—as long as you last."

Red's dark, scarred face was ugly. "I don't make a good slave."

"That depends on the master," said Korah gently. "Well?"

"How can I tell you where to go?" Red's body was clammy with sweat, prickling with the cold, dry hate he felt in them.

The old one said slowly, "Perhaps you don't understand. I'm Saran. My body is older than Korah's, less impetuous. I'll try to explain.

"We are near death. If we don't find a suitable place very soon, our race will become extinct. If you can help us to such a place, you will be rewarded. If not . . ."

He shrugged his narrow shoulders. "We have no reason to love your breed."

Red looked at the rust on the walls, the dim light, listened to the whispering silence of the great empty cube. He saw Korah's eyes, burning with deep, terrible fires, and the others with their beautiful crested heads straining forward.

He shivered. The white scar stood livid against the burn of his face, where old Wick had broken his nose with a spanner. Earth, Venus, Mars; swamp and desert and teeming cities; spaceguard ships—where could he tell them to go?

"If I do tell you," he said, "how do I know you won't welsh?"

"We keep our word," whispered Saran, "even to humans."

Somehow Red believed him. But the younger ones, Korah—He licked dry lips and tried to think. They waited, pale and glowing in the dim well, hardly breathing.

And suddenly, in the tight silence, there was a voice, a man's voice, faint and distant, down below in the rusty dimness, cursing. Cursing with such a low, blistering intensity that the whisper of it carried like a spear.

Red's muscles tightened. "What's that? Some other fool who did you a favor?"

Korah laughed very softly, the point of his blue tongue flicking across his pointed teeth.

"Yes, Red, a very great favor. But that doesn't concern you now. Three planets beyond the Belt. Our instruments showed us four."

"Mercury!" cried Red. He'd forgotten it. Nobody thought about little fireball much. Then he shut his jaw and his mind tight.

Saran said wearily, "Don't bother, Red. We can drug you and pick your mind at leisure. You'll have to trust us."

Korah's thought smashed across the older man's. "Then there is a place!"

"I don't know," said Red slowly. "Maybe." Their glowing shapes blurred. He took hold of the balcony rail and closed his eyes. Quite suddenly the last of his tough strength was used up.

The last thing he heard was the man's voice, cursing down in the rusty well.

* * *

Red realized two things when he came to. The first was that the ship was moving. He was as sensitive to every quiver of a spaceship as a good rider is to his mount. He knew that the great cube was limping slowly along a definite course.

The second thing was that he'd been out a long time. He was completely rested. He was neither thirsty nor hungry. And there was the mark of a hypodermic needle on his wrist.

He scowled at it, remembering Saran's words. They'd moved him off the balcony. He lay on a mattress of some spongy stuff in a little iron cubicle.

He got up and tried the door. It opened. A little surprised, he went out onto a balcony, like the first one but much lower down.

And suddenly a mind invaded his, gripped it, shook it, tramped about in it like a black wind.

Red started instinctively to fight it off, but it cried, "You, human! Come down! Come down!"

Red looked over the rail. There was no sign of the shining creatures. The floor of the well was just below him, partly obscured by the pattern of the girders, murky in the dim light.

He went down, slowly, the mind force pulling at him with terrible intensity. It wasn't a mind like Korah's. It was wild and savage and powerful, but it was human.

His sandaled foot touched bottom. He turned. Heavy riveted doors pricked the black walls on four sides. In the center of the space were three great blocks of iron, kept free of rust.

The two outer blocks bore clustered vats and coils and apparatus in glassite cases. The rhythmic breathing sound which Red had heard before came from them.

The middle block was higher and larger. There was something on it, connected by transparent tubes to the others, so that the whole thing formed a cross. The red light was dim. He padded forward. Then he stopped, the pulses hammering in his throat and wrists.

Spreadeagled on the center block was a man in armor.

He must have measured nearly seven feet. His black armor was dulled and crusted with age, dented with the marks of great blows.

His mailed feet were shackled to the block with iron bands. The wristlets had been stripped from his wide-spread arms and there too were shackles, grown deep into the flesh. Below them the transparent tubes ran into the veins, pumping a fluid that glinted darkly in the dull light.

Black hair grew from the man's head, flowed down the block and out over the metal floor in a pool of shadow. His black beard spread out over his battered breastplate, falling down to mingle with the darkness of his hair.

Something dangled from the girders overhead. It was a chain, and a sword hung from the end of it by its grip. A great two-handed sword, its queer blunt point just above the face of the giant.

Red stopped. The pit of his belly was cold. The man's head turned suddenly, so that his hair made a dark, whispering sound on the rusty plates, and eyes were watching him from under shaggy black brow—eyes half mad, but human.

The mind-voice said to Red, "You've given them refuge. You've given them life. You've betrayed your kind!"

* * *

Red looked at the mark on his wrist and smiled without mirth. "The dirty sons! So we're headed for Mercury."

"They got everything—orbits, spaceguard patrol boundaries, everything you know about the planet. Korah told me. He was pleased to tell me."

The black eyes went to the sword overhead, swinging slowly in a vagrant current of air. They followed the motion in a way that made Red shiver. Suddenly the prisoned body moved convulsively, fighting the shackles, and the rusty armor groaned and rang.

"The devils! They've won out after all. All this—the darkness, the suffering, the time—for nothing!"

His gaze swung back to Red, only half seeing him. "I drove them out of one solar system. I sacrificed myself to do it. And I've stood the punishment, the drifting and the time because I thought they'd never find a home again. And now you—little red man that I could break in my two hands—you make it all for nothing!"

Remembering Korah's opal eyes, Red wondered if it was all for nothing for him too. His hand strayed uneasily to where his blaster should have been, and his narrow blue eyes searched the darkness.

He said, "I don't get this. Who are you? What are they? Where did you come from, and why? And—how long ago?"

He looked at the dull, rusted armor and the shackles grown into the flesh of the man's wrists, and the black hair heavy on the deck.

"How long, little man? How long is eternity?" Those suffering, elemental eyes went again to the swinging sword. "I am Crom. I was king once, in a land called Yf. And they are the Rakshi. The time came when we had to fight them, we humans, because we couldn't take any more.

"They were different then. They were beautiful and numerous and very strong. They knew a lot we didn't know, the shining devils! But they didn't know us—not the heart, the guts of us."

Crom's hands clenched into great scarred fists and the glass tubes swayed into his wrists. He smiled, his teeth white in the black tangle of his great beard.

"That was a fight," he whispered. "They almost beat us. But they were fighting from this ship, all the best brains of them, and I thought of something. I got in through a space-vent while they were busy deciding how to finish us off in a hurry, too busy to hear my mind. I killed two of them in the engine room, and poured every last ounce of power they had into their drive.

"The terrific acceleration tore us clean away from our solar system, as I hoped it would. It also burned out the motors. Even if they could have fixed the motors they couldn't have got the ship back because they use sun-power and there wasn't any sun."

Crom laughed, the harsh roar of it echoing in the rusty balconies. "Can you conceive how they felt? They had me, but that was all. Me, and interstellar space! Haie! That memory is almost compensation for the rest. All this load of mighty brains, rushing at constant speed through nothing to nowhere, and helpless, because of me!

"I thought they'd kill me, but they had better ideas. Trust them! They kept me alive—alive to meditate on my sins, with my sword mocking me overhead. But I could mock them too. I could say, 'My people are safe from you,' and laugh at them, all through those black empty ages of drifting.

"But now we've been drawn into the field of another sun. And you . . . " His head turned, and the voice of his mind shuddered like distant thunder in Red's brain. "And you have let them win."

* * *

It took all Red had to meet Crom's eyes. He said, half angrily, "That's too bad. But how could I help it?"

Crom whispered, "You could have thrown yourself from the balcony."

Red stared at him, and then laughed. "Hey, wait a minute! This isn't my fight. All I want is my neck safe and a getaway."

"Not your fight!" said Crom. "The gods blast you! There's a colony on Mercury, isn't there?"

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"Korah told me. He took particular pleasure in telling me. They picked your brain clean, Red, and it gave them ideas. You know why you're here talking to me, don't you?"

"No." He was liking things less by the minute.

"You're here to make me squirm," said Crom with savage quiet. "They're throwing my laughter back in my teeth, through you. Do you know what they'll do to that colony on Mercury?"

"No." The red shadows were still empty. Red's hide prickled uneasily. He knew he was being watched, and he didn't like it.

"They'll take them for slaves, Red, use them like beasts, for work they won't do and for experiments. You don't know the Rakshi, how they live on and on in different bodies. You don't know the agony they can cause. They worship power, Red, as men worship their gods—power, pure and naked, for its own sake. They don't want world conquest or domination by force, nothing as stupid and mentally unimaginative as that.

"They like to sit in their beautiful fortress and play with men like pieces on a chess board, for the sheer mental pleasure of the game. They get power in many ways—giving scientific secrets to unscrupulous men, powerful new weapons to lawbreakers, the gift of prolonged life to men whose minds they test and approve. Minds," he added softly, "like yours, Red."

Red's blue eyes were suddenly hot and bright. "What are you getting at?"

"I mean they can use you. They'll give you power under them, the status of—well, ambassador to the human forces they wish to contact. Power, Red, and virtual immortality."

A thick, hot pulse began to beat in Red's temples. His lips were dry. He licked them, and whispered, "Yeah?"

There were thoughts tramping around in his head—huge, thundering dreams. Circe, the Pleasure World, with the wealth of three planets there for the plundering. The Treasure City of Mars and the lost, water-buried secrets of Venus.

He spread out his big, scarred hands and looked at them. Age was like death to him, a sneaking thief to steal his strength and his cunning. To defeat age, to jeer at death . . . .

It was while he was off guard, thinking these things, that Crom attacked him.

The shackled Titan looked up at the swinging sword with eyes as deep and elemental as primal space. And the strength of his brain shocked against Red's, huge and savage and terrible.

"Free me!" roared the voice of his mind. "Give me my sword. Free me! Free me!"

It was very still in the dark well. Red's eyes closed. His body stiffened, bent like a straining bow. Sweat needled his face, oiled the red-gold hair of his chest.

It was agony, the beating of that mind against his, greater than the blow of Wick's spanner across his face, a great thundering pain, the pain of iron under the hammer. He snarled, and the veins of his brow and throat stood out like knotted cords.

And suddenly it was gone. Crom lay limp on the block, his teeth white in the black tangle of his beard and the breath harsh between them.

"They were right," he whispered. "The gods curse you, Red. The gods blast you to hell!"

A cold, black fury swept across Red's heart. "What do you want me to do?"

"Look at that door. That's the Temple. The Temple of the Flame, the light that makes them shine the way they do, and stimulates their tissues so that they live on and on. Do you know how many there are sealed up in there, waiting for bodies? Three hundred of them, the best brains of their stinking race!

"My sword was forged in Yf. It has a power beyond steel, a flame of its own that will destroy their Flame. Give me my sword. Free me, let me blast the Flame. You're human, Red. Remember your duty!"

Red laughed, a harsh, ugly bark. He stripped off the rumpled silken tunic and stood with the red light spilling over his bull neck and great thick-muscled body.

"Look," he said.

Crom's black eyes went from the white scar of the spanner across Red's broken nose, down the tangled pattern of old weals across his back and breast, to the puckered gashes of a spiked Martian knuckle-duster across his flat belly.

"Most of that," Red said dispassionately, "I got before I was fifteen. I was born on a tramp freighter. I never knew who my parents were, never cared much. Had all I could worry about just staying alive.

"They sold me from one tramp to another, to sweat in the galleys and the glory holes. I never set foot on any ground until I was sixteen. Then I ran away from the ship I was in. It was a dirty little tramp port. I got shanghaied aboard Wick's rotten hulk. I stood him for two voyages, and then he hit me once too often. I woke up. I took the spanner away from him, and I never heard whether he died or not. I got away in a life-skiff. Nobody touched me. They knew I wasn't a kid any more, and they were scared.

"Since then I've made my way alone, getting what I could and not doing badly. Black Cargo running, hijacking, straight piracy."

He pulled the tunic on again, running his palm over the soft, rich silk.

"I haven't said I'd take their offer, if they make it. I don't like taking orders. But if I do decide to . . ."

He shrugged and gave a slow, hard grin. "I have no world," he said softly, "and I never met a man I didn't hate."

Crom looked at him. He didn't speak nor move, but a cold, iron something slid through Red and held him.

He snarled and jerked his head away, and saw Korah coming toward him, a swift silver gleam in the red dusk.

The Rakshi's tilted eyes burned like living opals, a shifting fire that warmed his beautiful white face. He set the great sword swinging over Crom's head and laughed silently, the points of his teeth like ivory needles.

"Come into the control room, Red," he said. "We're landing on Mercury."

CHAPTER TWO

Port of Death

Red stood in the control room, looking into a visilens of unfamiliar shape. The bitter blaze of Mercury stabbed in at him. The Rakshi had made a long curve in their ship, clear outside the orbital range of planets or spaceguard patrols.

They were coming in now toward the Sunside. As they drew nearer, Red could see the black line of the Darkside slicing thin across the farther hemisphere, and the naked mountains of the Twilight Belt raking at the sky like Titan spear-points.

He was used to the sleek fast ships of the System, and the great cube seemed clumsy and unmaneuverable.

He said uneasily, "Do you think she'll do it?"

Korah hovered beside him. He answered in Red's own mongrel tongue, learned from his drugged brain along with the information on himself and Mercury.

"If we had full power, there'd be no doubt. But we had only proper metal enough to repair one motor. And since we had none of these problems in our own sphere of activity, we're not prepared for them."

He looked at the visilens. The opalescent fire of his eyes was suddenly misted.

"No more darkness," he whispered. "No more hunger. No more ages of little death in the Temple. We can have bodies again, strong fine bodies, and breathe clean air and feel sunlight."

The muscles stood out on his pale, shining jaw. "We've got to make it." Saran spoke from a complicated panel of indicators and delicate reaction gauges.

"There's unlimited power from the Sunside, and raw materials of every kind in the rock and soil. Notice the topography, Korah—a jumble of tremendous peaks with deep valleys isolated between them. A fortress cut in any one of those peaks would be completely hidden and impregnable."

The youngest one of the ten Rakshi grunted. He was watching still another set of instruments.

"The human is right, though, Mercury is highly metallic. It cuts the sun's magnetic field in an eccentric orbit, and dangerously close to the source. With full power in all our anti-gravity plates—which we haven't—it would still be hard to land."

Korah said grimly, "The ship is strong. The Temple is doubly protected. Even if we crash, some of us will live."

Red looked at him admiringly. Human or not, these Rakshi had the tough kind of insides he liked.

Korah must have caught his thought. He turned suddenly on the man, his tilted eyes and feathery crest alive with savage fire.

"Guts!" he said. "You don't know. Your brain couldn't conceive. Over three hundred of us trapped in this iron coffin, without adequate supplies of any kind, and a hundred human slaves. We had to learn, human—learn how to handle brains as separate entities, keeping them alive and safe after the body was worn out. Learn how to create new bodies from the living tissue of the slaves, grown and kept in a plasma culture.

"We are a long-lived race. But the time we've drifted, the bitter, empty time! There were not bodies enough, even for the few permitted them. We had to design these hideous legless things and these magnetic cars, so that we could save flesh and energy. We worked a miracle. We stripped the inside of the cube of metal to keep our air pumps and heating units going. We designed bodies that needed almost no food. We lived, in spite of Crom, in spite of humanity.

"Now there is no more flesh for new bodies. We'll get it down there. We're not going to be beaten now, even if the ship is smashed to bits!"

* * *

Red scratched his bearded jaw. The idea of growing bodies from living tissue was unpleasant to him. But so were pain and hunger and hate, and he'd lived with those all his life. He said, "That offer Crom told me about—is that on the level?"

Saran looked up from his dials. "Yes. Do you accept?"

Red shrugged. "I don't know yet."

Korah's pointed teeth flashed. "There's no hurry, Red."

For some subtle reason Red disliked the way he said it. "Now, what's this Temple, and the Flame? Crom said—"

"Red." Korah's silky voice slid across his like cold steel. "Those are questions not to be asked. Remember that."

Red's mouth set. And then the young Rakshi cried out, "Look! In the visilens. Isn't that the Earthman's beacon?"

Red looked into the screen. The night shadow was cutting in across the peaks of the Twilight Belt, drawn by the rocking of the planet on its axis.

On one gigantic, airless pinnacle was a shaft of metal topped by a glowing ball—a perpetual beacon powered by Mercury's own electric potential—set there to guide the infrequent ships that dared the planet to bring supplies and fresh colonists. Without it there was no way of identifying the colonist's valley. No compass or radio of any kind could work near little fireball.

Korah touched a stud on a bank beside him. A single beam of light licked out and touched the beacon. It flared once, then there was only a molten puddle on the rock.

"An enlarged version of the weapon you experienced, Red. Using sun-power, it can reproduce light of any frequency and any concentration. By modulation, we can induce burning, blindness, or spontaneous combustion. Simple, and very effective."

"Very," said Red grimly. They dropped lower over the valley. It was dark now, and there was a storm raging down in the atmosphere. He could see the lightning flashes.

This was Markham Chandler's haven for waifs and strays—one little man tackling a job too tough even for the mining companies. The last man Red had talked to, in a crimp port while fueling, had said there were about eight hundred dopes sweating their hearts out in the valley.

The naked peaks came closer. The cube lurched with sharp suddenness. Seven-fingered hands began to fly over key-banks. There was dead silence in the control room, except for the spitting hum of power.

Red got hold of a stanchion and braced his feet. He disliked the feeling of helplessness. But the controls of the cube were a mystery to him. Besides, they had forgotten his existence.

Pale, glowing faces bent over instruments. The young Rakshi had the tip of his blue tongue hard between his teeth, thin strong fingers racing. There was a singing tension in the air.

The cube lurched again, heavily. Now that they were close, Saran had slid the metal shutters from the huge square ports. Walls of naked rock reared up beyond them.

Red wasn't quite clear about what happened next. The magnetic pull of the cliffs made the cube rattle like a die in a box. The snarl of overloaded transformer banks rose, stuttered, and choked out.

Somebody yelled, sharp and high. There was a shattering, grating crash of metal on stone. The cube tilted over and began to drop.

Red hung fiercely to his stanchion, his legs dangling.

The glowing shapes of the Rakshi moved erratically in the dull red light. He heard Crom laughing far down the well, a great taunting roar. The cube dropped with a scream of tortured metal.

There was an impact. Red got only a confused chaos of sound. He lost his grip and fell a long way through grinding, wrenching darkness.

Hot, wet air struck him, and lashing rain. The noise of crashing metal blended into the stunning roar of thunder. There was earth under him, soft and wet and warm.

He got blindly to his knees, gasping. Blood was running into his mouth and eyes with the savage rain.

And suddenly there were hard human hands on his body, and a hard human voice yelling in his ear, "Get up! For God's sake, hurry! Back into the caves!"

* * *

He ran, but without sight or knowledge. There were flashes of fierce light, and then another light that was fiercer and didn't go away. The man with him cursed in a sobbing voice.

There were feet trampling the wet ground, a lot of them. Voices crying out. Red tried to break free from the hands that held him, but there were more of them, helping, urging. His head spun and sang.

His eyes began to hurt—the familiar, blinding pain of Korah's tube. The running feet began to falter. A man's voice cried out, wild and strong and, even in that dazed moment, infinitely thrilling.

"The caves! Run, all of you! Never mind the pain. Come on!"

Up a steep, rocky slope, Red stumbled, drenched, his head a burning agony. The man had stopped cursing. And then darkness came sudden and sharp, like a blow.

The rain was gone; the thunder muted. Voices, footsteps ran back queerly.

The vibrant voice said, "Back to the third chamber—quickly."

They stumbled on in utter dark, in uneasy silence. A child was whimpering and someone moaned softly, but that was all. Then the sounds of their going flicked away, as though the walls and roof had opened out.

It did that twice more, and by that time Red was getting his grip back. In the third cavern they all stopped. Someone lighted torches. Red blinked and shook himself away.

The man who had picked him up started to speak, stared, and then yelled, "Hey! All of you! This man—"

The babble that had started hushed abruptly. In the utter silence, every wet, stricken face turned to Red, standing huge in the torchlight, blood and water dripping from his beard, his blue-green tunic molded tight across his bunched, taut muscles.

The man said with grim quiet, "I picked him up in Tenney's field, right under the thing. He must have come from it."

In the silence Red could hear the beat and rush of his own blood. The air was furnace-hot, but his skin was cold. They were a hardy lot of people, big and tough and work-hardened. Just now they were furious in a grim, dangerous way.

He said, "I did. Got thrown free when the ship crashed." His voice was steady "They had me prisoner in her."

A man pushed forward. He was little, broad and thick and ugly. Thinning gray-brown hair was plastered wetly to a clumsy skull, and his face was almost funny, even now. But his brown eyes had something in them that made Red's heart jump a little, just as Crom's voice had.

The little man said, "I'm Markham Chandler. What are the creatures in that—ship, you said? We couldn't see it clearly."

There was no point in lying. Red told them as well as he could. The man who had helped him watched him with hard green eyes. He was a Martian with Drylander blood in him, as big as Red, with a stern, dark face and thick, dark hair.

"Drifted in from outer space, eh?" he said. "How'd they get you then?"

"Suspicious, aren't you?" growled Red, and explained, including the spaceguard, because there was no other credible reason for his being beyond the Belt.

"Spaceguard, eh?" said Chandler. "Well, we hold nothing against you for that. Many of us have been in trouble at one time or another."

That sounded strange to Red. But Chandler's eyes were neither soft nor foolish.

The Earthman went on: "What do they—the Rakshi—want of us?"

Red told them that too. He watched faces go whiter and harder, eyes widen in stunned disbelief. Suddenly the big Martian caught Red's tunic at the throat.

"You're lying," he said, his green eyes ugly "You're either pirates or slavers."

Red's hand went up toward the Martian's face, and was caught suddenly by another—a cool, strong, brown hand, a woman's hand.

"Let him alone, Jat. He's hurt—and he's not lying. I saw the thing crash and something shiny was thrown out of a broken port. It wasn't human, and the ship isn't a Triangle ship."

Red looked into a woman's face, not far below his own. Tangled, curling hair the color of wheat-straw framed its brownness, softened the clear sharp lines of brow and jaw.

She smiled at him. Her hazel eyes were hard and grim, but not afraid. She said, "Come over here and I'll fix your head."

Chandler nodded. He looked very tired. "Yes. I'll count noses, and then we'll see what to do next. Jat, you get some of the men and guard the passage. We may be attacked at any time."

* * *

Jat went away reluctantly. Markham turned back into the crowd, and there began to be a stir of voices and purposeful movement. Red studied the girl with flat, hard eyes.

"What's the game, sister?"

She stared at him. "Game? I just want to patch up that cut."

Remembering the women in the crimp ports, Red put his eyebrows up. Then he shrugged and fell in beside her. She moved easily, with a springy litheness. Her body, in a plain short tunic of rough homespun, was built of long, clean curves.

It came to Red that she was something he'd never seen before. He scowled uncertainly and asked, "What's your name?"

She laughed. "Hildegarde Smith. They call me Hildy. What's yours?"

"Red. What do you do here?"

"Work on my father's farm." Her face sharpened as though with a sudden pain, and she glanced at the cave entrance and away again.

"He didn't make it," said Red.

She nodded. "It all happened so suddenly. I was visiting in the upper part of the settlement. We all made for the caves when we heard the crashing—sometimes the cliffs crack and there are slides during a heavy storm. Our place is farther down the valley. I started back, but I knew it was no use. I—" She broke off and bent over a chest marked First Aid.

Red scratched his matted beard. The girl had sand. He wanted suddenly to get away, back to the Rakshi. But there was no way without tipping his hand, and that meant death.

"Sit down," she said. Red obeyed reluctantly. If the girl had been one of the kind he understood, it wouldn't have mattered. But she wasn't. He had no precedent, nothing to judge her by. It made him uneasy.

Looking out over the cave, he realized with a sharp, cold shock that he had no precedent for any of those people. They were as alien to him as the Rakshi.

And he was trapped with them.

Hildy's fingers were cool and deft on his skin. They made him feel strange, uneasy. He watched her tensely while she bandaged the cut, sponged his face and beard clean.

She gave him water, caught the look and smiled. "What's the matter? Did I hurt you?"

"No. Only nobody ever did that for me before."

She looked at the scar of Wick's spanner across his face, her eyes both angry and compassionate.

She said quietly, "You've suffered, haven't you?"

He shrugged and took his eyes away. "I guess so."

"Then you can understand." The people in the cave were breaking up into orderly groups, supplying themselves with food, water, and blankets from big chests. Hildy watched them, the torchlight making deep, harsh shadows on her face.

"We've worked so hard, Red. God knows what we'd have done without this place, and Markham Chandler. And now, to have it stolen from us, to be threatened and tortured . . . ."

She moved her clenched hands savagely. Chandler came up, rolling heavily on his short legs.

"Four hundred and twenty-seven," he said, and put his hands wearily over his face. "The cube crashed almost in the center of the valley. The others were cut off, or caught by the light."

Red had a mental picture of how the Rakshi were doing it. The high-power light mechanism would make the people blind and helpless long enough to be disarmed and divided up, herded into the few remaining rooms of the ship that still had doors.

Chandler went on, "I'm sending the women and children back into the caves in small scattered groups, with a few men. The rest of the men will go up into the galleries to try and get a line on how to fight these devils."

His brown eves met Red's blue ones suddenly, very clear and direct. "Red, you know about these Rakshi. You'll help us."

Hildy took his hand. "Of course he will." She smiled at him, her hazel eyes warm and deep with friendliness.

All the meaning, the implication of trust and comradeship and understanding behind Hildy's eyes took Red with a sudden violence. He took his hand away roughly and opened his mouth, but no words came.

He saw Hildy's eyes go cold and bright as spear points, saw the furrows deepen and tighten in Chandler's ugly, tired face. Then, through the bitter silence, there came the roar of blasters out in the passage.

They broke off raggedly. There was a noise of running feet. Jat stumbled into the cavern, his hands over his eyes, followed by the men who had gone with him.

A voice spoke out in Red's brain. He knew the others heard it too from the way they stiffened and gasped.

It said, "Submit and you will not be harmed. Resistance will only mean pain."

* * *

Korah came floating through the entrance, a shining blur against the dark of the passage, four other Rakshi behind him. His crest was erect, a living, pulsing flame, and his eyes were godlike.

Hildy's face was a mask cut from gray bone. Only the eyes were alive in it, alive and hating. In a single blurred motion she caught up a heavy tin box from the first aid chest and threw it straight at Korah's head.

The Rakshi jerked aside in his floating car. The box went past him, crashing harmlessly into the rock wall. He showed his sharp teeth and the tip of his blue tongue in a smile, and raised his light tube.

Hildy cried out and turned away, shielding her eyes. Jat couldn't see her, but he knew her voice. He raised his blaster blindly. Korah's tube flicked a beam across his hand. He screamed and dropped the blaster. Red saw the smoke from the burn.

There was chaos after that for a brief time. They fought with everything they had, tools, weapons, fragments of rock. And the five Rakshi flitted batlike through the smoky torchlight, burning, blinding, laughing with their blue tongues and pointed teeth.

Red stayed out of it, against the wall. He dragged Hildy back of the chest and growled, "You'll be able to see again soon."

She didn't answer. He stood watching the fight. The Rakshi were mere pallid blurs, moving too fast for the eye to see. Their reactions were much quicker than the humans', because they didn't miss a shot.

They weren't out to kill. Men and women, blinded by the light, blundered into each other, so that those who could still see had to stop fighting lest they kill their own people.

Markham Chandler's ringing voice made itself heard finally, over the din, telling them to stop. They did, reluctantly. Hildy got up without looking at Red and went uncertainly toward Jat, crouched and snarling over his seared hand.

Korah said aloud, silkily, "That's better. You'll learn to obey. Form ranks, please. We're going back to the ship."

Chandler came forward. His brown eyes were bloodshot, tortured slits, but his voice was clear and steady.

"What right have you to do this?"

Korah's eyes burned on him. "The right of survival."

"We haven't harmed you. This is ours. Our lives aren't yours to take or control. You can't do this!"

Korah's soft voice carried across the whole cavern, and it made Red shiver.

"We can do it because we must, or perish. Your race is not at stake. You're only a handful, a pinch of dust. But we are all. Do you say, when you kill a beast to feed your children, 'We have no right'?"

"A pinch of dust!" It was Hildy s voice, ringing out like the music of a steel blade.

She stood erect, with her hand on Jat's broad shoulder. Her face in the torchlight had the primal beauty of a tigress. Red licked dry lips, watching it. The palms of his hands were wet.

"Who are you to judge us as nothing? You, a monster from another world! What right have you here, stealing and maiming? This is not your earth, nor your air, nor your sun!"

Korah turned to her slowly. It was a long time before he spoke.

"No," he said very quietly "It's not our earth, nor air, nor sun. All those we had once, and a human stole them from us."

He moved his free hand down his body to the metal car. The muscles tightened in his glowing face, ridged and bitter.

He whispered, "Monster!" and raised his tube.

He didn't go for her eyes this time. The hot beam flicked like a whiplash. She bared her teeth and her eyes closed, but she didn't move. Red saw the red weals of the burns come out across her face and throat.

Jat roared and started to his feet, but Red was quicker.

He took the stabbing beam on his own back and snarled, "Stop it, damn you!"

Korah let the beam stay just long enough to set the silk of his tunic smoldering. Then he flicked it off and said, "Well, Red. We thought we'd lost you."

"The port split when we struck," said Red sullenly. "I fell through and got caught in the stampede." Hildy hadn't moved, but her fingers bit deep into the muscles of Jat's shoulder. The Martian's green eyes were the eyes of a tortured fiend.

Red said, "Did you have to do that?"

"Why?" Korah's eyes were mocking. "I thought you hated humans."

"She was kind to me," said Red sulkily. It sounded a weak, silly thing to say. His heart was pounding and the veins in his neck hurt. He was confused and viciously angry, and he didn't know why.

* * *

Red felt Korah's mind probing into his. He tried to shut his mind, but the anger and confusion slowed his reflexes. Korah's thought withdrew, and Korah's eyes danced with wicked fires.

"About that offer, Red. Will you take it?"

"I'll tell you later." He was safe enough, with five light tubes holding the colonists.

But the hate, the loathing in them prickled across his hide.

"Now, Red," said Korah softly.

Red felt Korah's thought, and knew it was now. He tried to think of Circe and the Martian Treasure City, and strength beyond the span of other men's strength.

But all he could think of was Hildy's gentle fingers on his head and the burns red and ugly across her face.

He looked at Korah, and there was a new, wary understanding in him.

"I won't bargain with you. Where's Saran?"

"Dead, in the crash. Don't you trust me?"

"No." He knew nothing of the process of longevity. Korah could play any sort of a trick on him at any time. And he didn't like reins on him. If he took orders from the Rakshi, he'd never be free.

Hildy's face, stony white and barred with livid burns; Jat, dark and tortured; Markham Chandler's ugly, gentle face with eyes that Red couldn't meet—all those people, alien, new, beyond his understanding—and Hildy, saying, "You've suffered. You can understand."

"There must be a ship in the colony. Give me that and let me go."

Korah laughed. His crest shimmered in the torchlight. "No."

Fear began to tighten along Red's nerves. "You promised me life."

"Have I said you were not to live? Think of this, Red. If you go to the culture vats, you'll live a very long time indeed!"

Red said very softly, "You dirty son!"

Korah laughed again. "Your crazy, inconsistent little minds! You humans run with every mood that blows across you. No matter how well I think I know a human brain, something latent may develop in a few short minutes and upset all my plans. I wouldn't have trusted you, Red, if you had accepted. You don't know it yourself yet, but you've changed. You're like Crom, too tough to be broken. You'd betray us before we were ready.

"I think, my friend, that the culture vats will be much the safest place for you, if—" he let his tilted eyes move across the tense white faces, waiting under the threat of the Rakshi beams—"you live to reach them."

Red didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. He stood still while the Rakshi saw to the disarming of the crowd.

When it was done, Korah said, "We're short of food for the humans. Why the large stock here?"

Markham Chandler answered, in a voice utterly drained of emotion, "The storms at perihelion often drive us out of the valley."

Korah nodded. "Fetch it along. You'll need it while we're classifying you."

The youngest Rakshi had been preoccupied for some time, his crest glittering. Now he drifted close to Korah and spoke in his own tongue. Korah threw back his head in fierce exultation. His crest too rose and pulsated, and the three others joined in.

Red knew that the Rakshi back in the ship were communicating. He'd picked up the rudiments of telepathy from the Martian stokers in the tramp ships. Now he tried to use them.

He wasn't good at it. All he could catch were vagrant thoughts concerning "plasma shortage—hurry." But he could fill in. They were making plasma for the culture vats; they were short-handed, and they wanted help in a hurry. He wondered if the brains in the Temple were getting impatient for bodies.

It was just by sheer chance that Red caught the brief flame of inspiration in Jat's green eyes. The Rakshi were too busy to catch the thought back of it. But Red watched the Martian go very obediently to the store chests against the wall and haul out a side of bacon.

Watching that, Red saw Markham Chandler's quick start, the urgent touch of his hand on Jat's shoulder, and the swift interchange of whispers between them. Chandler too got a side of bacon.

They came back together to Hildy, very patient and drooping. The ranks formed in sullen quiet and trailed out into the passage, with the Rakshi floating overhead, tubes raised and alert.

At low power the tubes lighted the way plainly. Red made his mind as nearly blank as possible and stayed close to Jat, Chandler, Hildy, and the fat sides of bacon.

They went through the second chamber, where the Rakshi's light was swallowed up in vaulting darkness, then back through the corridor beyond that, and into the first of the three caverns.

Again the light was swallowed up, the sound of their slow, sullen departure dispersed. And Red found out why Jat had insisted on bacon.

CHAPTER THREE

Sword of Light

The cave roof was high and very black. Nothing happened for a minute or two, until the bacon was well out across the floor. Then Red heard them, cutting swift and shrill across the hot, still air—wings, huge, wide wings arrowing down.

Somebody yelled, and a woman screamed. The ranks fell apart. Red saw Korah's opal eyes dart upward, and his light tube brightened.

There were gleams up there in the dark, metallic purple and green, hard and bright. Red saw wings with small light bodies between them and little fanged heads, rushing down toward them.

They were going so fast that the light didn't stop them. Jat threw his bacon high up beside Korah. A cloud of the shiny things swooped at it like gulls. Red saw that their thin wings were scaled.

The Rakshi turned up their power. Even at burning concentration the bat creatures didn't pay much attention. Chandler threw his load at the nearest Rakshi. Then he turned and ran, his arm around Hildy.

Red followed them. The Rakshi were recovering from their surprise now. Winged bodies were beginning to clatter down. One of the yarns he'd heard in a fueling port came back to Red: The Mercurian hunting bats, sheathed in glass-like, silicate scales to defy the lightning.

It was probably the salt they were after in the bacon. There wasn't much of it on Mercury.

Jat was leading the way toward a small side passage. There was no time to collect others from the confused mob. They could only run, hoping that the brief margin of time would be long enough.

The Rakshi, battling desperately against the hard-sheathed bats, didn't see them go. The little dark hole swallowed them up, Jat, Hildy, Chandler, and Red, following unnoticed.

They went a long way, quite slowly but as though Jat knew the way. The echoes didn't betray the extra pair of footsteps. They came out presently into a gallery that seemed to run just inside the cliff, because there was blinding daylight pouring in farther along it.

Red let the others get ahead of him. They stopped by the cleft in the rock.

He caught Chandler's low hard voice: "Our valley. Our valley, damn them!"

Jat said, "The ship's still there. If I only had bombs!"

"But we haven't," Hildy put her hands on their shoulders. "There must be some way! We can't lose it all now."

Jat said, very low, "That swine Red might know a way." His big body flexed. "I'd like to tear it out of him!"

Chandler sighed. "Poor devil. He's caught in his own trap."

Red, padding toward them on his soft sandals, stopped, scowling. Hildy shook her light curly hair away from her burned face.

"Red's not bad," she said. "He saved me, you know. He's suffered a lot, and he's bitter. I don't think he ever saw a decent human being before. He just doesn't understand."

Jat made a wordless snarling noise. Chandler looked at him with the ghost of a smile on his tired face.

"You haven't forgotten, Jat, how you felt when you came out of the Jekkara quarries?"

The line of Jat's shoulders sagged. "All right. But that doesn't help us now. Look down there. They got rid of the bats. And there go the last of our people into their cursed ship."

Red ran his hand through his beard, and then up across the mark of Wick's spanner. His fingers touched the bandage on his forehead. He looked at Hildy's face, clear and strong in the sunlight.

He went forward then, and said, "Hildy."

* * *

They turned, the three of them, startled. Chandler put a hand on Jat's arm and said, "Wait."

Red said, "Hildy, I've got to ask you something. There's a ship down there. Are you three going to escape in it?"

She frowned. "I suppose Jat will try and get back to Venus for help. Why?"

"You're not going?"

"Not without my father."

"And you, Chandler?"

"Those people are my friends. There may be some way I can help. A lot of them will die before help can possibly get here."

Red measured Jat's strength. "I can take that ship from you."

Hildy's face was suddenly brighter than the sunlight. She put her hands on his arms and smiled and said, "But you won't. You're beginning to see, Red, aren't you? You're realizing that the people you've known are only a small part of humanity. Haven't you ever felt lonely, Red? Out there in space, with no one to speak to, nothing to trust, nothing to work for?"

He looked away from her, out to the insulated hangar that meant freedom, the old life. Her hands were warm and strong on him, and they never quivered.

"Lonely?" he whispered. "I never knew till now."

He broke away sharply. "Jat, take that ship and clear out. Get help here as fast as you can. Chandler—"

Chandler said, "Hold on. There's Rakshi."

They looked out. Far below, a little floating dot pressed over the hangar dome, trailing a pencil of pale flame. Then it flashed away, back to the great black cube tilted drunkenly in the neat green fields, with one corner crumpled and the square ports split.

"Fused the hangar opening," said Jat bitterly. "So that's that."

Chandler turned his brown eyes to Red. "Do you know of any way?"

"Perhaps." He was thinking of a man in black armor, and a vengeance that had waited too long. "Anyway, I'll try."

He sat down with them to wait until dark. And he laughed suddenly. "It doesn't make sense, any of it. You know that."

Markham Chandler smiled. "The best things," he said softly, "seldom do."

* * *

Plans were completed by dark. Red and the Martian went cautiously back to the caves for arms. There was no sign of a search.

"Too busy," growled Red. "That's what I'm gambling on. They're in a fever for new bodies, and there are only nine of 'em to work."

Coming back, Red had an idea. He stripped the heavy glassy-scaled wings from several of the fallen bats. "Armor," he said briefly.

When it was time, they went out into the stifling, moonless dark, going down the valley toward the broken cube. Steam from the hot springs choked them, and the rich earth was warm underfoot.

There was a Rakshi on guard. Red grinned. "All right," he whispered. "Cover me. And if I don't see you again . . ."

Hildy said, "Good luck, Red. God go with you." She kissed him, firmly on the lips. Jat and Markham Chandler shook hands with him. Red let his head drop.

"I still don't know why I'm doing this. Maybe if I come back . . ." He shrugged and went away, going softly through thick undergrowth. The glassy bat wings hanging against his body made a tiny clicking.

The Rakshi stopped suddenly in his drifting patrol. He didn't look at Red, but beyond, and Red smiled. The three he had just left were thinking hard at the Rakshi, thinking threats and plans, trying to cover Red's mind. He crept on, his mind guarded.

The Rakshi made a single dart toward the noisy minds. Red got behind him. His blaster made a brief bright flare in the blackness.

"Eight," he said grimly, and climbed in through the riven port.

There was no one in the control room, or the dark well beyond. He could hear muffled sounds from the prisoners. He didn't try to release them. Their suddenly-altered thought pattern would warn the Rakshi no matter what they were doing. But two brains, wary and guarded, might be blanketed, might go unnoticed long enough . . .

One mind, if Crom had died in the wreck. But Crom's sword would still be there.

The floor of the well tilted crazily, but the walls, here in the heart of the cube, were not much buckled. The Titan in black mail lay still on his block, his eyes open, fixed on the sword.

Red padded softly across the floor. The heavy iron doors were all shut. He came up beside the block and whispered, "Crom!"

He thought for a long moment that the man was dead. The black, fixed eyes never wavered. Then, from a vast, cold distance, "Go away. The stink of you makes me sick."

Red said, "I discovered something, Crom. I am a human—and proud of it."

The eyes moved then. They came slowly to Red's face, and a fire began to burn in them, deep and terrible.

"You lie. The gods blast you!"

Red said doggedly, "How do I get you loose?"

The mad black eyes seared into his, but this time he could meet them. He felt Crom's brain beating at his, and he didn't stop it.

"Gods, gods, gods!" whispered Crom. "Don't give me hope again!"

Red said, "How, Crom? Before it's too late."

This time he couldn't meet Crom's eyes.

"Take out the tubes and bind my wrists. I'll live long enough."

He did it, binding the round holes tight with strips from his tunic. "Now, Crom. The shackles."

"Take down my sword. Hold it by the grip only."

Red climbed on the block. The sword was heavy in his hands. He got it free and climbed down again.

"Lay the blade across the iron bands."

Wild violet light sheeted out. Molten metal sparked and ran. Red stood back, pulses hammering thick and hot in his throat and head.

Slowly, slowly, Crom rose from his block and stood.

Red put the sword in his hands. A cold shudder shook him. It wasn't Crom's body doing this impossible thing. It was something beyond, something primal and burning strong as the sun.

There was a grating clang of metal behind him. He spun around. Korah floated in the red dusk, smiling, his light tube raised.

"Well, Red," he said softly, "I thought you might come back." Then he saw the giant standing, his hair spread like a sable cloak over the block and the rusty iron floor.

His face turned to a pale, glowing mask, and his opal eyes had death in them. He didn't speak. But the light tube steadied.

The blinding beam struck Crom fairly across the eyes.

* * *

Red fired. The flame of his blaster shot wide as Korah made his car dip aside. Crom cried out, a great thundering roar. Red cursed silently and went in closer.

He fired again, and missed again. The Rakshi was diabolically quick. Crom was abruptly quiet. Korah laughed, the tip of his blue tongue sharp between his pointed teeth. His beam flicked to Red.

Red smiled without mirth. With his free hand he held one of the bat wings to shield his face, firing from the shelter of it.

The blaster flame just grazed Korah's gleaming shoulder. Red heard, behind him, the ring and groan of Crom's armor and the heavy, dragging whisper of his hair. Korah's face tightened.

His beam shifted strength, shot down below Red's guard to leave a seared weal across his midriff. Then it went to Crom again.

Red shut his teeth together and went in between them. The hot beam struck against his shield of hard-scaled wings.

Then, almost contemptuously, it darted down, found his unprotected legs and struck them from under him. His hands came out to stop the fall, and the beam smoked across them. Red screamed and lay still.

The beam touched the fallen blaster and brightened. The weapon vanished in a molten blob.

"Little men," whispered Korah. "Foolish little humans, to think you could stop us now!"

Crom moved across the floor in slow, ragged jerks. Korah danced out of the way of his sword, laughing without sound.

"Go on, Crom, every step of the way. Is there a bitter, deathly taste in your mouth, the taste of defeat, Crom? The bitter bread you fed us. Suck it, Crom! Chew it, and strangle on it!"

He let his burning beam play with exquisite skill across Crom's face. The weals stood scarlet against the deathly white skin, and the eyes were black seared shadows under the heavy brows. But he didn't stop, moving step by step toward the door of the Temple.

Down on the floor, Red twitched and drew his muscles tight. His mind stood at a great distance, looking down at his body and telling it what to do. Korah floated below, lost in the ecstasy of his triumph over Crom.

There was no time to Red, nothing but his mind detached in a clear white light directing the formless agony that was his body. He got up, very slowly, and went up behind Korah.

His great seared hands went up. They pulled the floating metal disc off balance and down, and jerked up to the Rakshi's glowing neck.

Korah cried out. He tried to turn, but Red's hands held him. He stepped up the power of his beam and turned it backward against Red's body. The hard bat wings began to melt, but not soon enough.

Korah's crest, for the first time, rose in an effort to warn the Rakshi in the temple. But it dropped again with the snapping of his neck in Red's fingers.

Crom made a harsh animal sound in his throat and staggered forward against the prop of his sword. Red saw his face through a dark veil, the face of a dead man, driven only by the fire that burned in him.

Red said, "Give me the sword, Crom."

"Open the door," whispered Crom.

"You're dying. Give me the sword."

"The gods blast you! Open the door!"

Red pushed the handle down with his elbow. The metal door swung back. Light flooded out, warm opalescent light that pricked his skin with tiny needles. Red looked into the Temple of the Flame.

Seven Rakshi hovered over huge vats, turning startled faces to the door. The square room was very large. Stacked against the walls in transparent containers were naked brains in clear fluid, bathed in the light.

The light came from a pedestal in the center of the space. The heart of it was too bright to look at. But Red knew dimly that in some way it was life.

Red whispered, "You can't make it. Give me the sword. You can't even see it."

"I can feel it," said Crom softly, and smiled. The sweep of one great arm struck Red back out of the way. He went on into the Temple, his head erect, carrying the weight of his rusted armor and the black hair that dragged behind him as though they were nothing.

The Rakshi made a strange wailing cry and their tubes came out. Crom's armor glowed and his hair became a bursting aureole of flame. He laughed out of it, a great ringing shout beyond pain, beyond anything human.

He crashed forward, and the blade of his sword smote fairly across the heart of the Flame.

* * *

There was nothing after that but light. Lying on the floor of the well, seeing very dimly, Red watched it swell out and out in a pulsing fury of strength. The Rakshi vanished in it, and the vats, and the brains in their stacked containers.

Presently the inner surface of the heavy walls vanished too, in a flood of molten metal. Then the fire died away and there was darkness, and utter silence.

Red smiled. It was a boy's peaceful, tired smile. His body ached. He looked down and said, "Hildy'll fix it."

He fainted, quite happily, on the rusty iron floor beside the empty block.


Outpost on Io

Planet Stories, Winter 1942


I

MacVickers stopped at the brink of the dark round shaft.

It was cold, and he was stark naked except for the silver collar welded around his neck. But it was more than cold that made him shiver and clamp his long bony jaw.

He didn't know what the shaft was for, or where it led. But he had a sudden feeling that once he went down he was down for good.

The small, round metal platform rocked uneasily under his feet. Beyond the railing, as far as MacVickers could see to the short curve of Io's horizon, there was mud. Thin, slimy blue-green mud.

The shaft went down under the mud. MacVickers looked at it. He licked dry lips, and his grey-green eyes, narrow and hot in his gaunt dark face, flashed a desperate look at the small flyer from which he had just been taken.

It bobbed on the heaving mud, mocking him. The eight-foot Europan guard standing between it and MacVickers made a slow weaving motion with his tentacles.

MacVickers studied the Europan with the hating eyes of a wolf in a trap. His smooth black body had a dull sheen of red under the Jupiter-light. There was no back nor front to him, no face. Only the four long rubbery legs, the roundish body, and the tentacles in a waving crown above.

MacVickers bared white, uneven teeth. His big bony fists clenched. He took one step toward the Europan.

A tentacle flicked out, daintily, and touched the silver collar at the Earthman's throat. Raw electric current, generated in the Europan's body, struck into him, a shuddering, blinding agony surging down his spine.

He stumbled backward, and his foot went off into emptiness. He twisted blindly, catching the opposite side of the shaft, and hung there, groping with his foot for the ladder rungs, cursing in a harsh, toneless voice.

The tentacle struck out again, with swift, exquisite skill. Three times like a red-hot lash across his face, and twice, harder, across his hands. Then it touched the collar again.

MacVickers retched and let go. He fell jarringly down the ladder, managed to break his fall onto the metal floor below, and crouched there, sick and furious and afraid.

The hatch cover clanged down over him like the falling hammer of doom.

MacVickers dropped into a circular room thirty feet across, floored and walled with metal and badly lighted. The roof was of thick glassite plates. Through them, very clearly, MacVickers could see four Europan guards, watching.

"They're always there," said the Venusian softly. "You'll come to love them, stranger."

There were men standing around the ladder foot, thirteen of them, with the Venusian. Earthmen, Martians, Venusians, pale, stark naked, smeared with a blue-green stain. Their muscles stood out sharp on their gaunt bodies, their silver collars a mocking note of richness.

Deep, deep, inside himself, MacVickers shivered. His nostrils wrinkled. There was fear in the room. The smell of it, the shudder of it in the air. Fear that was familiar and accustomed, lying in uneasy sleep, but ready to awake.

There were other men, four or five of them, back in the shadows by the wall bunks. They didn't speak, nor come out.

He took a deep breath and said steadily, "I'm Chris MacVickers. Deep-space trader out of Terra. They caught me trying to get through the Asteroid lines."

Their eyes glistened at him, looking from him to something behind them that he couldn't see. They were waiting, and there was something ghoulish in it.

The Venusian said sharply, "Tough luck, MacVickers. I'm Loris, late of the Venusian Guard. Introduce yourselves, boys."

They did, in jerky detached voices, their eyes sliding from him to the hidden something. Loris drew a little closer, and one of the Earthmen in the group came toward him.

"I'm Pendleton," he said. "The Starfish. Remember?"

MacVickers stared at him. The furrows deepened in his craggy face. He said, "My God!" very softly, and not as a curse. "Pendleton!"

The man grinned wryly. He was English, the ravaged ghost of the big, ruddy, jovial spaceman MacVickers remembered.

"Quite a change, eh? Well, perhaps we're lucky, MacVickers. We shan't have to see the smash."

MacVickers' head dropped forward. "Then you saw it coming, too?"

Loris made a little bitter laugh that was almost a sob. All the desperate boyish humor was gone from his face, leaving it old and grim.

"Who hasn't? I've been here — God knows. An eternity. But even before my ship was taken, we knew it. We can't build spaceships as fast as their Jovium destroys them. When they break through the Asteroid line . . . ."

Pendleton's quiet voice was grave. "Mars is old and tired and torn with famine. Venus is young, but her courage is undisciplined. Her barbarians aren't suited to mechanized warfare. And Earth . . . ." He sighed. "Perhaps if we hadn't fought so much among ourselves . . . ."

MacVickers said harshly, "It wouldn't make much difference. When a man has a weapon that causes metal to explode its own atoms, it doesn't make any difference what you stack up against him."

He shook his craggy head impatiently. "What is this place? What are you doing here? The Jovies just brought me here and dumped me in without a word of explanation."

Pendleton shrugged. "We, too. There's a pit below, full of machinery. We work it, but we're not told why. Of course, we do a lot of guessing."

"Guessing!" The word rose sharp on the thick hot air. A man burst out of the group and stood swaying with the restless motion of the floor. He was a swart Low-Canal Martian. His yellow cat-eyes glittered in his hatch-face, and his thin ropy muscles twitched.

"I'll tell you what this place is, Earthman. It's a hell! And we're caught in it. Trapped, for the rest of our lives." He turned on Pendleton. "It's your fault. We were in a neutral port. We might have been safe. But you had to get back . . . ."

"Janu!" Pendleton's voice cracked like a whip. The Martian went silent, watching him. There was more than hate in his yellow eyes. Dando, the beginning of the trap-madness. MacVickers had seen it in men who couldn't stand the confinement of a deep-space voyage.

The Englishman said quietly, "Janu was my glory-hole foreman. He rather holds this against me."

The Martian snarled, and then coughed. The cough became a paroxysm. He stumbled away, grey-faced and twitching, bent almost double.

"It's the heat," said Loris, "and the damp. Poor devil."

MacVickers thought of the air of Mars, cold and dry and pure. The floor rocked under him. Eyes, with the queer waiting shine to them, slid furtively to the hidden thing behind the standing men.

The hot wet air lay on his lungs. He sweated. There was a stir of nausea in him and the lights swirled. He shut his jaw hard.

He said, "What did Janu mean, the rest of our natural lives? They'll let us go when the war's over — if there's anything left to go to."

There was a tight little silence. And then, from the shadows against the wall, there came a brittle, whispering laugh. "The war? They let us go before that!"

The group parted. MacVickers had a brief glimpse of a huge man crouched in a strange position on the floor. Then he couldn't see anything but the shape that came slowly out into the light.

It moved with a stiff, tottering gait, and its naked feet made a dry clicking sound on the metal floor. MacVickers' hand closed hard on the ladder behind him.

It had been a man, an Earthman. His body was still tall, his features still fine. But there was a film over him, a pale blue-green sheathe that glistened dully.

He thrust out an arm, with a hand on it like a hand carved in aquamarine. "Touch it," he whispered.

MacVickers touched it. It was quite hard, and warm only with the heat of the air. MacVickers' grey-green eyes met the sunken, sheathed eyes of the Earthman. His body hurt with the effort to control it.

"When we can no longer move," the whispering voice said, "they take us up the shaft and throw us over, into the mud. That's why you're here - because we were one man short."

MacVickers put his hand back on the ladder rung. "How long?"

"About three Earth months."

He looked at the blue-green stain that smeared them all. The color of the mud. His hands sweated on the ladder rung.

"What is it?"

"Something in the mud. A radioactivity, I think. It seems to turn the carbon in human flesh to a crystalline form. You become a living jewel. It's painless. But it's . . . ." He didn't finish.

Beads of sweat stood on MacVickers' forehead. The men standing watching him smiled a little. There was motion behind them. Loris and Pendleton stiffened, and their eyes met.

MacVickers said steadily, "I don't understand. The mud's outside."

Loris said with a queer, hurried urgency, "You will. It's almost time for the other shift . . . ."

He broke off. Men scattered suddenly, crouching back in a rough circle, grinning with feral nervousness. The room was suddenly quiet.

The crouching man had risen. He stood with his huge corded legs wide apart, swaying with the swaying of the floor, his round head sunk between ridges of muscle, studying the Earthman out of pale, flat eyes.

Loris put his old, bitter boy's face close to MacVickers. His whisper was almost inaudible.

"Birek. He's boss here. He's mad. Don't fight him."

II

MacVickers' grey-green eyes narrowed. He didn't move. Birek breathed in slow, deep sighs. He was a Venusian, a coal-swamper from his size and pallor and the filthy-white hair clubbed in his neck.

He shimmered, very faintly in the dim light. The first jewel-crust was forming across his skin.

Knife-sharp and startling across the silence, a round hatch-cover in the floor clashed open. Sweat broke cold on MacVickers. Men began to come out of the hole, just at the edge of his vision. Naked, dirty men with silver collars.

They had been talking, cursing, jostling. The first ones saw Birek and stopped, and the silence trickled back down the shaft. It was utterly quiet again, except for the harsh straining of things against the hot, wet air and the soft sounds of naked men climbing the ladder.

The cords ridged on MacVickers' jaw. He shifted his balance slightly, away from the ladder. He could see the faces thrust forward in the dim light, eager, waiting.

Shining eyes, shining teeth, cheek-bones shining with sweat. Frightened, suffering men, watching another man fear and suffer, and being glad about it.

Birek moved forward, slowly. His eyes held a pale glitter, like distant ice, and his lips smiled.

"I prayed," he said softly. "I was answered. You, new man! Get down on your belly."

Loris grinned at Birek, but there was no humor in his eyes. He had drawn a little away from MacVickers. He said carelessly:

"There's no time for that now, Birek. It's our shift. They'll be burning us if we don't go."

Birek repeated, "Down on your belly," not looking at Loris.

A vein began to throb on MacVickers' forehead. He looked slight, almost small against the Venusian's huge bulk.

He said quietly, "I'm not looking for trouble."

"Then get down."

"Sorry," said MacVickers. "Not today."

Pendleton's voice cracked out sharply. "Let him alone, Birek! You men, down the ladder! They're going for the shockers."

MacVickers was aware of movement overhead, beyond the glass roof. Men began to drop slowly, reluctantly, down the ladder. There was sweat on Pendleton's forehead and Loris' face was as grey as his eyes.

Birek said hoarsely, "Down! Grovel! Then you can go."

"No." The ladder was beyond Birek. There was no way past him.

Loris said, in a swift harsh whisper, "Get down, MacVickers. For God's sake get down, and then come on!"

MacVickers shook his head stubbornly. The giant smiled. There was something horribly wrong about that smile. It was the smile of a man in agony when he feels the anesthetic taking hold. Peaceful, and happy.

He struck out, startlingly fast for such a big man. MacVickers shrank aside. The fist grazed past his head, tearing his ear. He crouched and went in, trying for a fast body-blow and a sidestep.

He'd forgotten the glimmering sheathe. His fist struck Birek on the mark, and it was like striking glass that didn't shatter. The pain shot up his arm, numbing, slowing, sickening. Blood spattered out from his knuckles.

Birek's right swept in, across the side of his head. MacVickers went down, on his right side. Birek put a foot in the small of his back. "Down," he said. "Grovel."

MacVickers twisted under the foot, snarling. He brought up his own feet viciously, with all his strength. The pain of impact made him whimper, but Birek staggered back, thrown off balance.

There was no sign of hurt in his face. He stood there, looking down at MacVickers. Suddenly, shockingly, he was crying. He made no sound. He didn't move. But the tears ran out of his eyes.

A deep, slow shudder shook MacVickers. He said softly, "There's no pain, is there?"

Birek didn't speak. The tears glistened over the faint, hard film on his cheeks. MacVickers got up slowly. The furrows were deep and harsh in his face and his lips were white.

Loris pulled at him. Somewhere Pendleton's voice was yelling, "Hurry! Hurry, please!"

The guards were doing something overhead. There was a faint crackling sound, a flicker of sparks in a circle around the top of the wall. Shivering, tingling pain swept through MacVickers from the silver collar at his throat.

Men began to whisper and curse. Loris clawed at him, shoved him down the ladder, kicked his face to make him hurry. The pain abated.

MacVickers looked up. The great corded legs of Birek were coming, down, the soles of the feet making a faint, hard sound on the rungs.

The hatch closed overhead. The voice of the dying Earthman came dry and soft over his shoulder.

"Here's where you'll work until you die. How do you like it?"

MacVickers turned, scowling. It was hot. The room above was cool by comparison. The air was thick and sluggish with the reek of heated oil and metal. It was a big space, running clear to the curving wall, but the effect was of stifling, cramped confinement.

Machinery crammed the place, roaring and hissing and clattering, running in a circuit from huge intake pumps through meaningless bulking shapes to a forced-air outlet, with oil-pumps between them.

The pumps brought mud into a broad sluice, and the blue-green stain of it was everywhere.

There were two glassite control boxes high on the walls, each with a black, tentacled Europan. About five feet overhead was a system of metal catwalks giving complete coverage of the floor area. There were Europans on the walks, too, eight of them, patrolling, steadily.

Their sleek, featureless bodies were safe from contact with the mud. They carried heavy plastic tubes in their tentacles, and there were heavy-duty shockers mounted at every intersection.

MacVickers grinned dourly "Trustful lot."

"Very." Pendleton nudged him over toward a drive motor attached to some kind of a centrifugal separator. Loris and the blue-sheathed Earthman followed, with Birek coming slowly behind him.

MacVickers said. "What's all this for?"

Pendleton shook his head. "We don't know. But we have an idea that Jovium comes from the mud."

"Jovium!" MacVickers' grey-green eyes began to grow hot, "The stuff that's winning this war for them. The metal destroyer!"

"We're not sure, of course." Pendleton's infinitely weary eyes turned across the stretch of greasy metal deck to the end of the circuit. But look there. What does that suggest to you?"

The huge pipe of the forced-air ejector ran along the deck there behind a screen of heavy metal mesh. Just above it, enclosed behind three thicknesses of glassite, was a duct leading upward. The duct, from the inordinate size of its supports and its color, was pure lead.

Lead. Lead pipe, lead armor. Radiations that changed living men into half-living diamonds. Nobody knew what Jovium was or where it came from - only it did.

But scientists on the three besieged worlds thought it was probably an isotope of some powerful radioactive metal, perhaps uranium, capable of setting up a violent progressive breakdown in metallic atoms.

"If," said MacVickers softly, "the pipe were lined with plastic . . . . Blue mud! I've traded through these moons, and the only other deposit of that mud is a saucepan full on J-XI! This must be their only source."

Loris shoved an oil can at him. "What difference does it make?" he said savagely.

MacVickers took the can without seeing it. "They store it up there, then, in the space between the inner wall and the outer. If somebody could get up there and set the stuff off . . . ."

Pendleton's mouth twisted. "Can you see any way?"

He looked. Guards and shockers, charged ladders and metal screens. No weapons, no place to conceal them anyway. He said doggedly:

"But if someone could escape and get word back . . . . This contraption is a potential bomb big enough to blow Io out of space! The experts think it only takes a fraction of a grain of the pure stuff to power a disintegrator shell."

There was a pulse beating hard under his jaw and his grey-green eyes were bright.

Loris said, "Escape." He said it as though it were the most infinitely beautiful word in existence, and as though it burned his mouth.

"Escape," whispered the man with the shimmering, deadly sheathe of aquamarine. "There is no escape but — this."

MacVickers said, into the silence that followed, "I'm going to try. One thing or the other, I'm going to try."

Pendleton's incredibly tired eyes looked at the livid burns on MacVickers' face. "It's been tried. And it's no use."

Birek moved suddenly out of his queer, dazed stillness. He looked up and made a hoarse sound in his throat. MacVickers caught a flicker of motion overhead, but he didn't pay attention to it. He went on, speaking quietly in a flat, level voice. "There's a war on. We're all in it. Soldiers, civilians, and kings, the big fellows and the little ones. When I got my master's ticket, they told me a man's duty wasn't done until his ship was cradled or he was dead.

"My ship's gone. But I haven't died, yet."

Pendleton's broad, gaunt shoulders drooped. He turned his head away. Loris' face was a death-mask carved from grey bone. He said, almost inaudibly:

"Shut up, damn you. Shut up."

The movement was closer overhead, ominously close. The men scattered across the pit had stopped working, watching MacVickers with glistening, burning eyes across hot oil-filmed metal.

MacVickers said harshly, "I know what's wrong with you. You were broken before you came, thinking the smash was coming and it was no use."

Pendleton whispered, "You don't know, the things they do to you."

Stiff and dry out of the Earthman's aquamarine mask, came the words, "You'll learn. There's no hope, MacVickers, and the men have all they can bear without pain.

"If you bring them more suffering, MacVickers, they'll kill you."

Heat. Oil and reeking metal, and white stiff faces filmed with sweat. Eyes shining, hot and glittering with fear. Rocking floor and sucking pumps and a clutching nausea in his belly. Birek, standing straight and still, watching him. Watching. Everybody, watching.

MacVickers put his hand flat on the engine-housing beside him. "There's more to it than duty," he said softly, and smiled, without humor, the vertical lines deep in his cheeks. His gaunt Celtic head had a grim beauty.

His voice rang clear across the roar of the machines. "I'm Christopher Rory MacVickers. I'm the most important thing in the universe. And if I have to give my life, it'll not be without return on the value of it!"

Janu the Martian, away on the other side of the pit, made a shrill wailing cry, Loris and Pendleton flinched away like dogs afraid of the whip, looking upward.

MacVickers glimpsed a dark tentacled shape on the catwalk above, just before the shattering electricity coursed through him. He screamed, once. And then Birek moved.

He struck Loris and Pendleton and the blue-sheathed Earthman out of the way like children. His left leg took MacVickers behind the knees in the same instant that his right hand pushed MacVickers' face.

MacVickers fell heavily on his back, screaming at the contact of the metal floor. Then Birek sprawled over him, shielding his body with the bulk of his own.

The awful shocking pain was lessened. Lying there, looking up into Birek's pale eyes, MacVickers made his twitching lips say, "Why?"

Birek smiled. "The current doesn't hurt much anymore. And I want you for my self— to break."

MacVickers drew a deep, shuddering breath and smiled back, the lines deep in his lean cheeks.

He had no clear memories of that shift.

Heat and motion and strangling air, and Janu coughing with a terrible, steady rhythm, his own hands trying to guide the oil can. Toward the end of the time he fainted, and it was Birek who carried him up the ladder.

He had no way of knowing how long after that he came to. There was no time in that little hell. The first thing he noticed, with the hair-trigger senses of a man trained to ships, that the motion of the room was different.

He sat up straight on the bunk where Birek had laid him. "The tidal wave," he said, over a quick stab of fear. "What . . ."

"We ride it out," said Loris bitterly. "We always have."

MacVickers knew the Jovian Moons pretty well. Remembering the tremendous tides and winds caused by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, he shuddered. There was no solid earth on Io, nothing but mud. And the extraction plant, from the feel of it, was a hollow bell stink under it, perfectly free.

It had to be free. No mooring cable made could stand the pull of a Jupiter-tide.

"One thing about it," said Pendleton with quiet viciousness. "It makes the bloody Jovies seasick."

Janu the Martian made a cracked, harsh laugh. "So they keep a weak current on us all the time." His hatchet-face was drawn, his yellow cat-eyes lambent in the dim light.

The men sprawled on their bunks, not talking much. Birek sat on the end of his, watching MacVickers with his pale still eyes. There was a tightness in the room.

It was coming. They were going to break him now, before he hurt them. Break him, or kill him.

MacVickers wiped the sweat from his face and said, "I'm thirsty."

Pendleton pointed to a thing like a horse-trough against the bulkhead. His eyes were tired and very sad. Loris was scowling at his stained and faintly filmed feet.

There wasn't much water in the trough. What there was brackish and greasy. MacVickers drank and splashed some on his face and body He saw that he was already stained with the mud. It wouldn't wash off.

The dying Earthman whispered, "There is food also."

MacVickers looked at the basket of spongy synthetic food, and shook his head.

The floor dipped and swung. There was a frightening, playful violence about it, like the first soft taps of a tiger's paw. Loris looked up at the glass roof with the black shapes beyond.

"They get the pure air," he said. "Our ventilator pipes are only a few inches wide, lest we crawl up through them."

Pendleton said, rather loudly, "The swine breathe through the skin, you know. All their sense organs, sight and hearing.

"Shut up," snarled Jaru. "Stop talking for time."

The sprawled men on the bunk's drew themselves slowly tight, breathing hard and deep in anticipation. And Birek rose.

MacVickers faced them, Birek and the rest. There was no lift in his heart. He was cold and sodden, like a chuted ox watching the pole-axe fall. He said, with a bitter, savage quiet,

"You're a lot of bloody cowards. You, Birek. You're scared of the death creeping over you, and the only way you can forget the fear is to make someone else suffer.

"It's the same with all of you. You have to trample me down to your own level, break me for the sake of your souls as much as your bodies."

He looked at the numbers of them, at Birek's huge impervious bulk and his great fists. He touched his silver collar, remembering the agony of the shock through it.

"And I will break. You know that, damn you."

He gave back three paces and set his feet. "All right. Come on, Birek. Let's get it over with."

The Venusian came toward him across the heaving floor. Loris still looked at his feet and Pendleton's eyes were agonized. MacVickers wiped his hands across his buttocks. The palms were filmed and slick with oil from the can he had handled.

There was no use to fight. Birek was twice his size, and he couldn't be hurt anyway. The diamond-sheathe even screened off the worst of the electric current, being a non-conductor.

That gave the dying men an advantage. But even if they had spirit enough left by that time to try anything, the hatches were still locked tight by air-pressure and the sheer numbers of their suffering mates would pull them down. Also, the Jovies were as strong as four men.

Non-conductor. Sheathed skin. Birek's shoulders tensing for the first blow. Sweat trying to break through the film of oil on his palms, the slippery feel of his hands as he clenched them.

Birek's fist lashed out. MacVickers dodged under it, looking for an opening, dreading the useless agony of impact. The bell lurched wildly.

A guard moved abruptly overhead. The motion caught MacVickers' eye. Something screamed sharply in his head: Pendleton's voice saying, "They breathe through the skin. All their sense organs . . ."

He sensed rather than saw Birek's fist coming. He twisted, enough to take the worst of it on his shoulder. It knocked him halfway across the deck. And then the current came on.

It was weak, but it made him jerk and twitch. He scrambled up on the pitching deck and started to speak. Birek was coming again, leisurely, smiling. Then, quite suddenly, the hatch cover clanged open, signaling the change of the shifts. MacVickers stood still for a second. Then he laughed, a queer little chuckle, and made a rush for the hatch.

III

He went down it with Birek's hand brushing past his head. Men yelled and cursed. He trampled on them ruthlessly. The ones lower down fell off the ladder to avoid his feet.

There was a clamor up above. Hands grabbed at him. He lashed out, kicking and butting. His rush carried him through and out across the pit, toward the space between the end points of the horseshoe circuit.

He slowed down, then. The guards had noticed the scuffle. But it seemed to be only the shift changing, and MacVickers looked like a man going peacefully for oil.

Peacefully. The blood thundered in his head, he was cold, and the skin of his back crawled. Men shoved and swore back by the ladder. He went on, not too fast, fighting the electric shiver in his brain.

Fuel and lubricating oils were brought up, presumably from tanks in a still lower level, by big pressure pumps. All three sets of pumps, intake, outlet, and oil, worked off the same compressed-air unit.

He set the lubricating-oil pump going and rattled cans into place. The men of his shift were straggling out from the ladder, twitching from the light current, seared, angry, but uncertain.

There was a subtle change in the attitude of the Europan guards. Their movements were sluggish, faintly uncertain. MacVickers grinned viciously. Seasick. They'd be sicker — if they didn't get him too soon.

The surging pitch of the bell was getting worse. The tide was rising, and the mud was playing with the bell like a child throwing a ball. Nausea began to clutch at MacVickers' stomach.

The pressure-gauge on the pump was rising. He let it rise, praying, his grey-green eyes hot and bright. Going with the motion of the deck, he sprawled over against the intake pumps.

He spun the wheel on the pressure-control as far as it would go. A light wrench, chained so that it could not be thrown, lay at his feet He picked it up, his hand jerking and tingling, and began to work at the air-pipe coupling.

Hands gripped his shoulder suddenly, slewing him around. The yellow eyes of Janu the Martian glared into his.

"What are you doing here, Earthman? This is my station."

Then he saw the pressure gauge. He let out a keening wail, cut short by the crunch of MacVickers' fist on his mouth. MacVickers whirled and swung the wrench.

The loose coupling gave. Air burst whistling from the pipe, and the rhythm of the pumps began to break.

But Janu's cry had done it. Men were pelting toward him, and the guards were closing in overhead.

MacVickers flung himself bodily on the short hose of the oil-pump.

Birek, Loris, Pendleton, the dying Earthman, the hard faces behind them. The guards were manning the shockers. Up in the control boxes black tentacles were flashing across banks of switches. He had to work fast, before they cut the pressure.

Birek was ahead of the others, very close. MacVickers gave him the oil-stream full in the face. It blinded him. Then the nearest shocker came on, focused expertly on MacVickers.

He shut his teeth hard, whimpering through them, and turned the hard forced stream of oil into the hoarsely shrieking blast from the open pipe.

Oil sprayed up in a heavy, blinding fog. Burning, shuddering agony shook MacVickers, but he held his hose, his feet braced wide, praying to stand up long enough.

The catwalks were hidden in the oily mist. The ventilating blowers caught it, thrusting it across the whole space. MacVickers yelled through it, his voice hardly recognizable as human.

"You, out there! All of you. This is your chance. Are you going to take it?"

Something fell, close by, with a heavy thrashing thud. Something black and tentacled and writhing, covered with a dull film.

MacVickers laughed, and, the laughter was less human than the voice.

"Cowards!" he cried. "All right. I'll do it all myself."

Somebody yelled, "They're dying. Look!" There was another heavy thud. The hot strangling fog roiled with hidden motion. MacVickers gasped and retched and shuddered helplessly. He was going to drop the hose in a minute. He was going to fall down and scream.

If they stepped the power up one more notch, he was going to fall down and die. Only they were dying too, and forgetting about power.

It seemed a static eternity to MacVickers, but it had all happened in the space of a dozen heartbeats. There were yells and shouts and, a sort of animal tumult in the thick haze. Suddenly Pendleton's voice rang out of it.

"MacVickers! I'm with you, man! You others, listen. He's giving us the break we needed. Don't let him down!"

And Janu screamed, "No! He's killed the guards, but there are more. They'll fry us from the control boxes if we help him."

The pressure was dropping in the pipe as the power cut out. There was a last hiss, a spurt of oily spray, then silence. MacVickers dropped the hose.

Janu's voice went on, sharp and harsh with fear. "They'll fry us, I tell you. We'll lie here and jerk and scream until we're crazy. I'm going to die. I know it. But I won't go through that, for nothing! I'm going back by the ladder and pray they won't notice me."

More seconds, more tumult. Men suddenly torn between hope and abject terror. MacVickers said wearily into the fog,

"If you help me, we can win the war for our worlds. Destroy this bell, start the Jovium working, destroy Io — victory for us. And if you don't, I hope you fry here and in Hell afterward."

They wavered. MacVickers could hear their painful breathing, ragged with the emotion in them. Some of them started toward the sound of Pendleton's voice.

Janu made an eerie wauling sound, like a hurt cat, and went for him.

MacVickers started to help, but the current froze him to the metal floor. He strained, feeling his nerves, his brain dissolving in a shuddering fire. He knew why the others had broken so soon. The current did things to you, inside.

He couldn't see what was happening. The heavy mist choked his eyes, his throat, his nostrils. The pitching of the bell was a nightmare thing. Men thrashed and struggled and cursed.

So he had killed the guards. So what. There were still the control boxes. If they didn't rush them before the oil settled, they wouldn't have a chance.

Why not give up? Let himself dissolve into the blackness he was fighting off?

A great pale shape came striding through the mist toward him. Birek. This was it, then. Well, he'd had his moment of fun. His fists came up in a bland, instinctive gesture.

Birek laughed. The current made him jerk only a little, in his thin diamond sheathe. He bunched his shoulders and reached out.

MacVickers felt himself ripped clear of the floor. In a second he was out of focus of the shocker and the pain was gone. He came nearest to fainting then, but Birek's huge hand shook him by the hair and Birek's voice shouted

"Tell 'em, little man! Tell 'em it's better to die quick, now, than go mad with fear."

"Come on!" yelled Pendleton. "Here's our chance to show we're still men. Hurry up, you sons!"

MacVickers looked at the Venusian's face. The terrible frozen fear was gone from his eyes. He wanted to die, now, quickly, fighting for vengeance.

The gray, pinched face of Loris loomed abruptly out of the fog. It was suddenly young again, and the smile was genuine. He said,

"Let's teach 'em to mind, Birek. MacVickers, I . . ." He shook his head, looking away. "You know."

"I know. Hurry up with it."

Pendleton's voice burst out of the fog, triumphantly. Janu crouched on the heaving deck, bleeding and whimpering. MacVickers yelled,

"Who's with me? We're going to take the control boxes. Who wants to be a hero?"

Birek laughed and threw him bodily up, onto the catwalk overhead. Most of the men came forward then. The three or four that were left looked at the Martian and followed.


The Halfling

Astonishing Stories, February 1943


I: Primitive Venus

I was watching the sunset. It was something pretty special in the line of California sunsets, and it made me feel swell, being the first one I'd seen in about nine years. The pitch was in the flatlands between Culver City and Venice, and I could smell the sea. I was born in a little dump at Venice, Cal., and I've never found any smell like the clean cold salt of the Pacific—not anywhere in the Solar System.

I was standing alone, off to one side of the grounds. The usual noises of a carnival around feeding time were being made behind me, and the hammer gang was pinning the last of the tents down tight. But I wasn't thinking about Jade Greene's Interplanetary Carnival, The Wonders of the Seven Worlds Alive Before Your Eyes.

I was remembering John Damien Greene running barefoot on a wet beach, fishing for perch off the end of a jetty, and dreaming big dreams. I was wondering where John Damien Greene had gone, taking his dreams with him, because now I could hardly remember what they were.

Somebody said softly from behind me, "Mr. Greene?"

I quit thinking about John Damien Greene. It was that kind of a voice—sweet, silky, guaranteed to make you forget your own name. I turned around.

She matched her voice, all right. She stood about five-three on her bronze heels, and her eyes were more purple than the hills of Malibu. She had a funny little button of a nose and a pink mouth, smiling just enough to show her even white teeth. The bronze metal-cloth dress she wore hugged a chassis with no flaws in it anywhere. I tried to find some.

She dropped her head, so I could see the way the last of the sunlight tangled in her gold-brown hair.

"They said you were Mr. Greene. If I've made a mistake. . . ."

She had an accent, just enough to be fascinating.

I said, "I'm Greene. Something I can do for you?" I still couldn't find anything wrong with her, but I kept looking just the same. My blood pressure had gone up to about three hundred.

It's hard to describe a girl like that. You can say she's five-three and beautiful, but you can't pass on the odd little tilt of her eyes and the way her mouth looks, or the something that just comes out of her like light out of a lamp, and hooks into you so you know you'll never be rid of it, not if you live to be a thousand.

She said, "Yes. You can give me a job. I'm a dancer."

I shook my head. "Sorry, miss. I got a dancer."

Her face had a look of steel down under the soft kittenish roundness. "I'm not just talking," she said. "I need a job so I can eat. I'm a good dancer. I'm the best dancer you ever saw anywhere. Look me over."

That's all I had been doing. I guess I was staring by then. You don't expect fluffy dolls like that to have so much iron in them. She wasn't bragging. She was just telling me.

"I still have a dancer," I told her, "a green-eyed Martian babe who is plenty good, and who would tear my head off, and yours too, if I hired you."

"Oh," she said. "Sorry. I thought you bossed this carnival." She let me think about that, and then grinned. "Let me show you."

She was close enough so I could smell the faint, spicy perfume she wore. But she'd stopped me from being just a guy chinning with a pretty girl. Right then I was Jade Greene, the carny boss-man, with scars on my knuckles and an ugly puss, and a show to keep running. Strictly Siwash, that show, but my baby—mine to feed and paint and fuel. If this kid had something Sindi didn't have, something to drag in the cash customers—well, Sindi would have to take it and like it. Besides, Sindi was getting so she thought she owned me.

The girl was watching my face. She didn't say anything more, or even move. I scowled at her.

"You'd have to sign up for the whole tour. I'm blasting off next Monday for Venus, and then Mars, and maybe into the Asteroids."

"I don't care. Anything to be able to eat. Anything to—"

She stopped right there and bent her head again, and suddenly I could see tears on her thick brown lashes. I said, "Okay. Come over to the cooch tent and we'll have a look."

Me, I was tempted to sign her for what was wrapped up in that bronze cloth—but business is business. I couldn't take on any left-footed ponies.

She said shakily, "You don't soften up very easily, do you?" We started across the lot toward the main gate. The night was coming down cool and fresh. Off to the left, clear back to the curving deep-purple barrier of the hills, the slim white spires of Culver, Westwood, Beverly Hills and Hollywood were beginning to show a rainbow splash of color under their floodlights.

Everything was clean, new and graceful. Only the thin fog and the smell of the sea were old.

We were close to the gate, stumbling a little in the dusk of the afterglow. Suddenly a shadow came tearing out from between the tents.

It went erratically in lithe, noiseless bounds, and it was somehow not human even though it went on two feet. The girl caught her breath and shrank in against me. The shadow went around us three times like a crazy thing, and then stopped.

There was something eerie about that sudden stillness. The hair crawled on the back of my neck. I opened my mouth angrily.

The shadow stretched itself toward the darkening sky and let go a wail like Lucifer falling from Heaven.

I cursed. The carny lights came on, slamming a circle of blue-white glare against the night.

"Laska, come here!" I yelled.

The girl screamed.

* * *

I put my arm around her. "It's all right," I said, and then, "Come here, you misbegotten Thing! You're on a sleighride again!"

There were more things I wanted to say, but the girl cramped my style. Laska slunk in towards us. I didn't blame her for yelping. Laska wasn't pretty.

He wasn't much taller than the girl, and looked shorter because he was drooping. He wore a pair of tight dark trunks and nothing else except the cross-shaped mane of fine blue-gray fur that went across his shoulders and down his back, from the peak between his eyes to his long tail. He was dragging the tail, and the tip of it was twitching. There was more of the soft fur on his chest and forearms, and a fringe of it down his lank belly.

I grabbed him by the scruff and shook him. "I ought to boot your ribs in! We got a show in less than two hours."

He looked up at me. The pupils of his yellow-green eyes were closed to thin hairlines, but they were flat and cold with hatred. The glaring lights showed me the wet whiteness of his pointed teeth and the raspy pinkness of his tongue.

"Let me go. Let me go, you human!" His voice was hoarse and accented.

"I'll let you go!" I cuffed him across the face. "I'll let you go to the immigration authorities. You wouldn't like that, would you? You wouldn't even have coffee to hop up on when you died."

The sharp claws came out of his fingers and toes, flexed hungrily and went back in again.

I dropped him.

"Go on back inside. Find the croaker and tell him to straighten you out. I don't give a damn what you do on your own time, but you miss out on one more show and I'll take your job and call the I-men. Get it?"

"I get it," said Laska sullenly, and curled his red tongue over his teeth. He shot his flat, cold glance at the girl and went away, not making any sound at all.

The girl shivered and drew away from me. "What was—that?"

"Cat-man from Callisto. My prize performer. They're pretty rare."

"I—I've heard of them. They evolved from a cat-ancestor instead of an ape, like we did."

"That's putting it crudely, but it's close enough. I've got a carload of critters like that, geeks from all over the System. They ain't human, and they don't fit with animals either. Moth-men, lizard-men, guys with wings and guys with six arms and antennae. They all followed evolutionary tracks peculiar to their particular hunks of planet, only they stopped before they got where they were going. The Callistan kitties are the aristocrats of the bunch. They've got an I. Q. higher than a lot of humans, and wouldn't spit on the other halflings."

"Poor things," she said softly. "You didn't have to be so cruel to him."

I laughed. "That What's-it would as soon claw my insides out as soon as look at me—or any other human, including you—just on general principles. That's why Immigration hates to let 'em in even on a work permit. And when he's hopped up on coffee. . . ."

"Coffee? I thought I must have heard wrong!"

"Nope. The caffeine in Earthly coffee berries works just like coke or hashish for 'em. Venusian coffee hits 'em so hard they go nuts and then die, but our own kind just keeps 'em going. It's only the hoppy ones you ever find in a show like this. They get started on coffee and they have to have it no matter what they have to do to get it."

She shuddered a little. "You said something about dying."

"Yeah. If he's ever deported back to Callisto his people will tear him apart. They're a clannish bunch. I guess the first humans on Callisto weren't very tactful, or else they just hate us because we're something they're not and never can be. Anyway, their tribal law forbids them to have anything to do with us except killing. Nobody knows much about 'em, but I hear they have a nice friendly religion, something like the old-time Thugs and their Kali worship."

I paused, and then said uncomfortably, "Sorry I had to rough him up in front of you. But he's got to be kept in line."

She nodded. We didn't say anything after that. We went in past the main box and along between the burglars readying up their layouts—Martian getak, Venusian shalil and the game the Mercurian hillmen play with human skulls. Crooked? Sure—but suckers like to be fooled, and a guy has to make a living.

I couldn't take my eyes off the girl. I thought, if she dances the way she walks. . . .

She didn't look much at the big three-dimensional natural-color pictures advertising the geek show. We went by the brute top, and suddenly all hell broke loose inside of it. I've got a fair assortment of animals from all over. They make pretty funny noises when they get started, and they were started now.

They were nervous, unhappy noises. I heard prisoners yammering in the Lunar cell-blocks once, and that was the way this sounded—strong, living things shut up in cages and tearing their hearts out with it—hate, fear and longing like you never thought about. It turned you cold.

The girl looked scared. I put my arm around her again, not minding it at all. Just then Tiny came out of the brute top.

Tiny is a Venusian deep-jungle man, about two sizes smaller than the Empire State Building, and the best zooman I ever had, drunk or sober. Right now he was mad.

"I tell that Laska stay 'way from here," he yelled. "My kids smell him. You listen!"

I didn't have to listen. His "kids" could have been heard halfway to New York. Laska had been expressly forbidden to go near the brute top because the smell of him set the beasts crazy. Whether they were calling to him as one animal to another, or scared of him as something unnatural, we didn't know. The other halflings were pretty good about it, but Laska liked to start trouble just for the hell of it.

I said, "Laska's hopped again. I sent him to the croaker. You get the kids quiet again, and then send one of the punks over to the crumb castle and tell the cook I said if he ever gives Laska a teaspoonful of coffee again without my say-so I'll fry him in his own grease."

Tiny nodded his huge pale head and vanished, cursing. I said to the girl, "Still want to be a carny?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "Anything, as long as you serve food!"

"That's a pretty accent you got. What is it?"

"Just about everything. I was born on a ship between Earth and Mars, and I've lived all over. My father was in the diplomatic corps."

I said, "Oh. Well, here's the place. Go to it."

* * *

Sindi was sitting cross-legged on the stage, sipping thil and listening to sad Martian music on the juke box behind the screen of faded Martian tapestry. She looked up and saw us, and she didn't like what she saw.

She got up. She was a Low-Canaler, built light and wiry, and she moved like a cat. She had long emerald eyes and black hair with little bells braided in it, and clusters of tiny bells in her ears. She was wearing the skin of a Martian sand-leopard, no more clothes than the law forced her to wear. She was something to look at, and she had a disposition like three yards of barbed wire.

I said, "Hi, Sindi. This kid wants a try-out. Climb down, huh?"

Sindi looked the kid over. She smiled and climbed down and put her hand on my arm. She sounded like a shower of rain when she moved, and her nails bit into me, hard.

I said between my teeth, "What music do you want, kid?"

"My name's Laura—Laura Darrow." Her eyes were very big and very purple. "Do you have Enhali's Primitive Venus?"

Not more than half a dozen dancers in the System can do justice to that collection of tribal music. Some of it's subhuman and so savage it scares you. We use it for mood music, to draw the crowd.

I started to protest, but Sindi smiled and tinkled her head back. "Of course, put it on, Jade."

I shrugged and went in and fiddled with the juke box. When I came out Laura Darrow was up on the stage and we had an audience. Sindi must have passed the high sign. I shoved my way through a bunch of Venusian lizard-men and sat down. There were three or four little moth-people from Phobos roosting up on the braces so their delicate wings wouldn't get damaged in the crush.

The music started. Laura kicked off her shoes and danced.

I don't think I breathed all the time she was on the stage. I don't remember anyone else breathing, either. We just sat and stared, sweating with nervous ecstasy, shivering occasionally, with the music beating and crying and surging over us.

The girl wasn't human. She was sunlight, quicksilver, a leaf riding the wind—but nothing human, nothing tied down to muscles and gravity and flesh. She was—oh, hell, there aren't any words. She was the music.

When she was through we sat there a long time, perfectly still. Then the Venusians, human and half-human, let go a yell and the audience came to and tore up the seats.

In the middle of it Sindi looked at me with deadly green eyes and said, "I suppose she's hired."

"Yeah. But it doesn't have anything to do with you, baby."

"Listen, Jade. This suitcase outfit isn't big enough for two of us. Besides, she's got you hooked, and she can have you."

"She hasn't got me hooked. Anyway, so what? You don't own me."

"No. And you don't own me, either."

"I got a contract."

She told me what I could do with my contract.

I yelled, "What do you want me to do, throw her out on her ear? With that talent?"

"Talent!" snarled Sindi. "She's not talented. She's a freak."

"Just like a dame. Why can't you be a good loser?"

She explained why. A lot of it didn't make sense, and none of it was printable. Presently she went out, leaving me sore and a little uneasy. We had quite a few Martians with the outfit. She could make trouble.

Oh, hell! Just another dame sore because she was outclassed. Artistic temperament, plus jealousy. So what? Let her try something. I could handle it. I'd handled people before.

I jammed my way up to the stage. Laura was being mobbed. She looked scared—some of the halflings are enough to give a tough guy nightmares—and she was crying.

I said, "Relax, honey. You're in." I knew that Sindi was telling the truth. I was hooked. I was so hooked it scared me, but I wouldn't have wiggled off if I could.

She sagged down in my arms and said, "Please, I'm hungry."

I half carried her out, with the moth-people fluttering their gorgeous wings around our heads and praising her in their soft, furry little voices.

I fed her in my own quarters. She shuddered when I poured her coffee and refused it, saying she didn't think she'd ever enjoy it again. She took tea instead. She was hungry, all right. I thought she'd never stop eating.

Finally I said, "The pay's forty credits, and found."

She nodded.

I said gently, "You can tell me. What's wrong?"

She gave me a wide, purple stare. "What do you mean?"

"A dancer like you could write her own ticket anywhere, and not for the kind of peanuts I can pay you. You're in a jam."

She looked at the table and locked her fingers together. Their long pink nails glistened.

She whispered, "It isn't anything bad. Just a—a passport difficulty. I told you I was born in space. The records got lost somehow, and living the way we did—well, I had to come to Earth in a hurry, and I couldn't prove my citizenship, so I came without it. Now I can't get back to Venus where my money is, and I can't stay here. That's why I wanted so badly to get a job with you. You're going out, and you can take me."

I knew how to do that, all right. I said, "You must have had a big reason to take the risk you did. If you're caught it means the Luna cell-blocks for a long time before they deport you."

She shivered. "It was a personal matter. It delayed me a while. I—was too late."

I said, "Sure. I'm sorry." I took her to her tent, left her there and went out to get the show running, cursing Sindi. I stopped cursing and stared when I passed the cooch tent. She was there, and giving.

She stuck out her tongue at me and I went on.

That evening I hired the punk, just a scrawny kid with a white face, who said he was hungry and needed work. I gave him to Tiny, to help out in the brute top.

II: Voice of Terror

We played in luck that week. Some gilded darling of the screen showed up with somebody else's husband who wasn't quite divorced yet, and we got a lot of free publicity in the papers and over the air. Laura went on the second night and brought down the house. We turned 'em away for the first time in history. The only thing that worried me was Sindi. She wouldn't speak to me, only smile at me along her green eyes as though she knew a lot she wasn't telling and not any of it nice. I tried to keep an eye on her, just in case.

For five days I walked a tightrope between heaven and hell. Everybody on the pitch knew I was a dead duck where Laura was concerned. I suppose they got a good laugh out of it—me, Jade Greene the carny boss, knocked softer than a cup custard by a girl young enough to be my daughter, a girl from a good family, a girl with talent that put her so far beyond my lousy dog-and-pony show. . . .

I knew all that. It didn't do any good. I couldn't keep away from her. She was so little and lovely; she walked like music; her purple eyes had a tilt to them that kept you looking, and her mouth—

I kissed it on the fifth night, out back of the cooch tent when the show was over. It was dark there; we were all alone, and the faint spicy breath of her came to me through the thin salt fog. I kissed her.

Her mouth answered mine. Then she wrenched away, suddenly, with a queer fury. I let her go. She was shuddering, and breathing hard.

I said, "I'm sorry."

"It isn't that. Oh, Jade, I—" She stopped. I could hear the breath sobbing in her throat. Then she turned and ran away, and the sound of her weeping came back to me through the dark.

I went to my quarters and got out a bottle. After the first shot I just sat staring at it with my head in my hands. I haven't any idea how long I sat there. It seemed like forever. I only know that the pitch was dark, sound asleep under a pall of fog, when Sindi screamed.

I didn't know it was Sindi then. The scream didn't have any personality. It was the voice of terror and final pain, and it was far beyond anything human.

I got my gun out of the table drawer. I remember my palm was slippery with cold sweat. I went outside, catching up the big flashlight kept for emergencies near the tent flap. It was very dark out there, very still, and yet not quiet. There was something behind the darkness and the silence, hiding in them, breathing softly and waiting.

The pitch began to wake up. The stir and rustle spread out from the scream like ripples from a stone, and over in the brute top a Martian sand-cat began to wail, thin and feral, like an echo of death.

I went along between the tents, walking fast and silent. I felt sick, and the skin of my back twitched; my face began to ache from being drawn tight. The torch beam shook a little in my hand.

I found her back of the cooch tent, not far from where I'd kissed Laura. She was lying on her face, huddled up, like a brown island in a red sea. The little bells were still in her ears.

I walked in her blood and knelt down in it and put my hand on her shoulder. I thought she was dead, but the bells tinkled faintly, like something far away on another star. I tried to turn her over.

She gasped, "Don't." It wasn't a voice. It was hardly a breath, but I could hear it. I can still hear it. I took my hand away.

"Sindi—"

A little wash of sound from the bells, like rain far off— "You fool." she whispered. "The stage. Jade, the stage—"

She stopped. The croaker came from somewhere behind me and knocked me out of the way, but I knew it was no use. I knew Sindi had stopped for good.

Humans and halflings were jammed in all round, staring, whispering, some of them screaming a little. The brute top had gone crazy. They smelt blood and death on the night wind, and they wanted to be free and a part of it.

"Claws," the croaker said. "Something clawed her. Her throat—"

I said, "Yeah. Shut up." I turned around. The punk was standing there, the white-faced kid, staring at Sindi's body with eyes glistening like shiny brown marbles.

"You," I said. "Go back to Tiny and tell him to make sure all his kids are there. . . . All the roustabouts and every man that can handle a gun or a tent stake, get armed as fast as you can and stand by. . . . Mike, take whatever you need and guard the gate. Don't let anybody or anything in or out without permission from me, in person. Everybody else get inside somewhere and stay there. I'm going to call the police."

The punk was still there, looking from Sindi's body to me and around the circle of faces. I yelled at him. He went away then, fast. The crowd started to break up.

Laura Darrow came out of it and took my arm.

She had on a dark blue dressing-gown and her hair was loose around her face. She had the dewy look of being freshly washed, and she breathed perfume. I shook her off. "Look out," I said. "I'm all—blood."

I could feel it on my shoes, soaking through the thin stuff of my trouser legs. My stomach rose up under my throat. I closed my eyes and held it down, and all the time Laura's voice was soothing me. She hadn't let go of my arm. I could feel her fingers. They were cold, and too tight. Even then, I loved her so much I ached with it.

"Jade," she said. "Jade, darling. Please—I'm so frightened."

That helped. I put my arm around her and we started back toward my place and the phone. Nobody had thought to put the big lights on yet, and my torch beam cut a fuzzy tunnel through the fog.

"I couldn't sleep very well," Laura said suddenly. "I was lying in my tent thinking, and a little while before she screamed I thought I heard something—something like a big cat, padding."

The thing that had been in the back of my mind came out yelling. I hadn't seen Laska in the crowd around Sindi. If Laska had got hold of some coffee behind the cook's back. . . .

I said, "You were probably mistaken."

"No. Jade."

"Yeah?" It was dark between the tents. I wished somebody would turn the lights on. I wished I hadn't forgotten to tell them to. I wished they'd shut up their over-all obbligato of gabbling, so I could hear. . . .

"Jade. I couldn't sleep because I was thinking—"

Then she screamed.

* * *

He came out of a dark tunnel between two storage tents. He was going almost on all fours, his head flattened forward, his hands held in a little to his belly. His claws were out. They were wet and red, and his hands were wet and red, and his feet. His yellow-green eyes had a crazy shine to them, the pupils slitted against the light. His lips were peeled back from his teeth. They glittered, and there was froth between them—Laska, coked to hell and gone!

He didn't say anything. He made noises, but they weren't speech and they weren't sane. They weren't anything but horrible. He sprang.

I pushed Laura behind me. I could see the marks his claws made in the dirt, and the ridging of his muscles with the jump. I brought up my gun and fired, three shots.

The heavy slugs nearly tore him in two, but they didn't stop him. He let go a mad animal scream and hit me, slashing. I went part way down, firing again, but Laska was still going. His hind feet clawed into my hip and thigh, using me as something to push off from. He wanted the girl.

She had backed off, yelling bloody murder. I could hear feet running, a lot of them, and people shouting. The lights came on. I twisted around and got Laska by the mane of fur on his backbone and then by the scruff. He was suddenly a very heavy weight. I think he was dead when I put the fifth bullet through his skull.

I let him drop.

I said, "Laura, are you all right?" I saw her brown hair and her big purple eyes like dark stars in her white face. She was saying something, but I couldn't hear what it was. I said, "You ought to faint, or something," and laughed.

But it was me, Jade Greene, that did the fainting.

I came out of it too soon. The croaker was still working on my leg. I called him everything I could think of in every language I knew, out of the half of my mouth that wasn't taped shut. He was a heavy man, with a belly and a dirty chin.

He laughed and said, "You'll live. That critter damn near took half your face off, but with your style of beauty it won't matter much. Just take it easy a while until you make some more blood."

I said, "The hell with that. I got work to do." After a while he gave in and helped me get dressed. The holes in my leg weren't too deep, and the face wasn't working anyway, I poured some Scotch in to help out the blood shortage, and managed to get over to the office.

I walked pretty well.

That was largely because Laura let me lean on her. She'd waited outside my tent all that time. There were drops of fog caught in her hair. She cried a little and laughed a little and told me how wonderful I was, and helped me along with her small vibrant self. Pretty soon I began to feel like a kid waking up from a nightmare into a room full of sunshine.

The law had arrived when we got to the office. There wasn't any trouble. Sindi's torn body and the crazy cat-man added up, and the Venusian cook put the lid on it. He always took a thermos of coffee to bed with him, so he'd have it first thing when he woke up—Venusian coffee, with enough caffeine in it to stand an Earthman on his head. Enough to finish off a Callistan cat-man. Somebody had swiped it when he wasn't looking. They found the thermos in Laska's quarters.

* * *

The show went on. Mobs came to gawk at the place where the killing had happened. I took it easy for one day, lolling in a shiny golden cloud with Laura holding my head.

Along about sundown she said, "I'll have to get ready for the show."

"Yeah. Saturday's a big night. Tomorrow we tear down, and then Monday we head out for Venus. You'll feel happier then?"

"Yes. I'll feel safe." She put her head down over mine. Her hair was like warm silk. I put my hands up on her throat. It was firm and alive, and it made my hands burn.

She whispered, "Jade, I—" A big hot tear splashed down on my face, and then she was gone.

I lay still, hot and shivering like a man with swamp-fever, thinking, Maybe. . . .

Maybe Laura wouldn't leave the show when we got to Venus. Maybe I could make her not want to. Maybe it wasn't too late for dreaming, a dream that John Damien Greene had never had, sitting in a puddle of water at the end of a jetty stringer and fishing for perch.

Crazy, getting ideas like that about a girl like Laura. Crazy like cutting your own throat. Oh, hell. A man never really grows up, not past believing that maybe miracles still happen.

It was nice dreaming for a while.

It was a nice night, too, full of stars and the clean, cool ocean breeze, when Tiny came over to tell me they'd found the punk dead in a pile of straw with his throat torn out, and the Martian sand-cat loose.

III: Carnival of Death

We jammed our way through the mob on the midway. Lots of people having fun, lots of kids yelling and getting sick on Mercurian jitsi-beans and bottled Venusian fruit juice. Nobody knew about the killing. Tiny had had the cat rounded up and caged before it could get outside the brute top, which had not yet opened for business.

The punk was dead, all right—dead as Sindi, and in the same way. His twisted face was not much whiter than I remembered it, the closed eyelids faintly blue. He lay almost under the sand-cat's cage.

The cat paced, jittery and snarling. There was blood on all its six paws. The cages and pens and pressure tanks seethed nastily all around me, held down and quiet by Tiny's wranglers.

I said, "What happened?"

Tiny lifted his gargantuan shoulders. "Dunno. Everything quiet. Even no yell, like Sindi. Punk kid all lonesome over here behind cages. Nobody see; nobody hear. Only Mars kitty waltz out on main aisle, scare hell out of everybody. We catch, and then find punk, like you see."

I turned around wearily. "Call the cops again and report the accident. Keep the rubes out of here until they pick up the body." I shivered. I'm superstitious, like all carnies.

They come in threes—always in threes. Sindi, the punk—what next?

Tiny sighed. "Poor punk. So peaceful, like sleeper with shut eye."

"Yeah." I started away. I limped six paces and stopped and limped back again.

I said, "That's funny. Guys that die violent aren't tidy about their eyes, except in the movies."

I leaned over. I didn't quite know why, then. I do now. You can't beat that three-time jinx. One way or another, it gets you.

I pushed back one thin, waxy eyelid. After a while I pushed back the other. Tiny breathed heavily over my shoulder. Neither of us said anything. The animals whimpered and yawned and paced.

I closed his eyes again and went through his pockets. I didn't find what I was looking for. I got up very slowly, like an old man. I felt like an old man. I felt dead, deader than the white-faced kid.

I said, "His eyes were brown."

Tiny stared at me. He started to speak, but I stopped him, "Call Homicide, Tiny. Put a guard on the body. And send men with guns. . . ."

I told him where to send them. Then I went back across the midway.

A couple of Europans with wiry little bodies and a twenty-foot wing-spread were doing Immelmans over the geek top, and on the bally stand in front of it two guys with six hands apiece and four eyes on movable stalks were juggling. Laura was out in front of the cooch tent, giving the rubes a come-on.

I went around behind the tent, around where I'd kissed her, around where Sindi had died with the bells in her ears like a wash of distant rain.

I lifted up the flap and went in.

The tent was empty except for the man that tends the juke box. He put out his cigarette in a hurry and said, "Hi, Boss," as though that would make me forget he'd been smoking. I didn't give a damn if he set the place on fire with a blowtorch. The air had the warm, musty smell that tents have. Enhali's Primitive Venus was crying out of the juke box with a rhythm like thrown spears.

I pulled the stage master, and then the whites. They glared on the bare boards, naked as death and just as yielding.

I stood there a long time.

After a while the man behind me said uneasily, "Boss, what—"

"Shut up. I'm listening."

Little bells, and a voice that was pain made vocal.

"Go out front." I said. "Send Laura Darrow in here. Then tell the rubes there won't be a show here tonight."

I heard his breath suck in, and then catch. He went away down the aisle.

I got a cigarette out and lit it very carefully, broke the match in two and stepped on it. Then I turned around.

* * *

Laura came down the aisle. Her gold-brown hair was caught in a web of brilliants. She wore a sheath-tight thing of sea-green metal scales, with a short skirt swirling around her white thighs, and sandals of the shiny scales with no heels to them. She moved with the music, part of it, wild with it, a way I'd never seen a woman move before.

She was beautiful. There aren't any words. She was—beauty.

She stopped. She looked at my face and I could see the quivering tightness flow up across her white skin, up her throat and over her mouth, and catch her breath and hold it. The music wailed and throbbed on the still, warm air.

I said, "Take off your shoes, Laura. Take off your shoes and dance."

She moved then, still with the beat of the savage drums, but not thinking about it. She drew in upon herself, a shrinking and tightening of muscles, a preparation.

She said, "You know."

I nodded. "You shouldn't have closed his eyes. I might never have noticed. I might never have remembered that the kid had brown eyes. He was just a punk. Nobody paid much attention. He might just as well have had purple eyes—like yours."

"He stole them from me." Her voice came sharp under the music. It had a hiss and a wail in it I'd never heard before, and the accent was harsher. "While I was in your tent, Jade. I found out when I went to dress. He was an I-man. I found his badge inside his clothes and took it."

Purple eyes looking at me—purple eyes as phony as the eyes on the dead boy. Contact lenses painted purple to hide what was underneath.

"Too bad you carried an extra pair, Laura, in case of breakage."

"He put them in his eyes, so he couldn't lose them or break them or have them stolen, until he could report. He threw away the little suction cup. I couldn't find it. I couldn't get the shells off his eyeballs. All I could do was close his eyes and hope—"

"And let the sand-cat out of his cage to walk through the blood." My voice was coming out all by itself. It hurt. The words felt as though they had fishhooks on them, but I couldn't stop saying them.

"You almost got by with it, Laura. Just like you got by with Sindi. She got in your way, didn't she? She was jealous, and she was a dancer. She knew that no true human could dance like you dance. She said so. She said you were a freak."

That word hit her like my fist. She showed me her teeth, white, even teeth that I knew now were as phony as her eyes. I didn't want to see her change, but I couldn't stop looking, couldn't stop.

I said, "Sindi gave you away before she died, only I was too dumb to know what she meant. She said, 'The stage.' "

I think we both looked, down at the stark boards under the stark lights, looked at the scratches on them where Laura had danced barefoot that first time and left the marks of her claws on the wood.

She nodded, a slow, feral weaving of the head.

"Sindi was too curious. She searched my tent. She found nothing, but she left her scent, just as the young man did today. I followed her back here in the dark and saw her looking at the stage by the light of matches. I can move in the dark, Jade, very quickly and quietly. The cook tent is only a few yards back of this one, and Laska's quarters close beyond that. I smelt the cook's coffee. It was easy for me to steal it and slip it through the tent flap by Laska's cot, and wake him with the touch of my claws on his face. I knew he couldn't help drinking it. I was back here before Sindi came out of the tent to go and tell you what she'd found."

She made a soft purring sound under the wicked music.

"Laska smelt the blood and walked in it, as I meant him to do. I thought he'd die before he found us—or me—because I knew he'd find my scent in the air of his quarters and know who it was, and what it was. My perfume had worn too thin by then to hide it from his nose."

I felt the sullen pain of the claw marks on my face and leg. Laska, crazy with caffeine and dying with it, knowing he was dying and wanting with all the strength of his drugged brain to get at the creature who had killed him. He'd wanted Laura that night, not me. I was just something to claw out of the way.

I wished I hadn't stopped him.

I said, "Why? All you wanted was Laska. Why didn't you kill him?"

The shining claws flexed out of her fingertips, under the phony plastic nails—very sharp, very hungry.

She said huskily, "My tribe sent me to avenge its honor. I have been trained carefully. There are others like me, tracking down the renegades, the dope-ridden creatures like Laska who sell our race for human money. He was not to die quickly. He was not to die without knowing. He was not to die without being given the chance to redeem himself by dying bravely.

"But I was not to be caught. I cost my people time and effort, and I am not easily replaced. I have killed seven renegades, Jade. I was to escape. So I wanted to wait until we were out in space."

She stopped. The music hammered in my temples, and inside I was dead and dried up and crumbled away.

I said, "What would you have done in space?"

I knew the answer. She gave it to me, very simply, very quietly.

"I would have destroyed your whole filthy carnival by means of a little bomb in the jet timers, and gone away in one of the lifeboats."

I nodded. My head felt as heavy as Mount Whitney, and as lifeless. "But Sindi didn't give you time. Your life came first. And if it hadn't been for the punk. . . ."

No, not just a punk—an Immigration man. Somewhere Laura had slipped, or else her luck was just out. A white-faced youngster, doing his job quietly in the shadows, and dying without a cry. I started to climb down off the stage.

She backed off. The music screamed and stopped, leaving a silence like the feel of a suddenly stopped heart.

Laura whispered, "Jade, will you believe something if I tell you?

"I love you, Jade." She was still backing off down the aisle, not making any sound. "I deserve to die for that. I'm going to die. I think you're going to kill me, Jade. But when you do, remember that those tears I shed—were real."

She turned and ran, out onto the midway. I was close. I caught her hair. It came free, leaving me standing alone just inside the tent, staring stupidly.

* * *

I had men out there, waiting. I thought she couldn't get through. But she did. She went like a wisp of cloud on a gale, using the rubes as a shield. We didn't want a panic. We let her go, and we lost her.

I say we let her go. We couldn't help it. She wasn't bothering about being human then. She was all cat, just a noiseless blur of speed. We couldn't shoot without hurting people, and our human muscles were too slow to follow her.

I knew Tiny had men at the gates and all around the pitch, anywhere that she could possibly get out. I wasn't worried. She was caught, and pretty soon the police would come. We'd have to be careful, careful as all hell not to start one of those hideous, trampling panics that can wreck a pitch in a matter of minutes.

All we had to do was watch until the show was over and the rubes were gone. Guard the gates and keep her in, and then round her up. She was caught. She couldn't get away. Laura Darrow. . . .

I wondered what her name was, back on Callisto. I wondered what she looked like when she let the cross-shaped mane grow thick along her back and shoulders. I wondered what color her fur was. I wondered why I had ever been born.

I went back to my place and got my gun and then went out into the crowd again. The show was in full swing; lots of people having fun, lots of kids crazy with excitement; lights and laughter and music—and a guy out in front of the brute top splitting his throat telling the crowd that something was wrong with the lighting system and it would be a while before they could see the animals.

A while before the cops would have got what they wanted and cleaned up the mess under the sand-cat's cage.

The squad cars would be coming in a few minutes. There wasn't anything to do but wait. She was caught. She couldn't escape.

The one thing we didn't think about was that she wouldn't try to.

A Mercurian cave-tiger screamed. The Ionian quags took it up in their deep, rusty voices, and then the others chimed in, whistling, roaring, squealing, shrieking, and doing things there aren't any names for. I stopped, and gradually everybody on the pitch stopped and listened.

For a long moment you could hear the silence along the midway and in the tents. People not breathing, people with a sudden glassy shine of fear in their eyes and a cold tightening of the skin that comes from way back beyond humanity. Then the muttering started, low and uneasy, the prelude to panic.

I fought my way to the nearest bally stand and climbed on it. There were shots, sounding small and futile under the brute howl.

I yelled, "Hey, everybody! Listen! There's nothing wrong. One of the cats is sick, that's all. There's nothing wrong. Enjoy yourselves."

I wanted to tell them to get the hell out, but I knew they'd kill themselves if they started. Somebody started music going again, loud and silly. It cracked the icy lid that was tightening down. People began to relax and laugh nervously and talk too loudly. I got down and ran for the brute top.

Tiny met me at the tent flap. His face was just a white blur. I grabbed him and said, "For God's sake, can't you keep them quiet?"

"She's in there, Boss—like shadow. No hear, no see. One man dead. She let my kids out. She—"

More shots from inside, and a brute scream of pain. Tiny groaned.

"My kids! No lights, Boss. She wreck 'em."

I said, "Keep 'em inside. Get lights from somewhere. There's a blizzard brewing on the pitch. If that mob gets started. . . ."

I went inside. There were torch beams spearing the dark, men sweating and cursing, a smell of hot, wild bodies and the sweetness of fresh blood.

Somebody poked his head inside the flap and yelled, "The cops are here!"

I yelled back, "Tell 'em to clear the grounds if they can, without starting trouble. Tell—"

Somebody screamed. There was a sudden spangle of lights in the high darkness, balls of crimson and green and vicious yellow tumbling towards us, spots of death no bigger than your fist—the stinging fireflies of Ganymede. Laura had opened their case.

We scattered, fighting the fireflies. Somewhere a cage went over with a crash. Bodies thrashed, and feet padded on the packed earth—and somewhere above the noise was a voice that was sweet and silky and wild, crying out to the beasts and being answered.

I knew then why the brute top went crazy when Laska was around. It was kinship, not fear. She talked to them, and they understood.

I called her name.

Her voice came down to me out of the hot dark, human and painful with tears. "Jade! Jade, get out; go somewhere safe!"

"Laura, don't do this! For God's sake—"

"Your God, or mine? Our God forbids us to know humans except to kill. How, if we kept men as you kept Laska?"

"Laura!"

"Get out! I'm going to kill as many as I can before I'm taken. I'm turning the animals loose on the pitch. Go somewhere safe!"

I fired at the sound of her voice.

She said softly, "Not yet, Jade. Maybe not at all." I beat off a bunch of fireflies hunting for me with their poisoned stings. Cage doors banged open. Wild throats coughed and roared, and suddenly the whole side wall of the tent fell down, cut free at the top, and there wasn't any way to keep the beasts inside any more.

A long mob scream went up from outside, and the panic was on.

* * *

I could hear Tiny bellowing, sending his men out with ropes and nets and guns. Some huge, squealing thing blundered around in the dark, went past me close enough to touch, and charged through the front opening, bringing part of the top down. I was close enough behind it so that I got free.

I climbed up on the remains of the bally stand. There was plenty of light outside—blue-white, glaring light, to show me the packed mass of people screaming and swaying between the tents, trampling toward the exits, to show me a horde of creatures sweeping down on them, caged beasts free to kill, and led by a lithe and leaping figure in shining green.

I couldn't see her clearly. Perhaps I didn't want to. Even then she moved in beauty, like wild music—and she had a tail.

I never saw a worse panic, not even the time a bunch of Nahali swamp-edgers clemmed our pitch when I was a pony punk with Triangle. The morgues were going to be full that night. Tiny's men were between the bulk of the mob and the animals. The beasts had had to come around from the far side of the tent, giving them barely time to get set. They gave the critters all they had, but it wasn't enough.

Laura was leading them. I heard her voice crying out above all that din. The animals scattered off sideways between the tents. One Martian sand-cat was dead, one quag kicking its life out, and that was all. They hadn't touched Laura, and she was gone.

I fought back, away from the mob, back into a temporarily empty space behind a tent. I got out my whistle and blew it, the rallying call. A snake-headed kibi from Titan sneaked up and tried to rip me open with its double-pointed tail. I fed it three soft-nosed slugs, and then there were half a dozen little moth-people bouncing in the air over my head, squeaking with fear and shining their great eyes at me.

I told them what I wanted. While I was yelling the Europans swooped in on their wide wings and listened.

I said finally, "Did any of you see which way she went?"

"That way." One of the mothlings pointed back across the midway. I called two of the Europans. The mothlings went tumbling away to spread my orders, and the bird-men picked me up and carried me across, over the crowd.

The animals were nagging at their flanks, pulling them down in a kind of mad ecstasy. There was a thin salt fog, and blood on the night wind, and the cage doors were open at last.

They set me down and went to do what I told them. I went alone among the swaying tents.

All this hadn't taken five minutes. Things like that move fast. By the time the Europans were out of sight the mothlings were back, spotting prowling beasts and rolling above them in the air to guide men to them—men and geeks.

Geeks with armor-plated backs and six arms, carrying tear-gas guns and nets; lizard-men, fast and powerful, armed with their own teeth and claws and whatever they could pick up; spider-people, spinning sticky lassos out of their own bodies; the Europans, dive-bombing the quags with tear gas.

The geeks saved the day for us. They saved lives, and the reputation of their kind, and the carnival. Without them, God only knows how many would have died on the pitch. I saw the mothlings dive into the thick of the mob and pick up fallen children and carry them to safety. Three of them died, doing that.

I went on, alone.

I was beyond the mob, beyond the fringe of animals. I was remembering Laura's voice saying, "Not yet, Jade. Maybe not at all." I was thinking of the walls being down and all California free outside. I was hearing the mob yell and the crash of broken tents, and the screams of people dying—my people, human people, with the claws bred out of them.

I was thinking—

Guns slamming and brute throats shrieking, wings beating fast against the hot hard glare, feet pounding on packed earth. I walked in silence, a private silence built around me like a shell. . . .

Four big cats slunk out of the shadows by the tent. There was enough light left to show me their eyes and their teeth, and the hungry licking of their tongues.

Laura's voice came through the canvas, tremulous but no softer nor more yielding than the blue barrel of my gun.

"I'm going away, Jade. At first I didn't think there was any way, but there is. Don't try to stop me. Please don't try."

* * *

I could have gone and tried to find a cop. I could have called men or half-men from their jobs to help me. I didn't. I don't know that I could have made anybody hear me, and anyway they had enough to do. This was my job.

My job, my carnival, my heart.

I walked toward the tent flap, watching the cats.

They slunk a little aside, belly down, making hoarse, whimpering noises. One was a six-legged Martian sand-cat, about the size of an Earthly leopard. Two were from Venus, the fierce white beauties of the high plateaus. The fourth was a Mercurian cave-cat, carrying its twenty-foot body on eight powerful legs and switching a tail that had bone barbs on it.

Laura called to them. I don't know whether she said words in their language, or whether her voice was just a bridge for thought transference, one cat brain to another. Anyway, they understood.

"Jade, they won't touch you if you go."

I fired.

One of the white Venusians took the slug between the eyes and dropped without a whimper. Its mate let go a sobbing shriek and came for me, with the other two beside it.

I snapped a shot at the Martian. It went over kicking, and I dived aside, rolling. The white Venusian shot over me, so close its hind claws tore my shirt. I put a slug in its belly. It just yowled and dug its toes in and came for me again. Out of the tail of my eye I saw the dying Martian tangle with the Mercurian, just because it happened to be the nearest moving object.

I kicked the Venusian in the face. The pain must have blinded it just enough to make its aim bad. On the second jump its forepaws came down on the outer edges of my deltoids, gashing them but not tearing them out. The cat's mouth was open clear to its stomach.

I should have died right then. I don't know why I didn't, except that I didn't care much if I did. It's the guys that want to live that get it, seems like. The ones that don't care go on forever.

I got a lot of hot bad breath in my face and five parallel gashes in back, where its hind feet hit me when I rolled up. I kicked it in the belly. Its teeth snapped a half inch short of my nose, and then I got my gun up under its jaw and that was that. I had four shots left.

I rolled the body off and turned. The Martian cat was dead. The Mercurian stood over it, watching me with its four pale, hot eyes, twitching its barbed tail.

Laura stood watching us.

* * *

She looked just like she had the first time I saw her. Soft gold-brown hair and purple eyes with a little tilt to them, and a soft pink mouth. She was wearing the bronze metal-cloth dress and the bronze slippers, and there was still nothing wrong with the way she was put together. She glinted dully in the dim light, warm bronze glints.

She was crying, but there was no softness in her tears.

The cat flicked its eyes at her and made a nervous, eager whine. She spoke to it, and it sank to its belly, not wanting to.

Laura said, "I'm going, Jade."

"No."

I raised my gun hand. The big cat rose with it. She was beyond the cat. I could shoot the cat, but a Mercurian lives a long time after it's shot.

"Throw down your gun, Jade, and let me go."

I didn't care if the cat killed me. I didn't care if Death took me off piggy-back right then. I suppose I was crazy. Maybe I was just numb. I don't know. I was looking at Laura, and choking on my own heart.

I said, "No."

Just a whisper of sound in her throat, and the cat sprang. It reared up on its four hind feet and clawed at me with its four front ones. Only I wasn't where it thought I was. I knew it was going to jump and I faded—not far, I'm no superman—just far enough so its claws raked me without gutting me. It snapped its head down to bite.

I slammed it hard across the nose with my gun. It hurt, enough to make it wince, enough to fuddle it just for a split second. I jammed the muzzle into its nearest eye and fired.

Laura was going off between the tents, fast, with her head down, just a pretty girl, mingling with the mob streaming off the pitch. Who'd notice her, except maybe to whistle?

I didn't have time to get away. I dropped down flat on my belly and let the cat fall on top of me. I only wanted to live a couple of seconds longer. After that, the hell with it!

The cat was doing a lot of screaming and thrashing. I was between two sets of legs. The paws came close enough to touch me, clawing up the dirt. I huddled up small, hoping it wouldn't notice me there under its belly. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, with a cold precision. I steadied my right hand on my left wrist.

I shot Laura three times, carefully, between the shoulders.

The cat stopped thrashing. Its weight crushed me. I knew it was dead. I knew I'd done something that even experienced hunters don't do in nine cases out of ten. My first bullet had found the way into the cat's little brain and killed it.

It wasn't going to kill me. I pulled myself out from under it. The pitch was almost quiet now, the mob gone, the animals mostly under control. I kicked the dead cat. It had died too soon.

My gun was empty. I remember I clicked the hammer twice. I got more bullets out of my pocket, but my fingers wouldn't hold them and I couldn't see to load. I threw the gun away.

I walked away in the thin, cold fog, down toward the distant beat of the sea.


The Citadel of Lost Ships

Planet Stories, March 1943


I

Roy Campbell woke painfully. His body made a blind, instinctive lunge for the control panel, and it was only when his hands struck the smooth, hard mud of the wall that he realized he wasn't in his ship any longer, and that the Guard wasn't chasing him, their guns hammering death.

He leaned against the wall, the perspiration thick on his heavy chest, his eyes wide and remembering. He could feel again, as though the running fight were still happening, the bucking of his sleek ship beneath the calm control of his hands. He could remember the pencil rays lashing through the night, searching for him, seeking his life. He could recall the tiny prayer that lingered in his memory, as he fought so skillfully, so dangerously, to evade the relentless pursuer.

Then there was a hazy period, when a blasting cannon had twisted his ship like a wind-tossed leaf, and his head had smashed cruelly against the control panel. And then the slinking minutes when he had raced for safety—and then the sodden hours when sleep was the only thing in the Universe that he craved.

He sank back on the hide-frame cot with something between a laugh and a curse. He was sweating, and his wiry body twitched. He found a cigarette, lit it on the second try, and sat still, listening to his heartbeats slow down.

He began to wonder, then, what had wakened him.

It was night, the deep indigo night of Venus. Beyond the open hut door, Campbell could see the liha-trees swaying a little in the hot, slow breeze. It seemed as though the whole night swayed, like a dark blue veil.

For a long time he didn't hear anything but the far-off screaming of some swamp beast on the kill. Then, sharp and cruel against the blue silence, a drum began to beat.

It made Campbell's heart jerk. The sound wasn't loud, but it had a tight, hard quality of savagery, something as primal as the swamp and as alien, no matter how long a man lived with it.

The drumming stopped. The second, perhaps the third, ritual prelude. The first must have wakened him. Campbell stared with narrow dark eyes at the doorway.

He'd been with the Kraylens only two days this time, and he'd slept most of that. Now he realized that in spite of his exhaustion, he had sensed something wrong in the village.

Something was wrong, very wrong, when the drum beat that way in the sticky night.

He pulled on his short black boots and went out of the hut. No one moved in the village. Thatch rustled softly in the slow wind, and that was the only sign of life.

Campbell turned into a path under the whispering liha-trees. He wore nothing but the tight black pants of his space garb, and the hot wind lay on his skin like soft hands. He filled his lungs with it. It smelled of warm still water and green, growing things, and. . . .

Freedom. Above all, freedom. This was one place where a man could still stand on his legs and feel human.

The drumming started again, like a man's angry heart beating out of the indigo night. This time it didn't stop. Campbell shivered. The trees parted presently, showing a round dark hummock.

It was lit by the hot flare of burning liha pods. Sweet oily smoke curled up into the branches. There was a sullen glint of water through the trees, but there were closer glints, brighter, fiercer, more deadly.

The glinting eyes of men, silent men, standing in a circle around the hummock.

There was a little man crouched on the mound in the center. His skin had the blue-whiteness of skim milk. He wore a kilt of iridescent scales. His face was subtly reptilian, broad across the cheekbones and pointed below.

A crest of brilliant feathers—they weren't really feathers, but that was as close as Campbell could get—started just above his brow ridges and ran clean down his spine to the waist. They were standing erect now, glowing in the firelight.

He nursed a drum between his knees. It stopped being just a drum when he touched it. It was his own heart, singing and throbbing with the hate in it.

Campbell stopped short of the circle. His nerves, still tight from his near-fatal brush with the Spaceguard, stung with little flaring pains. He'd never seen anything like this before.

The little man rocked slightly, looking up into the smoke. His eyes were half closed. The drum was part of him and part of the indigo night. It was part of Campbell, beating in his blood.

It was the heart of the swamp, sobbing with hate and a towering anger that was as naked and simple as Adam on the morning of Creation.

* * *

Campbell must have made some involuntary motion, because a man standing at the edge of the hummock turned his head and saw him. He was tall and slender, and his crest was pure white, a sign of age.

He turned and came to Campbell, looking at him with opalescent eyes. The firelight laid the Earthman's dark face in sharp relief, the lean hard angles, the high-bridged nose that had been broken and not set straight, the bitter mouth.

Campbell said, in pure liquid Venusian, "What is it, Father?"

The Kraylen's eyes dropped to the Earthman's naked breast. There was black hair on it, and underneath the hair ran twisting, intricate lines of silver and deep blue, tattooed with exquisite skill.

The old man's white crest nodded. Campbell turned and went back down the path. The wind and the liha-trees, the hot blue night beat with the anger and the hate of the little man with the drum.

Neither spoke until they were back in the hut. Campbell lit a smoky lamp. The old Kraylen drew a long, slow breath.

"My almost-son," he said, "this is the last time I can give you refuge. When you are able, you must go and return no more."

Campbell stared at him. "But Father! Why?"

The old man spread long blue-white hands. His voice was heavy.

"Because we, the Kraylens, shall have ceased to be." Campbell didn't say anything for a minute. He sat down on the hide-frame cot and ran his fingers through his black hair.

"Tell me, Father," he said quietly, grimly.

The Kraylen's white crest rippled in the lamplight. "It is not your fight."

Campbell got up. "Look. You've saved my neck more times than I can count. You've accepted me as one of your own. I've been happier here than any—well, skip that. But don't say it isn't my fight."

The pale, triangular old face smiled. But the white crest shook.

"No. There is really no fight. Only death. We're a dying tribe, a mere scrap of old Venus. What matter if we die now—or later?"

Campbell lit a cigarette with quick, sharp motions. His voice was hard. "Tell me, Father. All, and quick."

Opalescent eyes met his. "It is better not."

"I said, 'tell me'!"

"Very well." The old man sighed. "You would hear, after all. You remember the frontier town of Lhi?"

"Remember it!" Campbell's white teeth flashed. "Every dirty stone in it, from the pumping conduits on up. Best place on three planets to fence the hot stuff."

He broke off, suddenly embarrassed. The Kraylen said gently, "That is your affair, my son. You've been away a long time. Lhi has changed. The Terra-Venusian Coalition Government has taken it for the administration center of Tehara Province."

Campbell's eyes, at mention of the Coalition Government, acquired a hot, hard brightness. He said, "Go on."

The old man's face was cut from marble, his voice stiff and distant.

"There have been men in the swamps. Now word has been sent us. It seems there is coal here, and oil, and certain minerals that men prize. They will drain the swamps for many miles, and work them."

Campbell let smoke out of his lungs, very slowly. "Yeah? And what becomes of you?"

The Kraylen turned away and stood framed in the indigo square of the doorway. The distant drum sobbed and shouted. It was hot, and yet the sweat turned cold on Campbell's body.

The old man's voice was distant and throbbing and full of anger, like the drum. Campbell had to strain to hear it.

"They will take us and place us in camps in the great cities. Small groups of us, so that we are divided and split. Many people will pay to see us, the strange remnants of old Venus. They will pay for our skills in the curing of leshen-skins and the writing of quaint music, and tattooing. We will grow rich."

Campbell dropped the cigarette and ground it on the dirt floor. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead, and his face was cruel. The old man whispered:

"We will die first."

* * *

It was a long time since anyone had spoken. The drumming had stopped, but the echo of it throbbed in Campbell's pulses. He looked at his spread, sinewy hands on his knees and swallowed because the veins of his neck were swollen and hurting.

Presently he said, "Couldn't you go farther back into the swamps?"

The old Kraylen spoke without moving. He still stood in the doorway, watching the trees sway in the slow wind.

"The Nahali live there. Besides, there is no clean water and no earth for crops. We are not lizard eaters."

"I've seen it happen," said Campbell somberly. "On Earth, and Mars, and Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Little people driven from their homes, robbed of their way of life, exploited for the gaping idiots in the trade centers. Little people who didn't care about progress, and making money. Little people who only wanted to live, and breathe, and be let alone."

He got up in a swift savage rush and hurled a gourd of water crashing into a corner and sat down again. He was shivering. The old Kraylen turned.

"Little people like you, my son?"

Campbell shrugged. "Maybe. We'd worked our farm for three hundred years. My father didn't want to sell. They condemned it anyhow. It's under water now, and the dam runs a hell of a big bunch of factories."

"I'm sorry."

Campbell looked up, and his face softened. "I've never understood," he said. "You people are the most law-abiding citizens I ever met. You don't like strangers. And yet I blunder in here, hot on the lam and ugly as a swamp-dragon, and you. . . ."

He stopped. It was probably the excitement that was making his throat knot up like that. The smoke from the lamp stung his eyes. He blinked and bent to trim it.

"You were wounded, my son, and in trouble. Your quarrel with the police was none of ours. We would have helped anyone. And then, while you had fever and your guard was down, you showed that more than your body needed help. We gave you what we could."

"Yeah," said Campbell huskily. He didn't say it, but he knew well enough that what the Kraylens had given him had kept him from blowing his top completely.

Now the Kraylens were going the way of the others, straws swept before the great broom of Progress. Nothing could stop it. Earth's empire surged out across the planets, building, bartering, crashing across time and custom and race to make money and the shining steel cage of efficiency.

A cage wherein a sheep could live happily enough, well-fed and opulent. But Campbell wasn't a sheep. He'd tried it, and he couldn't bleat in tune. So he was a wolf, now, alone and worrying the flock.

Soon there wasn't going to be a place in the Solar System where a man could stand on his own feet and breathe.

He felt stifled. He got up and stood in the doorway, watching the trees stir in the hot indigo gloom. The trees would go. Wells and mines, slag and soot and clattering machinery, and men in sweat-stained shirts laboring night and day to get, to grow, to produce.

Campbell's mouth twisted, bitter and sardonic. He said softly:

"God help the unconstructive!"

The old Kraylen murmured, "What happened to those others, my son?"

Campbell's lean shoulders twitched. "Some of them died. Some of them submitted. The rest . . ."

He turned, so suddenly that the old man flinched. Campbell's dark eyes had a hot light in them, and his face was sharply alive.

"The rest," he said evenly, "went to Romany."

* * *

He talked, then. Urgently, pacing the hut in nervous catlike strides, trying to remember things he had heard and not been very much interested in at the time. When he was through, the Kraylen said:

"It would be better. Infinitely better. But—" He spread his long pale hands, and his white crest drooped. "But there is no time. Government men will come within three days to take us—that was the time set. And since we will not go . . ."

Campbell thought of the things that had happened to other rebellious tribes. He felt sick. But he made his voice steady.

"We'll hope it's time, Father. Romany is in an orbit around Venus now—I nearly crashed it coming in. I'm going to try, anyhow. If I don't—well, stall as long as you can."

Remembering the drum and the way the men had looked, he didn't think that would be long. He pulled on a loose shirt of green spider-silk, slung the belt of his heavy needle-gun over one shoulder, and picked up his black tunic.

He put his hand on the Kraylen's shoulder and smiled. "We'll take care of it, Father."

The old man's opalescent eyes were shadowed. "I wish I could stop you. It's hopeless for us, and you are—hot is that the word?"

Campbell grinned. "Hot," he said, "is the word. Blistering! The Coalition gets awfully mad when someone pulls their own hijacking stunt on them. But I'm used to it."

It was beginning to get light outside. The old man said quietly, "The gods go with you, my son."

Campbell went out, thinking he'd need them.

It was full day when he reached his hidden ship—a sleek, souped-up Fitts-Sothern that had the legs of almost anything in space. He paused briefly by the airlock, looking at the sultry green of liha-trees under a pearl-gray sky, the white mist lapping around his narrow waist.

He spent a long time over his charts, feeding numbers to the computers. When he got a set-up that suited him, he took the Fitts-Sothern up on purring 'copters, angling out over the deep swamps. He felt better with the ship under his hands.

The Patrol blanket was thin over the deep swamps, but it was vigilant. Campbell's nerves were tight. They got tighter as he came closer to the place where he was going to have to begin his loop over to the night side.

He was just reaching for the drive switch when the little red light started to flash on the indicator panel.

Somebody had a detector beam on him. And he was morally certain that the somebody was flying a Patrol boat.

II

THERE was one thing about the Venusian atmosphere. You couldn't see through it, even with infra-beams, at very long range. The intensity needle showed the Patrol ship still far off, probably not suspicious yet, although stray craft were rare over the swamps.

In a minute the copper would be calling for information, with his mass-detectors giving the stray a massage. Campbell didn't think he'd wait. He slammed in the drive rockets, holding them down till the tubes warmed. Even held down, they had plenty.

The Fitts-Sothern climbed in a whipping spiral. The red light wavered, died, glowed again. The cop was good with his beam. Campbell fed in more juice.

The red light died again. But the Patrol boat had all its beams out now, spread like a fishnet. The Fitts-Sothern struck another, lost it, struck again, and this time didn't break out.

Campbell felt the sudden racking jar all through him. "Tractor beams," he said. "You think so, friend?"

The drive jets were really warming now. He shot it to them. The Fitts-Sothern hung for a fractional instant, her triple-braced hull shuddering so that Campbell's teeth rang together.

Then she broke, blasting up right through the netted beams. Campbell jockeyed his port and starboard steering jets. The ship leaped and skittered wildly. The cop didn't have time to focus full power on him anywhere, and low power to the Fitts-Sothern was a nuisance and nothing more.

Campbell went up over the Patrol ship, veered off in the opposite direction from the one he intended to follow, hung in a tight spiral until he was sure he was clean, and then dived again.

The Patrol boat wasn't expecting him to come back. The pilot was concentrating on where Campbell had gone, not where he had been. Campbell grinned, opened full throttle, and went skittering over the curve of the planet to meet the night shadow rushing toward him.

He didn't meet any more ships. He was way off the trade lanes, and moving so fast that only blind luck could tag him. He hoped the Patrol was hunting for him in force, back where they'd lost him. He hoped they'd hunt a long time.

Presently he climbed on slowed and muffled jets, out of the atmosphere. His black ship melted indistinguishably into the black shadow of the planet. He slowed still more, just balancing the Venus-drag, and crawled out toward a spot marked on his chart.

An Outer Patrol boat went by, too far off to bother about. Campbell lit a cigarette with nervous hands. It was only a quarter smoked when the object he'd been waiting for loomed up in space.

His infra-beam showed it clearly. A round, plate-shaped mass about a mile in diameter, built of three tiers of spaceships. Hulks, ancient, rusty, pitted things that had died and not been decently buried, welded together in a solid mass by lengths of pipe let into their carcasses.

Before, when he had seen it, Campbell had been in too much of a hurry to do more than curse it for getting in his way. Now he thought it was the most desolate, Godforsaken mass of junk that had ever made him wonder why people bothered to live at all.

He touched the throttle, tempted to go back to the swamps. Then he thought of what was going to happen back there, and took his hand away.

"Hell!" he said. "I might as well look inside."

He didn't know anything about the internal set-up of Romany—what made it tick, and how. He knew Romany didn't love the Coalition, but whether they would run to harboring criminals was another thing.

It wouldn't be strange if they had been given pictures of Roy Campbell and told to watch for him. Thinking of the size of the reward for him, Campbell wished he were not quite so famous.

Romany reminded him of an old-fashioned circular mousetrap. Once inside, it wouldn't be easy to get out.

"Of all the platinum-plated saps!" he snarled suddenly.

"Why am I sticking my neck out for a bunch of semi-human swamp-crawlers, anyhow?"

He didn't answer that. The leading edge of Romany knifed toward him. There were lights in some of the hulks, mostly in the top layer. Campbell reached for the radio.

He had to contact the big shots. No one else could give him what he needed. To do that, he had to walk right up to the front door and announce himself. After that. . . .

The manual listed the wavelength he wanted. He juggled the dials and verniers, wishing his hands wouldn't sweat.

"Spaceship Black Star calling Romany. Calling Romany."

His screen flashed, flickered, and cleared. "Romany acknowledging. Who are you and what do you want?"

* * *

Campbell's screen showed him a youngish man—a Taxil, he thought, from some Mercurian backwater. He was ebony-black and handsome, and he looked as though the sight of Campbell affected him like stale beer.

Campbell said, "Cordial guy, aren't you? I'm Thomas Black, trader out of Terra, and I want to come aboard."

"That requires permission."

"Yeah? Okay. Connect me with the boss."

The Taxil now looked as though he smelled something that had been dead a long time. "Possibly you mean Eran Mak, the Chief Councilor?"

"Possibly," Campbell admitted, "I do." If the rest of the gypsies were anything like this one, they sure had a hate on for outsiders.

Well, he didn't blame them. The screen blurred. It stayed that way while Campbell smoked three cigarettes and exhausted his excellent vocabulary. Then it cleared abruptly.

Eran Mak sounded Martian, but the man pictured on the screen was no Martian. He was an Earthman, with a face like a wedge of granite and a frame that was all gaunt bones and thrusting angles.

His hair was thin, pale-red and fuzzy His mouth was thin. Even his eyes were thin, close slits of pale blue with no lashes. Campbell disliked him instantly.

"I'm Tredrick," said the Earthman. His voice was thin, with a sound in it like someone walking on cold gravel. "Terran Overchief. Why do you wish to land, Black?"

"I bring a message from the Kraylen people of Venus. They need help."

Tredrick's eyes became, if possible, thinner and more pale.

"Help?"

"Yes. Help." Campbell was struck by a sudden suspicion, something he caught flickering across Tredrick's granite features when he said "Kraylen." He went on, slowly, "The Coalition is moving in on them. I understand you people of Romany help in cases like that."

There was a small, tight silence.

"I'm sorry," said Tredrick. "There is nothing we can do."

Campbell's dark face tightened. "Why not? You helped the Shenyat people on Ganymede and the Drylanders on Mars. That's what Romany is, isn't it—a refuge for people like that?"

"As a latnik, there's a lot you don't know. At this time, we cannot help anyone. Sorry, Black. Please clear ship."

The screen went dead. Campbell stared at it with sultry eyes. Sorry The hell you're sorry. What gives here, anyway?

He thrust out an angry hand to the transmitter. And then, quite suddenly, the Taxil was looking at him out of the screen.

The hostile look was gone. Anger replaced it, but not anger at Campbell. The Taxil said, in a low rapid voice:

"You're not lying about coming from the Kraylens?"

"No. No, I'm not lying." He opened his shirt to show the tattoo.

"The dirty scut! Black, clear ship, and then make contact with one of the outer hulks on the lowest tier. You'll find emergency hatchways in some of the pipes. Come inside, and wait."

His dark eyes had a savage glitter. "There are some of us, Black, who still consider Romany a refuge!"

* * *

Campbell cleared ship. His nerves were singing in little tight jerks. He'd stepped into something here. Something big and ugly. There had been a certain ring in the Taxil's voice.

The thin, gravelly Mr. Tredrick had something on his mind, too. Something important, about Kraylens. Why Kraylens, of all the unimportant people on Venus?

Trouble on Romany. Romany the gypsy world, the Solar System's stepchild. Strictly a family affair. What business did a public enemy with a low number and a high valuation have mixing into that?

Then he thought of the drum beating in the indigo night, and an old man watching liha-trees stir in a slow, hot wind.

Roy Campbell called himself a short, bitter name, and sighed, and reached lean brown hands for the controls. Presently, in the infrafield, he made out an ancient Krub freighter on the edge of the lowest level, connected to companion wrecks by sections of twelve-foot pipe. There was a hatch in one of the pipes, with a handwheel.

The Fitts-Sothern glided with exquisite daintiness to the pipe, touched it gently, threw out her magnetic grapples and suction flanges, and hung there. The airlock exactly covered the hatchway.

Campbell got up. He was sweating and as edgy as a tomcat on the prowl. With great care he buckled his heavy gun around his narrow hips. Then he went into the airlock.

He checked grapples and flanges with inordinate thoroughness. The hatch wheel jutted inside. He picked up a spanner and turned it, not touching the frigid metal.

There was a crude barrel-lock beyond. Campbell ran his tongue once over dry lips, shrugged, and climbed in.

He got through into a space that was black as the Coalsack. The air was thin and bitingly cold. Campbell shivered in his silk shirt. He laid his hand on his gun butt and took two cautious steps away from the bulge of the lock, wishing to hell he were someplace else.

Cold green light exploded out of nowhere behind him. He half turned, his gun blurring into his palm. But he had no chance to fire it.

Something whipped down across the nerve center in the side of his neck. His body simply faded out of existence. He fell on his face and lay there, struggling with all his might to move and achieving only a faint twitching of the muscles.

He knew vaguely that someone rolled him over. He blinked up into the green light, and heard a man's deep, soft voice say from the darkness behind it:

"What made you think you could get away with it?"

Campbell tried three times before he could speak. "With what?"

"Spying. Does Tredrick think we're children?"

"I wouldn't know." It was easier to speak this time. His body was beginning to fade in again, like something on a television screen. He tried to close his hand. It didn't work very well, but it didn't matter. His gun was gone.

Something moved across the light. A man's body, a huge, supple muscular thing the color of dark bronze. It knelt with a terrible tigerish ease beside Campbell, the bosses on its leather kilt making a clinking noise. There was a jeweled gorget of reddish metal around the base of its throat. The stones had a wicked glitter.

The deep, soft voice said, "Who are you?"

Campbell tried to force the returning life faster through his body. The man's face was in shadow. Campbell looked up with sultry, furious eyes and achieved a definite motion toward getting up.

The kneeling giant put out his right arm. The green light burned on it. Campbell's eyes followed it down toward his throat. His face became a harsh, irregular mask cut from dark wood.

The arm was heavily, beautifully muscled. But where the hand should have been there was a leather harness and a hook of polished Martian bronze.

* * *

Campbell knew what had struck him. The thin, hard curve of the hook, more potent than the edge of any hand.

The point pricked his throat, just over the pulse on the left side. The man said softly: "Lie still, little man, and answer."

Campbell lay still. There was nothing else to do. He said, "I'm Thomas Black, if that helps. Who are you?"

"What did Tredrick tell you to do?"

"To get the hell out. What gives with you?" If that Taxil was spreading the word about him, he'd better hurry. Campbell decided to take a chance. The guy with the hook didn't seem to love Tredrick.

"The black boy in the radio room told me to come aboard and wait. Seems he's sore at Tredrick, too. So am I. That makes us all pals, doesn't it?"

"You lie, little man." The deep voice was quietly certain. "You were sent to spy. Answer!"

The point of the hook put the exclamation point on that word. Campbell winced away. He wished the lug wouldn't call him "little man." He couldn't remember ever having felt more hopelessly scared.

He said, "Damn your eyes, I'm not lying. Check with the Taxil. He'll tell you."

"And betray him to Tredrick? You're clumsy, little man."

The hook bit deeper. Campbell's neck began to bleed. He felt all right again otherwise. He wondered whether he'd have a chance of kicking the man in the groin before his throat was torn out. He tried to draw farther away, but the pipe wall wouldn't give.

A woman's voice spoke then, quite suddenly, from beyond the green light. Campbell jumped. He hadn't even thought about anyone else being there. Now it was obvious that someone was holding the light.

The voice said, "Wait, Marah. Zard is calling me now."

It was a clear, low voice. It had music in it. Campbell would have loved it if it had croaked, but as it was it made his nerves tingle with sheer ecstasy.

The hook lifted out of the hole it had made, but it didn't go away. Campbell raised his head a little. The lower edge of the green light spilled across a pair of sandaled feet. The bare white legs above them were as beautiful as the voice, in the same strong clear way.

There was a long silence. Marah, the man with the hook, turned his face partly into the light. It was oblong and scarred and hard as beaten bronze. The eyes in it were smoky amber, set aslant under a tumbled crest of tawny hair.

After a long time the woman spoke again. Her voice was different this time. It was angry, and the anger made it sing and throb like the Kraylen's drum.

"The Earthman is telling the truth, Marah. Zard sent him. He's here about the Kraylens."

The big man—a Martian Drylander, Campbell thought, from somewhere around Kesh—got up, fast. "The Kraylens!"

"He asked for help, and Tredrick sent him away." The light moved closer. "But that's not all, Marah. Tredrick has found out about—us. Old Ekla talked. They're waiting for us at the ship!"

III

Marah turned. His eyes had a greenish, feral glint like those of a lion on the kill. He said, "I'm sorry, little man."

Campbell was on his feet now, and reasonably steady "Think nothing of it," he said dourly. "A natural mistake." He looked at the hook and mopped the blood from his neck, and felt sick. He added, "The name's Black. Thomas Black."

"It wouldn't be Campbell?" asked the woman's voice. "Roy Campbell?"

He squinted into the light, not saying anything. The woman said, "You are Roy Campbell. The Guard was here not long ago, hunting for you. They left your picture."

He shrugged. "All right. I'm Roy Campbell."

"That," said Marah softly, "helps a lot!" He could have meant it any way. His hook made a small, savage flash in the green light.

"There's trouble here on Romany. Civil war. Men are going to be killed before it's over—perhaps now. Where's your place in it?"

"How do I know? The Coalition is moving in on the Kraylens. I owe them something. So I came here for help. Help! Yeah."

"You'll get it," said the woman. "You'll get it, somehow, if any of us live."

Campbell raised his dark brows. "What goes on here, anyhow?"

The woman's low voice sang and throbbed against the pipe walls. "A long time ago there were a few ships. Old ships, crowded with people who had no homes. Little, drifting people who made a living selling their odd handicrafts in the spaceports, who were cursed as a menace to navigation and distrusted as thieves. Perhaps they were thieves. They were also cold, and hungry, and resentful.

"After a while the ships began to band together. It was easier that way—they could share food and fuel, and talk, and exchange ideas. Space wasn't so lonely. More and more ships drifted in. Pretty soon there were a lot of them. A new world, almost.

"They called it Romany, after the wandering people of Earth, because they were gypsies, too, in their own way.

"They clung to their own ways of life. They traded with the noisy, trampling people on the planets they had been driven away from because they had to. But they hated them and were hated, just as gypsies always are.

"It wasn't an easy life, but they were free in it. They could stand anything, as long as they were free. And always, anywhere in the Solar System, wherever some little lost tribe was being swallowed up and needed help, ships from Romany went to help them."

Her voice dropped. Campbell thought again of the Kraylen's drum, singing the anger in the indigo night.

"That was the creed of Romany," she whispered. "Always to help, always to be a refuge for the little people who couldn't adjust themselves to progress, who only wanted to die in dignity and peace. And now. . . ."

"And now," said Marah somberly, "there is civil war."

* * *

Campbell drew a long, unsteady breath. The woman's voice throbbed in him, and his throat was tight. He said, "Tredrick?"

Marah nodded. "Tredrick. But it's more than that. If it were only Tredrick, it wouldn't be so bad."

He ran the curve of his hook over his scarred chin, and his eyes burned like candle flames.

"Romany is growing old, and soft. That's the real trouble. Decay. Otherwise, Tredrick would have been kicked into space long ago. There are old men in the Council, Campbell. They think more of comfort than they do of—well. . . ."

"Yeah. I know. What's Tredrick's angle?"

"I don't know. He's a strange man—you can't get a grip on him. Sometimes I think he's working for the Coalition."

Campbell scowled. "Could be. You gypsies have a lot of wild talents and some unique skills—I've met some of them. The man that controlled them would be sitting pretty. The Coalition would like it, too."

The woman said bitterly, "And they could always exhibit us. Tours, at so much a head. So quaint—a cross-section of a lost world!"

"Tredrick's the strong man," Marah went on. "Eran Mak is Chief Councilor, but he does as Tredrick tells him. The idea is that if Romany settles down and stops getting into trouble with the Planetary Coalition, we can have regular orbits, regular trade, and so on."

"In other words," said Campbell, dryly, "stop being Romany."

"You understand. A pet freak, a tourist attraction, a fat source of revenue." Again the savage flash of the hook. "A damned circus!"

"And Tredrick, I take it, has decided that you're endangering the future of Romany by rebellion, and put the finger on you."

"Exactly." Marah's yellow eyes were bright and hard, meeting Campbell's.

Campbell thought about the Fitts-Sothern outside, and all the lonely reaches of space where he could go. There were lots of Coalition ships to rob, a few plague-spots left to spend the loot in. All he had to do was walk out.

But there was a woman's voice, with a note in it like a singing angry drum. There was an old man's voice, murmuring, "Little people like you, my son?"

It was funny, how a man could be alone and not know he minded it, and then suddenly walk in on perfect strangers and not be alone any more—alone inside, that is—and know that he had minded it like hell.

It had been that way with the Kraylens. It was that way now. Campbell shrugged. "I'll stick around."

He added irritably, "Sister, will you for Pete's sake get that light out of my eyes?"

She moved it, shining it down. "The name's Stella Moore."

He grinned. "Sorry. So you do have a face, after all."

It wasn't beautiful. It was pale and heart-shaped, framed in a mass of unruly black hair. There were long, gray eyes under dark-gold brows that had never been plucked, and a red, sullen mouth.

Her teeth were white and uneven, when she smiled. He liked them. The red of her sullen lips was their own. She wore a short tunic the color of Tokay grapes, and the body under it was long and clean-cut. Her arms and throat had the whiteness of pearl.

Marah said quietly, "Contact Zard. Tell him to throw the PA system wide open and say we're taking the ship, now, to get the Kraylens!"

* * *

Stella stood absolutely still. Her gray eyes took on an eerie, remote look, and Campbell shivered slightly. He'd seen telepathy often enough in the System's backwaters, but it never seemed normal.

Presently she said, "It's done," and became human again. The green light went out. "Power," she explained. "Besides, we don't need it. Give me your hand, Mr. Campbell."

He did, with absolutely no aversion. "My friends," he said, "generally call me Roy." She laughed, and they started off, moving with quick sureness in the black, icy darkness.

The ship, it seemed, was up on the second level, on the edge of the living quarters. Down here was all the machinery that kept Romany alive—heat, light, water, air, and cooling systems—and a lot of storage hulks.

The third tier was a vast hydroponic farm, growing the grain and fruit and vegetables that fed the Romany thousands.

Stumbling through pipes and dismantled hulks that smelled of sacking and dried vegetables and oil, Campbell filled in the gaps.

The leaders of the rebel element had held a meeting down here, in secret. Marah and the girl had been coming from it when Campbell blundered into them. The decision had been to rescue the Kraylens, no matter what happened.

They'd known about the Kraylens long before Campbell had. Gypsies trading in Lhi had brought word. Now the Kraylens were a symbol over which two points of view were clashing in deadly earnest.

Remembering Tredrick's thin, harsh face, Campbell wondered uneasily how many of them would live to take that ship away.

He became gradually aware of a broken, rhythmic tap and clank transmitted along the metal walls.

"Hammers," said Stella softly. "Hammers and riveters and welders, fighting rust and age to keep Romany alive. There's no scrap of this world that wasn't discarded as junk and reclaimed by us."

Her voice dropped. "Including the people."

Campbell said, "They're scrapping some beautiful things these days."

She knew what he meant. She even laughed a little. "I was born on Romany. There are a lot of Earth people who have no place at home."

"I know." Campbell remembered his father's farm, with blue cold water over the fields instead of sky. "And Tredrick?"

"He was born here, too. But the taint is in him. . . ." She caught her breath in a sudden sharp cry. "Marah! Marah, it's Zard!"

They stopped. A pulse began to beat under Campbell's jaw. Stella whispered, "He's gone. I felt him call, and now he's gone. He was trying to warn us."

Marah said grimly, "Tredrick's got him, then. Probably knocked him out while he was trying to escape from the radio room."

"He was frightened," said Stella quietly. "Tredrick has done something. He wanted to warn us."

Marah grunted. "Have your gun ready, Campbell. We go up, now."

* * *

They went up a wooden ladder. It was suddenly getting hot. Campbell guessed that Romany was in the sun again. The Martian opened a door at the top, very, very slowly.

A young, vibrant voice sang out, "All clear!" They piled out of the doorway. Four or five husky young Paniki barbarians from Venus stood grinning beside two bound and slumbering Earthmen.

Campbell stared past them. The air was still and hot, hung with veils of steamy mist. There was mossy earth dotted with warm pools. There were liha-trees, sultry green under a pearly light that was still brightening out of indigo gloom.

A slow, hot breath of wind stirred the mist and liha-trees. It smelt of warm still water and growing things, and—freedom.

Campbell drew a long breath. His eyes stung and the veins in his neck hurt. He knew it was a dead hulk, with an iron sky above the pearl-gray mist. But it smelled of freedom.

He said, "What are we waiting for?"

Marah laughed, and the young Venusian laughed. Barbarians, going to fight and laughing about it. Stella's gray eyes held a sultry flame, and her lips were blood-orange and trembling.

Campbell kissed them. He laughed, too, softly, and said, "Okay, gypsy. Let's go."

They went, through the seven hulks of the Venusian Quarter. Because of the Kraylens, most of the Venusians were with the rebels, but even so there were angry voices raised, and fists, and a few weapons, and some blood got spilled.

More tow-headed young men joined them, and squat little upland nomads who could talk to animals, and three four-armed serpentine crawlers from the Lohari swamps.

They came presently to a huge dismantled freighter on the edge of the Venusian Quarter. There were piles of goods waiting lading through the row of airlocks, into smaller trading ships. Marah stopped, his gorget shooting wicked jeweled sparks in the sunlight that seared in through half-shuttered ports, and the others flowed in behind him.

They were on a narrow gallery about halfway up the inner wall. Campbell looked down. There were people on the ladders and the two balcony levels below. A sullen, ugly mob of people from Earth, from Venus, from Mars and Mercury and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Men and near-men and sheer monstrosities, silent and watching in the hot light. Here a crest of scarlet antennae burning, there the sinuous flash of a scaled back, and beyond that the slow ominous weaving of light-black tentacles.

A creature like a huge blue spider with a child's face let out a shrill unearthly scream. "Traitor! Traitor!"

The whole packed mass on the ladders and the galleries stirred like a weird tapestry caught in a gust of wind. The rushing whisper of their movement, their breathing, and their anger sang across Campbell's nerves in points of fire.

Anger. Anger in the Kraylen's drum and Stella's voice and Marah's yellow eyes. Anger like the sunlight, hot and primal. The anger of little men flogged into greatness.

A voice spoke from across the deck below, cold, clear, without the faintest tremor.

"We want no trouble. Return to your quarters quietly"

"The Kraylens!"

The name came thundering out of all those angry throats, beating down against the gaunt, erect figure standing in the forefront of a circle of Earthmen guarding the locks with ready guns.

Tredrick's thin, red head never stirred from its poised erectness. "The Kraylens are out of your hands, now. They harbored a dangerous criminal, and they are now being imprisoned in Lhi to answer for it."

Roy Campbell gripped the iron railing in front of him. It seemed to him that he could see, across all that space, the cold, bright flame of satisfaction in Tredrick's eyes.

The thin, calm voice slid across his eardrums with the cruel impersonality of a surgeon's knife.

"That criminal, Roy Campbell, is now on Romany. The Guard is on its way here now. For the sake of the safety of your families, for the future of Romany, I advise no one to hide him or help him escape."

IV

Campbell stood still, not moving or speaking, his hard, dark face lined and dead, like old wood. From a great distance he heard Marah's smothered, furious curse, the quick catch of Stella's breath, the sullen breathing and stirring of the mob that was no longer sure what it wanted to do.

But all he could see was the pale, kind face of an old man smiling in the warm, blue night, and the dirty, sordid stones of Lhi.

A voice spoke, from beside the circle of armed men. Campbell heard it with some part of his brain. An old voice, dry and rustling, possessed of great dignity and great pain.

"My children," it said. "Have patience. Have faith that we, your leaders, have the good of Romany at heart."

Campbell looked with dead, dark eyes at the speaker, standing beside Tredrick. A small man in a robe of white fur. A Martian from one off the Polar Cities, frail, black-eyed, grave, and gently strong.

"Remember the cold, the hunger, the uncertainty we have endured. We have a chance now for security and peace. Let there be no trouble, now or when the Guard comes. Return to your quarters, quietly"

"Trouble!" Marah's voice roared out across the hot, still air. Every face down there below turned up toward the balcony. Campbell saw Tredrick start, and speak to one of the guards. The guard went out, not too fast. Campbell swore under his breath, and his heart began to tick over again, swift and hard.

Marah thundered on, a bronze Titan in the sultry glare. His gorget, his yellow eyes, the bosses on his kilt, held points of angry flame.

"You, Eran Mak, a Martian! Have you forgotten Kesh, and Balakar, and the Wells of Tamboina? Can you crawl to the Coalition like a sindar for the sake of the bones they throw you? You, Tredrick! You've sold us out. Since when have latniks been called to meddle in Romany's affairs?"

Tredrick's cold voice was quite steady. "The Kraylens are beyond reach, Marah. A revolt will get you nothing. Do you want blood on your hands?"

"My hand," said Marah softly. His hook made a burning, vicious arc in the hot light. "If there's blood on this, the Coalition spilled it when their Frontier Marshal lopped my sword hand for raising it against him."

The mob stirred and muttered. And Campbell said swiftly, "Tredrick's right. But there's still a chance, if you want to take it."

Stella Moore put a hand on Marah's arm. "How?"

Tredrick was still pretending he hadn't seen Campbell, pretending there weren't men crawling through dark tunnels to trap him.

"It'll mean trouble. It may mean death or imprisonment. It's a million-to-one shot. You'd better give me up and forget it."

The point of Marah's hook pricked under his jaw. "Speak quickly, little man!"

"Okay. Tell them to behave. Then get me out of here, fast!"

* * *

Tredrick's men knew their way around. A lot of gypsies, moreover, who weren't with Tredrick, joined the hunt for the latnik. They didn't want trouble with the Guard.

Campbell stumbled through a maze of dark and stifling passages, holding Stella's hand and thinking of the Guard ships sweeping closer. They were almost caught a dozen times, trying to get across Romany to his ship.

The hunt seemed to be an outlet for the pent feelings of Romany. Campbell decided he would never go hunting again. And then, just above where his ship lay, they stepped into a trap.

They were in the Saturnian Quarter, in the hulk devoted to refugees from Titan. There were coolers working here. There was snow on the barren rocks, glimmering in weird light like a dark rainbow.

"The caves," said Stella. "The Baraki."

There was an echoing clamor of voices all around them, footsteps clattering over metal and icy rock. They ran, breathing hard. There were some low cliffs, and a ledge, and then caves with queer blue-violet fires burning in them.

Creatures sat at the cave mouths. They were small, vaguely anthropoid, dead white, and unpleasantly rubbery. They were quite naked, and their single eyes were phosphorescent. Marah knelt.

"Little Fathers, we ask shelter in the name of freedom."

The shouts and the footsteps were closer. There was sweat on Campbell's forehead. One of the white things nodded slightly.

"No disturbance," it whispered. "We will have no disturbance of our thoughts. You may shelter, to stop this ugly noise."

"Thank you, Little Father." Marah plunged into the cave, with the others on his heels. Campbell snarled, "They'll come and take us!"

Stella's sullen lips smiled wolfishly. "No. Watch."

The cave, the violet fire were suddenly gone. There was a queer darkness, a small electric shiver across Campbell's skin. He started, and the girl whispered:

"Telekinesis. They've built a walled off area around us. On the outside it seems to be rock like the cave wall."

Marah moved, the bosses on his kilt clinking slightly. "When the swine are gone, there's a trap in this hulk leading down to the pipe where your ship is. Now tell us your plan."

Campbell made a short, bitter laugh. "Plan, hell. It's a gamble on a fixed wheel, and you're fools if you play it."

"And if we don't?"

"I'm going anyway. The Kraylens—well, I owe them something."

"Tell us the plan."

He did, in rapid nervous sentences, crouched behind the shielding wall of thought from those alien brains. Marah laughed softly.

"By the gods, little man, you should have been a Keshi!"

"I can think of a lot of things I should have been," said Campbell dourly. "Hey, there goes our wall."

It hadn't been more than four minutes. Long enough for them to look and go away again. There might still be time, before the Guard came.

There was, just. The getaway couldn't have been more perfectly timed. Campbell grinned, feeding power into his jets with exquisite skill.

He didn't have a Chinaman's chance. He thought probably the gypsies had less than that of coming through. But the Kraylens weren't going to rot in the slave-pens of Lhi because of Roy Campbell.

Not while Roy Campbell was alive to think about it. And that, of course, might not be long.

He sent the Fitts-Sothern shooting toward the night side of Venus, in full view and still throttled down. The Guard ships, nine fast patrol boats, took out after him, giving Romany the go-by. No use stopping there. No mistaking that lean, black ship, or whose hands were on the controls.

Campbell stroked the firing keys, and the Fitts-Sothern purred under him like a cat. Just for a second he couldn't see clearly.

"I'm sorry, old girl," he said. "But that's how it has to be."

* * *

It was a beautiful chase. The Guard ships pulled every trick they knew, and they knew plenty. Campbell hunched over the keys, sweating, his dark face set in a grin that held no mirth. Only his hands moved, with nervous, delicate speed.

It was the ship that did it. They slapped tractors on her, and she broke them. They tried to encircle her, and she walked away from them. That slight edge of power, that narrow margin of speed, pulled Roy Campbell away from what looked like instant, easy capture.

He got into the shadow, and then the Guard began to get scared as well as angry They stopped trying to capture him. They unlimbered their blasters and went to work.

Campbell was breathing hard now, through his teeth. His dark skin was oiled with sweat, pulled tight over the bones and the ridges of muscle and the knotted veins. Deliberately, he slowed a little.

A bolt flamed past the starboard ports. He slowed still more, and veered the slightest bit. The Fitts-Sothern was alive under his hands.

He didn't speak when the next bolt struck her. Not even to curse. He didn't know he was crying until he tasted the salt on his lips. He got up out of the pilot's seat, and then he said one word:

"Judas!"

The follow-up of the first shot blasted the control panel. It knocked him back across the cockpit, seared and scorched from the fusing metal. He got up, somehow, and down the passage to the lock compartment. There was a lot of blood running from his cheek, but he didn't care.

He could feel the ship dying under him. The timers were shot. She was running away in a crazy, blind spiral, racking her plates apart.

He climbed into his suit. It was a special one, black even to the helmet, with a special harness-jet, illegally baffled. He hoped his hands weren't too badly burned.

The ship checked brutally, flinging him hard into the bulkhead. Tractors! He clawed toward the lock, an animal whimper in his throat. He hoped he wasn't going to be sick inside the helmet.

The panel opened. Air blasted him out, into jet-black space. The tiny spearing flame of the harness-rocket flickered briefly and died, unnoticed among the trailing fires of the derelict.

Campbell lay quite still in the blackened suit. The Guard ships flared by, playing the Fitts-Sothern like a tarpon on the lines of their tractor beams. Campbell closed his eyes and cursed them, slowly and without expression, until the tightness in his throat choked him off.

He let them get a long way off. Then he pressed the plunger of the rocket, heading down for the night-shrouded swamps of Tehara Province.

He retained no very clear memory of the fall. Once, when he was quite low, a spaceship blazed by over him, heading toward Lhi. There were still about eight hours' darkness over the swamps.

He landed, eventually, in a clearing he was pretty sure only he knew about. He'd used it before when he'd had stuff to fence in Lhi and wasn't sure who owned the town at the time. He'd learned to be careful about those things.

There was a ship there now, a smallish trader of the inter-lunar type. He stared at it, not really believing it was there. Then, just in time, he got the helmet off.

When the world stopped turning over, he was lying with his head in Stella's lap. She had changed her tunic for plain spaceman's black, and it made her face look whiter and lovelier in its frame of black hair. Her lips were still sullen, and still red.

Campbell sat up and kissed them. He felt much better. Not good, but he thought he'd live. Stella laughed and said, "Well! You're recovering."

He said, "Sister, you're good medicine for anything." A hand which he recognized as Marah's materialized out of the indigo gloom. It had a flask in it. Campbell accepted it gladly. Presently the icy deadness around his stomach thawed out and he could see things better.

He got up, rather unsteadily, and fumbled for a cigarette. His shirt had been mostly blown and charred off of him and his hands hurt like hell. Stella gave him a smoke and a light. He sucked it in gratefully and said:

"Okay, kids. Are we all ready?"

They were.

* * *

Campbell led off. He drained the flask and was pleased to find himself firing on all jets again. He felt empty and relaxed and ready for anything. He hoped the liquor wouldn't wear off too soon.

There was a path threaded through the hammocks, the bogs and potholes and reeds and liha-trees. Only Campbell, who had made it, could have followed it. Remembering his blind stumbling in the mazes of Romany, he felt pleased about that. He said, rather smugly:

"Be careful not to slip. How'd you fix the getaway?"

Marah made a grim little laugh. "Romany was a madhouse, hunting for you. Some of the hot-headed boys started minor wars over policy on top of that. Tredrick had to use most of his men to keep order. Besides, of course, he thought we were beaten on the Kraylen question."

"There were only four men guarding the locks," said Stella. "Marah and a couple of the Paniki boys took care of them."

Campbell remembered the spaceship flashing toward Lhi. He told them about it. "Could be Tredrick, coming to supervise our defeat in person." Defeat! It was because he was a little tight, of course, but he didn't think anyone could defeat him this night. He laughed.

Something rippled out of the indigo night to answer his laughter. Something so infinitely sweet and soft that it made him want to cry, and then shocked him with the deep and iron power in it. Campbell looked back over his shoulder. He thought:

"Me, hell. These are the guys who'll do it, if it's done."

Stella was behind him. Beyond her was a thin, small man with four arms. He wore no clothing but his own white fur and his head was crowned with feathery antennae. Even in the blue night the antennae and the man's eyes burned living scarlet.

He came from Callisto and he carried in his four hands a thing vaguely like a harp, only the strings were double banked. It was the harp that had spoken. Campbell hoped it would never speak against him.

Marah brought up the rear, swinging along with no regard for the burden he bore. Over his naked shoulder, Campbell could see the still white face of the Baraki from Titan, the Little Father who had saved them from the hunters. There were tentacles around Marah's big body like white ropes.

Four gypsies and a public enemy. Five little people against the Terra-Venusian Coalition. It didn't make sense.

A hot, slow wind stirred the liha-trees. Campbell breathed it in, and grinned. "What does?" he wondered, and stopped to part a tangle of branches. There was a stone-lined tunnel beyond.

"Here we go, children. Join hands and make like little mousies." He took Stella's hand in his left. Because it was Stella's he didn't mind the way it hurt. In his right, he held his gun.

V

He led them, quickly and quietly, along the disused branch of an old drainage system that he had used so often as a private entrance. Presently they dropped to a lower level and the conduit system proper.

When the rains were on, the drains would be running full. Now they were only pumping seepage. They waded in pitch darkness, bypassed a pumping station through a side tunnel once used for cold storage by one of Lhi's cautious business men, and then found steep, slippery steps going up.

"Careful!" whispered Campbell. He stopped them on a narrow ledge and stood listening. The Callistan murmured, with faint amusement:

"There is no one beyond."

Antennae over ears. Campbell grinned and found a hidden spring. "Lhi is full of these things," he said. "The boys used to keep their little wars going just for fun, and every smart guy had several bolt holes. Maps used to sell high."

They emerged in a very deep, very dark cellar. It was utterly still. Campbell felt a little sad. He could remember when Martian Mak's was the busiest thieves' market in Lhi, and a man could hear the fighting even here. He smiled bitterly and led the way upstairs.

Presently they looked down on the main gate, the main square, and the slave pens of Lhi. The surrounding streets were empty, the buildings mostly dark. The Coalition had certainly cleaned up when it took over the town. It was horribly depressing.

Campbell pointed. "Reception committee. Tredrick radioed, anyway. One'll get you twenty he followed it up in person."

The gate was floodlighted over a wide area and there were a lot of tough-looking men with heavy-duty needle guns. In this day of anesthetic charges you could do a lot of effective shooting without doing permanent damage. There were more lights and more men by the slave pens.

Campbell couldn't see much over the high stone walls of the pens. Vague movement, the occasional flash of a brilliant crest. He had known the Kraylens would be there. It was the only place in Lhi where you could imprison a lot of people and be sure of keeping them.

Campbell's dark face was cruel. "Okay," he said. "Let's go."

* * *

Down the stone steps to the entrance. Stella's quick breathing in the hot darkness, the rhythmic clink of the bosses on Marah's kilt. Campbell saw the eyes of the Callistan harper, glowing red and angry. He realized he was sweating. He had forgotten his burns.

Stella opened the heavy steel-sheathed door. Quietly, slowly. The Baraki whispered, "Put me down."

Marah set him gently on the stone floor. He folded in upon himself, tentacles around white, rubbery flesh. His single eye burned with a cold phosphorescence.

He whispered, "Now."

The Callistan harper went to the door. Reflected light painted him briefly, white fur and scarlet crest and outlandish harp, and the glowing, angry eyes.

He vanished. Out of nowhere the harp began to sing.

Through the partly opened door Campbell had a clear view of the square and the gate. In all that glare of light on empty stone nothing moved. And yet the music rippled out.

The guards. Campbell could see the startled glitter of their eyeballs in the light. There was nothing to shoot at. The harping was part of the night, as all-enveloping and intangible.

Campbell shivered. A pulse beat like a trip-hammer under his jaw. Stella's voice came to him, a faint breath out of the darkness.

"The Baraki is shielding him with thought. A wall of force that turns the light."

The edge of the faint light touched her cheek, the blackness of her hair. Marah crouched beyond her, motionless. His hook glinted dully, curved and cruel.

They were getting only the feeble backwash of the harping. The Callistan was aiming his music outward. Campbell felt it sweep and tremble, blend with the hot slow wind and the indigo sky.

It was some trick of vibrations, some diabolical thrusting of notes against the brain, like fingers, to press and control. Something about the double-banked strings thrumming against each other under the cunning of four skilled hands. But it was like witchcraft.

"The Harp of Dagda," whispered Stella, and the Irish music in her voice was older than time. The Scot in Campbell answered it.

Somewhere outside a man cursed, thickly, like one drugged with sleep and afraid of it. A gun went off with a sharp slapping sound. Some of the guards had fallen down.

The harp sang louder, throbbing along the gray stones. It was the slow wind, the heat, the deep blue night. It was sleep.

The floodlights blazed on empty stone, and the guards slept.

The Baraki sighed and shivered and closed his eye. Campbell saw the Callistan harper standing in the middle of the square, his scarlet crest erect, striking the last thrumming note.

Campbell straightened, catching his breath in a ragged sob. Marah picked up the Baraki. He was limp, like a tired child. Stella's eyes were glistening and strange. Campbell went out ahead of them.

It was a long way across the square, in the silence and the glaring lights. Campbell thought the harp was a nice weapon. It didn't attract attention because everyone who heard it slept.

He flung back the three heavy bars of the slave gate. The pain of his burned hands jarred him out of the queer mood the harping and his Celtic blood had put on him. He began to think again.

"Hurry!" he snarled at the Kraylens. "Hurry up!" They came pouring out of the gate. Men, women with babies, little children. Their crests burned in the sullen glare.

Campbell pointed to Marah. "Follow him!" They recognized him, tried to speak, but he cursed them on. And then an old man said:

"My son."

Campbell looked at him, and then down at the stones. "For God's sake, Father, hurry." A hand touched his shoulder gently. He looked up again, and grinned. He couldn't see anything. "Get the hell on, will you?" Somebody found the switch and the nearer lights went out.

The hand pressed his shoulder, and was gone. He shook his head savagely. The Kraylens were running now, toward the house. And then, suddenly, Marah yelled.

Men were running into the square. Eight or ten of them, probably the bodyguard of the burly gray-haired man who led them. Beside the gray-haired man was Tredrick, Overchief of the Terran Quarter of Romany.

* * *

They were startled. They hadn't been expecting this. Campbell's battle-trained eye saw that. Probably they had been making a routine tour of inspection and just stumbled onto the crash-out.

Campbell fired from the hip. Anesthetic needles sprayed into the close-packed group. Two of them went down. The rest scattered, dropping flat. Campbell wished there had been time to kill the gate lights. At least, the shadows made shooting tricky.

He bent over and began to run, guarding the rear of the Kraylen's line. Stella, in the cover of the doorway, was laying down a methodical wall of needles. Campbell grinned.

Some of the Kraylens caught it and had to be carried. That slowed things down. Campbell's gun clicked empty. He shoved in another clip, cursing his burned fingers. A charge sang by him, close enough to stir his hair. He fired again, blanketing the whole sector where the men lay. He wished he could blow Tredrick's head off.

The Kraylens were vanishing into the house. Marah and the Callistan had gone ahead, leading them. Campbell groaned. Speed was what they needed. Speed. A child, separated from his mother in the rush, knelt on the stones and shrieked. Campbell picked him up and ran on.

Enemy fire was slackening. Stella was doing all right. The last of the Kraylens shoved through the door. Campbell bounded up the steps. Stella got up off her belly and smiled at him. Her eyes shone. They were halfway through the door when the cold voice behind them said, "There are lethal needles in my gun. You had better stop."

Campbell turned slowly. His face was wooden. Tredrick stood at the bottom of the steps. He must have crawled around the edge of the square, where the shadows were thick under the walls.

"Drop your gun, Campbell. And you, Stella Moore."

Campbell dropped it. Tredrick might be bluffing about those needles. But a Mickey at this stage of the game would be just as fatal. Stella's gun clattered beside him. She didn't say anything, but her face was coldly murderous.

Tredrick said evenly, "You might as well call them back, Campbell. You led them in, but you're not going to lead them out."

It was funny, Campbell thought, how a man's voice could be so cold when his eyes had fire in them. He said sullenly, "Okay, Tredrick. You win. But what's the purpose behind this?"

Tredrick's face might have been cut from granite, except for the feral eyes. "I was born on Romany. I froze and starved in those rotten hulks. I hated it. I hated the darkness, the loneliness, the uncertainty. But when I said I hated it, I got a beating.

"Everybody else thought it was worth it. I didn't. They talked about freedom, but Romany was a prison to me. I wanted to grow, and I was stifled inside it. Then I got an idea.

"If I could rule Romany and make a treaty with the Coalition, I'd have money and power. And I could fix it so no more kids would be brought up that way, cold and hungry and scared.

"Marah opposed me, and then the Kraylens became an issue." Tredrick smiled, but there was no mirth or softness in it. "It's a good thing. The Coalition can take care of Marah and you others who were mixed up in this. My way is clear."

Stella said softly between her teeth, "They'll never forgive you for turning Romany people over to the latniks. There'll be war."

Tredrick nodded soberly. "No great change is made without bloodshed. I'm sorry for that. But Romany will be happier."

"We don't ask to be happy. We only ask to be free."

Campbell said wearily, "Stella, take the kid, will you?" He held out the little Kraylen, droopy and quiet now. She looked at him in quick alarm. His feet were spread but not steady, his head sunk forward.

She took the child. Campbell's knees sagged. One seared arm in a tattered green sleeve came up to cover his face. The other groped blindly along the wall. He dropped, rather slowly, to his knees.

The groping hand fell across the gun by Stella's foot. In one quick sweep of motion Campbell got it, threw it, and followed it with his own body.

* * *

The gun missed, but it came close enough to Tredrick's face to make him move his hand. The involuntary muscular contraction of his whole body spoiled his aim. The charge went past Campbell into the wall.

They crashed down together on the stones. Campbell gripped Tredrick's wrist, knew he couldn't hold it, let go with one hand and slashed backward with his elbow at Tredrick's face.

The gun let off again, harmlessly. Tredrick groaned. His arm was weaker. Campbell thrashed over and got his knee on it. Tredrick's other fist was savaging his already tortured body.

Campbell brought his fist down into Tredrick's face. He did it twice, and wept and cursed because he was suddenly too weak to lift his arm again. Tredrick was bleeding, but far from out. His gun was coming up again. He didn't have much play, but enough.

Campbell set his teeth. He couldn't even see Tredrick, but he swung again. He never knew whether he connected or not.

Something thrummed past his head. He couldn't say he heard it. It was more like feeling. But it was something deadly, and strange. Tredrick didn't make a sound. Campbell knew suddenly that he was dead.

He got up, very slow, shaking and cold. The Callistan harper stood in the doorway. He was lowering his hands, and his eyes were living coals. He didn't say anything. Neither did Stella. But she laughed, and the child stirred and whimpered in her arms.

Campbell went to her. She looked at him with queer eyes and whispered, "I called him with my mind. I knew he'd kill."

He took her face in his two hands. "Listen, Stella. You've got to lead them back. You've got to touch my mind with yours and let me guide you that way, back to the ship."

Her eyes widened sharply. "But you can come. He's dead. You're free now."

"No." He could feel her throat quiver under his hands. Her blood was beating. So was his. He said harshly, "You fool, do you think they'll let you get away with this? You're tackling the Coalition. They can't afford to look silly. They've got to have a scapegoat, something to save face!

"Romany, so far, is beyond planetary control. Slap your tractors on her, tow her out. Clear out to Saturn if you have to. Nobody saw the Callistan. Nobody saw anybody but me and the Kraylens, and an unidentifiable somebody up here on the porch. Nobody, that is, but Tredrick, and he won't talk. Do you understand?"

She did, but she was still rebellious. Her sullen lips were angry, her eyes bright with tears and challenging. "But you, Roy?"

He took his hands away. "Damn you, woman! If I hide out on Romany I bring you into Guard jurisdiction. I'll be trapped, and Romany's last chance to stay free will be gone."

She said stubbornly, "But you can get away. There are ships."

"Oh, sure. But the Kraylens are there. You can't hide them. The Coalition will search Romany. They'll ask questions. I tell you they've got to have a goat!"

He was really weak, now. He hoped he could hold out. He hoped he wouldn't do anything disgraceful. He turned away from her, looking out at the square. Some of the guards were beginning to stir.

"Will you go?" he said. "Will you get to hell out?"

She put her hand on him. "Roy . . ."

He jerked away. His dark face was set and cruel. "Do you have to make it harder? Do you think I want to rot on Phobos in their stinking mines, with shackles on my feet?" He swung around, challenging her with savage eyes.

"How else do you think Romany is going to stay free? You can't go on playing cat and mouse with the big shots this way. They're getting sick of it. They'll pass laws and tie you down. Somebody's got to spread Romany all over the Solar System. Somebody's got to pull a publicity campaign that'll make the great dumb public sit up and think. If public opinion's with you, you're safe."

He smiled. "I'm big news, Stella. I'm Roy Campbell. I can splash your lousy little mess of tin cans all over with glamour, so the great dumb public won't let a hair of your little head be hurt. If you want to, you can raise a statue to me in the Council hall.

"And now will you for God's sake go?"

* * *

She wasn't crying. Her gray eyes had lights in them. "You're wonderful, Roy. I didn't realize how wonderful."

He was ashamed, then. "Nuts. In my racket you don't expect to get away with it forever. Besides, I'm an old dog. I know my way around. I have a little money saved up. I won't be in for long."

"I hope not,'" she said. "Oh, Roy, it's so stupid! Why do Earthmen have to change everything they lay their hands on?"

He looked at Tredrick, lying on the stones. His voice came slow and somber.

"They're building, Stella. When they're finished they'll have a big, strong, prosperous empire extending all across the System, and the people who belong to that empire will be happy.

"But before you can build you have to grade and level, destroy the things that get in your way. We're the things—the tree-stumps and the rocks that grew in the way and can't be changed.

"They're building; they're growing. You can't stop that. In the end it'll be a good thing, I suppose. But right now, for us. . . ."

He broke off. He thrust her roughly inside and locked the steel-sheathed door. "You've got to go now."

It was dark, and hot. The Kraylen child whimpered. He could feel Stella close to him. He found her lips and kissed them.

He said, "So long. And about that statue. You'd better wait until I come back to pose for it."

His voice became a longing whisper.

"I will be back!" he promised.


MEET THE AUTHOR

Amazing Stories, June 1941

IN quite undramatic fashion, I began by being born. Place, Los Angeles, California. Date, December 7, so few years ago that darned little has had time to happen. Ancestry, Scots-English. I weighed ten pounds, had black hair, and a strident personality, especially during the wee sma' hours.

The next few years are somewhat hazy, except that I was very naughty and had an uncanny faculty for imitating dialect. The family was never quite sure whether it had hatched out a Chinese cook or an Italian fruit man.

At an early age I discovered books. It was a sad day for the family. It's a mournful tradition with us that if you want to get me out of a book, you've got to use a good-sized percussion cap.

Presently I was put into a small school in Santa Monica. I may say, with a pardonable blush, that I was the second worst brat on the campus. The worst one had a head start — she was a year older.

This I call my beachcombing period. I lived at the shore, acquired an indelible tan and a mop of straw-colored hair — the black fuzz I started out with having apparently made a mistake. I didn't grow scales and gills, but the fish all called me by my first name.

By this time several alarming characteristics had appeared in me. I was crazy over dogs. I'd have had a dozen or so, if the family hadn't sternly refused to cooperate. I had a nice taste in Elizabethan oaths, garnered from pirate stories. I wavered between four desperate alternatives: whether to be a smuggler like Jim Davis, a pirate like Blackbeard, an all-round daredevil like Douglas Fairbanks, who was my idol, or just to settle for cowboys'n' Indians.

And I discovered "imaginative fiction." There was apprehensive shaking of heads among the female relatives. Attempts were made to save me. But it was too late. I devoured Burroughs, Haggard, Balmer and Wylie, Doyle's unforgettable "Maracot Deep," Jules Verne. Yes, boys and girls. I was hooked. Completely and utterly.In

the meantime, I flunked Latin and algebra, acted in some school plays, fought the neighbor's boy, and made several unsuccessful att¬empts to go to Mars a la John Carter.

Then we went East, and the Fateful Day arrived.

It dawned quite simply. The sun shone, the little birds were doing their stuff, all was quiet and serene. I got out of bed...

There was a muffled thunder of psychic drums. Boston quaked to foundations. And I said to myself:

"Brackett, you're thirteen. Time you thought about things. The days of piracy are over, smuggling has degenerated into boot-legging, and cowboy-ing seems to have lost its siren charm. What's it to be, the life Work?"

Brackett struggled with this for a long time — five minutes at least. And then,

"I have it! You get good marks in Eng. Lit. You read incessantly. Composition is a snap. Writing is easy. In fact, it's so easy it'll be almost a pity to take money for it.

"Brackett, your future is assured,You will be a writer. "Uh huh. Gruesome, isn't it? My only excuse is that I was young. and no one had ever kicked me very hard.

I wrote a novel, an intensely dramatic problem piece. I wrote short stories. Then two more novels.

They made a horrible stench, burning. My one consolation is that wrote them in longhand, which in my case is practically illegible, mid I think the editors simply stuck rejection slips on them, of necessity, without reading.

We came West again. I entered school, and took a course in writing on the side. It did some good, but not much Besides, I was bitten by the acting bug about this time and spent most of my waking hours in the school auditorium.

hours in the school auditorium.

This eventually resulted in my placing second for dramatic reading in the Festival of Arts and Sciences, and teaching speech and dramatics for a year at an up-coast school.

I taught swimming as well during the summers, and had an idea I might be a physical instructor. But writing had become chronic. I couldn't shake it. I turned out incredibly bad stories in every spare moment.

Now we come to the tragic, soul-searing period inevitable in the life of every struggling artist, the time when he's sure his Muse has deserted him for good. If, indeed, the gal was ever around. In nine years I hadn't sold a word. I was beating my head against a wall, with no way over or around. Writing was easy. Ha!

Then, just as I was poised on the edge of a cliff, with a rope around my neck, a bottle of poison in one hand and a gun in the other, Fate stepped in. I found a teacher, heaven bless him. I found a writer willing to help. I found an agent, ditto. I decided life wasn't so bad after all.

Behold me now, laboring in my garret, which overlooks the city of Los Angeles. I've sold a dozen stories. Not much, but a beginning. And some day, maybe...

That just about finishes this uneventful chronicle. If physical statistics are of interest, I'm tallish, fairish, and mildly insane on the subject of beach volley-ball. I still read. I like eating and sleeping, dislike hats and cats, and dream of globe-trotting.

There's just one more thing — a very important thing. I hope you enjoy "No Man's Land..." It's the first story I've sold to AMAZING STORIES, but I hope, I do sincerely hope, that it will not be the

last. — Leigh Brackett.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"Martian Quest," Copyright © 1940 Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, February 1940.

"The Treasure of Ptakuth," Copyright © 1940 Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, April 1940.

"The Tapestry Gate," Copyright © 1940 Better Publications, Inc.,

for Strange Stories, August 1940.

"The Stellar Legion," Copyright © 1940 Love Romances, Inc., for Planet Stories, Winter 1940.

"The Demons of Darkside," Copyright © 1941 Better Publications, Inc., for Startling Stories, January 1941.

"Water Pirate," Copyright © 1941 Fictioneers, Inc., for Super Science Stories, January 1941.

"Interplanetary Reporter," Copyright © 1941 Better Publications, Inc., for Startling Stories, May 1941.

"The Dragon-Queen of Venus," originally published as "The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter," Copyright © 1941 Love Romances, Inc., for Planet Stories, Summer 1941.

"Lord of the Earthquake," Copyright © 1941 Columbia Publications, Inc., for Science Fiction, June 1941.

"No Man's Land in Space," Copyright © 1941 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, for Amazing Stories, July, 1941.

"A World is Born," Copyright © 1941 H-K Publications, Inc., for Comet Stories, July 1941.

"Retreat to the Stars," Copyright © 1941 Fictioneers, Inc., for Astonishing Stories, November 1941.

"Child of the Green Light," Copyright 1942 Fictioneers, Inc., for Super Science Stories, February 1942.

"The Sorcerer of Rhiannon," Copyright © 1942 Street & Smith

Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science Fiction, February 1942.

"Child of the Sun," Copyright © 1942 Love Romances, Inc., for

Planet Stories, Spring 1942.

"Out of the Sea," Copyright © 1942 Fictioneers, Inc., for Astonishing Stories, June 1942.

"Cube from Space," Copyright © 1942 Fictioneers, Inc., for Super Science Stories, August 1942.

"Outpost on lo," Copyright © 1942 Love Romances, Inc., for Planet Stories, Winter 1942.

"The Halfling," Copyright © 1942 Fictioneers, Inc., for Astonishing Stories, February 1943.

"The Citadel of Lost Ships," Copyright © 1943 Love Romances, Inc., for Planet Stories, March 1943.


FIRST EDITION

2002

MARTIAN QUEST: THE EARLY BRACKETT by Leigh Brackett, was published by Haffner Press, 5005 Crooks Road, Suite 35, Royal Oak, Michigan 48073-1239.

One thousand trade copies, and a limited edition of one hundred numbered and slipcased copies signed by Michael Moorcock, the author of the introduction, have been printed on 55# Booktext Natural from Adobe Bembo. The printing was done by Edwards Brothers of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The binding cloth is Holliston Roxite B.