escape velocity by charles l. fontenay _it was a duel to the death and kraag had all the advantages, including offense and defense. jonner had neither, but he employed an old equation peculiarly adaptable to the situation. and the proper equation properly worked...._ [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from worlds of if science fiction, october . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] murdering stein was easy. kraag waited until jonner donned his spacesuit and went out to have a personal look at the asteroid. even then kraag held his patience, because he wanted jonner to come back to the ship unsuspecting. kraag sat tensely at the back of the control room while stein, the navigator and communications man, operated the radio. there was a brief period when stein talked with marsport, then he got in touch with jonner. until jonner got some distance from the wrecked ship, most of their conversation was an argument. "i still think two of us ought to go out and one stay at the ship," argued stein. "kraag agrees with me. what if you fall into a crevice?" "there's not much danger, and you've got a directional fix on me," replied jonner's voice through the loudspeaker. "if we had a large crew, i'd agree we ought to explore in pairs. since there are just three of us, only one ought to be endangered at a time. i'm the captain, so i'm it." "well, don't get out of sight," warned stein. "we don't have an atmosphere here to bounce radio waves over the horizon." through the glassite port, kraag could see jonner poking around at the asteroid's surface with his steel probe. against the incredibly curved horizon, jonner's suited figure leaned at a slight angle under the black, star-studded sky. the distant sun gleamed from the sphere of his helmet. "pretty smooth terrain," remarked jonner. "it's not much of a planet, but it seems to have enough mass to pull down any mountains. looks like there should be some hills, though. it must have been in a molten state when the original trans-martian planet was broken up." "that ought to mean high albedo," said stein. "higher than it ought to be." "sounds more like vesta," said jonner. "sure we're on ceres?" stein looked at the notes he had made from the ship's instruments, before the crash. "the escape velocity was , . feet per second," he said, "and the diameter . . i figure the mass at . ." "all those figures are off according to the latest table for ceres," said jonner. "the fellows that made that table were on mars," reminded stein. "vesta doesn't have a -mile diameter. it must be ceres." "you're the navigator," surrendered jonner. "i'll take your word for it." the personnel sphere of the ship rested on the ground, tilted at almost a -degree angle from the horizontal. the tilt was no inconvenience, however. each of the men weighed only five or six pounds here, and slippage was hardly noticeable. "i'll turn you over to kraag," said stein at last, glancing up at the chronometer. "it's my day to fix supper, you know." it was the signal kraag had been waiting for. he reached behind him and fumbled in the rack for a gun. the one he brought out was jonner's, and it wasn't a heat-gun but the ancient pistol jonner swore by. kraag put it back hurriedly, but not before stein had turned in his chair and seen it. "what's up, kraag?" asked stein without alarm. "why the gun?" kraag pulled a heat-gun from the rack. "nothing's up," he said, and shot stein. the ray burned into stein's shoulder, and kraag swung it down across stein's chest to his stomach before relaxing his pressure on the trigger. "my god, kraag!" gurgled stein. summoning a last effort, he croaked into the microphone: "jonner! watch out! kraag shot...." kraag blasted him in the face, cutting him off. stein's body floated forward and upward out of the chair and began to settle slowly toward the slanting floor. "what's going on, stein?" came jonner's alarmed voice over the loudspeaker. "stein? stein!" "it's all right, jonner," said kraag as calmly as he could, when he could reach the microphone. "stein just fainted." there was silence from jonner. "i'll take care of stein and then take over the mike till you get ready to come in," said kraag into the microphone. "i want to talk to stein when he comes around," said jonner. his voice sounded cold. so jonner suspected something. well, that couldn't be helped. maybe he could be talked around. "all right, jonner," agreed kraag soothingly. stein's body had to be hidden from jonner, just in case. jonner got into the personnel sphere alive--something kraag did not intend for him to do. when he had taken care of jonner, he could dispose of both bodies before the rescue ship got there. dragging stein's body was like towing someone through water. it floated through the air of the sphere at kraag's tug, settling slowly. his only problem was getting good leverage for pushing. after some cogitation, he jammed the body into an empty food compartment two decks below the control room. back in the control room, kraag looked out the port. jonner was closer to the personnel sphere now, looking toward it but not moving. other portions of the ship, some jettisoned, some crumpled and broken apart by its crash, lay at varying distances from the personnel sphere. some of the parts were scattered out of sight beyond the horizon, a mile away. kraag had not wanted to fool with the asteroid. there had been no question that they had to swing back off their original orbit toward titan when the meteorite slashed open both of their hydrazine tanks. but kraag's idea had been to stay in space and try to turn back toward mars before the fuel gave out. as the engineer, kraag resented jonner overruling him. jonner had felt it safer to take an orbit around the asteroid and wait for rescue. but the fuel pumps had failed before they could adjust to the orbit. kraag would never forget that helpless waiting as they circled and circled, spiraling downward to the inevitable crash. he went back to the microphone. "okay, jonner," he said. "what's going on out there now?" "where's stein?" countered jonner. "i want to talk to him." "he's not feeling so good. said he'd rather not try to get back up to the control room right now." "tell him to come to the mike anyhow. i don't want to talk to you till i talk to stein." "stein can't talk, i tell you. if you don't want to talk to me, then are you ready to come in?" "and get shot?" retorted jonner. so jonner's suspicions were that definite. it was to be expected after the words stein had been able to shout into the microphone. jonner was nobody's dumbbell. kraag tired once more. "that's a ridiculous idea, jonner," he said. "i can't figure why you'd say such a thing." "you shot stein," said jonner positively. "there's no use your denying it. i know you shot stein, and i'll know it until stein himself tells me it isn't so." kraag knew jonner too well to try to keep up the pretense any longer. he tried another tack. "okay, so i shot stein," he admitted. "that doesn't mean i'll shoot you. come on in and talk it over. we can make a deal." "if you shot stein, why wouldn't you shoot me?" asked jonner logically. "there wasn't enough air for three. there is for two." jonner was silent for a moment. "so that's why you did it," he said then. "figured it pretty close, didn't you, kraag?" "i'm the guy who has to watch supplies on this boat. i checked the oxygen after the crash broke open those three compartments on the supply deck. there's pounds of oxygen left. it'll take about months for the rescue ship to get here from mars. at . pounds of oxygen a day, you and i can make it, but it would have lasted the three of us only months." jonner cursed him for a full minute, not loudly but with such intensity that kraag felt his face getting warm. "you damn murderer!" finished jonner. "you damn cold-blooded murderer!" "cut it out, jonner," growled kraag. "i can't understand you and stein. what were you expecting to save us? a miracle?" "i don't feel like talking about it now," said jonner warily. "if you had only ... hell, kraag, we'd been together a long time. even if all of us had thought we were going to die, i didn't think we'd kill each other off like animals." "self-preservation is the first law of nature," said kraag cynically. "better that two should die than three. come on in, jonner." "that's self-preservation? no thanks, kraag. you know i'll turn you in as a murderer when the rescue ship gets here. i have no hankering to walk up where you can burn me down." "okay, stay out there till your air gives out." the airlock was not a comfortable place to spend one of the asteroid's seven-hour nights, but kraag was afraid not to stand guard there with his heat-gun. he was afraid to sleep, too, for the airlock combination was virtually noiseless and jonner could open it from the outside. jonner was unarmed, but kraag had no hankering for a hand-to-hand fight with the powerfully built captain inside the personnel sphere. because the air would swish out of the lock instantly if jonner opened it, kraag had to wear a spacesuit. he tried to talk to jonner several times, but got no answer. toward dawn, kraag dozed off, only to be brought awake with a start by jonner's voice in his earphones. "good morning, kraag," said jonner. there was iron in his voice. "have a good night's sleep?" "about as good as yours, i'd say," retorted kraag, wishing he could get his hands inside his helmet to rub his eyes. "i slept fine. found me a good foxhole just beyond the horizon." "damn you, jonner! where are you now?" "go on and have breakfast, kraag. i'm far enough away for you to see me. take a look." kraag peered out of the uppermost airlock ports, one by one. they slanted at a bad angle, but through one of them he made out jonner, standing half a mile away. uncannily, as though he could see kraag's helmet at the port, jonner waved. kraag was afraid to take off the spacesuit now because the supply deck had no ports and jonner could get to the ship in a hurry if he wanted to. he took off the helmet, though, and went up to the center deck. hurriedly, he opened the cover of the port in the direction he had seen jonner. jonner was still in the same place, sitting down. kraag heated breakfast and ate it with an eye on the port. jonner didn't move. kraag felt better when he had eaten, and went up to the control room. "why don't you give it up and come on in, jonner?" he asked. "the oxygen in that suit's not good for more than another hours." "that's where you're wrong, kraag, and that's what's so tragic about your murdering stein," said jonner quietly. "you either forgot that we carried oxygen instead of nitric acid as the fuel oxidizer this trip or, being an engineer, you didn't think of it except as fuel. "there's enough oxygen in the tanks scattered over the landscape to keep a dozen men alive until the rescue ship gets here. it's hard for me to get at, but i've already found i can manage it." kraag was profoundly shocked. for a moment the enormity of what he had done in killing stein almost overwhelmed him. it had been completely unnecessary. then his self-reproach turned into a growing anger against jonner. jonner was always so reticent, always required his orders to be obeyed without explanation. during the whole argument about taking an orbit around the asteroid, during the whole time it had taken to spiral down to a crash, he had not told kraag how he expected them to stay alive until they were rescued. kraag hadn't asked him, of course. kraag had assumed jonner was thinking in terms of his own figures. "i'm sorry about stein," said kraag, and meant it. "but it can't be helped now, jonner. there's enough air for both of us, if you'll keep your mouth shut when the rescue ship gets here." "if i promised, i still wouldn't trust you and you wouldn't trust me. no, kraag. the only way it'll work is for you to come out unarmed and let me go in and get the guns. then i'll lock you in the control room till the rescue ship gets here." "one of us is a fool, jonner, and you seem to think it's me. i'm not going to burn for murder. i've got the whip hand. you may have oxygen, but you've got to have food and water, too." jonner laughed, without humor. "i've got enough of that for three earth days and i can last longer," he said. "before that time, i'll come and get you, kraag. don't go to sleep!" kraag cursed and switched off the loudspeaker. but he kept an eye on jonner through the glassite. always, he had to watch jonner--or stay on guard in the airlock. if there were only some way to lock jonner out! but the only real lock was on the control room, and a man couldn't live in the control room with an enemy below who could cut the water and oxygen lines. kraag would have to sleep some time. jonner couldn't know when, but jonner already was seven hours sleep up on him. jonner could pick his own time to slip up to the sphere under cover of darkness, he could pick his own time to come through the lock. maybe kraag would be awake and could burn him down--but maybe not. there was only one thing to do. he'd have to take the attack to jonner. * * * * * still watching jonner through every port he passed, always watching jonner, kraag hung a heat-gun on one of the hooks at his spacesuit's belt. he went back below, put the helmet on, and went out through the airlock. the shadow of the sphere stretched away toward his left. he was in sunlight. jonner, still in the same spot, got to his feet but made no move to approach. "welcome to the great outdoors," said jonner. "i'm going to get you, jonner," said kraag grimly. "one way or another, i'm going to get you." he moved toward jonner. each step was a long, floating leap and it was hard to stay balanced before landing. jonner moved, not away from him but sidewise. kraag stopped. the effective range of the heat-gun was no more than feet. if he tried to get close enough to jonner to use it, jonner could circle and get to the personnel sphere. there were the oxygen tanks, the big ones used for fuel. if kraag could get to them and burn them open, jonner couldn't last long outside. but they were scattered pretty far from the personnel sphere. jonner would get to the sphere for sure if he tried that. "okay, jonner, i know when i'm licked," said kraag. "come on in." "i'm not too far away to see the gun, kraag." "i'll take it back to the sphere and leave it." "why not just toss it away?" "and have you beat me to it and get the drop on me? we'll leave the guns in the sphere and i'll meet you on even terms." "i'll believe it when i see it." kraag went back to the sphere. he couldn't stand in shadow without looking suspicious, but he took the heat-gun from his belt ostentatiously and swung it in an arc, apparently tossing it through the open outer lock. instead, he held onto it and hung it by the trigger guard to a belt hook at the back of his suit. "i'm all clean, jonner. come on up," he invited. "let's see the hooks, kraag," said jonner. kraag held his arms aloft, wriggling the empty steel fingers of the spacesuit. jonner came toward him, floating high above the surface with each step. at just about the extreme range of the heat-gun, he stopped. kraag kept his arms outspread, but tensed himself. "clean, so far," said jonner drily. "now turn around, kraag." "and have you jump me from behind? not hardly." "gun on the back hook, eh, kraag?" "damn you, jonner!" kraag reached behind him for the gun and at the same time leaped toward jonner. jonner, ready, jumped back, and jonner was a more powerful man. handling a heat-gun with the hand-hooks of a spacesuit is awkward business, and by the time kraag could bring the weapon to bear on jonner and press the trigger, jonner's distance was such that the ray obviously did no worse than make things uncomfortably warm for him. "i didn't think that surrender rang true," commented jonner. "if you'd been level, you'd have tossed away the heat-gun." then jonner revealed that he was not entirely weaponless. as he hit the surface, his arm moved in an arc and a good-sized rock came hurtling through space toward kraag. kraag writhed frantically, two feet off the ground, and the stone missed him by inches. kraag landed on his side and bounced again. jonner hit once more and hurled another rock. evidently he was armed with several of them. this one ricocheted off the ground near kraag just as kraag finally slid to rest. getting to his feet and turning to flee was agonizingly slow, when every frantic movement lifted him off the ground. another stone came sailing by, to strike the personnel sphere and rebound at an angle, before kraag could jump back, away from jonner. perspiring and panting, he clambered hastily back into the safety of the airlock. jonner's rocks were a better weapon than a heat-gun, kraag realized. they weighed only a fraction of an ounce and jonner could fling them an amazing distance. but their mass was just the same as ever, and a jagged one could rip a fatal hole in a spacesuit. he had no intention of engaging in a stone-throwing duel with jonner, in which jonner would be at least on equal terms with him. on the other hand, it was even more imperative than before that he eliminate jonner as soon as possible. a rock could be a deadly weapon if jonner got inside the sphere, too. at any rate, there was no point in concealing stein's body from jonner any longer and kraag couldn't take chances on it polluting the atmosphere of the sphere. he dragged the corpse from the food compartment, down to the airlock, and pushed it out onto the surface of ceres. the body settled stiffly to the ground a few feet away. kraag removed his helmet and hand-hooks, went back up to the control room and settled himself to watch jonner. jonner walked around freely, periodically hurling rocks at the sphere. the rocks bounced off without damage, but every time one of them hit the hull, the sound of it rang through the sphere. kraag switched on the communications system. "do you have to do that?" he demanded in irritation. "it's not doing you any good." "keeping me in practice," replied jonner cheerfully. "i developed a pretty good arm throwing grenades in the charax uprising." jonner was a veteran of that brief but savage war on mars, and sometimes reminisced about it. it was there he had developed his preference for the old-style projectile pistol over the heat-gun. * * * * * kraag's eyes lingered on jonner's pistol, hanging in the rack with the heat-guns, and slowly an idea spread through his mind. the heat-gun range was the same anywhere, but the range of a projectile weapon should be greater here than on mars or earth. its range should be far greater than jonner's rocks. kraag took it from the rack and turned it over in his hand, studying it. he wasn't sure of its principle, but thought it was something on the order of rocket fuel. it should fire without an atmosphere around it. there were some figures stamped on the barrel: "colt , cal-. , mv- , ser- ." kraag puzzled over them. he knew the first one was the make and year and the last undoubtedly was the serial number. he deduced that "mv- " probably was a figure showing the relationship between the projectile's mass and velocity. but it had been a long time since projectile weapons were common. he called on the memory of a demonstration of the weapon jonner had given his companions once on mars. there was something that had to be done to prepare it for firing. holding it in his right hand, kraag grasped the barrel with his left. after a moment of hesitant tugging, he hit the right movement and the whole outer casing of the barrel slid backward and clicked. it snapped back into position as kraag released it, and he remembered. the gun was primed now. all he had to do was press the trigger and it would fire. it would automatically prime itself again after firing. it would fire each time he pressed the trigger now, until it exhausted its projectiles. exultant, he laid it carefully in a contour chair, where it wouldn't slide out. he put his helmet back on and replaced the hand-hooks of his spacesuit. he looked out several ports before he found jonner. the captain was not more than feet away, casually lobbing rocks at the sphere. kraag picked up jonner's pistol and made his way down to the airlock. he emerged and walked around the sphere to the side where he had located jonner. jonner was moving away now, though he couldn't have known kraag was coming out. he was about feet away--too far for a heat-gun, but certainly within range of the projectile weapon. he seemed to be headed toward one of the big fuel tanks. kraag levelled the pistol toward jonner and pulled the trigger. to his astonishment, he was hurtled backward, heels over head. the kick of a . on an asteroid is pretty powerful. kraag must have bounced feet backward over the terrain before he slid to rest on his stomach. but he held on to the pistol--and, since he never had a chance to release the pressure of his hand-hook on the trigger, it did not fire again. when he struggled upright, jonner was standing at the edge of the fuel tank, watching him. "using my gun now, eh, kraag?" jonner said. "you'd better stick to weapons you know something about." with that, he disappeared behind the fuel tank. kraag got to his feet and advanced confidently. his heat-gun was still hanging at his belt if he got close enough to jonner to use it, and he could fire the projectile weapon at jonner when jonner was out of heat-gun range. he was learning. one had to point the projectile gun accurately before firing. it couldn't be swung around and focused while pressing the trigger, like a heat-gun. he might miss a few times, but he ought to be able to hit jonner at least once before the ammunition was exhausted. once should be enough. heat-gun ready in his left hand, projectile gun in his right, kraag circled the fuel tank. keeping it between them, jonner had headed straight for the horizon, running in long, shallow leaps. he was at least half a mile away. kraag pointed the projectile pistol and pulled the trigger. nothing happened. then he realized that he had never released the pressure of his hand-hook on the trigger after firing the first time. he let up on it and pressed it down. and again kraag was hurled backward, but this time he was smashed against the fuel tank and rebounded forward, falling on his face. by the time he reached his feet again, jonner had vanished over the horizon. cursing softly, kraag made his way back to the personnel sphere. he had hoped to get jonner with that shot. he was very sleepy, and now he was faced with another night on guard. he entered the airlock, pushed himself gently upward to catch the rungs of the metal ladder and turned the wheel of the airlock's inner door. nothing happened. the door did not open. fear gripped him like a paralyzing hand. for a moment he thought jonner had managed to get to the sphere ahead of him and somehow had locked him out. but that was impossible. then he thought the inner door might be jammed, and he and jonner locked out together. he glanced frantically below him, then broke into relieved laughter. he had left the outer airlock door open. as a safety measure against the sphere's accidentally losing its air, neither door would open unless the other was shut. and that meant he could lock jonner out of the sphere simply by leaving the inner door of the airlock open! his laugh was full and genuine now as he pulled the outer door closed. "having fun, kraag?" asked jonner in his earphones. "just looking forward to a good night's sleep, for a change," retorted kraag triumphantly. "prowl around all you want to, jonner. i can wait you out, now." "the airlock, eh? i wondered when your guilty conscience would settle down and let you remember about that airlock," said jonner phlegmatically. "you know, kraag, i had no idea you wouldn't think about a simple thing like that, till i looked through the airlock port last night and saw you huddled up there with a heat-gun. you should have turned out the light." jonner was silent for a few minutes. then he added: "i don't think i'd laugh yet, though, kraag. remember, you're fighting with my weapons." kraag wasn't sure what he meant by that: whether he was talking about kraag's using the projectile pistol or the fact that they were in space, jonner's natural element. kraag himself had been in space years, most of it with jonner, but before then he had never left earth. jonner had been born and raised on mars, where a man needed a suit to go to the next settlement, and he had been on a ship since he was . as for using the pistol, kraag could see danger for no one but jonner. he had proved, twice, that he could fire it. he was quite sure the old-fashioned weapon was no more likely to explode than a heat-gun. the only trouble he foresaw was figuring how to reload it if he used up all its projectiles before hitting jonner. kraag shrugged and removed his suit. he was hungry, and he was looking forward to a supper better than jonner had available in the concentrated supplies in his spacesuit. jonner's food and water by now had dwindled to less than hours' supply, unless he was weakening himself by going on slim rations. * * * * * as he wolfed down his supper, kraag took stock of his situation. he could see no flaw in his position. all he had to do was sit back and wait. he decided not to destroy the tanks that were jonner's supply of extra oxygen. after all, jonner could not last beyond his food and water supply. the presence of the oxygen made his case airtight. he could dispose of the bodies of stein and jonner and tell the crew of the rescue ship they had wandered off on an exploration tour and never returned. with plenty of oxygen for the three of them, no motive could be established against him for the murders. he began to feel rather sorry for jonner. they had been companions, and stein with them, for a long time. after eating, he went up to the control room and turned jonner in on the communications system. he was genuinely regretful that jonner had to die so soon. it would be lonesome on the asteroid with no one to talk to. "i hope you've been keeping the radio open to marsport, in case there were any inquiries," said jonner. "if they get the idea we're all dead out here, they may call off the rescue." "the last time they called was right after you left the ship," said kraag. "stein was going to tell you, but i suppose he forgot it. marsport knows where we are. a rescue ship should have blasted off by now." "that's the advantage of being on ceres instead of in space," jonner pointed out. "they know ceres' orbit, but they'd have to have several directional fixes on us, spaced several days apart, to pinpoint us if the ship were in space. what did stein say the escape velocity here is?" surprised at the unexpected question, kraag consulted the notes stein had left lying in the control room. "ev , . feet per second," he replied. "not figuring on jumping off the planet, are you, jonner?" "maybe," said jonner. "well, don't wake me up if you do. i'm really going to pound the pillow tonight." jonner laughed shortly, and kraag heard the click as the captain switched off his helmet radio. he grinned. kraag was asleep almost as soon as he hit the bunk. he came awake slowly, reluctantly, knowing he had not had all the sleep he needed. something was pounding noisily somewhere, ringing through his head. he shook his head to clear it. for just an instant there was silence in the utter darkness. then: crash! like a clap of thunder the noise reverberated through the metal hull of the sphere. kraag started violently, and only the bunk straps kept him from rocketing to the ceiling. again: crash! and kraag could feel the sphere shiver with the blow. he switched on the lights just as another terrific crash sounded. this time he could see everything on the central deck quiver with the impact. one of the four small ports around the central deck was uncovered, and the light threw a beam out into the black night of the asteroid. it brought a temporary cessation of the regular blows. during the interval, kraag unstrapped himself and tumbled up to the control room, to switch on the communications system. "jonner!" he shouted. "jonner, what in hell?" "i'm not deaf," said the loudspeaker resentfully. "give me a chance to turn down my volume, if you're going to holler." "what the devil are you doing out there, jonner?" "what i promised you. i'm coming in after you." kraag swore. "i'm going to blow you off the damned planet," he threatened, and leaped for the gun rack. "you'll have to come outside to do it," reminded jonner. "if you try to shoot through the ports, you'll save me a lot of work." kraag raced up and down the sphere twice before he had sense enough to turn out all the lights and use the searchlight. then he located jonner, clinging to the sphere outside the astrodome on the navigation deck. jonner had a sledge hammer from the ship's cargo section in his hand. jonner grinned at him and moved quickly out of the searchlight's beam. ten seconds later, another thunderous crash sounded, apparently from the other side of the sphere. kraag swung the light in a circle, but jonner could move faster than the beam. hastily, kraag made another tour of the sphere, this time closing all the metal covers over the ports. when he reached the control room, jonner's voice was calling him over the loudspeaker, repeating his name every few seconds. "what do you want?" demanded kraag, panting. "just wanted to tell you i could have knocked out the astrodome or one of the ports before you woke up," said jonner cheerfully. "i don't want to kill you, kraag. i just want you to surrender, and if you don't i can eventually batter through the meteor shield and the hull, and ruin the sphere for you." "we'll see about that," gritted kraag. hurriedly he donned a spacesuit. hanging jonner's pistol at his belt, he took a heat-gun in his right hand and a flashlight in his left and ventured out through the airlock. he did not make the mistake of switching on the airlock light, but jonner seemed to know when he emerged, possibly from the vibration when the lock opened. "nice night out, isn't it, kraag?" jonner welcomed him. kraag grunted. the night was black as pitch. the only way he could tell where the ground ended and the sky began was that the sky was jewelled with stars. he turned the light on and flashed it over the sphere. no sign of jonner. but a rock struck his helmet and bounced off with a clang that nearly knocked him down and left him momentarily dizzy. "i'm behind you, kraag," said jonner pleasantly. "better go back inside. i promise not to break your shell open tonight." kraag twisted around and fired the heat-gun even as he searched for jonner with the flashlight. both beams pierced emptiness. jonner just laughed at him. afraid now that jonner would get into the sphere, kraag scuttled back around to the airlock. heat-gun ready, he turned on the light before closing the outer door, and breathed a sigh of relief at finding it empty. trembling with reaction, he closed the outer lock, left the inner one open and made his way up to the center deck. he needed coffee. "i see you've gone back to the heat-gun," said jonner. "that's smart." "you'd like to see me exhaust the fuel tank of your pistol shooting it in the dark, when i can't hit you, wouldn't you?" retorted kraag. "no, thanks. i'll keep it for long distances." "fuel tank? oh, you mean the magazine." jonner laughed. "i'd stay away from that old . of mine if i were you, kraag. it's been with me too long. it's a lot more likely to turn on my enemies than to do me any harm." "rot!" snapped kraag. "it's a gun. all i have to do is get the hang of aiming it properly." "i wouldn't use too much power tonight, either," warned jonner. "you don't get much with the solar mirror this far out. anyhow, i took the mirror off while you were having your nap. the batteries should give out in a few hours." without answering, kraag switched off his radio and removed his helmet. that last bit of information was a blow. gradually, jonner was stripping kraag down to his own subsistence level. power or not, kraag was determined to have his coffee. but first he went over the sphere again and switched off all unnecessary lights. jonner was a man who kept his word, but kraag couldn't afford to trust him. jonner might change his mind and try to break open the sphere again before morning. kraag kept his spacesuit on. he did not sleep too well, for about once every or minutes something--either a large rock or jonner's sledge hammer--would strike the sphere a resounding blow. * * * * * when kraag's watch told him it was morning, he opened the ports of the center deck and let the weak sunlight stream into the sphere. off to the east, he saw jonner digging with a pick from the cargo. jonner was far enough away for his legs from the knees down to be hidden by the extreme curvature of the little planet. kraag's first impulse was to go out and take a pot shot at him. instead, he switched on the short-wave cooker and prepared some breakfast. taking it up to the control room, where he could switch on the communications system, he opened the eastern port and watched jonner. this high, he could see jonner's feet and the hole he was digging--and stein's body. jonner had taken stein's body from the spot outside the sphere where kraag had pushed it. he was burying stein. jonner finished his excavation and laid stein gently to rest in it. he pushed rocks back in to fill it up, and wrested a boulder that would have weighed a ton over it for a monument. then he murmured a brief prayer over the grave. kraag was ashamed and then, unaccountably, angry. but he stood at the port, drinking his coffee and watching jonner, and said nothing. either with chalk or with some soft rock he had found--kraag could not tell which--jonner wrote something on the big stone that was stein's monument. then he stood up and turned toward the sphere. "kraag," he said. "kraag, are you tuned in?" "yes," replied kraag shortly. "you have today to surrender. tonight i'm going to hatch you out of your comfortable egg." kraag switched off the communications system and paced the room, anger burning slowly inside him. this was ridiculous. he held all the cards. he had the guns, he had the sphere. jonner was outside, weaponless, with a limited supply of food and water. yet jonner had him on the defensive. how had it happened? how could it happen? kraag lit a cigarette and puffed at it slowly, applying his mind coldly to the situation. he didn't doubt that jonner would do as he threatened, but he didn't think it was the recklessness of desperation. more likely, jonner deliberately, calculatingly, planned to reduce his own chances for comfort, in order to bring kraag down to more even terms with him. if jonner broke the hull of the sphere, it could be repaired--by someone working outside, free from interruption by an enemy. until it was repaired, it would mean that kraag, too, would have to live in a spacesuit. and jonner might knock open a hole, or more than one, big enough to permit him to enter the sphere and attack kraag in the darkness. if only he could surround the sphere with light at night, he could keep jonner at a distance. but with the solar mirror gone, the searchlight, on top of the sphere's other electrical requirements, would discharge the batteries before the night was half gone. kraag knew jonner's stubbornness, his resourcefulness, his raw courage. jonner was the one of them who was really at bay, when you considered it. yet kraag felt that jonner was closing in on him, gradually, inexorably. facing this, kraag felt the steel enter his own will. he wasn't a coward. he had just been expecting this to be too easy. if jonner would force him to fight, he would fight. he still had the advantage. he must abandon the sphere as an asset. jonner could take that away from him anyhow. on the other hand, if jonner took over the sphere, kraag could use the same weapon against him. he could break open the sphere. so the sphere was no longer a factor. the food and water were no longer a factor, for food and water went with the sphere. he would admit jonner to equality in those supplies--not full equality, for he could provision himself now more fully than jonner had been provisioned two ceres days earlier. he still might pin jonner down as jonner tried to get to the sphere for more supplies. then kraag's remaining advantage lay in the guns. they should be enough. if he could get close enough to use a heat-gun, he could blast jonner. jonner's own projectile weapon would keep jonner out of rock-throwing range, and sooner or later he would hit jonner with it. he couldn't keep on missing; the law of average would give him a hit sooner or later. and all he needed was just one.... kraag provisioned his spacesuit and hung all three of the heat-guns at his belt. in one of the capacious outside pockets he put two spare flashlights and half a dozen of the extra fuel packets--what was it jonner had called them? magazines, that was it--for jonner's projectile pistol. he took that pistol in his right hand and sallied forth to do battle. * * * * * jonner was nowhere in sight. kraag shut the outer lock to make it appear he might be still in the sphere if jonner happened not to spot him. he went over to stein's new grave. jonner had written on the stone: rest in peace. r. stein murdered by a. kraag. dec. , . angrily, kraag burned the lettering off in a -second blast with his heat-gun that left the face of stein's gravestone cherry red. he turned to survey the terrain, and saw jonner. the captain was crouched half a mile away, apparently writing more on a flat rock or on the ground itself. jonner was facing him, but his head was down and he hadn't seen kraag. if kraag fired the projectile pistol, he probably would miss and might warn jonner with the shot. he was sure of his accuracy with a heat-gun. kraag took a heat-gun in his left hand and ran toward jonner. possibly the vibration of the ground warned jonner. he looked up, jumped to his feet and fled. as soon as he could stop and get his feet planted firmly on the ground, kraag fired the projectile pistol after him. he was still shooting low and to one side. kraag picked himself up from the ground, where the backlash of the weapon had knocked him, and went up to the spot where jonner had been writing. a mathematical problem had been scratched on the surface with a sharp rock. kraag had interrupted jonner in the middle of it. the figures that had been written were: ------ . ) . --- --- [transcriber's note: figures are long division of . divided by . ] kraag stared at it, carrying out the rest of the simple mathematics in his head. the answer was . but what was the problem? the figure " . " was familiar enough. it was the square root of two, carried to two decimal places. but what was jonner dividing by it, and why? he frowned in concentration. there was something familiar about the numbers, something that had to do with him and jonner, and jonner wouldn't be working arithmetic just for amusement. he saw jonner moving on the horizon, just his head visible against the black sky, his body hidden by the curve of the planet. jonner was circling. the sudden realization of danger wiped other thoughts from his mind. until he saw the epitaph jonner had written for stein, kraag had thought jonner looked at this as he did: one man against the other, and winner take all. but jonner intended to win even if he lost, because jonner was not fighting just for jonner's survival but for due process of law. jonner was trying to make certain that, even if kraag killed him, martian law would punish kraag for stein's death. and if jonner got into the sphere, he could get his message to marsport or the rescue ship simply by turning on the radio. kraag turned and raced back to the sphere. he arrived, panting heavily. jonner was nowhere in sight, but he knew jonner, circling, could not have gotten there ahead of him. he must kill jonner before nightfall, if he could, but he must not get far enough from the sphere to let jonner slip in behind him. he was not ready, yet, to destroy the radio to keep jonner from it. he walked around the sphere. there was jonner on the other side, only his head above the horizon, moving clockwise. the sun flashed and gleamed from jonner's helmet. there was no sense in shooting at so small a target as a head. a mile away, jonner's whole body was a small enough target. a carefully gauged leap carried kraag to the top of the sphere. here, feet higher, his range of view was increased considerably. he could see jonner well. jonner could see him, too. jonner stopped to hurl a stone. it took a while for the missile to cover the distance. it passed below kraag's level, some distance away from him. "why don't you give it up, jonner?" asked kraag. "you can't hurt me with a rock, at this distance." "why should i?" retorted jonner. "all i have to do is wait till night." "sure, wait. but i'm not waiting, jonner. one of us is going to win this thing before night, or i'm going to blast the radio so you can't reach marsport. if i have to do that, i'll track you down tomorrow--and i think i can stay outside and fight you away from the sphere tonight." "getting desperate enough to fight like a man now, aren't you, kraag? if you want a showdown today, i'm willing." kraag's mind was clear now. he had the situation under control. he glanced around the landscape at the scattered portions of the wrecked ship. there was the cargo hull, burst open, where jonner had gotten his sledge hammer and the pick to bury stein. over there was a red sphere, ripped by the jagged gash of the meteor collision--one of the two hydrazine fuel tanks. the yellow sphere degrees away from it was an oxygen fuel tank. kraag leveled jonner's gun and fired at the yellow sphere. the kick knocked him off the sphere, but as he somersaulted backwards he saw the projectile hit the ground. still low and to one side. but he noticed something on the gun, he hadn't seen before. there were ridges for sighting along the barrel of jonner's pistol. regaining his position atop the sphere, kraag pressed his back against the observatory dome, to brace himself against the gun's backlash. he aimed carefully at the yellow sphere and fired again. the yellow tank jumped--not from the impact, but from the spout of freed, expanding oxygen through the hole the bullet made. it moved and wobbled about in the weak gravity, like a dying balloon. when it stopped, kraag knew he had destroyed half of jonner's oxygen supply. "good shot, kraag," congratulated jonner, with fatalistic irony in his tone. "of course, i'm not as big a target as the tanks." "each target in its own time," replied kraag triumphantly, and looked around for the other yellow sphere. he had been afraid it might be one of the parts that had fallen over the horizon, but it wasn't. it was behind him, a little closer than the first. he hit it with one shot. now jonner had only the oxygen in his spacesuit tanks. jonner had made no effort to move farther away. he was still visible on the horizon, from the knees up, moving in a great circle around the personnel sphere. kraag aimed carefully and fired. he did not know the projectile's speed, but certainly it would be much faster than jonner's rocks. after half a minute had passed, he knew he had missed. there was only one thing to do. he settled himself and fired again, trying to lead jonner slightly. again he missed. methodically, taking his time, kraag fired. jonner walked on unconcernedly, circling. kraag tried to fire so the path of his projectile would strike at the top of jonner's strides, for then jonner rose several feet into the air and his whole body was visible. occasionally, jonner would stop and hurl a stone at kraag. one man was as inaccurate as the other. jonner's stones went wide at that distance, and kraag obviously had not hit jonner with a bullet. at last jonner stopped. he seemed to be fiddling with something that was right on the ground, below kraag's line of vision. then a tremendous stone, bigger than kraag's head, came hurtling toward the sphere. kraag ducked instinctively, but the missile passed feet above him, still going well. "what in the devil!" exclaimed kraag. "a little innovation of mine, to make things more interesting," said jonner. "in case you ever want to use the idea, i made me a super-slingshot out of two of the jeep inner tubes from the cargo, and a couple of crowbars i could drive into crevices. fixed it up yesterday for bombardment purposes." the duel went on. there came the time when the hammer of the pistol clicked on an empty chamber. "how do you refuel this thing, jonner?" asked kraag pleasantly. the sun was still high. he could retreat to the interior of the sphere and figure it out if he had to. "it's pretty hard to do with spacesuit hooks," replied jonner. "be glad to demonstrate, if you'll toss me the gun." kraag laughed, a laugh with more triumph in it than humor, because in his fumbling he had just hit the button that ejected the magazine. to push in a fresh one was the matter of a moment. he had hoped jonner would move in closer when he knew the pistol was empty, but no such luck. jonner stayed put. kraag's first effort with the new magazine brought no results, for he had neglected to prime the weapon by pushing the outer covering back on the barrel. he did this, and resumed his methodical firing. as the time wore on, kraag began to appreciate the difficulties involved in hitting a moving target, even a slowly moving one, when the marksman was as inexperienced as he was. the trouble was that, at that distance, he could not see where the bullets were striking and had no way of knowing how wide of his mark he was shooting. he was on the fourth magazine and the sun had passed the meridian when he felt the sphere vibrate faintly and momentarily beneath him. he twisted around, alarmed. he could see nothing. it wasn't one of jonner's rocks, because a big one had just missed. his eye detected a shining streak that stretched a few inches along the curve of the sphere's meteor shield, at about the level of his feet. he bent to examine it. something had struck it at high speed, a glancing blow. it couldn't be one of jonner's rocks. small meteor? a jagged hole suddenly appeared in the observatory dome near him. kraag moved up and examined it closely. it had been made by some small object. through the glassite he could see a similar hole in the other side of the dome. did jonner have some sort of new weapon? he couldn't. even jonner wasn't resourceful enough to invent a high-powered weapon with the innocuous cargo they were carrying for the titan colony. something struck kraag a powerful blow in the left chest, a blow that hurled him sideways, to tumble off the sphere and fall slowly to the ground below. there was a great pain in his chest, and he released his hand-hooks in agony, so that the pistol fell away from him. kraag gasped for breath as he struck the ground and bounced. he coughed up blood. he fell slowly again, and bounced again. the third time he settled jarringly, prone on his back. he couldn't understand what had happened to him. he pulled his right arm inside the suit with an effort and probed the painful area on his chest. he felt the hot wetness of flowing blood. he would have to get to the sphere. he tried to move. he couldn't get off his back. he lay there and writhed in pain. jonner's voice was in his ears, saying something. "i knew it would get you," jonner said. "it was my only chance. but it got you at last, kraag." "come help me, jonner," whimpered kraag weakly. "i've been hit by ... i don't know. it must have been a meteor." "i'm coming as fast as i can, kraag, but it was no meteor. it was my gun." "gun?" repeated kraag wonderingly. "i warned you about that gun of mine, kraag. if you'd looked at the figures on the barrel, the muzzle velocity of those . -calibre bullets is feet a second. with ceres' escape velocity, that's almost exactly the circular velocity at the asteroid's surface." jonner was standing over him, and then was lifting him gently, to carry him to the sphere. "i deliberately got just out of your range of vision, from the ground, so you'd climb to a high spot," said jonner. "you had to be high, so the bullet would clear the irregularities on the planet's surface, and i knew that sooner or later you'd shoot a bullet or two high enough not to hit the ground. "when you were firing at me, your bullets weren't describing a trajectory and falling to the surface, as they would on earth or mars. they were taking an orbit that brought them all the way around the planet to the same spot, to hit you from the other side two hours later." kraag tried to look up at him. something was going wrong with his sight, and everything outside his face plate was a blur. must be the oxygen ... maybe his suit didn't seal the bullet hole properly. "i thought...." kraag began, and choked. he coughed, slowly and painfully, then tried again: "i thought that ... problem on the rocks ... looked familiar." "you've always done it with a slide rule. that's probably why the long division didn't register," said jonner. "the equation is one every spaceman knows: the circular velocity equals the escape velocity divided by the square root of two." the beast of space _a tale of the prospectors of the starways--of dangers--_ by f. e. hardart [illustration: he staggered back from the lapping pool--the gas--the weight of the girl's body--the dog--] here the dark cave, along which nat starrett had been creeping, broadened into what his powerful searchlight revealed to be a low, wide, smoothly circular room. at his feet lapped black, thick-looking waves of an underground lake, a pool of viscous substance that gave off a penetrating, poignant odor of acid, sweetish and intoxicating, unlike any acid he knew. the smell rolled up in a sickening, sultry cloud that penetrated his helmet, made him cough and choke. near its center projected from the sticky stuff what appeared to be the nose of a spaceship. he looked down near his feet at the edge of the pool where thick, slowly-moving tongues of the liquid appeared to reach up toward him, as if intent on pulling him into its depths. as each hungry wave fell back, it left a slimy, snake-like trail behind. now came a wave of strange music, music such as he had never heard before. faintly it had begun some time back, so faintly he was barely aware of it. now it swelled into a smooth, impelling wail lulling him into drowsiness. he did not wonder why he could hear through the soundproof space helmet he wore; he ceased to wonder about anything. there was only the strange sweetness of acid and the throbbing music. abruptly the spell was broken by something shrilling in his brain, sending little chills racing up and down his spine. digger! a small, oddly canine-like creature with telepathic powers, a space-dweller which men found when first they came to the asteroids. the relationship between spacehounds and men was much the same as between man and dog in the old, earthbound days. appropriate name for the beast, digger. with those large, incredibly hard claws, designed for rooting in the metal make-up of the asteroids for vital elements, the spacehound could easily have shredded the man's spacesuit and helmet, could, at any time, tear huge chunks out of men's fine ships. the half-conscious man jerked his thin form erect. his mouth, which had gaped loosely, closed with a snap into firm lines. "she isn't in this hell hole, digger. you wouldn't expect her to be where we could find her easily." scooping the small beast up under his good arm, he quickly climbed the steep, slimy slope of the cave. the other arm in his suit hung empty. that empty arm in the spacesuit told the story of an earthman become voluntary exile, choosing the desolation of space to the companionship of other humans who would deluge him with unwonted sympathy. the spacehound was friendly in its own fashion; fortunately, such complex things as sympathy were apparently outside its abilities. the two could interchange impressions of danger, comfort, pleasure, discomfort, fear, and appreciation of each other's company, but little more. whether or not the creature could understand his thoughts, he could not tell. as he went on, he reviewed, mentally, the events leading up to his landing here. the sudden appearance on his teleview screen of the face and slim shoulders of a girl. her attractiveness plainly distinguishable through her helmet; for a moment he forgot that he disliked women. the call for help, cut short ... but not before he had learned that apparently she was being held prisoner on asteroid moira. he knew he'd have to do what he could even if it meant unwonted company for an indefinite length of time. the spell was gone soon after her face vanished; he remembered former experiences with attractive-looking girls. damn traditions! a change in his course and a landing on asteroid moira. here he'd found a honeycomb of caves, all leading from one large main tunnel. the cavern walls had been of a translucent, quartz-like substance, ranging in color from yellowish-brown to violet-grey. it looked vaguely familiar, yet he could not place it. there was not time to examine it more carefully. the room in which he'd found the evil, hungry lake had been the first one to the right. now he crossed to the opening in the opposite wall. the mouth of this cave was much larger, wider than the other. he stood in the opening, slowly swung the beam of his torch around the smooth walls, still holding digger, who, by now, was indicating that he'd like to be set down. nat released him unthinkingly, his mind fully taken up with what the light revealed. * * * * * spaceships! the room was packed with them--all sizes, old and new. a veritable sargasso. at first, he thought they might be craft belonging to nameless inhabitants of this world, but, as he approached them, he recognized terrestrial identifications. the first was a scout ship of american spaceways! nat recognized the name: _ceres_, remembered a telecast account of its disappearance in space. there was a neat little reward for information as to its whereabouts. nat's lips curled in derision: it wouldn't equal the expense of his journey out here. there was a deep groove in the smooth material of the floor where the ship had been dragged through the doorway into the room. what machines could have done this work without leaving their own traces? he went to the other ships: all were small, mostly single or two-passenger craft. the last entry in the logs of many was to the effect that they were about to land on the asteroid moira to rescue a girl held captive there. none had crashed; all ships were in perfect order. but all were deserted. two doors were gone from the interior of one of the vessels. they might have been removed for any of a hundred reasons--but why here? nat's glance swept the room, came to rest on the figure of a heavy duty robot of familiar design. semi-human in form, it looked like some misshapen, bent, headless giant. he inspected it: _meyers robot, inc._ earth designed for mining operations on mars. "well, digger, i can see now how these ships were brought in here; that robot could move any one of these with ease. but that doesn't explain where the humans have gone. it might be space pirates using this asteroid for a base, or it might be some alien form of life. we're still free. shall we beat it or stay and try to check this out?" he did not know how much of this got over to the spacehound, but the impressions he received in answer were those of approving their remaining where they were. "i suppose the best system is to explore the rest of the caves in order; let's go." followed by digger, he walked quietly toward the next cave on the left, slipped through the doorway, and, standing with his back against the wall, swung the light of his torch in a wide, swift arc about the room. halfway around, he stopped abruptly; a slim, petite figure appeared clearly in the searchlight's glare. the girl he had seen on the televisor stood in the middle of the room, facing a telecaster, her back toward him. she did not seem aware of him as he moved forward. what could be wrong; surely that light would arouse her. the figure did not turn as he approached. so near was he now that he could seize her easily, still she made no move. nat stepped to one side, flashed his torch in her face. her beautifully-lashed eyes stared straight ahead unblinkingly; the expression on her lovely composed face did not change. a robot! he laughed bitterly. but then, he was not the only one.... she was an earth product; nat opened her helmet and found the trade-mark of _spurgin's robots_ hung like a necklace about her throat. but whoever had lured him here easily could have removed her from one of the vessels in the front cave. it did not seem like the work of pirates, more likely unknown intelligent beings. he turned to examine the televisor. it, too, was an earth product. the mechanism was of old design; evidently it had been taken from the first of the ships to land here. outside of the telecaster and the solitary robot, there was nothing to be seen in this cave. a sound behind him. he whirled, heat-rod poised for swift, stabbing action. nothing--except--small bowling-ball things rolling in through a narrow door. ridiculous things of the same yellowish-quartz material as composed the cave-walls. at regular intervals a dull, bluish light poured forth from rounded holes in their smooth sides. and issuing forth from within these comic globes was the same weird, compelling music he had heard before. they rolled up to him, brushed against his toes; a shrilling in his brain told him that digger was aware of them. "back, digger!" he thought as he drew away from the globes. they poured their penetrating blue light over him, inspectingly, while the music from within rose and fell in regular cadences, sweetly impelling and dulling to the senses as strong oriental incense. but digger was not soothed. the spacehound lunged at one of the globes; instead of slashing its sides, he found himself sailing through the air toward it. nat received impressions of irritation combined with astonishment. within the globes, the music rose to a furious whine while one of the things shot forth long tentacles from the holes in its side. lightning-swift they shot forth, wrapped themselves about the body of the spacehound, constricting. digger writhed vainly, his claws powerless to tear at the whip-like tentacles. nat severed the tentacles at their base with the heat-beam. he turned, strode toward the door watching the spheres apprehensively out of the corner of his eye, ready to jump aside should they roll toward him suddenly. but they followed at respectful distances, singing softly. before he reached the door, he found himself walking in rhythm to the music, his head swaying. it came slowly, insidiously; before he was aware, his body no longer obeyed his will. muscles refused to move other than in coordination with the music. his arm relaxed, the heat-rod sliding from his grasp. * * * * * but digger! the spacehound sent out a barrage of vibrations that fairly rocked his brain out of his skull. simultaneously, the beast attacked the nearest globes, tearing fiercely at them. rapidly the others rolled away, but two lay torn and motionless, the music within them stilled. nat reached down, retrieved the heat-rod. "i think we'd better look for a 'squeaker'. next time they might get you, digger." they returned to the room of the spaceships, seeking one of the small, portable radio-amplifiers used for searching out radium. it was known as a "squeaker" because of the constant din it made while in use; the noise would cease only when radium was within a hundred feet of the mechanism. he found one after searching a few of the smaller ships. with the portable radio strapped to his back, power switched on, he started again down the main tunnel. the globes set up their seductive rhythms as before, but he could not hear them above the discord of his squeaker. failing to lure him as before, they sought to force him in the direction they desired him to go by darting at him suddenly, lashing him with their tentacles. but it was a simple thing to elude them. still remained the question: why could they want to lure him into that stinking pool of acid? he flashed a beam of heat at the nearest of the annoying globes. under the released energy it glowed, yet did not melt. but the tentacles sheared off and the blue lights faded. the flow of music changed to shrill whines as of pain and its rolling ceased. the others drew back; he turned down another tunnel. they stopped at the cave beyond the one where he had found the robot-girl. it was sealed by a locked door, one of the airlock-doors from that space vessel, firmly cemented into the natural opening of the cave. nat bent forward, listening, his helmeted head pressed against the door. no sound. he was suddenly aware of the dead silence that pressed in on him from all sides now that the globes no longer sang and his "squeaker" had been turned off. the powerful energy of his heat-beam sputtered as it melted the lock into incandescent droplets which sizzled as they trickled down the cold metal of the door. the greasy, quartz-like material at the side of the door glowed in the heat from his rod, but no visible effect upon it could be seen. what was that material? he knew, yes, he knew--but he could not place a mental finger on it. he thrust the shoulder of his good arm against the heavy door, swung it inwards, stepped inside. the light of his torch pierced the silence, picked out a human skeleton in one corner. he hurried toward it--no, it was not entirely a skeleton as yet. the flesh and bone had been eaten away from the lower part of the body to halfway up the hips, as though from some strong acid. the rest of the large, sturdy frame lay sunken under the remains of a spacesuit which was tied clumsily around the middle to retain all the air possible in the upper half of it. evidently some acid had eaten away the lower half of the man's body after he had suffocated. the face was that of a norwegian. by one outstretched hand a small notebook lay open with the leather back upward. the corners of several pages were turned under carelessly--nat swung the torch around the room. it was bare. the notebook--quickly he picked it up. the page on which the writing began was dated may , . about two months ago. "helmar swenson. my daughter, helena, aged nineteen, and i were lured into the maw of this hellish monster by a robot calling for help in our television screen. this thing, known to man as asteroid moira, is, in actuality, one of the gigantic mineral creatures which inhabited a planet before it exploded, forming the asteroids. somehow it survived the catastrophe, and, forming a hard, crustaceous shell about itself, has continued to live here in space as an asteroid. "it is apparently highly intelligent and has acquired an appetite for human flesh. the singing spheres act as its sensory organs, separated from the body and given locomotion. it uses these to lure victims into its stomach in the first cave. i escaped its lure at first because of the 'squeaker' i carried with me. we set up these two doors as a protection from the beast while we stayed here to examine it. but the monster got me when i fell and the 'squeaker' was broken. my daughter rescued me after the acid of the pool had begun eating away my flesh. "my helena is locked in the room opposite this one. she has food and water to last until july th. oxygen seeps in there somehow--the beast wants to keep her alive until it can get her out of the room to devour her." here the writing became more cramped and difficult to read. "i have put the key in my mouth to prevent the spheres from opening the door should they force their way into this room. some one must come to save my helena. i can't breathe--" the writing ended in a long scrawl angling off the page. the pencil lay some distance from the body. july th! but that had been almost a week ago! * * * * * he unscrewed the man's helmet, tried to pry the jaws open. they would not move; the airless void surrounding the tiny planetoid had frozen the body until now it was as solid as the quartz cave-walls. there was but one thing to do: the other door must be melted down. he leaped halfway across the room toward the door in the opposite wall. could it be possible that he was in time? anxiously he flung a bolt of energy from his heat rod toward the lock, holding a flashlight under the other stump of an arm. the molten metal flowed to the floor like a rivulet of lava. the door, hanging off balance, screeched open; air swooshed past him in its sudden escape from the room. he squeezed himself through, peered carefully about to see a slim spacesuit start to crumple floorward in a corner. the girl was alive! he started toward her; the slim figure pulled itself erect again. he saw a drawn, emaciated face behind the helmet. then, with a fury that unnerved him, she whipped out a heat rod, shot a searing bolt in his direction. he felt the fierce heat of it as it whizzed past his shoulder; in his brain digger's thoughts of attack came to him, he flung an arm around the spacehound, dragged it back as he withdrew toward the door. the girl continued to fire bolt after bolt straight ahead, her eyes wide and staring. they made the door, waited outside while the firing within continued. when at last it was still within, he peered around the corner of the room. she lay in a crumpled heap in the corner; quietly he re-entered, picked her up awkwardly. through the thin, resistant folds of the spacesuit, he could feel the warmth of her, but could not tell whether the heart still beat or not. they would have to take her to one of the ships. her limp form was held tightly under his good arm as nat hurried down the main tunnel. digger apparently realized the seriousness of the situation, for he received impressions of "must hurry" from the beast and another creature, looking much like him, surrounded by small creatures of the same type, trapped in a crevice. "aren't you a bit premature, old fellow," he chided. halfway there, the globes met them again. the things were not singing; from their many eyes poured a fierce, angry blue light. they rolled with a determination that frightened him. yet he strode on, until they were barely a foot away. "jump, digger!" the spheres stopped short, reversed their direction toward the little group at a furious rate, flinging out long, whip-like tentacles. one wrapped itself around nat's ankle, drew him down. he shifted the limp form over to his shoulder, slipped out his heat-rod. quickly the tentacle was severed. but now others took their place; he continued firing at them, making each bolt tell, but the numbers were too great. digger sprang into action, rending the globes with those claws that were capable of tearing the hulls of spaceships. but tentacles lashed around him from the rear, snaked about him so that he was helpless. the girl was slipping off nat's shoulder. he could not raise the stump of an arm to balance her; it was stiff and useless. he stopped firing long enough to make the shift, even as the spheres attacked again. the bolts had put out the lights in fully half of the marauders but the others came on unafraid. nat straddled digger's writhing body, held the spacehound motionless between his legs. at short range, he seared off the imprisoning tentacles, knowing that it would take far more than a heat-bolt to damage the well-nigh impregnable creature. he swooped the dog up under his good arm and fled from the madly-pursuing spheres, thanking nameless deities that the gravity here permitted such herculean feats. the spheres rolled faster, he soon found, than he could jump; so long as he was above them, all was well, but by the time the weak gravity permitted him to land, they were waiting for him. he tried zig-zagging. good! it worked. he eluded them up to the mouth of the cave, then jumped for the door of his ship's outer airlock. * * * * * nat placed the girl in his bunk, removed the cumbersome spacesuit. her eyes blinked faintly, then sprang open. but they did not see him; they were staring straight ahead. her mouth opened and shut weakly as though she were speaking, but no sound issued from it. he brought her water, but when he returned she had fallen asleep. he returned to the kitchen to prepare some food. "you're still running around in that pillow case," he remarked to digger as he extracted the spacehound from it. "attend me, now. we know why and how those people disappeared. it would take the space patrol ship at least a month to arrive here; i don't intend to perch on the back of this devil as long as that. and if we leave, old thing, it'll just lure other chivalrous fools to very unpleasant ends. "and we've got to get this kid back to civilization. she needs a doctor's care, preferably a doctor with two arms." digger's vibrations were one of general approval. "we could poison it," he went on. "only i'm not a chemist; even if i knew the compounds contained in that reeking stomach i wouldn't know what would destroy them. might blow it up, but we haven't enough explosive. "no, we'll have to get down into the thing's insides again. in fact--" he paused suddenly, mouth open. "congratulate me, digger! i have it!" the smell of burning vegetables cut short his soliloquy. he fed the starved, half-blind girl, then left her sleeping exhaustedly as he squirmed into his suit. no sooner had he entered the mouth of the cave than a half-dozen of the singing sensory organs rolled quickly, yet not angrily, toward him. the beast was apparently optimistic, for the globes sang in their most soothing, seductive tones. they tried to herd him into the first cave on the right, but he had remembered the _squeaker_; they could not distract him. effortlessly he leaped over them toward the mouth of the cave on the left. that was where the spaceships lay, pointing in all directions like a carelessly-dropped handful of rice. all the ships were in running order. good; had there been one vessel he could not move, then all was lost. the fuel in several ran low, but after a few moments of punching levers and pulling chokes, the under rockets thundered in the big room. taking care not to injure the motor compartments of the other ships, using only the most minute explosion-quantities, he jockeyed each ship around until all their noses pointed in one direction. the exhausts pointed out through the wide doorway. it was well that the beast had formed curved corners in the room, otherwise the scheme would not have worked. the exhausts which did not point toward the door, directly, were toward the curved walls which would deflect the forceful gasses expelled doorward. when he emerged from the ship, the spheres attacked. he seared off their tentacles throughout what seemed to be eternities. his body was becoming a mass of bruises from the lash of their tentacles. he burned his way through the swarm on to ship after ship. as he stepped from the last vessel there was a rumbling beneath his feet. did the monster understand his intent? was it stirring in its shell? most of the globes had disappeared; now a nauseatingly sweet odor penetrated the screen in his headpiece, which permitted him to smell without allowing the oxygen to escape. he hurried around to the rear of the ship, an apprehensive, sickening feeling at the pit of his stomach. a thick jelly-like wave of liquid was rolling over the floor--the reeking, deadly juices from the beast's stomach. if the liquid touched him, it would eat through the heavy fabric, exploding the air pressure from around his body. how was he to escape from the cave? the answer came to him suddenly. quickly he darted back toward the nearest vessel. two of the screaming spheres blocked his way; he sent bolt after searing bolt into them, more of a charge than he had given any of the others. the lights in the globes went out; their voices ceased. and they burst into slowly mounting incandescence. yet, they were not consumed by their fire, only glowed an intense white light like that of a lighthouse. "lighthouse!" the word flashed through his mind clearly, strongly. they glowed like the "zirconia lights" of a lighthouse. why hadn't he recognized the greasy, quartz-like material before? it was zirconia, a compound of zirconium, of course. a silicate base creature could easily have formed a shell of it about itself. zirconia--one of the compounds he'd intended prospecting for on the moons of saturn. worth over a hundred dollars per pound. because of its resistance to heat, it was used to line the tubes of rockets; terra's supply had long been used up. here was a fortune all around him; but that fortune was about to be destroyed, he along with it, if he did not hurry. if he could only reach the timing mechanism to yank from it the wires connecting it to the other ships. it was at the other end of the line. he started in that direction, but a surge of fatal, thick acid rolled before him, reaching for him with hungry, questing tongues. when it was almost touching his toes, he leaped. as he floated toward the floor, he placed a chair beneath him so that his feet landed on the seat. the legs of the chair sank slowly into the liquid. again he leaped, his moment retarded by the fluid which now reached halfway up the chair legs, sucked and clung there. the sweetly-evil smelling stuff was rising rapidly. but the next leap carried him into the main cave. abandoning the chair, he leaped once more, out through the cave's mouth, pursued by the waving tentacles of the sensory spheres. * * * * * he had lost precious minutes eluding that deadly acid. it would take at least five minutes to get his ship away from the asteroid; he must hurry before all those rocket motors were thrown into action, or it would be too late. leap and leap again. it seemed ages, but he reached the ship, bolted the door shut. thumps against the door as the pursuing globes ran up against it. a thought came to him; swiftly he opened the door, permitted a few of them to enter, then slammed it shut. with the heat gun he sheared off their tentacles; he could sell the zirconia in the entities. then he turned to the controls and the ship zoomed up and out. nat had barely raised his ship from the asteroid moira when he saw the small planetoid lurch suddenly, bounding off its orbit at almost a right angle. the sudden combined driving force of all the rockets within the cave had sent it hurtling away like a rocket itself. the asteroid housing the monster was heading into the flora group of asteroids. there the fifty-seven odd solid bodies of that group would grind, crack, and rend that dangerous beast into harmless, dead fragments. "a good job," said a weak, but softly friendly voice behind him. he whirled. the girl stood in the doorway of the pilot room, supporting herself against the door frame. digger rubbed thoughtfully against her legs. "we'll just follow that asteroid, miss," he said, "and see if we can't pick up some odd fragment of zirconia when it's smashed in the grindstone there. then we'll light out for terra." she smiled. earth, to him, seemed like a very good place to go as soon as possible. transcriber's note: this e-text was produced from comet july . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed. revolt in the ice empire by ray cummings frozen little zura was a stellar utopia, until the earthmen came to topple the rule of its gentle queen with the cankerous weapons of revolt. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] so much has been written into the permanent chronologies of science concerning our pioneer voyage to the little asteroid of zura--facts and figures and sociological deductions, most of which are, of actuality, erroneous--that even now after these many years, i feel constrained to set down, as simply as i can, exactly what occurred. all my life i have shunned publicity; my wife has shunned it. zura, weird little wandering world, has never returned. why, after coming in from the realms of outer space at least twice and rounding our sun upon an elliptic orbit, it should now have failed to reappear--i will leave that to the astronomers to imagine. but no one from earth, quite obviously, will ever go to zura again. tara and i, so to speak, are sole survivors. so at least i think i am qualified to tell what happened; to correct the official chronolograph in its implications that zura was a model little world, from which our earth might learn much. as my grandfather might have quoted his grandfather saying, that is the bunk. when you put humans on a planet, you will get love--but also hate; honesty, but dishonesty; peace, but also war. the weird people of zura were weird to us only because their environment had made them outwardly different from us. like us they were human--and there could never have been utopia evolved from them. i am no philosopher, but at least i must have my say on this. tara was misguided. she admits it now. indeed, at heart she is more opposed than most of you who read this, to those crusaders here on earth who talk of revolutions and bloodshed so that some new social order may evolve and bring the world utopia. the ideals are often sound, but always impossible of fulfillment. and those who sponsor them usually are intelligent enough to know it, advancing themselves upon the pitiful hopes of the ignorant, who think they are being led upward when in reality they are often worse off than before. do i seem prefacing some weighty analysis of mankind's frailties? that is wrong. i am prefacing what might better be called a love story. i am an old man now, but it colors my memory still with a warm glow like a sunrise spreading glorious colors on the drabness of a twilight sky. that, to my young life, was the coming of tara.... i was just twenty, that spring morning of when dr. robert livingston's message came to me. "strange good news, john. i have picked our destination, but it must be secret. fly up and see me tonight." strange good news! there was a note of suppressed excitement in those three words which somehow communicated to me so that as i flew my little car up to the maine woods that evening i was tensed to hear what it could be. my name is john taine, as naturally you must have realized from my preface. there is nothing of me that can be of interest to this narrative previous to that spring morning of . i quite imagine i was a drab enough sort of young fellow. certainly my work as mechanic in the building of stratosphere ships had brought me little money and no claim to achievement. but dr. livingston liked me; for a year now i had been working for him, building to his specifications that primitive little space ship with which he hoped to pioneer on an exploratory flight to some other world. livingston was an inventor and scientist of very great genius. but unfortunately, being a dreamer, a gentle fellow and trusting--completely no businessman--he had gone through life impoverished. we had been much pinched for funds in our work. our little flyer indeed was now not finished, and i was on an enforced vacation, with our funds exhausted, waiting until dr. livingston might find some sponsor to refinance us. strange good news? assuredly i was hoping that he would have a few decimars in hand now--or even a few thousand gold dollars with which we might continue the work. * * * * * his pleasure and excitement were obvious when he greeted me in the laboratory of his isolated little maine home, upon my arrival just after dusk that evening. "good news, john. it certainly is. i couldn't tell you before what i've been trying to do here while work on the _planeteer_ had to stop. but i've accomplished my purpose." "money--" i said. "money, yes. oh, yes, indeed, john. and fame. the accomplishment of our desire--to make a flight into interplanetary space, and come back again. we've got it all within our reach now. sit down, john--i'll tell you what i've done." i had never seen dr. livingston so excited. he was a small man, forty perhaps, though he looked somewhat older with his thin face and his shaggy, longish iron-gray hair. he had no family; he lived here alone, with only one deaf old woman for his housekeeper. we were in his chemical laboratory now--a littered room on the ground floor of his home, which was a few miles out in the country from a small town of the maine coast. we were building the _planeteer_ here, in a big impromptu frame hangar which was set on the wooded hilltop a hundred yards or so from the house. but work on the _planeteer_ had ceased. our two assistants who had been engaged with me now, like myself, were laid off. there was no one here tonight save livingston and me and the old woman who now had gone to her room upstairs. "we've got to be absolutely secret," livingston said. he lowered his voice and flung a glance at the window oval where the moonlight was gleaming with a silver sheen. "there's big money involved in this. i'm going to trust you, john, but no one else." "what is it?" i murmured. a little half-smile of excited triumph was playing about his thin lips. "let me ask you," he said, "have you ever heard of xalite?" "well--just vaguely." "the new element which was discovered a few years ago. i needn't explain its technical uses--" "a germ-killer," i said. "i remember hearing a technological newscast--you bombard diseased tissues--" "exactly. to kill certain virulent germs without injuring the living human tissue. and they're thinking now they could use it in the new atomic engines--perhaps the one thing which would make them really commercially practical--" "except that xalite costs about ten thousand gold-dollars a grain," i observed. "quite so. as a matter of fact, what little was discovered here on earth is now in use. no more can be found--and it's an unstable element. within another year we will have no xalite." he paused, and then abruptly he added, still more softly, "i've discovered an unlimited quantity, john. xalite in quantity beyond anyone's wildest dreams--" "where?" i gasped. "not here on earth. don't you see how it fits with our plans for the _planeteer_?" i sat silent, tense as he told me. there was, this year, coming in from the realms of interplanetary space, a little asteroid. astronomers for their charts had named it zura--a dark, cold little world of perhaps five hundred miles diameter. "it seems this is its second visit," he said. "some sixteen years ago it first made its appearance--came into our solar system, rounded the sun and went out again. the elements of its orbit, sixteen years ago, were computed. a narrow ellipse, taking it in between mercury and vulcan, and out beyond pluto." * * * * * in his laboratory here, dr. livingston had erected a small, but ultra-modern, electroscope. he took me to it now. the dark little zura, he told me, already had cut the orbit of mars and was fairly close to us. it was in the northern sky now, near the zenith. the night was clear, glittering with a myriad stars like gems profusely strewn on the deep purple velvet of the heavens. i gazed at little zura as he swung the high-powered little instrument almost to its full intensity of magnification. what i saw was a round, blurred, dark-gray disc, dimly mottled with heavy cloudbanks. "what has this to do with us, and xalite?" i murmured. "i'll show you, john. if we can get a break in those clouds--it sometimes occurs--" we waited perhaps an hour, with the spectroscope attached so that the vague reflected light from zura was spread before us in its prismatic colors. and then, momentarily, a break in the swirling, turgid atmosphere of the dark little world, let us through to its bleak, blurred, dark surface. light was coming from there; light inherent to the little world. on the spectroscope band i saw a new dark line. "xalite!" livingston murmured. "you see it? unmistakable. deposits of xalite exist there. xalite in quantities which to us and our needs will be enormous. so that's the destination of our exploratory flight in the _planeteer_! it's not a question of money with us now, john. the anglo-american medical research society--and the u. s. government dept. of power--have financed us for all we need." i could only gaze at him with excitement thrilling me, matching his own. all our money troubles ended. and a double purpose to our adventure now. the conquest of interplanetary flight; and the giving to the world an element it so greatly needed. little dr. livingston was bending over me, gripping me. "you realize the need of secrecy?" he murmured. "you and i, if we get this xalite, it will make us independently rich, of course. enough for our life's needs. but beyond that, the world will have it. xalite, to be cheap as old-fashioned petroleum." his voice had risen with his excitement, but suddenly he lowered it again. "but john, suppose we were unscrupulous. to keep the price of xalite up--to deal it out, only to the rich--to make ourselves fabulously wealthy at the expense of the poor--" "i see," i agreed. i wonder why my glance, like his, strayed idly to our moonlit window oval, here on the ground floor of his home? i am not the least bit psychic; there is, of course, no such thing anyway. "we'll finish up the _planeteer_ now," livingston was saying. "pete duroh and carruthers--that's all you'll need. and as we agreed, we'll take them with us. four of us--that's enough to man the little _planeteer_. but nothing must be said of xalite. you understand?" "yes, of course." "so far as the world will know, the _planeteer_ is starting merely on a trial flight into space. we don't want any publicity anyway. and duroh and carruthers--they must know only that we're hoping we might reach this wandering little asteroid. nothing about xalite. that can come later. we don't want to take the least chance of this thing leaking out--" he checked himself suddenly. we both heard it--the sound of what seemed padding footsteps, retreating from our laboratory doorway. someone furtively slinking away in the house corridor. "why--good lord--!" i gasped. i dashed into the dim corridor. there was nothing; and then i heard a distant outer door close. the intruder had escaped from the house. and then, from the laboratory, came dr. livingston's gasp: "john, look--" i swung back to him. in the moonlight at the laboratory window a face showed behind the filmy curtains--a man's face peering in at us. it was just an instant glimpse.... staring, wild, red-rimmed eyes--the face wearing a bluish stubble of beard. by no chance could it have been the person who had escaped me in the corridor. in that second, i dashed for the window. the face had gone. i got there only in time to see a dark blob scurrying away into the shadows of the moonlit woods. ii "all ready, dr. livingston," i said. "eh? oh, yes. well, that's fine, john. we'll start at once." "i checked the ventilators," duroh said. the big, beetle-browed peter duroh--dark-haired, handsome young giant who had been working for us nearly a year--stood beside me. it was the great night--our time of departure at last had arrived, with the little _planeteer_ glistening and ready. to you who read this, familiar now with the great finned cylinders which the last half century has produced on earth for the conquest of interplanetary space, our little space-ship was inadequate and queer indeed. unlike modern vessels, dr. livingston had built the _planeteer_ in the shape of a huge bell-like globe. huge, to us then. but its maximum equatorial diameter was a scant fifty feet. strange little ship indeed. its interior was of three stories--the largest--the middle one--our several rooms of living quarters, ample enough for four of us. below that, in the base, were the mechanism rooms. and the top level, fairly near the apex, was in effect a mere circular turret, with a glassite dome over it completing that segment of the outer shell. it is not my purpose here to describe dr. livingston's pioneer mechanisms. all that is technological history in the chronicles of the development of space-navigation. but i do wish to point out that dr. livingston, in his essentials of mechanism, has not been improved upon even in this last half century. the _planeteer_ was double-shelled, the six-inch space between the reinforced walls containing the swiftly vibrating, oscillating electronic current now known as the erentz principle--the absorption of the outer pressure, translated by the swiftly flying electrons of the current into harmless kinetic energy. and we had, in segments, throughout the globe-shaped walls, gravity plates for the neutralization of gravity; its intensification; and the negative force of repulsion. we had air-renewers--antiquated now, i admit--but still very serviceable to us; and ventilating and temperature systems. we had no electronic rocket-streams for atmospheric flight; that, as you all know, came much later. it was, by earth-time, just midnight when we were ready to start. dr. livingston was excited, confused now that the time was at hand. but the other three of us, outwardly at least, were calm enough, eager only to be sure every preparation was in order. there was no public celebration. like livingston, i had no close family, so that only a few of the family and friends of peter duroh and james carruthers, our other assistant, were here on this momentous night in the little board hangar to see us off. "tell him to come in," dr. livingston was saying. "i want to start on the midnight hour." the big, dark-haired young duroh went to the incline that led down from the upper control turret room where we were now standing and shouted to carruthers, who was still down, bidding good-bye to the visitors on the hangar floor. "all right," he shouted up to us. "i'm coming." he came in a moment. he was livingston's most competent technician, this james carruthers. like young duroh, he had been with us almost from the start of the building of the _planeteer_. he was an older man, rather a small, tight-lipped, sandy-haired fellow. grim of aspect, usually silent, listening with alert, keen gray eyes. "all ready," he said. "yes, bolt the door," dr. livingston agreed. we waved our last farewells to the silent, awed little group of men and women down in the hangar, and i swung the big glassite bull's-eye door closed, bolted it and admitted the erentz current into it. departure from earth.... there was no one who could have seen that pioneer departure, much less be on it, without a surging thrill and a trembling. certainly i felt it. excitement--and fear. there is no one who can face the unknown without a little shudder, no matter how adventurous and reckless he may be. i recall that we four, in the dimly starlit little turret--starlight which came down through the open roof of the hangar and through our glassite dome--stood grim, silent and awed. then dr. livingston flung the current into the base gravity plates set for the repelling negation. the _planeteer_ trembled just a little; and then slowly, silently was rising.... * * * * * departure from earth.... and we were just the second party of all earth people in history who had ever seriously tried it. the first, as you all recall, had been sixteen years before. the ill-fated blake expedition--six men, one of them the strange, humanity-hating george simpson, joining the explorers at the last moment, declaiming publicly that he wanted to leave the earth forever! vowing that if blake landed anywhere in the universe, he, george simpson, would remain there in preference to coming back to earth! well, the fanatic simpson certainly had had his way in that! the blake ship--even more antiquated than our _planeteer_--safely left earth's atmosphere and plunged away. and never was heard of again! dr. livingston's clutch on my arm and his excited murmured words jerked me out of my roving awed thoughts. "we're starting, boy--good luck to us--" i could only nod and try to smile as i swallowed the lump in my throat. leaving earth. there was a jumbled prayer then in my mind and heart that the great creator would take care of us and give us luck.... the little group of people down on the hangar floor were waving now, queerly foreshortened as in a second they dropped away. then we were up in the starlight; mounting with the bleak maine coast and its string of lights shrinking beneath us.... swift acceleration. soon we were in the stratosphere; and then in a great curving crescent--product of our repulsion and the tangental force of the earth's rotation--we were hurled off into space.... "well, we did it, john--we did, didn't we?" dr. livingston said. "now--do you want some rest? go on down if you like." he was seated in his shirtsleeves by his little instrument table, with its humming bank of dials and levels. he mopped his dripping forehead with his handkerchief. it was hot as the shades of hell now in the _planeteer's_ interior--the friction of our rapid rise through the atmosphere, with which our temperature-controls were unable to cope. but we knew it would cool off quick enough presently. "i'll stay here with you a while," i said. "i can't get used to it yet--wonderful, sort of frightening, isn't it?" "and beautiful, john. profitable, too--with the xalite we'll bring back--turn it over to the authorities. and then, with our money, build another ship. a larger one. i'm going to devote my life to the development of space-travel. why, john, can't you envisage--a big vessel, with passengers, bringing people from mars maybe, if it's inhabited--" poor dr. livingston. his life was destined to be cut so short! how wise of the creator that he so seldom gives us any hint of what is to come, so that at least we may dream.... we had said nothing to duroh and carruthers about the xalite, fearing that they might be tempted to tell others, family and friends, and before our departure the secret would be out. when we reached zura, it was our plan to tell them, of course. and from the beginning dr. livingston had always insisted that he would see they shared equally with him and me. my mind went back now to that night when he had first told me our plans; that weird face at our window, and someone who simultaneously had seemed to be eavesdropping upon us from the corridor. we had been apprehensive--if our secret was known--that something might occur to stop our departure, that some other expedition might hurriedly be made ready to try and get to zura. but so far as we could know, nothing of the kind had happened. "you see, john, with what we know now of space-flying," dr. livingston was saying, "the whole realm of the solar system will be open to us in another twenty or thirty years. why, with real money at our command, you and i--" a shout from the living compartments under us checked him. then there was the sound of a scuffle, and big peter duroh's roar: "why, damn you, come out of there! grab him, jim!" and carruthers' grim, quiet voice: "i've got him--" they came clattering up into the starlit turret, dragging a man between them. numbly dr. livingston and i stared. the face we had seen that night, peering at us through the laboratory window--wild-eyed, pallid, with a stubble of beard! we saw now that it was a thin, youthful face, with rumpled curly black hair above it. a boy, certainly no more than sixteen or seventeen. he was clad in tattered, dirty clothes, his whole appearance unkempt, his figure thin, almost emaciated as though he had been long without adequate nourishment. he cowered between duroh and carruthers, shaking with terror. "don't--don't kill me," he gasped. "i'll do what you want--i'll help on the trip. i just want something to eat and drink--" "cast him loose," i said. i swung on him. "who in the devil are you--" "alan grant," he gasped. "oh, i guess you've heard of me, all right." he stood wild-eyed, trembling as carruthers and duroh let go of him. "where are we? we've left the earth, haven't we? well, that's all right--but don't you take me back. i'm not going to let anybody take me back--" alan grant. we knew him then. for months televised images of the lad had been flung around the world. a wanted man--wanted for multiple murder--with a price of a decimar on his head for anyone who would take him, dead or alive! iii "you think we should approach from this side, john?" dr. livingston said. i shrugged. "how can you tell?" "true enough. if only those damnable clouds would act decently and open up now." dr. livingston and i were seated in the turret, bathed in the brilliant sunlight. zura at which we were rushing broadside, so to speak, was now, even to the naked eye, a huge full-round disc, with the sunlight gleaming turgid in its sullen, swirling cloud-masses of atmosphere. by a queer mischance, we had had no break in the zurian clouds since leaving earth. at which side had we best approach? our only purpose was to land near some deposit of the xalite. but there was so much that we did not know. were deposits of the precious metal widespread over the little asteroid? would it be found only in a gaseous state, perhaps, so that we could not secure it? this atmosphere--would we be able to breathe it; or would our air-masks be necessary? so much that we did not know, but there were many things about the strange little world which already we had learned. apparently it was of a very great density. dr. livingston had calculated that back on earth. its gravity, despite its five hundred-mile diameter, was, he thought, perhaps not much less than that of earth. and we knew now that it was not presenting one side always to the sun, but was rotating on its axis. a swift procession of days and nights, each some three or four hours long. it is far from my purpose to detail the trip of the _planeteer_ from earth to zura. all that has been written many times--with embellishments--and space-flying today has lost its novelty. ours was a swift, uneventful passage, save that to us it was awe-inspiring indeed. alan grant, the young outlaw-killer who had so unexpectedly thrust himself upon us, had been a problem. his own case has now become history; i need not detail that either, except to say that by my experience with him, one may be a murderer and still inspire pity. it is really horrible how quickly one may plunge downward in life. alan grant was only a boy really. jealous over a worthless woman, and befuddled by alcoholite, in ten minutes he had changed himself from a decent, self-respecting lad into a bloodstained, multiple killer. all in ten minutes--with all the rest of his life to pay the penalty. to dr. livingston he was a problem. there were none of us willing to turn back to earth--even there at the start--just to deliver him to the authorities. it may have been his pleading; and dr. livingston's gentle, kindly nature. what would ultimately have been his fate, back on earth, was something which, as events transpired, never had to be decided. certainly on the trip up to now, he had caused us no trouble--an intelligent lad, seemingly eager to do his share of work. we had told carruthers and duroh now about the xalite. and alan had heard it also. his thin, boyish face had had a queer look, or at least it seemed so to me. the contamination of criminality! the thought had leaped into my mind, though heaven knows i said nothing. one crime so easily to lead to another. but i flung away the thought. with a human excuse, alan had stained himself with blood. somehow, knowing him through those days and nights of that awing trip, i did not think he would want to repeat the experience. "you'll stay on watch?" dr. livingston said, now as we sat together in the turret. "i'm tired, john. if those clouds break, call me at once." "yes," i agreed. he went down to his room. duroh and carruthers were sleeping; and alan also. i was left alone in the turret. i drew the curtains to shroud the sunlight. bathed in starlight from the other side, i sat staring out at zura. wild, sullen-looking little world. the sunlight shot into its gray-black clouds with turgid orange and green light. we were so close now that the huge cloudy ball was spread over much of the firmament, with the white gleaming stars prismatic in the black abyss of space around it. and with our still-rapid approach, the disc was almost visibly enlarging. a step sounded behind me, i looked up. "oh, you, alan?" "can i sit with you?" "yes, sure." * * * * * he was a different-looking lad now. we had given him clean clothes; he was cleanly shaved; his face and his body, though still thin, had filled out a bit. a handsome, sensitive-looking young fellow. but in his eyes was the same hunted look. "that's zura," he said. "looks quite a bit bigger now, doesn't it?" then suddenly he swung on me. "i'm going to stay there, john--understand? you can't stop me--not any of you--because i won't go back." pathetic damn words to come from a boy--to give up his world, his people, everything to which he was born, because he had made himself, all in ten minutes, unfitted for everything. "zura may not be habitable," i said. "no food. maybe you can't even breathe that air down there. we don't know." "i don't care. i'm not going back to earth." and then he added, "i--i guess i'd rather be there even without food." he muttered it with a grim bitterness. "the only man in my world--i couldn't do anything wrong then, could i?" for an hour after that i think we both sat almost in silence. i was busy with the electro-telescope, trying to see down into the swirling zurian clouds. on the stool beside me, alan grant just sat brooding. and then suddenly, as though he had been struggling all this time to reach some momentous decision, he burst out: "i've got to tell you, that's all. john, listen--" i was absorbed with the telescope so that i hardly heeded him. it seemed that the clouds of zura, in one place in the northern hemisphere, were breaking into a little rift. at alan's words, i saw out of the tail of my eye that he had flung an apprehensive look at the little spiral staircase of alumite which wound down into the lower levels of the _planeteer_. "what?" i said idly. he lowered his voice. "i can't help telling you. i don't want--again--" what a fatuous fool i was at that moment! queer how in life, things momentous may of actuality hang upon seeming trivialities! if only i had listened to alan grant then! but in that instant, as i peered into the eyepiece of the telescope, a rift in the clouds of zura opened up. i must have muttered some exclamation. "what is it?" alan demanded. "the clouds are breaking! we may be able to see the surface now. wait, i'll swing it onto the image screen, so we can both see it." i made the connections. the little flurescent screen glowed with an image of the atmosphere of zura--turgid, green, yellow and black masses of clouds, whirled and tossed by giant storms. "good lord!" alan exclaimed. "are we supposed to descend through that?" "no. we'd have to have a rift. there's one coming there now." midway between the equator and the pole there was a widening opening. then a segment of the dark surface was visible. i focused the electro-telescope, swung its controls to a smaller area with a greater magnification. the surface of zura! what a weird, wild scene! the image gave us perhaps a square mile. there was a turgid twilight down there, through which the daylight now was slanting, broken by the haze which still remained in this clearer atmosphere. the terrain was rocky--a bleak, desolate waste, barren and empty. tumbled rocks, buttes and spires, all slate-gray, sleek and glistening like marble. a tumbled terrain, with fissures and cave-mouths everywhere; rifts, gullies and huge canyons. was it rock, or metal? extremely dense--it had that obvious aspect; a compressed little world, with its surface broken, mangled as though by some titanic cataclysm. * * * * * it was a frigid little world. white patches of snow and sleek blue ice everywhere were apparent. but it was melting ice now. weirdly in places it drooped, grotesquely leprous where it had melted away. and in the hollows, there was water. off to one side, a big bowl-like depression was a lake of water, scattered with melting ice. frigid world, but now approaching the sun, warmth was striking down, melting the congealed surface. masses of ice turning rotten. as i stared, a great frozen mass which hung like a white veil over a hundred-foot cliff abruptly broke away. sunlight chanced to strike it as it came splintering down, so that it looked like fractured spun glass, a riot of prismatic color. "john! look! there, down at the lower corner!" alan was tensely pointing to a corner of the image screen. what was this? i stared and caught my breath. it seemed that against a distant ice-spire which stood like a stalagmite on the weird melting landscape, a white figure was poised. it seemed to move a little. "someone alive down there!" alan murmured. "look--that figure moved!" zura inhabited! we had never given a thought to that, save to assume that it was not. my fingers were shaking as i fumbled at the telescope, shortening the focus still further, giving a greater magnification of a much smaller area. our fluroscope screen blurred; then slowly clarified, with an area of only a hundred feet or so. numbed, we stared at a white figure which was against the ice-spire. a girl! a human girl? heaven knows, it seemed so. pale white in the weird zurian daylight, she stood motionless, seemingly gazing out over the melting landscape. a girl the size of a girl on earth. a white garment, white fur perhaps, draped her breasts and thighs. her long hair, white as a veil of frozen falling water, was tumbled over her shoulders. woman carved in white marble. woman molded of sleek ice. if we had not seen her move, she could have been a strange statue of a beautiful earthgirl, frozen there. then suddenly as the swirling clouds shifted, a shaft of sunlight fell upon her. there was a pink-whiteness, like a delicate flush, on her limbs, neck and face. for that second alan and i breathlessly stared. and then, as though the sunlight were something horribly frightening, her little body seemed to shudder. she turned, plunged into the shadows of a rock-rift and was gone! iv within another day, we were close over it. of necessity our velocity was much less now. we had tilted so that the asteroid was under us, with our base gravity plates in negation. zura for twenty-four earth-hours had been repulsing us, retarding us, as we dropped upon it. dr. livingston had made careful calculations. the total mass of zura, small as the asteroid was in size, he had figured to be nearly that of the earth. we confirmed it now, by the repulsing effect it had upon us. gradually we slowed, poised now midway in the northern hemisphere, zura had a rotation on its axis of almost exactly four hours. that we had been able to check now--there had been six rotations in the span of an earth-day, as measured by our chronometer. a thousand miles up? it seemed now that we were no more than that. the benson curve-rays, here in the turret, showed us on our tilted mirrors the full image of the little world directly under us. its convexity long since had been apparent. it spread now like a huge cloud-enveloped ball, covering almost all the lower firmament. "the clouds are lessening," dr. livingston said, as again he and i were alone in the turret. "we'll be able to descend easily through this atmosphere." "yes," i agreed. there had been faint, though unmistakable, evidences of xalite in many places. we had decided that our best course was to descend before the storms came back. most of the moisture-masses seemed clustered over the southern hemisphere now. here in the north, for six zurian days it had been fairly clear. swift alternation of day and night--days of gray, hazy light, with the sunlight often striking through. and nights of glittering stars. we had seen all the surface of the northern hemisphere now. everywhere it was the same--bleak, metallic-looking gray rocks, wildly tumbled; huge, fantastic ice and snow formations; strewn pools of water, choked with melting ice. alan and i had mentioned that weird vision we had had of a living girl, so strangely fashioned in human mold. was she real--or had our fancy tricked us? dr. livingston had blankly stared. from the big, handsome peter duroh had come a laugh and a ribald expression of hope that we were right. james carruthers had merely stared incredulously, with his thin lips smiling and a look in his alert eyes that somehow seemed predatory. but whether we had seen something animal or human, assuredly it had been alive. this atmosphere then, doubtless would be breatheable to us; and the temperature down there, by daylight at least, must be around f. dr. livingston was checking his instruments. another hour had passed. "only five hundred miles of altitude now," he said. "i think we may use a little less repulsion for a time, and then the final retardation must begin." awesome descent. it took us another eighteen earth-hours while the weird convex surface of little zura came up at us. i was often in the turret alone. queerly an ominous sense of disaster was upon me. i could not tell why. fear that we might not land safely? surely it was not that. rather was it as though, here in the little _planeteer_ which had been our world, something was impending. somehow i had grown to dislike pete duroh and jim carruthers. just little things. that ribald laugh. a way they had seemingly of watching me, whispering together while i was at the spectroscope, checking what evidence i could find of the presence of xalite on the asteroid's surface. and young grant, boyish multiple murderer, whom now i had come somehow to like--what was it that he had wanted to tell me? i had tried several times to see him alone to ask him; but obviously he was avoiding me now. whatever it was, he had repented the impulse. we were all five in the turret during the descent through the zurian atmosphere. only fifty thousand feet up now. it was night, with glittering stars above us, and below, that wild, tumbled, fantastic landscape spreading now off to the horizon, bleak and grim in the starlight.... * * * * * twenty thousand feet. sudden daylight had come and then night again. we were moving with zura now in her swift axial rotation, dropping almost vertically down, slowly now with a constant retardation. i did not mention it, but i realized that we were poised very nearly over where alan and i had seen--or thought we had seen--that strange vision of a girl. she had not reappeared. were there others like her here? a race of people so much like earth humans that one of them could be a beautiful young girl, so like a girl of earth that i had resented the ribald attitude of carruthers and duroh? my thoughts seemed totally impossible, according to scientific logic. yet alan and i surely had seen her.... "this damn heat," duroh said. he sat slumped on the control room floor, his lanky body in trousers and shirt. his black wavy hair was plastered on his forehead with sweat. he mopped it with his big handkerchief. "you'll get it cold enough pretty soon," carruthers laughed. "take your time, pete." carruthers was alertly watching dr. livingston as he shifted the gravity plates for a still greater retardation. "going to slow us some more, doc?" "yes. yes, i don't want to take any chances." five thousand feet.... then two thousand. off to the right the great cauldron depression was like a mile-wide lake--black water choked with floating ice on which the starlight glistened prismatic. a great ramp of the gray metallic rock went up like a glacier to the left. beside it, the foothills of distant mountains went up in great terraced tiers. everywhere there were ice-filled gullies, with water pouring down out of many of them. gullies, ravines and crevices; pits yawning with inky blackness.... and then i noticed that, weirdly, there seemed light inherent to these zurian rock-masses. some of the cave-mouths were not quite black--a little light appeared in them, glowing with a prismatic sheen. a thousand feet. i was at the gravity control-board now, executing dr. livingston's swift murmured orders. without our modern rocket-streams, the little _planeteer_, i must admit, was unwieldy. we were dropping slowly, with a side drift. in a corner alan sat staring at us, with his hands gripped between his knees, his fingers working nervously. duroh and carruthers were standing tense beside me. it was a touchy few minutes. we were some two hundred feet above a broken ice-strewn plateau, with a side drift that was carrying us toward a small cliff. i could see where dr. livingston intended to land now--a little shallow bowl-depression near the cliff, where the bottom seemed flat, with soft snow. the _planeteer_ was hovering upright, with a very slow, vertical axis rotation, so that as i used the cliff's repulsion to check our drift, i was shifting the current constantly in our side gravity plates. queer how one may think of two things at once! i was seated at the control table, with my fingers roving its gravity-plate shifting keys. dr. livingston was tensely peering through the side bull's-eyes, gauging our position, our downward and sidewise drift; calling out to me his orders. certainly my mind had never been more alertly on anything than it now was on those gravity keys. but nevertheless, suddenly i was aware of an electric feeling here in the control room. carruthers and duroh exchanging glances. and over in the corner young alan, with his hands between his knees, his fingers writhing, his dark gaze brooding on me. "base negation! full--quickly now!" dr. livingston called. we were almost over the snowy depression--hardly the height of the _planeteer_ above it. i flung on the base repulsion; held it only some ten seconds. then gave attraction for an instant. that may have been the first landing of any space-ship in the history of the universe. i do not know, of course; but i will say we eased the little _planeteer_ down as light as a falling snowdrop. there was hardly a bump as we landed, with the base flat in the melting snow, and the globe of the _planeteer_ almost exactly upright. "good enough, john. we did it!" dr. livingston was triumphant. he swung toward me, his face flushed with pleasure. jim carruthers was close beside him. "good work, wasn't it, jim?" "yes," carruthers said, with his thin smile. "you did nicely, doctor." he was partly behind dr. livingston; i saw his arm raised behind livingston's back. i had no more warning than that. the knife carruthers was clutching stabbed deeply. i saw the smile fade off poor dr. livingston's face, with a dazed look of wonderment spreading there as he tossed up his arms and sprawled forward. he dropped in a crumpled heap almost at my feet, with the alumite knife-handle sticking from his back where a ghastly crimson stain already was spreading on his white shirt. "why--why, good lord--" i gasped. i was on my feet; mind blurred, numbed with horror. my fists clenched as i whirled at carruthers. "why--why, you damned--" "easy there!" it was peter duroh's growling voice behind me. i swung to face him. his big lanky figure leaned nonchalantly against one of the side bull's-eye windows. both his hands were at his hips--his hands gripping an old-fashioned bullet-projector and a banning heat-gun, with muzzles leveled at my chest! v "so what are you going to do with me?" i demanded. "take it easy. sit where you are." they had shoved me back into my chair at the instrument board. over in a corner alan still sat with his hands clasped between his knees, and his fingers working. just a boy. he could not meet the glance i flung at him. "is dr. livingston dead?" i said. "if he isn't--good lord, are you going to let him just lie there?" "oh, he's dead all right," duroh growled. "you have no objection if i see, have you?" "no. go ahead." "we'll go out by the lower door," carruthers said impassively. "keep your muzzle on him, pete--i'm going down. livingston said we'll use a portable spectroscope to locate the xalite. it's in the base; i'll go rig it up." "you better not open that base door too quickly," i warned. "if this atmosphere is wrong, in chemical content or pressure--kill us all here like rats in a trap." "don't you worry, taine." from the head of the little incline stairway carruthers grinned at me with his tight-lipped, ironic smile. "that's why you're alive. we realize you know more about a lot of things in this than we do." damnable cold-blooded villain. he waved his hand with jaunty irony at me as he vanished down the staircase. with duroh's weapons alertly on me, i bent over the crumpled dr. livingston. he was dead, beyond question. for years he had been my best, almost my only, friend. there was a lump in my throat as i went back to my seat at the table. "about this xalite," duroh said pleasantly. "in what form do we expect to find it? pretty pure? can you tell how pure it is with your instruments? if it's in a pretty pure state, we won't need so much, will we? fifty pounds or so--to deal out to a panting world for all our lifetime and make us rich enough for any man's dreams." "so you all three have decided to be murderers?" i retorted. "one of us i should have thought was enough--contaminating damn business--" my bitter words brought a burst from alan. "so what can i do?" he flung at me; but still he did not look at me. "you think i want to live here on this god-forsaken little world--and die maybe in a day? or go back to earth? dr. livingston would have turned me over--you know he would--" one crime with such ghastly fecundity begets another! heaven knows i could hardly blame the boy. he was only sixteen; pushed into desperation. "what will he do?" duroh grinned. "why, that's easy, isn't it, alan? he'll go back to earth--rich. when you're rich--you can bribe officials. or, at worst, you can't be hunted like a sewer rat as he was before. money buys hiding places, clothes and food. easy to hide out, when you've got the decimars." "and me?" i persisted. "you need my help now? all right--let's say i'll give it. and then what?" "when we get back to earth we'll turn you loose," he smiled. "why not? you can hunt us all you like. we'll be gone." was that their plan for me? i doubted it a great deal. but i could see no reason now to balk them. certainly it was to my interest to find the xalite, get it aboard and start back. with alan to help me--or possibly even alone, for that matter--i could navigate back to earth. the landing there, on one of the big flying fields, would be far less difficult than here. meanwhile, i would watch my chance. and get a word alone with alan if i could. i was still convinced that he wasn't the same stripe as these other two cold-blooded villains. * * * * * duroh was questioning me now, and i answered him freely. a fairly rich deposit of the xalite should be somewhere near here where we had landed. it would exist, probably as a strata in the metallic rock--not recognizable perhaps with the naked eye, but identifiable with the portable spectroscope. "and with a pick and shovel we dig it out?" duroh said. "you damn sure better find it, taine, if you know what's good for you." "i will if i can," i agreed. carruthers came back. "come on down and rig up this gadget, taine. then we'll get on some heavy clothes and make a start." docilely i let them shove me down past our dim living quarters, into the base storeroom. i saw now that carruthers had a heat-gun clipped to his belt with his knife. alan apparently was unarmed. dr. livingston, i knew, had brought some weapons. they were in his sleeping room--more than these cut-throats had taken--but i had no way of getting to them now. in the base-room i rigged the small spectroscope, with its lenses, prisms and batteries. duroh brought us heavy trousers, boots, mackinaws and heavy caps. "now," he said, "we're about ready, aren't we? if that air out there is no good, we'll have to go through the midsection air-lock, with air-helmets. that the idea, taine?" "that's it," i agreed. "and maybe with pressure suits, for all i know." but none of that was necessary. cautiously i admitted the air. it was at once apparent that there was no great difference of pressure. it came slowly hissing in, stopping our ears for a moment. it was cold and dank, heavy to breathe and momentarily oppressive. but the feeling soon passed. "very good," carruthers said. "open wide, taine." i swung the bull's-eye inward ... zura. as my foot crunched into the moist, wet snow, a pang shot through me. perhaps i was the first living thing ever to set foot upon an alien world. how different this landing was from what i had anticipated! dr. livingston dead; myself a captive in the hands of these cut-throats. we had cut off the _planeteer's_ interior gravity, and had found that zura was little different. as i walked now out into the raw, bleak night, a sense of physical lightness was upon me. i was conscious that if i took a leap it would be prodigious. gravity perhaps was a quarter less; but the difference certainly was no greater than that. "we're leaving everything to you," duroh growled at my elbow. "make it quick now, taine, if you know what's good for you. all we want is a supply of the xalite, and get back and get away in a hurry." duroh and i were leading. he kept his little bullet-projector with its muzzle rammed into my side. behind us came alan and carruthers. i carried the small electro-spectroscope, with its batteries slung across my back. "i have no idea which way to go," i said. "it's all a chance. suppose we go a little way; then stop and make a test." "suit yourself," carruthers agreed from behind me. "we're cut off, down here in this depression. once we get up on the level, almost anywhere should do for a start." it was a weird, fantastic night-scene, as in a moment we emerged up upon the lip of the little depression. overhead the myriad stars glittered in an inky, frosty sky. around us spread the wild, tumbled landscape. it was a queerly small area, viewed now from the surface level. the convexity of the little world was instantly apparent, with the horizon everywhere crowding close; the stars in the dark sky which were low at the horizon seemed hanging there, as though one might make a leap and seize them. * * * * * we were hardly more than a hundred feet from the ragged little cliff which towered now grimly over us. i flung a glance around. everywhere great boulders and ice-masses were strewn, wildly tumbled. the starlight glittered prismatic on their tops. the shadows between them were black, yawning pits of emptiness. everywhere a frigid desolation. but its congealed beauty was marred by the blight of warmth upon it. veils of ice hung from the ragged, honeycombed little cliff--but they were leprous veils, their beauty eaten away by the blight of warmth, like some hideous disease rotting them. everywhere water was dripping, running in rivulets, gathering into pools on which the starlight shimmered with a faint opalescent sheen. "stop here," carruthers commanded. we had picked our tortuous, sloshing way perhaps halfway to the little cliff. "try the spectroscope here," carruthers added. "along the base of that precipice. if there's an outcropping there, it would be easy to get at." his words struck me with apprehension. carruthers seemed to know more about this thing than i had hoped. it was my plan now to locate the xalite if i could. but somehow i feared to let them get their hands on it. with it safely on board the _planeteer_, it might easily occur to them that they could successfully navigate back to earth. their purpose in keeping me alive would be ended.... i could not forget with what cold-blooded nonchalance carruthers had smiled at poor dr. livingston and then stabbed the knife into his back. i was alert every second now. if only i could get duroh interested, with his weapon turned from me just for a moment. with half a chance i would risk a fight now, rather than cold-blooded murder later on. "now, let's hope--" carruthers muttered, as i set up the little hooded spectroscope screen, and trained the instrument on the base of the cliff. in a breathless moment the band spread out on the screen, glorious little splash of colors, diffusing from one into the next, with the thin dark lines of radiotronic emanations vertical streaks in the band. xalite! it was here, unmistakable. i glanced up from the hooded screen. off there, where starlight was glittering at the ragged base of the little cliff, there was a narrow sword-slash of gray-white rock streaking the rock-face. it was visible now, where ice probably only recently had melted from it. ore of xalite! dr. livingston had described to me what probably it would look like in its crude state here on zura. a hundred pounds of that ore would be enough for a lifetime of earth's needs! "well," duroh growled. "what do you see?" i had been standing silent, peering at the cliff. had something moved off there? a sort of white shadow, quickly shifting. i had that vague impression. and out of the tail of my eye, vaguely i noticed a huge rock-cluster some ten feet from us. it was piled with fantastic ice-formations, blue-white in the starlight. but it seemed that there were white blobs there which had not been visible a moment ago. "what's that screen show? damn you, speak up." annoyed at my silence, carruthers prodded me in the ribs with his weapon. "looks like xalite--" "that rock off there," i murmured. "carruthers, look--" whatever vague sort of warning i had intended to give came too late. from beside us in the white, frosty starlight, weird white blobs materialized. men? were they? i had a vague glimpse of little white creatures, perhaps the height of my shoulder--white arms, legs, huge round heads, shining bald, slate-gray in the starlight. a horde of them in that second engulfed us. the spectroscope went clattering as i fell, fighting, with half a dozen of them on top of me. gruesome little creatures. to my grip their flesh was solid, sleek and cold.... i heard alan give a startled cry, and then a groan as he went down. duroh's weapon cracked, with its weird yellow-red stab of flame as the exploding powder in the old-fashioned gun hurled its bullet. the lead slug must have found a mark. there was an eerie, blood-chilling scream--inhuman, like some weird, unnamable animal in its death-cry; and i was aware of one of the little creatures leaping a dozen feet into the air and crashing down. * * * * * but duroh had no chance to fire again. the swarming, snarling little things bore him down. and carruthers was down. i had tumbled to my back, with half a dozen of them on me. they were heavy; more solid perhaps than an earthman. they seemed to have no weapons; their little fists, small as a child's, were thudding at me like hard balls of ice. frantically i lunged, but the weight of them held me. a white, furry garment seemed tied around their middle. one of the faces came down above mine; weird face with eyes like slits, holes for nostrils and a wide slit of mouth that jabbered at me with guttural, unintelligible syllables. "don't fight," i heard carruthers shouting. "better give up--don't goad them to kill us." it seemed reasonable advice. they were jabbering like monkeys all around us, but now they seemed more eager to make us stop fighting than to harm us. i yielded suddenly, lying limp with their weight pressing me. "all right," i muttered. "damn you--get off me." they understood at least my sudden limpness, and in a moment climbed away, and with a strength fully as great as my own, hauled me to my feet. carruthers and duroh now were up, with the little white zurians gripping them. and i saw alan, standing pallid and trembling, with blood streaming from a gash in his forehead. "got us," duroh muttered. "gosh, look at them." there seemed a hundred or more of the little white forms materializing in the starry whiteness of the zurian night. the protective coloration of nature. they were hardly visible except when they moved. the group that gripped us were fending off their crowding fellows now as they milled forward, wildly jabbering, peering to see these four strange beings which they had captured. "well, they don't seem to want to hurt us," i said. i peered down into the face of the one who was at my side, his small white hands, with long, thin fingers strong as little pincers, gripping my arm. "take it easy," i said. "let's be friends." i tried grinning at him. perhaps he vaguely understood the grin. the skin on his round white face was hairless, perhaps poreless, sleek as gray-white, polished marble. but it wrinkled with his grimace. i saw that he had no eyelids. the slits of the two sockets suddenly opened wide, so that i could see his huge round white eyeballs, with a very big purple-black lens in their center. it was a grotesque face, but suddenly i realized that it was not unintelligent. then we were being shoved forward. for an instant the big duroh, towering head and shoulders over his little captors, made resistance. "don't be an idiot," i shouted at him. "let them have their way." the crowd milled around us as we were shoved along the base of the cliff. i could see alan, pale, silent, with his bloodstained face; the grim, tight-lipped, pallid carruthers; and duroh, docile now. and it occurred to me then, as i caught a look of frightened appeal from duroh, how different things may be, all in a moment or two. i had been captive of duroh and carruthers and alan, just a moment ago. murderous cut-throats, they would have dispatched me, no doubt, when i had helped them all they needed. but now they looked to me as though we four earthmen were allied here against this fantastic enemy. and it was apparent that, like many bloodthirsty villains, carruthers and duroh were terrified. cowards at heart. we were being separated in the crowd. "take it easy," i shouted. "don't anger or frighten them--they'll kill us all." certainly i had no wish to have duroh go into a wild panic, with the zurians killing me as well as the rest of us. we were all four unarmed now. they had searched us. one or two of them were carrying duroh's and carruthers' weapons, carrying them gingerly, awed and puzzled by them. where were they taking us? we came to an end of the little ice-cliff, rounded it, and i saw a dark yawning hole, like a cave-entrance in the honeycombed cliffside. the little white zurians who were leading us plunged into it. i was shoved forward more swiftly now, with the darkness engulfing me--darkness filled with jabbering little voices and the patter of their huge bare feet. * * * * * it may have been that at first my eyes were not accustomed to the greater darkness, and that presently, with expanding pupils, i began to see. that, of course. but now i was aware of that sheen of light, inherent to the rocks of this strange little world. a vaguely luminous, opalescent sheen which grew in intensity as we advanced so that it illumined the darkness with a weird, beautiful glitter. i saw now that we were advancing into a widening tunnel. already it was some fifty feet wide, with lifting ceiling so that presently i could only dimly see it, far up as it glistened in the opalescent light. moisture was up there--a myriad tiny drops, glittering like opalescent gems in the eerie glow. occasionally one would drop and hit my face. steadily the jabbering little crowd, with excited guttural voices, pushed forward. i had the feeling at first that we were descending; this winding, broadening tunnel going downward at an ever increasing angle. then presently it was as though the tunnel were level and as we advanced, the whole little zurian world seemed turning forward and up over us. all in the viewpoint. up or down; top or bottom--they are meaningless terms except for comparison. it was growing steadily colder now. the roof moisture seldom dropped. ice formations were everywhere here. there was a place where the roof was suddenly much lower, so that i could see an intricate lacery of ice-clusters up there, prismatic with glorious colors. like stalagmites here on the tunnel floor, the ice stood in great columns, crinkled, glittering with a myriad facets of sparkling sheen. there were other tunnels crossing us now. i tried to imagine how far we had gone. certainly a mile. then i was aware, as we rounded a curve, that ahead of us the shining passage was opening up into some sort of apartment. the light-sheen there was more intense. the crowd of zurians had fallen silent now; and as another passage crossed us at an angle, our immediate captors herded most of their fellows away. silently we advanced, with three zurians gripping each of us. it was as though now we were advancing into some sacred place, so that our captors were suddenly respectfully silent. "what the devil," carruthers muttered, as i was shoved close to him. we came out of the tunnel. i had a quick glimpse of a big blue-white ice-grotto here--walls glittering with an opalescent sheen on hanging veils of ice. and then i gasped; stared, numbed. the ice maiden! the girl alan and i had seen through the _planeteer's_ telescope! at the end of the grotto, perhaps a hundred feet from us now, on a small raised dais, she reclined on a pile of white furs. her head and shoulders were raised on one elbow, her graceful pink-white limbs half revealed by the short white fur garment draped over her loins and breasts. her hair, blue-white as spun ice, fell in profusion over her shoulders, framing her small oval face that was beautiful with a perfection of earth-beauty! our captors were all intoning now: "tara! tara! tara!" then as we were hurriedly shoved forward, the girl's arm went up with an imperious gesture; and we were cast loose and flung at her feet! vi tara! quite obviously that was the girl's name. the little zurian men were all intoning it with awed respect, as a gesture and a low, guttural word from her made them seize us again, stand us erect in a line before her. what weird, beautiful priestess was this? by what incredible science could it be that she was fashioned like a beautiful young earthgirl? as we were stood upon our feet, with our captors at once withdrawing to line themselves near us, i saw that at each of the several door-openings which gave access to the grotto, other zurians were peering in at us. and guards were here--men somewhat taller, with wide, powerful shoulders and smaller heads. each of them held a long, pointed shaft of ice in his hand for a weapon, with his motionless figure tensed and his weird eyes alert upon us. men who could with a single thrust of their powerful leg muscles hurl themselves in a bound half across the grotto. for that moment we four stood silent, staring at the strange, beautiful creature reclining on the dais before us. young alan was numbed, blankly bewildered; carruthers, seemingly less terrified now, gazed with a grim smile playing on his thin lips; and on the handsome, rough-hewn face of the giant duroh, the panic of terror had gone. there was a look there now of open admiration; a bold confidence, an eager, predatory look. weird, transfixed tableau. it only lasted a brief moment, of course, while tara stared down at us, calmly, musingly--a gaze of quiet, confident appraisement, her soft red lips gently curving into a questing smile and her cold, pale-blue eyes roving us. and then she spoke. amazing thing--it struck us numb, so that we could only stand and gasp. "you look like earthmen," she said quietly. "which is it, your language?" english words, quaintly intoned, but english! her voice was soft, with a queer limpid, liquid quality to it, in amazing contrast to the guttural way she had spoken to her zurians. and her tone, her look, her gesture to us were quietly imperious. "english!" duroh gasped. "what luck! so you speak our language--well, that's fine. blast me for a sleeping tower time-keeper but you're beautiful, whoever you are. tell us." "i am tara," she said. the little smile that played on her lips was amused now as her gaze roved the six-feet-four figure of duroh. "tara? tara what?" he demanded. "you're an earthgirl of course. you must be. then how did you get here--" it was dawning on me now; the only combination of possible circumstances which logically it could be. "you are the leader of your men?" tara said quietly to duroh. "i--" carruthers began. but a look from duroh checked him--duroh's look of bold confidence that he could handle this girl. "yes, i am," duroh said. "i brought them here, on an exploring expedition from earth. we're not going to harm your little world. i killed one of your men--what in the hell did they dare set upon us for? see here now, what we want is--" "you do talk rather too much," she interrupted. her gaze left duroh and fastened on alan. "you--the young one--what is your name?" "alan. alan grant," he stammered softly. "you have a nice voice. you look like a nice young man. and you?" "i'm james carruthers," carruthers said. "if you'll let me explain--" "and you?" she gazed at me. "john taine," i said. she sat up suddenly, with her shimmering hair tumbling in a white mass over her breast. again her calm, blue-eyed gad impersonally roved us. "the big one lies," she stated. "which one of you is leader here?" "our leader is dead," i burst out. "murdered by these two--carruthers and duroh." "you're a liar!" duroh gasped. he took a step toward me, but thought better of it as the guard made a move forward. * * * * * carruthers started to speak, but tara's calm voice silenced him. "so even in your little expedition murder had to come." she seemed saying it not to us, but to herself. "of course, what would one expect? who was murdered?" her gaze was on me, and i told her what had happened and why we were here. there was a brief pause, and again she silenced duroh and carruthers. "zogg!" she called. "zogg--come--" from a glittering, blue-white vaulted doorway a figure approached--a big zurian nearly my own height. the shining, opalescent light gleamed on his white bald pate. he looked a powerful fellow. a white fur-skin draped him. in his hand was a club-like weapon, seemingly made of the heavy slate-gray rock, sleekly polished to a knife-like edge. "zogg, take them," she said in her calm english. "all of them, tara?" "no. all but this one." her imperious gesture went to me. "with him i will talk more." zogg's weird face twisted into a grin. a bluish tongue, like the tongue of an animal, licked the pallid lips of his slit of mouth. that the girl had taught him english was obvious. he had spoken to her haltingly, mouthing the words with his guttural voice. "not--hurt them?" he demanded. "no," she flashed. "never will i have that here. well do you know it." her cold-blue eyes glittered with her sudden angry emotion, and before it, zogg drew away. and then she burst at him in his own language. i could guess that she was directing him what to do with the three prisoners. duroh tried again to speak but was silenced. a dozen of the little side guards came pouncing forward. "easy," i warned. "don't put up a fight, duroh." they were engulfed by the zurians, shoved through the side archway, and were gone. "sit here by me," tara said calmly. at her gesture i sat on the side of the dais, with her calm gaze upon me as she questioned me. how shall i describe my first strange talk with tara? under her questions i described frankly our expedition, who we were, what we had come for, and what had happened. and then suddenly i began questioning her. i had thought that her beautiful cold-blue eyes would flash with the little lightnings as they had at zogg. but instead she said quietly, "i shall tell you about myself, because there is no reason why i should not." i had guessed what at least the main circumstances of her history must be.... the blake expedition, which had left earth some sixteen years ago and never returned, had landed here on zura, when the little asteroid previously had come into our solar system. landed here, with its space-ship smashed in the landing. "george simpson was my father," tara was saying. "everyone is dead now, of that little group, except me." * * * * * i was myself only some four years old when the blake expedition disappeared. but i had heard of george simpson. a fanatic. an altruist. that was the best, undoubtedly, that you could call him. a crusader for ideals, he had thought that he could remodel the world, remake god's erring creatures so that hate and fear and jealousy and violence would be gone. and among nations--peace, amity--never a hint of war or aggression. nice ideals. simpson undoubtedly was a genius. a remarkable orator; a fellow of indefatigable energy; a personality forceful, winning. for years, with fanatic fervor, he devoted his life to converting others to his own ideals. it was ironic, but inevitable, that he himself was always a storm-center. pathetically sincere, frequently he became a lawbreaker; was in prison and out again. until at last he was the frenzied hater of humanity--an outcast. and with a wild burst of condemnation for earth and everything on it, he had joined blake's expedition, vowing he would never return. "and you were on that expedition too?" i said. "and your mother--i understood blake took only a few men." "he would not take my mother," tara said. "so she hid herself on board. i was born here--a few months after they landed." the rest of the story was simple enough. her mother had died about a year after tara was born. her father had brought her up, here on little zura; had educated her. for fourteen years, until his death a year or so ago, she had been his constant companion. george simpson was an educated man, a scholar. he had left earth, determined never to return, so that he had taken many books with him, with which tara had been taught. and he had found here a strange, primitive little people. there were, i believe, since it is understood now that the zurians were a dying race, no more than a few thousands, living here in these interlacing honeycombed grottos. the forceful simpson, when he had learned their language, had come to rule them. his intelligence, much greater than their own, and his own ideas which seemed here, at least, possible of attainment, had enabled him to make himself the zurian ruler. i must state now that it is far from my purpose--even if space permitted, which it does not--to sketch the life-history of the tragic little zurian people. i am no ethnologist. nor can i detail the effect george simpson had upon them--the practical working of his ideal economic system. books have been written on it in the last half century, based on what tara was able to tell the learned men who questioned her. and as i indicated in my preface, much nonsense has been written. i think that my own experience, with tara there in zura, will demonstrate fully what i mean. "and so now," i said, "since your father's death, you are ruler here?" "yes, of course. i followed my father's ideals." "and there is no crime here? nobody does anything wrong? they obey you?" "i make them obey me," she said; and again her eyes flashed with the little lightnings. "so i understand you came here to get what it is you call xalite?" she added suddenly. "yes." "something that belongs to us--to me--not to you." * * * * * i withheld my smile. she was amazingly beautiful, reclining there so close to me. her bosom, the contour of it faintly apparent beneath the white furry garment, rose and fell with her emotion. her long snow-white hair glistened with a silvery sheen in the opalescent light. "you're very beautiful, tara," i said abruptly. "your strange white hair--" "my mother was like that. so you are a thief? my father would have expected it of any man of earth." i had touched her hand, where it rested on the fur rug beside me. "you were taught to hate all earth-people, weren't you, tara?" "i hate thievery, and murder." her beautiful moist red lips curved with her scorn. "five of you--just five to represent earth's millions--and you are thieves and murderers. everywhere on earth it is the same. oh, i _know_--my father, he told me. oh, he tried so hard for what is right--" "i know he did, tara. but he was doomed to fail." "and your nations, too--thieves, murderers, just like you individuals." she suddenly seemed to realize that my hand was on hers. as though a viper had stung her she snatched her hand away. "you--earthman! you would dare to touch me! thief! murderer--like all your miserable kind!" she was abruptly sitting erect, quivering with her anger as she spat the words at me. i had drawn back. i was aware that from a nearby door-oval one of the little white zurian guards was coming forward, but tara imperiously waved him away. her small white hand had gone to her furry garment, came back, clutching a small knife of polished stone. little frozen volcano. but the tempestuous fires within her were seething now. for that breathless instant i thought that she was about to spring upon me with the knife. "tara--" i murmured. amazing little creature. was it that subconsciously she realized the irony of her violence, and was ashamed that i should see it? her hand opened and the knife fell to the rug at her side. her flashing, steel-blue gaze like a little sliding sword clashed with mine. then she called out an imperious command in the zurian tongue. from the shadows of the door-oval three guards came leaping at me. "tara--wait! listen--" her furious commands drowned my protests. she was lying back, panting, staring after me as the guards roughly dragged me away. vii i was not killed, as momentarily i had feared, but was flung into a cell. you might call it that--a small cave-like recess off one of the smaller corridors. it seemed a level below the apartment in which tara had been. my captors flung me into it, shoved a heavy stone into the door-slit, barred the stone with a metal fastening and withdrew. more than ever now, the light inherent to the metallic rock-masses of subterranean zura was apparent--a soft luminous glow. left alone, i looked around me. it was somewhat warmer in here. the air was fresh enough. i saw that it was seeping in through many little rifts, an inch or two in width--tiny fissures in the honeycombed walls. there was a couch here, of white skins. i threw myself on it with the sudden realization that i was exhausted, and hungry and thirsty. the latter two needs i could not supply--but presently i had drifted into sleep. i was awakened by the realization that the door-slab was being drawn aside. it was zogg, tara's guard who had taken alan and the others away. he came in with food and water--food that was a fatty, uncooked animal flesh. i drank the water greedily--water different in taste from anything i had had on earth, but it was palatable. the blubbery animal-flesh at first was nauseous, but my hunger made me manage it. i was stiff with chill, but the food warmed me. "thanks," i said. zogg had been standing by the door, watching me impassively. i added: "those friends of mine--what did you do with them? kill them?" "near here. no hurt them," he said. was that irony on his weird, grimacing face? a string of little ornaments hung on his chest now, dangling from his spindly neck. he gestured to them proudly. he was a dignitary here--one of tara's leaders, i surmised. afterward i learned that for years, in fact, he had been simpson's lieutenant--forcing simpson's commands upon the primitive little people, with what autocratic violence i could only guess. a belt of sinew was around his waist, with crude weapons dangling from it. his grimace widened. he swept me with a sidelong glance and again i had the feeling that this zurian was far more intelligent than his weird, to me fantastic, aspect would suggest. his little slit eyes stared at me with a queer sort of cunning, and his grimacing mouth more than ever seemed ironical. it sent a vague shudder through me so that involuntarily i tensed as he came suddenly toward me. "tara send me for you," he said. "she wants see you now." silently i preceded him through the doorway. he followed, guiding me with his brief, guttural english words and with a knife-point prodding my back. we traversed the dim, glowing little tunnel, mounting steadily. i had expected we would emerge into the same apartment where tara had been before, but we did not. abruptly the tunnel ended in a huge glowing open space. the ceiling of this gigantic grotto must have been five hundred feet or more overhead; only a bluish opalescent haze was up there so that i had the feeling that i was outdoors. an ice and rock wall rose to one side of me, through big openings of which i could see the grotto apartment where i had met tara a few hours ago. and here, stretching before me in shining prismatic beauty, was her garden--a smaller, vaulted grotto to my left, into which zogg at once led me. it was an amazing little place of glittering ice formations. from its arching roof, ice hung in great sparkling clusters, like stalactites, in places hanging down to meet the icy stalagmites of the floor, so that there were vaulted little corridors and aisles between them. in other places there were recesses shrouded with a white lacery of frozen moisture--great bridal veils, blue-white, intricate with nature's lacy patterns. a little fairyland of ice. the opalescent sheen of the rocks sparkled on it everywhere with a riot of pastel colors--a soft, prismatic, breath-taking beauty. "this way," zogg said. "tara waits you." * * * * * she was in a small ice glade where furs had been spread, and in a recess, half shrouded with frozen lacery, there was a stone bench fashioned in earth-style. she was standing by the bench. zogg pushed me forward, and at her gesture, he withdrew. i caught a glimpse of his face; his grimace--ironical. "tara--" i began. "sit down--john taine." she waved me to the bench and dropped to the pile of rugs. "you angered me," she said. "i am sorry about that. i am thinking i will have to decide what to do with you--and those men with you whom you say are murderers." i could think of no answer. i could only sit staring at her beauty. the lacery of ice-veils behind her seemed to glorify her with its prismatic pastel glow. "tell me," she murmured, "of your earth-world. is it now what my father feared that always it would be?" "yes," i admitted. "i'm afraid it is." i began telling her of the history of my lifetime. it is horrible, when you think of it, how the events which humans create may be translated into terms of lust and greed, and jealousy and hatred. and the motives of nations--aggression--banditry. "but it isn't all like that," i tried to explain. "there is love, too. and friendship and self-sacrifice. and science to try and heal the sick--to raise the standards of living. xalite will do that. xalite which is apparently of no use to your people, tara." she was staring at me musingly. heaven knows, looking back on it now, i can try to understand her. something within her, frightening her as she talked here alone with me. the urge, hardly to be understood by her, to order me here--to be alone with me. the first young man of her own world whom she had ever seen. emotions, frightening--mingling with the life-long teachings of her fanatic father--his hatred of mankind, so that now what she instinctively felt must have angered as well as terrified her. i had shifted from the bench to the rug beside her. my own emotions were sweeping me. "tara," i murmured impulsively, "i'm going back to earth--and you're going with me." i think she hardly heard me. she drew in her breath with a little hiss at my touch and leaped to her feet. "i shall show you my people," she said. "you will see what my father and i have done here." she led me through the fairyland of the little garden; out through an archway, so that again i seemed outdoors, with the ceiling of this giant grotto high in the luminous haze overhead. and presently we stood on a small rocky height, gazing down upon a primitive little city. it was a brief glimpse--my only glimpse--of the zurian subterranean world. this group of habitations here--one of perhaps a dozen scattered throughout the vast system beneath the wild surface of the little asteroid--i saw as a scattered collection of white little mound-dwellings. stone and frozen moisture, modeled so that families might have privacy. i saw the women there, with dangling hair and breasts; and children, playing in the doorways of the huts. it had been, before tara's lifetime, a much more numerous people. perhaps once they had lived on the asteroid's surface. they were of a different bodily structure from earth-humans--cold-blooded, in comparison with ourselves. then the great change had driven them in here--and killed most of them, so that now, so far as tara knew, only these few thousand were left. "the great change?" i said. "it was when this world first came into the solar system. my father has explained it to me. it happened at about the time of my birth when this world rounded the sun. almost all of them died then. the heat was too terrible to them." * * * * * and that time was coming again! zura now was heading to round the sun, close, between the orbits of mercury and vulcan. already, as i well knew, the little asteroid was inside the orbit of venus.... with the protective blanket of heavy atmosphere, and the fires which doubtless were at the core of the little world, zura, even in the realms of outer interstellar space, had been habitable. but that protective atmospheric blanket was not enough, inside the orbit of mercury! the heat would melt these ice-grottos. already it was melting the outside surface. "and you have no crime here?" i murmured. i could not avoid a faint irony. "nothing ever goes wrong? everyone always does everything exactly right?" we were back in the prismatic little garden, walking down one of its glowing blue-white aisles. she stopped and faced me. "they would not dare do wrong," she said. again her eyes were flashing. "i see," i murmured. "but you have done well, tara. you and your father." and then, some damnable little imp within me made me add: "on earth, tara, our people sometimes resent that their rulers live in palaces, when they can have only a hovel. that room where i met you--and your gardens here--they're very beautiful--" it stung her. i cursed myself for the words, almost as i said them. she leaped to her feet, backed away, panting, in a tumult of hurt and anger. "so all you can do is let me talk and then jibe at me! i--i hate you! you and all your kind!" "oh, tara--i'm sorry. i shouldn't have said that. really, i'm sorry--" "i hate you--" the words died in her throat. behind us, here in the glittering garden, from tara's apartments a group of zurian women came running. they were terrified, calling out to her in their guttural voices. her personal servants. and now, with them, a dozen or more of the little guards appeared. they came from several directions, shouting for tara; confused, panic-stricken, wildly jabbering and gesticulating as they gathered near us. tara's questioning glance crossed with mine. "why--why, what--" she stammered. * * * * * there was a turmoil everywhere here. tara's servants and guards gathering around her in terror. and now we could hear other sounds, coming in through the huge archway from the open grotto-space outside. sounds floating up from the zurian village down the declivity. a distant blended murmur of angry voices. a mob down there, mounting the slope, screaming defiance.... it was as though my words of a moment ago had been prophetic. tara's people had risen now into sudden murderous revolt! "why--why, what is this?" she gasped. amazement swept her face as she listened to the terrified words of one of her servants. and then her beautiful face contorted with anger, her eyes were flashing as she tossed up her head and squared her shoulders. "why--why, how dare they--" she whirled suddenly and dashed through the garden, with me after her, and the panic-stricken guards and servants gathering behind us. at the big archway, where we emerged upon a little ledge-like eminence with a ragged white slope down to the village spread below us, tara paused, stricken by the tumult of the scene. a mob of a thousand or more, men, women and even children, were milling up the broken ascent. a frenzied, menacing mob. most of them carried crude weapons--shafts of pointed ice, knives of polished stone; others primitive implements of agriculture. at tara's appearance on the little height, a great shout went up. those in front, halfway up the slope now, momentarily paused, but the milling throng behind shoved against them, screaming threats, waving their weapons. a leaderless mob? and then i saw the tall figure of zogg. not in the front ranks, but a little farther down. he was shoving, shouting, inciting them forward. then with a prodigious leap he was on a boulder, screaming up at tara, wildly waving at the milling crowd, exhorting them forward. the thought stabbed at me: had the crafty carruthers contrived this? working upon zogg, showing him how he could raise himself into power here in his little world by promising these people things which poor tara had not been able to give them? had carruthers, duroh and alan contrived to be released? in that stricken moment i stared down at the frenzied, milling throng, expecting perhaps to see them down there. but i did not. "tara, good lord--" i gasped. an imperious sweep of her arm shoved me back. then, with her little figure drawn to its full height, she stepped to the brink of the ledge, with her arms raised as she confronted the murderous mob! viii for that instant the imperious, angry figure of tara checked the climbing rabble. their shouts rose higher, but as she grimly gestured, the shouts died into a low muttering murmur. and then she began speaking. for just a moment her imperious words in their own tongue held them. most of them had stopped milling now, staring up at her, muttering sullenly. her voice rose above it. then from his rock, zogg was shouting and the mob caught it up, mutterings that rose again into screams as the rear ranks again began shoving forward. poor little tara. for an instant she tried to shout above the din. and then suddenly she stopped, dropped her arms and on her face was the pathos of disillusionment. her father's ideals, bred in her, clattering down now like a house of cards upon her. the mob, frenzied again, was surging up the slope now. a thrown missile came hurtling past us, a rock that crashed into a lacery of ice-veil above us and brought it down upon us. then other rocks, stones, a variety of missiles showered us. behind me i was aware that the terrified servants and tara's guards had fled. "tara," i gasped. "no use--" i gripped her, trying to draw her away; and she stared at me with eyes in which tears now were gathering. "oh, john--" "come--run," i muttered. "you lead us--out to the upper surface--" we started back into the garden.... "here they are, damn them--" it was duroh's growling, triumphant voice! i whirled. he and carruthers were here in the garden glade, with alan behind them. near them were two or three of the little white zurian guards who evidently had released them. they stood confused as carruthers, snarling, whipped out a heat-gun and leaped for me. its sizzling violet bolt stabbed, missed me as i leaped under it; and i struck him with my lowered head. we went down, rolling, locked together in wild scrambling combat. above us, as we lunged and struggled with flailing fists, i could see that duroh had gestured at alan to help carruthers. he himself had leaped for tara, seized her as she fought like a little wildcat, with a knife in her hand now, trying to stab him. carruthers' gun had dropped from his hand with my onslaught. he was a damnably agile fellow. he twisted on top of me, his hands fumbling at my throat to strangle me. the confused, terrified zurians had decamped. i saw in that second that alan, unarmed, was standing numbed. duroh thought he would leap to finish me up, of course. but he did not. suddenly alan seemed to realize that duroh's huge arms were around tara, his hand twisting the knife from her, his leering, grinning face pressing down with a caress upon hers. and then alan swiftly stooped, seized a blue-white ragged chunk of ice at his feet, and leaped at duroh. the huge ice-chunk crashed on duroh's head and he fell, with the raging little alan upon him, crashing his head again and again. but the knife in duroh's hand was stabbing.... "got you--" carruthers leered. his hands throttled me. he did not see what was going on above him as he sprawled down upon me while momentarily i lay limp. but he didn't have me. my sudden unexpected heave caught him off balance, broke his hold on my throat. and i tumbled him off. the little heat-gun was lying here and i seized it. its bolt seared full into his face, shriveling, blackening the flesh with a ghastly stench. he was dead in that second, with his face a bubbling, pulpy mass of horror. "john--he--he's stabbed--dying--" * * * * * tara's voice called to me as i rose. duroh, with his skull cracked, was dead, and beside him alan lay with duroh's knife buried in his chest, a ghastly crimson stain spreading over his shirt-front. his eyes were open, glazing. they seemed to focus on me, and his lips, on which bloody foam was gathering, twisted into a smile. then he gasped faintly. "i did something worthwhile--in my new world--didn't i? that's--good--i guess i'm--glad--" a gush of blood from his mouth choked him. tara was down beside him, her hand on his. he was trying to smile at her as the light went out of his eyes and he died. "oh, john--" i was aware that the shouts from the oncoming mob were much louder now. rocks were clattering into the arcade opening. "tara--we've got to--" it seemed too late. in the opening three or four of the mob appeared, brandishing their weapons. my gun spat its sizzling bolt. one of the men screamed, leaped and fell. the others scattered as i ran forward. on the ledge, with tara behind me, i stared down at the advancing mob. the first milling ranks of it were hardly more than fifty feet from the top. my bolt hissed again; another man fell.... "john--oh, please--my people--" tara's hand checked me. but i could not be sure, if we tried to retreat, but that the frenzied throng would be able to overtake us. then with sudden thought i adjusted the gun to a spreading heat-beam. the wave of heat leaped down--again and again--heat diffused over a wide area, not intense enough to kill. but before it the leaders of the zurians staggered back, terrified, with their hands before their faces. the mob behind them wavered. down at the bottom of the slope, others were pressing upward. in a moment it was a milling, scrambling crowd with panic spreading. and then the wavering ranks of it began rolling back until it was a rout.... "tara, come--hurry--they'll be after us in a moment--" * * * * * white-faced, with sorrow in her eyes mingled with wonderment, as though still she could not believe this catastrophe, she nodded. she led me as we ran, plunging down into the maze of tortuous corridors. breathless, panting, we ran; rested a moment in a dim, glowing passage--and ran again. "oh, john--" "don't talk, tara--keep going--" it seemed that we could hear muffled shouts far behind us. but presently we outdistanced them, and then at last, after an eternity, we came safely out onto the upper surface. it was night; glittering starlight on this doomed little world, heading for the heat of our giant sun. and there, quite near us, was the dark little globe of the _planeteer_, with the starlight glittering on its glassite dome-top. "wait, tara--just a moment--" unexpectedly, here on the sloshing half-melted surface, i came upon the pickaxe, shovel and big canvas bags, which carruthers had dropped here when we were captured. the sword-slash of gray xalite ore was visible, a gleaming inlay in the cliff-face nearby. i ran there. it chipped out readily under the axe and then i shoveled it up, stuffed a hundred pounds or so of it into a bag and staggered away. the _planeteer_. never was anything so welcome as that lower little door-oval. i tossed the bag into it. barely in time. from over by the cliff, the first of the pursuing zurians were pouring out. "hurry! get inside, tara--i'll close the door--" mutely she obeyed. the oncoming zurians were led by a huge figure. zogg. grimly i leveled my gun, sizzled a bolt which struck him full, crumpled him. it checked the others for a moment as i slammed the _planeteer's_ door and with tara rushed up to its upper control turret. the mechanisms hummed as they went into operation. and then slowly, silently, we lifted. the zurians were in a horde down there around the _planeteer_, milling and scrambling. a few of them dropped off as we rose, up into the starlight with the strange little world sliding away beneath us. * * * * * "tell me more of what i will see on earth," tara said. the _planeteer's_ journey was nearing its end. in the pale glittering starlight, tara and i sat in the control room, watching the approaching earth, which was spread in a great crescent before us. "you're too warm, tara?" "no, i'm getting used to it." "the cold, on zura--you never felt it?" "i was born to that," she said. "my father, when i was a little girl, he did everything to make me fitted for it. but i will like earth's warmth." then again, as a hundred times before, i was telling her of earth--the things that we were going to do there together. she was seated now on a blanket on the floor-grid. her knees were hunched up to her chin, with her hands clasping them and her eager little face over her rounded knees turned to me. just an interested little earthgirl, making plans. and presently i sat beside her on the blanket, with my arm around her, and her head tilted so that her cheek was resting against my shoulder. then we fell silent as we stared out to the approaching crescent of earth. good or bad--our world. asteroid h --plus by harry walton it was a pretty web that akars spun aboard the sun-freighter _cinnabar_.... mass murder and piracy! but he wasn't clever enough to allow for the innocent-sounding asteroid charted as "h --plus." [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories summer . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] jon akars, petty officer of the sun line freighter _cinnabar_, backed away from the jimmied manifold of the air circulators and hastily felt for the emergency mask at his belt. any moment now the venusian _kui-knor_ he had filched from the ship's medicine cabinet and dropped into the circulators would take effect. without warning men would drop at their posts, apparently insensible, rigid of muscle, eyes staring fixedly. actually, they would be keenly aware of everything about them, their senses sharpened rather than dulled by the drug. but it was no part of akars' plans to be one of them. he strapped on the mask, and, at the sound of approaching footsteps, shrank back into the shadows of the machines. an officer peered into the circulator chamber for an instant, then marched on down the corridor. akars chuckled. box jordan _was_ part of his plan; in a way, he had a star role. but not an enviable one. nor, to be sure, were the remainder of the _cinnabar's_ crew going to be particularly lucky. the luck of the scheme was reserved for akars himself, and it involved four kilos of precious urulium which box jordan had unearthed during an emergency landing on an unexplored planetoid. jordan had been fool enough to turn the stuff over as a ship's prize, to be equally divided. but with the metal on board, it was inevitable that a smarter man would see and grasp the chance that was offered. akars was that man. he waited until the circulation meters told him that the _kui-knor_ had been diffused through every cubic foot of air in the ship, then softly trod the steelene-walled corridor back to the navigating compartment. the sight there was a gruesome one. captain cardigan was slumped over the chart table, glassy-eyed, to all appearance dead. but he wasn't dead, akars knew. the captain and the chief petty officer and the second navigator and the supercargo--all sprawled in grotesque attitudes about the compartment, all staring vacantly into space, were in the grip of an artificially induced coma. deliberately akars walked over and kicked captain cardigan in the chest. cardigan's face remained impassive, the eyes expressionless, yet there was a barely perceptible quiver that told the blow had hurt. akars grinned and landed another, then scowled and rubbed his ear with the back of a hairy hand. it was the first navigator, box jordan, whom he owed a special grudge. he'd nursed special ideas for jordan, the agony of broken bones, of a merciless beating, before death should wipe him out. but jordan wasn't here. built into the chart table was the fireproof compartment that held the ship's log. akars removed the bulky volume, opened it upon the table, and ripped out the last four page entries, crumpling the thin metallic foil before throwing it to the floor. with the log would perish all records of the urulium find; if any spaceman's notes or diary held mention of it the _cinnabar's_ fate would destroy that also. akars moved toward the control board, grasped the refrigeration controls, swung them to "off." immediately alarm bells clanged warning. he could feel the horror which his act engendered in the men who helplessly watched it--something of that horror chilled even him. for without refrigeration the fuel tanks would quickly warm up. the compressed gaseous fuel, held inert only by refrigeration, would spontaneously explode. the _cinnabar_, by that simple movement of two levers, was doomed. * * * * * the alarm bells echoed madly about him as he left the navigation compartment and walked further aft, to the stern deck where the ship's tender nestled against her hull. an airtight telescoping tube connected parent ship and life ship, and akars saw that the manhole cover was slid aside. someone was either in the tender or had just left it--perhaps one of the spacemen now lying beside the manhole--on a routine maintenance job. akars climbed the short ladder into the life ship's tiny control compartment. lamps were burning, but there was nobody in the compartment, nor in the little vessel's supply compartment, engine room, or living quarters. satisfied, akars checked food stores, fuel and air gauges with keen satisfaction. everything was in perfect order. his scheme couldn't fail. only a fool would have let a chance like this slip by. then, thinking of jordan again, akars cursed. the lean, red-headed first navigator had been poison to him ever since joining the ship. jordan hadn't been afraid of him. other officers had excused or overlooked badly done or neglected work--box jordan never. the red-head had tongue-lashed akars too often, and akars had promised himself a meeting with jordan--jordan helpless, paralyzed, but fully conscious and able to feel every blow that fury could inflict. now it seemed he was to be cheated of that. the clanging alarm reminded him that time was dangerously short. soon the tanks would let go; he couldn't afford to be near the doomed freighter when the exploding fuel did its work. without glancing back, he shut the entrance port, pressed the button that collapsed the escape tube, and took his place at the glowing controls of the little vessel. the _cinnabar's_ death knell was muffled now. like a tocsin of the dead, it rang dully in his ears as he reached for the levers. but confidence returned as he felt the familiar handles beneath him. the life ship was complete, self-sufficient. charts were reduced to a simple form, instruments were direct-reading, course plotting almost automatic, so that the commonest spaceman could navigate the tender at need. he had himself operated it during the _cinnabar's_ emergency landing a month ago. he punched the internal-combustion engines into life, watched the generator output mount, then cut in a weak repulsion field. with a lurch the little ship tore free from its parent vessel and retreated from the long, gleaming shape of the freighter. he switched over to the space-induction field coils. power thrummed in the depths of the tiny craft; it swerved about and obediently plunged ahead, fleeing the coming tragedy. after ten minutes at full field he turned it around and held it motionless in space with respect to the now distant _cinnabar_. the slim freighter, gleaming gold in the light of the distant sun, seemed to float upon a soft, star-sprinkled darkness. there was no trace of movement, although she was still flying, with untended engines, at three-quarters field. he bit his lips, waiting. then, soundlessly, catastrophe struck! * * * * * from amidships flowered a terrible, consuming blossom of blue-white flame, a petalled fire that engulfed the _cinnabar_ from bow to stem and limned itself fantastically against the velvet heavens behind. streamers of white-hot gas, sunlike in intensity, burst and flared in the brief glory of destruction, then as swiftly collapsed upon themselves, dimmed to the lesser glow of molten metal. the _cinnabar_, a slender, white-hot needle, broke into a thousand dripping fragments, droplets of fire spattering the sky. akars chuckled uneasily, swore, rubbed his ear with the back of a hand. that was that. somewhere in the swirling, far-flung wreckage he must find the tiny block of unbelievably heavy, practically indestructible urulium, flung out of the shattered strong room which he could have penetrated in no other way. the explosion should have released the treasure and wiped out all evidence against him at the same time. like the rest of his plan it was simple, direct, foolproof. he flung the little tender back through space toward the glowing debris which now milled about itself, spinning about a common center. a few fragments had ripped free from the gravitational whirlpool of the rest. he dodged a piece half as large as the life ship itself. red hot still, it swept past the port, more like a blazing meteor than anything, made by man. past other wreckage he swept, evidence of the terrific energy of spontaneously exploded fuel--gruesome human debris as well as that of the _cinnabar_ itself. the temperature within the tender climbed slowly as it absorbed heat from glowing fragments outside. uneasily he checked his own fuel refrigerator, turned thermostatic controls to maintain a lower temperature. something swept into his field of vision with startling speed. he ripped the helm over, swearing in sudden panic. the tender swerved, but not sharply enough. a grating shock, a metallic crash, told that the vessel had been hit. the jar of the concussion almost threw him from the control seat. his temples throbbing madly, akars waited for the dread hiss of escaping air, the drop in pressure which his ear drums would quickly detect. the tender was small; a gash in the hull plates would empty it of air rapidly. but the pressure remained normal, and he relaxed at last, certain that the collision had done no more than dent the hull plates. he forgot the incident upon spying what had been the strong room door. cautiously he worked the tender alongside it, scanning nearby debris closely. it took him fifteen minutes to find the thick-walled copper casket containing the treasure, scarred by impact, half fused by the terrific heat even though it had been protected by the walls of the strong room from the brunt of it. he knew that its precious contents could have suffered no harm, and carefully manipulated the ship's grappling mechanism until the casket was safely inside the tender's loading port. he swung the life ship about and drove for clear space. so easy it had been! a few minutes of effort had won him ten times as much as other men earned during a lifetime of hard, dangerous work in the space-lanes. lucky he wasn't squeamish by nature. this way he was safe. every witness against him was dead. his own word would be taken as gospel truth. already he had planned every detail of the story--how he had been on routine inspection of the tender when the explosion started forward, in the fuel tanks. how the life ship, with him aboard, had been blown free by the blast--how he had barely managed to close the port in time to escape suffocation--how from the tender he had witnessed the destruction of the _cinnabar_, and how--a touching detail this--he had cruised back into the wreckage in search of survivors, but found none. he would not try to explain the explosion. the lethally dangerous nature of the fuel would answer all doubts. nobody could suspect him. just before landing he would transfer the urulium to his own duffle bag--a new one, of course, stocked with clothing taken from the tender's supplies. a welding torch would reduce the copper casket to a lump of reddish metal. he would dispose of a little urulium illegally, outfit a one-man ship with the proceeds, and go on a prospecting cruise from which he could return with a legitimate store of the precious stuff. disposed of to the martians, who valued it as a healing agent, the four kilograms would bring a fortune. * * * * * he pushed the little ship to top speed, which was slow at best. hour after hour he hurled its silvery nose toward the distant stars, on a course which his charts told him led to earth. mars, smaller than his own world, was on the other side of the sun. it was on earth that automatic cameras would have snapped the explosion of the _cinnabar_. perhaps salvage ships were already on their way; in a few hours he might meet them. glancing at the chronometer, he saw that it was safe to remove his mask. the last vestige of _kui-knor_ which might have entered the tender from the _cinnabar_ would have decomposed by now. by this time it would also have decomposed in the blood of the drugged men had any remained alive to experience it. "akars! blast my orbit, what happened?" he whirled at the voice, all his fear surging up within him, choking him. in the doorway stood box jordan, his tall, lean figure swaying a little, keen eyes questioning. "jordan! i--where d'you come from?" "routine inspection forward. i was checking the fuel tanks, started to back out of the tank compartment when i froze up. couldn't move a toe." the navigator's sharp eyes narrowed. "what happened?" "happened?" akars fought the panic in his voice, the fear of this man who was not afraid of him. "nothing much--just that the _cinnabar_ blew up." "blew up! you mean we're the only survivors?" akars shrugged. "i thought i was, until you popped up. of course i looked around. there wasn't anybody else--" he stood up, stretching. "if you'll take over a while, i'll get the kinks out of me." for an instant jordan hesitated. akars watched him closely. he suspected, of course--knew that he had been drugged. even when under the _kui-knor_, he must have felt the tender pull away from the _cinnabar_, and that without any evidence of an explosion. in a moment he would add things up, reaching the only possible conclusion. desperately akars glanced about for a weapon. and jordan, with a queer twisted smile, walked forward--not toward the pilot's seat, but toward akars. those big bony hands of his were working. his very silence was terrible. akars flattened himself against a wall. big as he was, he knew himself to be no match for the hard-muscled first navigator. aroused as the latter now was, he would be doubly dangerous. akars clawed the bare wall, breathing hard. "you drugged the air-cycle," said jordan. "you shut off the refrigerators and took off in the tender. you stood by while the _cinnabar_ went to hell, with every man aboard her. then you went back and picked up the urulium--" "no!" screamed akars. "no! i swear i didn't--" jordan's hard fingers closed over his windpipe, crushed in his throat like a steel clamp tightened about it. he could feel his eyes bulging from their sockets, his body turning cold and dwindling away from him. he slumped suddenly, as though unconscious. a moment longer jordan held him in that terrible grip, then flung him away. akars hit the wall, collapsed into a huddled heap, gasping and retching as breath passed his bruised throat. he took his time, gathering strength, sure that jordan would not attack him while he was down. desperation lent him courage. concerned, there was nothing to do but fight it out. he wouldn't let the navigator get another throat hold. pretending to be weaker than he was, akars lurched to his feet. he had a plan now, and warily circled jordan before closing in. then he plunged forward, ducked a swift uppercut, took a solid body blow that left him gasping--but reached the wall behind jordan which was his objective. a rack of oxygen tanks for use with space suits was fastened there. akar's hands tore one free--a slender, blunt-ended cylinder, massive enough to be a dangerous club. as jordan closed in akars brought it down on the navigator's left arm, which fell limp. with a bellow of triumph akars struck for the head. jordan, still drug-hazy and crippled in one arm, took the blow on a temple. it stopped him like a shot; he crumpled to one knee and fell. breath rattling in his swollen throat, akars stared into the hated face and wondered whether he should finish the job with a few more blows. caution whispered consent, but still he hesitated. this was box jordan. _box jordan!_ why kill him like this? he wanted jordan to know what was coming--to know it as long as possible. it struck him then that killing jordan wasn't as simple as it seemed. found aboard the tender, jordan's body would convict him. flung into space, this far from the _cinnabar_ disaster, it would provoke awkward questions--unanswerable questions--when discovered. here was an unexpected flaw in a scheme that had looked foolproof! cursing, akars pulled the chart book toward him. * * * * * he had tied jordan's feet and fastened his hands behind him, lashed to a wall railing. in a supply closet he had found a paralysis gun, which he now wore in a side holster. for these and other reasons he was as confident, when jordan showed signs of returning life, as he had been at first. grinning, he watched the navigator stir and weakly sit up. "coming out of it, are you? listen to me, jordan. i've got the urulium aboard. want to come in on this with me?" jordan rubbed his temple tenderly. "i suppose there isn't much choice--" akars chuckled. "you'll come in, huh? and spill the first chance you get. i'd be asking for the mercury mines if i took you back. skip it, jordan. i was kidding." "so was i." the navigator smiled crookedly. "but when it comes to teaming up with a rat, i'm ashamed of myself for even kidding about it." akars struck out--a hard flat hand blow that rocked jordan's head and left red welts on his cheek. "you know what? i've got your spot picked out. nice and cool. no air, except what'll be in your suit tank. and about as much chance of rescue as an ice cube in hell--" he picked up the chart book and with ruffled brow turned its alumin-foil pages, his tongue between his lips. the page found, he held it before jordan. "see that? a dinky space-apple that's been passed up by every claiming bureau in the system. ten miles through. just big enough to keep you from drifting free where a nosy patrolship might find you. it's the nearest asteroid--i'd dump you on pluto if it weren't out of my way." "asteroid h plus," read jordan calmly. "not exactly exciting. why not ray me here and chuck out the remains?" akars swore. "because you're supposed to be with what's left of the _cinnabar_--damn you. i can't take you back there--salvage ships may be out by now. and i can't throw you out where you may be picked up by a patrol. i've got to ditch you where you'll stay put--" "so it's h plus for me?" murmured jordan. "the plus part of it sounds interesting. what does it mean, akars?" "how the hell would i know? and what do you care? you won't live long enough to worry about it." but akars himself was worrying as the asteroid floated into sight. he'd had to go off-course to reach it, when he should be making a bee-line for earth. there was a slight chance that the tender might be observed stopping here--a risk he had to take, but which could be minimized by haste. to cut the time shorter he'd let jordan wear a space suit and walk out of the airlock. that would save time. otherwise, if he killed jordan on board, there would be some delay while he disposed of the body. besides, there was a savage satisfaction in marooning the navigator alive, in letting him live out those last hopeless hours in slow torture of body and mind. akars himself shuddered as he thought of it--the fate reserved for murderers taken aboard ship. a ten hour tank of oxygen--and a barren island of the sky such as this. * * * * * asteroid h plus was a bleak lump of pitted rock, roughly oval in shape, gleaming where the sunlight fell, pitch-black in the shadows. no ship would ever come close enough to it to make out a man's body, even if it lay in the light. in fact, space-ships avoided such masses as this just as the ancient steamers avoided icebergs. the chance of rescue was practically non-existent. "almost there, aren't we?" asked jordan from the floor. "what do i do--a swan dive from the emergency lock?" akars shut off power, held the tender immovable by a weak repulsion field, and freed the navigator's feet. "you get in a suit--and don't try any tricks or i'll beam you." he watched sharply as jordan meekly obeyed and climbed into the stiff canvas garment. akars set the helmet over his head and fastened the rim studs, tearing off the collar bridge bearing the legend "_ss cinnabar_." "if you ever are found, you won't be recognized. they say a body loses heat slowly enough for decomposition to make a good start, in one of these suits. when we land, you close your face plate and go out through the lock." he watched jordan narrowly as he jockeyed the ship closer to the tiny asteroid. without knowing why, he was uneasy. jordan was a fighter. funny he'd go out like this, the hard way, without a scrap. but what could he do? if he didn't march out of the lock under his own power, akars could beam him and throw him out through the loading port. asteroid h plus swam up to meet the ship. akars picked his landing spot and reduced his repulsion field carefully. the ship settled. jordan seemed to stiffen expectantly. akars lifted the paralysis gun from its holster. directly beneath the basalt blackness of the asteroid shimmered oddly with a strange translucent light. akars swore softly. there couldn't be anything down there. a trick of the sunlight--perhaps the shadow of the ship? but it was queer. maybe he shouldn't land--just make jordan jump from the ship. that was it. his eyes flickered to the navigator, stiff as a ramrod now, with that tense air of waiting for something to happen. akars tightened his grip on the gun, jerked his eyes back to the asteroid--and froze with fear. from the basalt surface leaped a fountain of fire--cold leaping fire licking upward at the ship. he jerked the controls over to full repulsion, screamed in terror as the ship dipped further instead of rising. an electrical flame sprang to meet it--a snapping, snarling fury of saw-edged lightning. incredulously he saw it leave the prow of the vessel, flicker back to strike white flame from the hull plates just over the fuel tanks forward. a muffled roar beat upon his ears. flame billowed forth before the pilot glass. the ship trembled and shuddered to the force of unleashed gases; acrid fumes swirled over the control board and seeped from the very floor plates beneath his feet. through drifting smoke he saw the deck curl back, white hot, and drift lazily out of sight like a burnt leaf. his ear drums snapped as air fled into space. vaguely he saw the black surface of the asteroid fly upward, felt a crunch and crash of metal as it exploded in his face, and fell through senseless darkness.... * * * * * "so you're alive?" it was box jordan's voice, akars realized as he awoke to painful consciousness. parts of him seemed to be on fire. he was wearing a space suit, as jordan was, and they were no longer in the ship, but on the asteroid. "hard time getting you into a suit when the ship's air went," remarked the navigator, his voice loud in akars' earphones. "of course i knew what was coming and had only to close my face plate, just as you told me. but i wanted to save you particularly. they need good, tough murderers like you at the mines. some last as long as five years, i hear." akars tried to sit up, discovered that he was bound--and that jordan had the paralysis gun now. "i found the urulium," continued the navigator. "the _cinnabar's_ widows and orphans will get their share, after all." "what happened?" asked akars thickly. "that explosion--" "only a feeble imitation of the _cinnabar's_. don't forget that her fuel exploded spontaneously--with a thousand times the force. in our case the fuel was inert, because our refrigeration didn't fail. it _burnt_, once ignited, but without an explosion--just as i expected. what i didn't tell you, akars, was that the collision you had near the wrecked _cinnabar_ knocked a hole in one fuel tank. i was lying almost against it--almost froze, too--and for hours i could hear fuel leaking out through the rip. not much--just enough to catch fire when that spark hit us, and to carry back and ignite the whole tank." akars groaned. "that spark--that damn spark!" jordan was staring into space. he rose and looked long, then sat down again. "we're rescued, akars. naturally the salvage ships kept a lookout for the missing life ship and saw the flare-up here. they'll arrive soon." "that spark!" groaned akars. "what the devil was it?" "that was what you weren't interested in, akars. the 'plus' of h plus. did you know that the earth and most planets are negatively charged--have a surplus of electrons? and that our ships are also negatively charged--in fact super-charged because of the driving fields we use? a planetoid or asteroid with a simple name or number is also negative and no precautions are necessary. but a 'plus' following the designation means it is positively charged, whether because of interacting gravitational fields, internal radio-activity, or induction between the body and an atmosphere or some other reason. when an accredited navigator has to land on a 'plus' body he orders a careful check of all fuel tanks, because he knows there will be a heavy electrical discharge between it and the ship just before landing. but you didn't know that-- "another thing you didn't know, being a petty and not a commissioned officer, is that a new i.t.c. ruling requires an exact duplicate of the ship's log to be kept aboard life tenders at all times. just before i went back to the tanks i replaced that duplicate log book. you took it along, akars, and i found it when i found the urulium, safe and sound in its fireproof case. that's what will convict you, akars--not my words, but the story of the urulium find and my turning it over as a ship's prize, written and signed by captain cardigan himself. the i.t.c. would have found that duplicate log anyhow, akars. you never really had a chance to get away with it. funny, isn't it? funny how dumb a smart guy can be...." asteroid of the damned by dirk wylie somewhere on that asteroid of sin lurked the crime king of the universe. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories summer . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "sorry, son," maccauley said with the barrel-scrapings of his patience. "i said no and i meant it. i haven't got anything to give you. now please stop waggling at me and go." the excited glitter of the palladian's luminiferous eyes died dispiritedly. maccauley turned his back on the slight-bodied asterite and rapped his thumbnail against his drained glass. the bartender, a heavy and humorous man, expertly refilled mac's glass with oily, musky, milk-white synthetic liquor and said: "this kiddie bothering you? scat, you, or i'll see that you never get into this place again." mac shrugged as he watched the stripling strain to catch the bartender's meaning by reading his lips, then mournfully disappear. "no more than they all do," he answered. "what's the matter with them, anyhow? they're positively nutty on the subject of money." the bartender shook his head and snatched a quick drag on a smoldering cigar-stub. replacing it on a ledge, he said: "not money so much. you couldn't bribe a kiddie with a certified check for a couple of billion dollars. they're not bright, exactly; they don't regard paper as worth anything. it's metal they want. if it happens to be precious, that's all right, but any kind of metal will do. what they're really crazy about, of course, is silver and copper. they'll do just about anything for it, including murder and treason." mac, listening too intently, gulped a bit more of his drink than even his spaceman's gullet could take. when the red-hot lava stopped strangling him and he could see once more through the streaming fountains that had been his eyes, he managed to choke out: "what do they want it for? do they eat it?" the bartender laughed. "nah. they don't really eat anything. they drink some kind of stuff they find in the rocks--like they used to find petroleum, on earth. radioactive, this stuff is. that's all they need to live on. they don't breathe at all. you can see that; they don't even have a mouth or a real nose, just a sort of trunk that they drink through.... wait a minute. be back." the bartender rolled away. a couple of new customers had come into his side of the bar and were demanding attention. mac sighed and glanced at his watch. but the bartender was back and ready for more talk before mac had made up his mind to leave. the bartender wanted to talk because this was a dull night in the cafe attached to pallas' largest gambling-room; for the same reason, maccauley wanted to leave. he was here on business. * * * * * however, he might need to know something about the natives of pallas for his business. and he really was shockingly uninformed about the creatures who inhabited the free-port asteroid. other than that they were called kiddies, looked like seven-year-old earthly children, and didn't breathe, he really knew nothing. "then what do they do with this metal if they don't eat it?" he asked. the bartender shrugged. "they probably know, but they're too dopey to be able to tell you. i asked one of them once--he wrote out an answer, the way they always do when they want to tell you something. seems they generate electricity in their bodies. a palladian's idea of a real good time is to take a hunk of pure copper and hold it in his hands. the current runs from one hand to the other. they are like that. this one claimed that each metal gave them a different kind of thrill." "all right if you like," maccauley said absently. "me, i'll take my jolts out of a bottle." "was that an order for another drink?" the bottle was already in the fat man's hands. maccauley nodded, and glanced again at the time. he swallowed the poisonous liquor as fast as he could manage; then took one last quick look around the bar to make sure. yep, he was wasting time here. the place was practically empty. he paid his check in earth-american dollars, and passed on to the main game room. like everything else in pallas, it was completely underground, with a purely artificial atmosphere. artificial, in fact, was the word for pallas. everything about it was synthetic; there wasn't a figment of reality to be found in it. all that pallas had to offer visitors was freedom from most of the more pressing laws of the more civilized--and larger--worlds. that, and the kiddies, the peculiar race that had been found on the small asteroid when the first space-explorers got there. everything that pallas had, it owed to the fact that, in essence, it had nothing. no minerals worth the cost of extraction; no agriculture; no science; no artifacts; no history. it was so totally useless that the major worlds of the system had declared, "hands off!" and to that fact pallas owed the liberality of laws that made it a refuge for fugitives from the tri-planet justice, as well as a planet-sized gambling den. maccauley curled the tip of his nose when he got a whiff of the atmosphere. it had been bad enough in the bar--thin, moist air, representing a compromise between the atmospheres of earth, mars and venus; enjoyable to the members of none of the races from those planets, but just barely breathable to all. that atmosphere, even when pure, was obnoxious. and here, in the densely-packed main hall, it was really foul. there was something about venusians, mac decided, that he didn't like. it wasn't their fault, of course, that they had evolved in a wet climate, and had distinct auras of unearthly b.o. in consequence of their need to perspire. but it wasn't his fault, either, and he didn't see why he should suffer for it. * * * * * mentally holding his nostrils, he waded into the reek and halted by a magneto-roulette table. a casual observer, maccauley hoped, would think he was engrossed in watching the game. actually he was carefully scrutinizing each of the score of players and spectators at the table. somewhere in this motley mob made of the dwellers of a half-dozen planets there might be a cool, level-headed, thoroughly dangerous man, the brains of the syndicate that was flooding earth and venus with narcophene. that drug was the most formidable in the history of narcotics. you chewed it--if you were insane or ignorant!--and you felt nothing but a pleasant coolness on your tongue. there weren't any mad hallucinations of grandeur; you never lost consciousness of what you were doing or who you were. just, without your consciously realizing it, you felt better all around. things that should have worried you sick seemed trivial; you could laugh at the specter of sickness or agony or anything, however fearsome that endangered or injured you. the drug had a certain medical value; it was used to prevent total insanity in persons suffering from utterly incurable and horribly painful diseases. for with them it didn't matter that the narcophene habit was permanent, once acquired; they didn't have to fear the mental and moral and eventually physical collapse that was bound to come. they were as good as dead anyhow. but for others.... and the man who had reorganized the once-smashed industry of manufacturing and smuggling it was on pallas now. that much the home office of tri-planet law knew, and had told mac. that was all their best operatives on the inner planets had been able to dig up, and from that point onward ... nothing. those who could have told more were addicts, and those who had tried to tell more were dead. murdered. there was a tpl office on pallas, of course, but it was a one-man outfit. and the one man seemed thoroughly incompetent, for this job, at least. his reports had shown him to be unable to even begin the job of tracking down the man. hence, maccauley. for the sake of appearances, maccauley threw a bill on number , lost it, and moved on. nobody in the neighborhood of that table corresponded to the vague physical description he'd been able to glean from the scanty reports. nor, he found, did anyone in the house. that didn't prove anything, of course, except that the man mac was after wasn't at this particular place at the time; or, naturally, that the description maccauley'd been given was wrong from the ground up, but that wasn't a thing to think about. he shrugged and moved toward the exit. the room was packed worse than ever; he had to shove his way through. he kept bumping into people, he noticed--then looked around. it wasn't so much that he was bumping into people, he found, as that people, represented by the kiddie, were nudging him. "oh, for the lord's sake!" he cried tiredly. "i tell you i won't give you anything. now get away from me. and stay away, if you want to keep living." the kiddie shrank into himself and seemed to whimper voicelessly. the glow-glands set around his eyes shone a pinkish purple of fright. he started to say something--in the primitive sign-language that his race used to communicate with aliens--but halted the gesture and abruptly turned and slunk away. his slight frame, the size and appearance of a seven-year-old boy's, vanished almost immediately in the pack of hulking venusians and attenuated, pallid stick-men from mars. maccauley didn't pursue him; there was no reason, of course, for him to do so. * * * * * but that, "of course," like so many others, was wrong. there was a definite reason for mac to follow the metals-mad asterite. mac found the reason when he reached the cloakroom. he reached in his pocket to tip the pretty terrestrial check-girl--and found not even a pocket. just a slit that had been made not more than ten minutes before, through which the pocket itself and contents had been neatly extracted. presumably by the kiddie. "damn!" was the best mac could do, but he said it with feeling. he was casting about in his mind for something he could say to the girl that might make her forget about tips when he saw the kiddie himself, luminescing a vivid green, scuttling out the front door. "hey!" he yelled, and it wasn't only a desire to get away that kept the kiddie from looking around; he couldn't hear any more than he could speak. language failing, mac took stronger measures. he left his sport-silk jacket on the arm of the bewildered girl and sprinted after the kiddie. intercepting him just previous to the door, he swung the palladian around and gestured with frantic anger. the kiddie, with a surprising show of strength in so frail a body, attempted no answer or denial of the charge of theft, but wrenched himself free and darted out the door. mac, following, met the inevitable. when the luck of the maccauleys ran bad, it stayed bad--or worse. he collided with a fat and pugnacious drunk. not only collided with him but knocked the wind out of him. if it hadn't been that the drunk had an equally drunk and volatile companion, that would have been all right. as it was, mac found himself on the receiving end of a pale, knuckly venusian fist. he was flat on the floor before he realized he'd been hit. then began the real trouble. somebody yelled, "oh, boy! a fight!" and leaped joyously on mac with a pair of magno-caulked spaceman's boots. what happened after that got worse and worse. everybody in the gambling joint seemed to have mayhem in their hearts. practically to a man, they poured out and joined in the free-for-all. half the floating population of pallas seemed to have come to rest on maccauky's solar plexus by the time he heard the soft, popping noises from the weapons of the house's private army of bouncers and trouble-shooters. when maccauley next found himself able to look around he was out in the half-hearted illumination of the street, sick and weak from the effect of the gas pellets which had quelled the riot. and without a penny to his name. * * * * * it would have been foolhardy to have left his money in the "safe" at the hotel, though there was slight comfort in that thought. one place was as good as another on pallas, where laws were made for the sheer pleasure of violating them; the native palladians, shifty and unmoral as they were, were hopelessly outclassed in dishonesty by the civilized men of the inner planets. the one law all respected was the law of pure and applied force. mac fumbled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket and thought miserably of going to the police. miserably, because the native police force was a joke and a mockery, maintained more to put the squeeze on innocent foreigners than for any other reason. which shows how naive the asterites were; there was nothing innocent about most of the foreigners that came to the tiny planet. even the tpl post on the asteroid was powerless, shackled by diplomatic necessities to the pretence that the thick-witted palladians were capable of running their own world. "hands off!" was the watch-word. his swollen eyes squinting at the fluoro-flame lamps set in the rocky ceiling of the tunneled street, maccauley sighed heavily, feeling the full weight of his predicament. all his money had been on him. all that was left of his money was a memory and a neat little slit just under the zip-seal flap of his hip pocket. and on pallas, where it was dog eat dog and the devil help the one who lacked a full set of teeth, money was the means of obtaining dental attention. yes, mac was in a mess, for all his kit, including the last can of terrestrial cigarettes, were in the hotel room; even his blasters, the slim, wicked pistols that projected a vibratory pencil-beam that destroyed flesh and neural fibers and left the brain watery pulp, were locked up in that dark little rat-hole up near the top of pallas' single, buried city. mac was weaponless, except for a tempered bronze knife in his shirt, on an outlaw world where a swift attack was the best insurance against sudden death. his hotel bill was payable every twenty-four hours, and his period of grace had expired. pallas being first and foremost a gambling planet, it wasn't at all uncommon for a man to check into the best suite a hotel could offer, his money-belt fat and heavy with a half-million in platinum credits; leave in the early afternoon for a little fling at the tables, and come back in the evening asking apologetically if he might borrow the price of a shave so he could look nice on the trip back home. for that was the rule: no money, out you go and your baggage held by right of a lockout. everything on pallas was operated by the same ruling--cash strictly in advance. and to make sure that no floaters were left to the dubious charity of the planetoid, there was another standing rule. a law, this time; a duly enacted law of the palladian legislature and the sole ordinance that was enforced by the foreign-sponsored native authorities. before a visitor was admitted to pallas, he was first made to post a bond equal to his passage back home. and that could not be touched or refunded until he left. maccauley groaned aloud and looked about him. walking blindly and without thinking, very easy in the light gravity of low-powered magna-gravs, he had entered a part of the sealed city new to him. * * * * * he was in the native quarter, at the planetoid's core, where the asterites were as thick as red dust on mars--and for the first time mac saw a kiddie policeman. he was wearing no more clothing than the rest of his kind, just carried a staff of office, like the old bow street runners. an idea suddenly made contact in maccauley's mind. he signaled the officer and dragged out a notebook and pencil, unnecessarily, as it happened. the kiddie, in sinuous gestures, signified that he could understand english, partly by lip-reading, partly by picking up the sound in some weird fashion through rock-conduction and the sensitive soles of his splay feet. mac, enunciating carefully, spoke. "one of your people has robbed me. i want him arrested. where do i go?" the kiddie bobbed his head, and from the manner in which his luminiferous glands sparkled balefully, it was evident where he thought maccauley should go. nevertheless, he snapped out _his_ little pad and stylus, and scrawled: "commi wih me tu offic he wil arange arest." maccauley deciphered the scribble. he shrugged and said, "okay. hop to it, sonny." he walked beside the diminutive policeman for a few hundred feet, glancing incuriously at the small burrows which pierced the rock walls and kicking away chunks of the queer, spongy rock on which the kiddies subsisted, the equivalent of earthly garbage. he should have thought of the cops before, he realized. the kiddies, as a race, were not numerous, and he could probably bully them into finding the thief and recovering his money. after all, why not? he soon found out. the lolling half-breed venusian interpreter who loafed around the ratty, worm-infested police station heard his complaint and deftly translated it for the benefit of a moth-eaten kiddie who seemed to be as much in charge here as anyone else. maccauley drew an easy breath, his first in two hours, and then-- the interpreter sing-songed, "forty earth-dollars, please. filing fee." maccauley's eyes narrowed. the old squeeze play. "don't be a sap," he said flatly, his thin lips tight against his teeth. "i haven't got forty cents. that little louse took everything that was in my pocket." the venusian smirked, and regarded his greenish, webbed hand with great interest. "that is very bad, my friend," he said, and flicked a flea from a fold in the skin of his wrinkled wrist. "here on pallas we have a law; the citizens must be protected. when a foreigner makes an accusation against a citizen, it is quite possible that he is wrong, and a great injustice will have been done. as you know, there is only one way to soothe a palladian ... money." maccauley cursed bitterly, harsh, biting oaths. "all right," he said then, forcing his tone to evenness. "i'll sign a guarantee of the money. when you catch this pickpocket, you'll reclaim the money; then i'll put up the bond pending trial." by great effort the interpreter managed to look shocked. "that is absurd. you must pay now; if the palladian is innocent, he will not have the money. no, it is impossible." "if he's innocent it'll be because you caught the wrong guy. why, by all the plutonian ice devils, should i have to pay for your mistake?" the green-skinned man smirked again. "it is the law. the law is very strict. if you do not like it, you can go back to the planet you came from." and he turned away, busying himself with some important-looking papers, dusty and much-handled. maccauley was not too preoccupied to note that the blubbery venusian was holding them upside-down. maccauley socked his balled fist into his palm and wondered if pacing the littered floor would help. he was now, he assured himself, in the worst of all fixes. the time he'd been trapped between two hostile groups of mercurians who were settling a private argument with quarter-mile lightning bolts was a pleasure compared to this. then he'd had his guns, at least, and no restrictions about using them. he had to have his kit. which meant getting his money back. it was necessary, he decided, to play his trump card. he hadn't wanted to reveal himself as a free-lancing tpl man; word would be sure to leak out. but he certainly couldn't accomplish anything otherwise; the chance of recovering the credits, and eventually his _materiel_, was nil without some sort of aid. and that was what he could get only by showing these small-time constables that he was mr. law himself. it may be also that he was motivated by justifiable conceit in tpl itself. "okay," he snapped suddenly, startling the pudgy hybrid with the sharpness of his voice. "i guess there's no point in keeping under wraps any longer. let me tell you who i am...." * * * * * twenty minutes later, as he stumbled out of the warped stone building, he was wondering dazedly why his tpl affiliation had done him no good. tri-planet law was an organization that had considerable history, nor could all of it be written. it was the most potent single force in the history of any planet of the solar system, figured any way you like. it was the only force whose rule was hardly ever challenged. when you broke the law within the territories mandated by tpl, you did so with the very greatest caution. and you never tried to fight back if you were caught. it wasn't really a large organization, relative to the vast throngs of intelligent life that swarmed the system. it was only a tiny decimal of one per cent of the entire population of the thirty inhabited globes. but when you consider that the total census showed more than a hundred billion individuals of high enough brain-power to be rated sentient, you can understand that a fraction of a per cent does mean close to a hundred and thirty thousand persons united into the best-organized police and military force that a hundred trained social technicians could evolve. that is why maccauley couldn't understand the fact that the half-breed interpreter had practically laughed in his face. true, tpl's hundred and thirty thousand of personnel were largely on the planets of earth, mars and venus, plus their possessions and allied states. tpl had no standing here, officially, but the organization had a de facto reign over all of space by virtue of the fastest and best-armed space-ships made. and pallas, dependent upon the transient trade, certainly shouldn't be able to afford to anger representative of the body that ruled the space-lanes. something, mac decided, was thoroughly rotten in the local checking office of tpl. something that might show why the operative on pallas hadn't begun to be able to find the man or men behind the narcophene racket. maccauley hadn't shown himself there before because he didn't want himself identified with the law group. now that he'd uselessly exposed himself, that obstacle was nullified. he'd found out where the place was just so he could avoid it. pausing a second to puzzle out its probable direction, he started off. it was close, of course; nothing was far from anything on pallas. within five minutes he was standing outside the building, rubbing his chin and deciding that he could stand a wash-up before going in. like most of the asteroid's structures, this one seemed to have been made by a blind moron for his elder brother's fifth birthday. stepping gingerly to avoid bringing the ceiling down about his ears, he made for the washroom. the kiddie attendant was scrunched up in a corner, luminescing happily over a former airlock handle. "hey!" mac said uselessly. a wadded paper towel brought better results, and the kiddie glanced up. of course, it had to be the kiddie who lifted mac's roll. the gods of chance saw to that. in a trice mac had backed the frightened kiddie into a corner, looking rather threatening what with his grim expression and the bronze knife suddenly sprouting from his fist. he was fumbling for the gesture that would convey, "gimme!" to the asterite when the interruption came. "having fun?" mac dropped the kiddie and spun around, automatically reaching for a blaster that wasn't there. "who the devil are you?" he snarled. the long terrestrial newcomer leaned gingerly on a soot-covered washstand and frowned. "me? i work near here. who are you?" he stuck a cigarette in his taut lips, pinched the tip and inhaled sharply as it flared bluely. something clicked in maccauley's memory. remembrances of long rows of files, photographs.... the tpl agent for pallas. he said, "you're kittrell, right?" the long man nodded. "i might be," he said, "if you're somebody that's got a right to know. so what?" he hadn't moved but his posture seemed subtly altered, caution in every line of his frame. from the position of his hands, mac more than suspected he was armed. easing his hands behind his back, he twisted the stem of his wristwatch. kittrell jumped. "hey!" he exclaimed. sparks were fairly snapping from the blazing dial of his own heavy, old-fashioned timepiece--the recognition signal of tpl operatives. "i guess i am kittrell," the man acknowledged. "they told me they were sending someone from the narcotics division to take over on that narcophene business. you him?" "yeah. right now i'm having trouble of my own, though. this kiddie rolled me last night. every cent i had; i can't even get back to my hotel." "rolled you?" kittrell's eyes widened. "i know this fella. he cleans up around the office. wait a minute." his thin, pale hands flashed in intricate motions, meaningless to mac. they were significant to the kiddie, though, for he replied as rapidly. kittrell nodded. "i wouldn't have thought it of him. always thought he was too stupid to rob anybody over ten." that was a pretty dubious remark, mac thought, but he ignored it. "do you suppose you can make him cough up?" "sure!" the other smiled cheerfully. "like this!" * * * * * mac was unprepared for the next move. kittrell pulled his punch, of course, because he didn't want to kill the frail palladian, but his heavy fist bounced the kiddie off the floor and flung him to the base of the wall. he lay there, his glow-glands jetting crimson beams of fear and rage. "hey!" cried maccauley. "don't murder the poor son! that's no way to get my dough back!" kittrell stared. then a shadow passed over his face and he seemed to lose interest. he shrugged. "have it your way. what do you want me to do--adopt him?" "ask him what he did with the money. tell him he can have the metal stuff; all i want back is the bills." kittrell, looking disgusted, semaphored the message. kiddie faces don't react as a human's does, but maccauley was pretty sure there was gratitude glowing on this one's knobby features. after a couple of seconds' gesticulation, kittrell looked around. "he says he's sorry he took it. if you come with him he'll give you the money. he's got it stashed away in the sty he lives in, a little farther along this corridor." "will he do it?" kittrell shrugged again. "guess so. anyway, you're bigger than him--or don't you like rough stuff?" that, maccauley thought, was hardly a friendly remark. he resolved to take it up later; after all, it wasn't his fault that he was superseding kittrell. there really was no cause for jealousy in the long man. "coming?" mac asked. kittrell shook his head. "got to go back to the office for a minute. i'll drop around in about ten minutes, though." "okay," said mac, satisfied, and went out behind the kiddie. the kiddie's dwelling was ugly and cluttered, but moderately clean. the little asterite, with somewhat the attitude of a man who expects a poke in the face, gestured to mac to be seated on a hassock-like affair. maccauley rumbled: "sure i'll sit down. i'll stay right here until i get my dough back." the kiddie seemed to shrug resignedly; probably he just gave that impression from his general demeanor. he slipped away into another room. mac just had time to think of the possibility that the kiddie had made a getaway when he was back again, holding maccauley's billfold. mac counted it swiftly. "where's the rest of it?" he grunted. the bills were there, but there had been about two dollars in change--gone now. the kiddie looked scared but shook his head. "won't tell me, huh?" mac blustered. "how would you like to be put away for robbery? i swore out a complaint against you today; if i turn you over, it'll be a long time before you get out." the kiddie looked more frightened than ever; he was practically trembling. mac was encouraged, but surprised by the reaction to his threat--it shouldn't have been so great. he lived to regret the fact that he didn't find out just why the kiddie was so affected by the threat of imprisonment. "all right," he went on. "suppose i let you keep the metal. suppose i pay you well, get you lots more. gold and silver dollars. you'd like that, wouldn't you?" from the palladian's sudden attitude of dog-like devotion, it was more than clear that he would. "okay," mac said. "i'll pay you one hundred dollars in silver quarters, if--" the kiddie was ablaze with interest. not taking his eyes off mac, he scuttled crab-wise over to a tablette, snatched up a notebook and scrawled: "il do anyhin wat do yu wan." mac grinned. "fine. listen carefully now. i'm looking for an earthman. he's somewhere on this planet, but i wouldn't know him if i saw him. he is about two inches taller than me; weighs maybe two hundred pounds--a little fatter than i am. he's blind, practically, in one eye. that's all i can tell you, because those are the only things he can't disguise." * * * * * the kiddie seemed suddenly reluctant, but was persuaded by a gesture of mac's--a gesture that cost him dear, as it turned out. "here," he said, to seal the bargain. "here's an advance for you." dexterously he flipped his knife from some recess of his shirt and presented it to the kiddie. ecstacy was clearly shown by that kiddie. his glow-glands fairly spat large orange sparks of joy. the tempered bronze--it was made of that metal only to avoid magnetic spotters--wasn't much good for cutting, but it certainly was a conductor of electricity. "well?" maccauley said, growing impatient. he tapped the engrossed kiddie and repeated the question. the asterite bobbed his head and pressed a stud on his pad. the writing vanished, and he was scribbling again. "hello there!" boomed a new voice from the doorway. "what's going on?" maccauley whirled. kittrell was standing there, beaming broadly. "hi," mac said. "we were wondering--hey! what the hell!" kittrell's eyes had narrowed and a snarl flashed out on his face. with the fastest draw maccauley had ever seen, he snapped out his gun and blasted-- not maccauley. there was a stomach-squeezing hiss of sizzling flesh behind mac. he spun again, to see the kiddie, his shoulder and half his neck gone, slumped to the floor. mac knelt swiftly beside him. dead as a ganymedan secessionist. "now what the hell did you do that for?" mac demanded. "i was on the trail of something hot." he stared at the pad and stylus that had dropped from the dead asterite's limp hand. "i kni the man yu wan he is th." that was all it said. "_that's_ a big help," said maccauley, confronting the other man, who was strangely tense. he thrust the tablet at him. "now what do i do?" kittrell scanned it briefly, and relaxed a bit. "it looked bad to me," he explained. "there was that damned kiddie with a knife in his hand. he had it up to throw at you--or me. can't take chances." mac sighed, resigning himself to continued hard luck. "we all make mistakes, i guess," he said. then, hardening: "but you've made your last boner on this case. from now on stay the hell away from me. i don't like you and i don't like the way you do things." he moved toward the door. kittrell, lounging across it, obstructed his path--just enough to stop him. "where're you going?" the bigger man asked. "to report this," mac snapped. "you'll get out of it all right." "don't report it." "why not?" kittrell grimaced distastefully. "too much red tape. what the devil, who'll know we were here?" mac snorted and filled his lungs preparatory to telling kittrell just what he thought of him. there was a sweetish, balsam-like taste to the air, like the smell of a fir forest. or like the smell of narcophene. he had picked up the knife; still had it in his hands. while he was still figuring things out, his hand swept up with the knife still in it, pressed against kittrell's abdomen. kittrell's draw had been fast. maybe he was naturally gun-slick--fast enough, maybe, for a lightning draw like that to be natural to him. maybe he was, but maybe he was just burning up the years of his life twice as fast as normal under the influence of the drug. "if you don't want your gut slit, kittrell, keep your hands where they are!" mac grated, his voice suddenly gone flat and hard. kittrell's hand had fluttered toward his shoulder holster; it stopped as mac spoke. "i don't know whether you're really kittrell or not--probably you are," mac muttered. "but if you're in tpl now, you'll be out pretty soon. as soon as i tell them you're a hophead." kittrell's face had gone white. other than that there was no change as his bleak eyes bored steadily into maccauley's. "what are you talking about?" he said evenly. "take that thing out of my stomach." "oh, no!" mac shook his head decisively. "you killed one of my witnesses; you'll take his place. you're going to tell me how to find the guy that sells you the narcophene." "sorry," said kittrell, tautening still more, "but i can't." at the last possible second his eyes flicked behind and over mac's shoulder. the thing that hit maccauley on the back of the neck first didn't quite knock him out. he was stunned, but in the half-second before the next blow jolted him into complete darkness, he heard kittrell conclude, most casually: "you see, i _am_ the guy who sells the narcophene." * * * * * a shiver rippled along mac's spine, and another one. that was his first waking impression. he was cold, frozen stiff, he decided next, when his limbs failed to react to the stimuli of his neural commands. as the fog cleared away from his aching head he discovered that his hands were tightly bound behind him, hobbles on his feet to keep him from walking far or fast. not that he could have gone anywhere much. he was in a bare little metal room, lying on the grating that supplanted decks in most modern spacers. not much point in getting up, he realized, and merely hitched himself into a more comfortable position in a corner, moving as well as he could under the unaccustomed drag of full earth gravity. he was in the lock-room, the chamber before an airlock. he felt vaguely unhappy. whatever was coming, he was sure he wouldn't like it. behind him a heavy door eased open. boots thumped hollowly on the grids and a familiar voice sounded, echoing from the bare metal walls. "hello, maccauley. how's the head?" "go to hell," mac suggested. he craned his neck and stared full into kittrell's face. there was a curious mixture of emotions there; faint sorrow, an unpleasant sort of crooked leer, and an air of boredom--each was visible. kittrell shrugged. "i guess you know what you're up against?" "sure." maccauley tried to shrug, too, but succeeded only in tearing a patch of skin from his wrists where the wire bonds were tightest. "you're going to shove me out." "i'm afraid so. believe me, i'd rather not. i think you're a good chap; once i wanted to be like you--loyal to the service. they stuck me out here and made a desk clerk of me, when i would have given my arm to do some real work. i got a good salary; there was prestige enough whenever i could get back to boston and show off. it was a good job, in a way. but there was nothing to do. then i intercepted a load of narcophene. like everybody else, i thought i could beat it. i didn't. i tried it and couldn't stop." he stopped abruptly and scanned maccauley's face through narrowed eyes. "you see how it is?" he questioned. maccauley tried to stall for time. tensing his chest muscles against the bruises, he said, "give me a cigarette, kittrell? that's the usual privilege of the condemned man." the lunatic obligingly popped a brown-paper cylinder between his lips, squeezed the tip to light it. mac suddenly heard more footsteps, lighter ones but many of them. "what's that?" "just my kiddies," the dope peddler explained, as a dozen of them trotted into the room and ranged themselves, immobile, along the walls. "they've never seen an air-breather--that's you--in empty space, and they don't believe it will be fatal. you don't mind if they watch, do you?" mac could hold it in no longer. "kittrell," he blurted, "you're crazy as a coot!" kittrell, wading through kiddies whose faces shone an excited red, turned a surprised stare. "i've been afraid of that," he said worriedly over his shoulder. his long fingers pressed a stud by the 'lock, and the inner valve whined open. "you see, that's the trouble with narcophene. you know what's happening to you, but you just don't give a damn. god, it's cold in this 'lock!" he stood there, one foot on the coaming of the 'lock, peering around the dark, icy chamber. the lawman braced his back to the wall, shoved up. "it's a hell of a death, kittrell," he said, his voice strained. kittrell replied dreamily. "is it? i don't know. it isn't bad. it's clean, at least, and the worms don't get you." absently he fended off the crew of impatient, crowding kiddies. he stared silently into nothingness, for a long minute. * * * * * maccauley found he could reach his pocket, and his heart tried to impale itself on his palate. eagerly he tore more flesh from his raw wrists, strained his fingers to plumb the depths of the pocket. a weapon--anything. and his fingers found nothing. he remembered; that this was the pocket the dead asterite had picked; nothing there but a slit. on the automatic return trip, his fingers, numbed by disheartenment, sent a message to his brain; a message of cold. he disregarded it for a split second. then, just as kittrell was opening his mouth to speak, the correct interpretation of that coolness penetrated mac's consciousness. desperately he fumbled at the thing that was woven to his broad belt: wrenched at it with every atom of strength at his command. it came free; he twisted suddenly and something metallic jingled musically in the far corner of the 'lock, sending vibrations through the grid flooring to be picked up by the palladians. the jingle of metal--and the kiddies loved metal insanely! "money!" roared maccauley. and, "money! in the 'lock! copper--metal! go get it!" kittrell vanished, washed into the airlock by an overflowing wave of palladians. hands fumbling desperately behind him for the control switch--where was it!--mac cursed his stiff, ineffectual fingers and his inability to see behind his back. he touched a switch--no, not that one!--and another, jabbed at it. motors hummed softly, the scrambling noise died away as the inner door swung shut--so slowly!--and then for a second the only sound in the chamber was the harsh sobbing of mac's breath as he slumped weakly against the chill metal wall. until that semi-silence was broken by the descending siren-scream of the outer door's opening, abruptly terminating in a _whooosh_ as the last molecules of air tore into the vacuum without, dragging with irresistible force at the chunks of matter, living and dead, that tried to obstruct its passage.... * * * * * "and that's the story." maccauley turned away from the recorder. "here's the notebook i found among kittrell's things." he flipped a thin, black pad at the major. "i think you'll be able to break the code easily enough, as there are enough names known for you to work on. it seems to include his whole organization." major copeland glanced at the cabalistic signs incuriously, then ticketed the book and slipped it into a pneumatic tube. "what bothers me," he complained, "is why kittrell didn't claw his way out of the 'lock. sounds to me as though he had plenty of time." mac gestured inquiringly at his superior, received a nod, and with a sigh unclipped his sam browne. "kittrell? probably stumbled and slammed his head against a rivet." he stood up suddenly, savagely snubbed out a freshly lit cigarette. "oh, hell! i'll tell you what i really think, major--i don't believe kittrell tried to get out of there. i don't think he cared, and i haven't forgotten what he said about dying that way." "could be," copeland agreed. "and what did you say that stuff was that saved your life?" mac smiled. "money, of a sort. you know where i was stationed last year?" "some place on earth, wasn't it?" maccauley nodded. "china. got to know some of the people there. got kind of chummy with one of them; she gave me a present when i left, as a keepsake. a string of what they call "cash." it's a kind of money they used to use; square pieces of copper with holes in the middle. had 'em strung together and sewn onto a belt. well, you know how palladians feel about copper." his eyes crinkled again. "that was a pretty good keepsake--not worth much, but it bought my life." both men were silent for a while. then, "what are your plans now, maccauley? i've recommended you for promotion, to fill kittrell's job on pallas. you'll get a higher rating, more pay--and all the time in the world to yourself." maccauley shook his head. "sorry, major," he said, "but that's not what i want. my plans are extra-special. say," he went on, sitting down and staring earnestly at copeland, "have you ever heard the story of how manhattan island--that's part of new york city--was bought from the ancient indians? twenty-four dollars' worth of junk beads--that's what they paid the indians for it. now the land is worth billions of dollars--a square foot of it brings the best part of a million." "so?" the major was interested but lacked comprehension. "what's that got to do with your resignation?" maccauley smiled. "a lot," he answered. "did it ever occur to you that intelligent salesmanship can do wonders? and did you ever think of the possibilities that you could realize on pallas with--say--a couple of dozen thousand dollars' worth of copper and other metal junk?" the major looked startled. "no--not till now," he added, understanding dawning. "and what you're going to do is--?" "what i'm going to do," maccauley beamed, "is convert reward money into junk. and then, major, i'll begin to convert the junk--into a kingdom. i'm going to buy up a world--a wide-open world--with a boatload of scrap metal!" oridin's formula by r. r. winterbotham the formula was a simple equation, but caddo had to have it--for knowing its answer meant he would rule the universe. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories march . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] oridin the recluse listened to the threat wirelessed from the spaceship that was hoving to in a landing orbit about the planetoid azair. "i've a bead on your atmosphere plant," said the snarling voice. "one false move and i'll blast it to star dust." oridin shrugged as he heard the words. one more fool had come to azair looking for the secret that the recluse of the asteroids was supposed to possess. "your threats are unnecessary, stranger," oridin replied in the microphone of his radio. "everyone is welcome here as long as he behaves. i have ways of dealing with those who don't." "i'm warning you," came the voice again, "that i will stand for no foolishness. i'll kill you if you try to resist." oridin smiled. "land, stranger, you need not fear me." the hermit arose and went to the galley of the warm little house that seemed to grow from the solid rocks of the tiny planet. he pressed a button, waited a second and then opened a small compartment. in the box was a steaming pot of coffee, freshly made by oridin's automatic cook. outside the transparent shelter, the air grew blue from the reflection of landing rockets. oridin glanced to the leveled surface on which the ship was coming to rest. he saw a turret training on the little house. oridin was not afraid; the visitor probably would be interesting. even a recluse can grow lonesome on a minor planet. a figure emerged from the spaceship. he wore an oxygen helmet, although oridin plentifully supplied the planetoid with artificial atmosphere from a small plant at the north pole. the stranger did not believe that oridin would not resist. again oridin smiled. deep in the rocks of azair were guns that could have blasted the visitor a thousand times, had oridin wished. but there was nothing clever about blowing a foe to pieces. the foe too often was killed before he sensed defeat. oridin enjoyed an equal battle, or even one against odds. [illustration: _"open up," caddo snarled, "or i'll blow my way in!"_] "open up! open up, i tell you, or i'll burn my way in!" demanded the visitor. "he's certainly not deceiving me as to his intentions," oridin decided. the recluse pushed a button on the wall, and a giant gate swung outward admitting the stranger. the fellow was as tall and as muscular as oridin himself, but the space suit and the gaping blaster he held in his hand made the visitor seem much more formidable. oridin himself was dressed in bell-bottomed slacks and a loosely fitting, slipover coat. his beard softened his countenance and made him seem quite gentle, except for a certain glitter in his eyes that seemed to warn that oridin loved a contest. and this would seem to be a deadly contest. oridin bowed. "you are welcome, stranger," he said. "take off your helmet, for the air is pure. put aside your gun, for i am unarmed and i do not intend to harm you." the stranger hesitated, uncertainly. "no tricks, oridin!" he warned. "tricks?" oridin laughed tauntingly. "you are not very confident for a man of your caliber. i've heard of you often, caddo velexis. they say you have conquered whole nations single-handed, and yet you are afraid of an unarmed hermit." "i'm not afraid of you," caddo said in a tone that hinted he was. caddo removed his helmet and holstered his blaster, but oridin noted that the terrestrial giant did not move the firing button to safety. "will you have some coffee?" oridin asked. "it will refresh you after your long trip, and you must have had a long trip, for we are in a very sparsely filled part of the sky." oridin lifted the pot and poured the brown steaming liquid into a thick, metal mug. caddo waved it aside. "i have no time!" "do not be alarmed," oridin said. "the patrol will not be near azair for three days." oridin sat down. his fingers felt under the arm of the chair where a series of buttons controlled other mechanisms in the room. caddo had relaxed his watchfulness. "in three days i'll be well toward the other side of the solar system," caddo said. oridin lifted his eyebrows. "toward the earth? you have undertaken something this time!" "yes!" caddo said. "it's the earth i am after! i have all i want of the outlying planets and planetoids. you can capture a hundred of them and be no better off than you were at first. but if you capture the earth, you can rule the universe." oridin touched one of the buttons. a tiny pinhole in the wall of the room seemed to blink. there was a blinding flash and the smell of burned leather permeated the place. * * * * * caddo gave a cry of alarm and sprang back, knocking over his chair. he was on his feet holding his blaster in his hand in a second. across the top of his helmet was a scorched streak. "you tried to kill me!" caddo screamed. "you dirty swine." oridin's lips parted in a smile as he looked without fear into the mouth of the trembling weapon. "don't underestimate yourself, caddo," he said. "the hot beam was only a warning--something to let you know that i could kill you anytime i wished. even now, before you could squeeze the trigger on the weapon, i could cause certain things to happen--no, no! you are safe, caddo--i could cause you to die if i wish, but you are interesting, a dangerous man. it would be a better accomplishment for me to give you a punishment you deserve." the fear that shone in caddo's eyes faded away. for a moment he watched oridin. then he laughed. "so it's that kind of a game, is it? i can play it too! your threats do not frighten me. nor am i afraid of your hot beam. look!" caddo thrust his arm forward into the path of the beam. there was a puff of smoke as the tremendous heat vaporized particles of dust on the leather sleeves. then nothing happened. "i have a neutralizing force, powered with a small battery in my clothing," caddo said. "foolishly, i did not have it turned on a moment ago. but you can't hurt me now." oridin shrugged. "i am still not afraid of you caddo. if you had come here to loot, you would have killed me long ago. but what you want is something you cannot gain by killing me. what is it?" "you are going to give me the secret that will make me the master of the earth, and the master of the universe," caddo announced. oridin poured himself a mug of coffee. "i knew you did not want gold, although azair is filthy with the stuff," he said. "but what secret have i that is so powerful?" "the _discovery_!" caddo said. "i have many." oridin nodded toward the wall, and the pinhole of light blinked out. "i want the secret of the universe!" caddo spoke tensely. "come! don't be so melodramatic," oridin chided. "the universe is full of secrets." "you're stalling. you know what i mean!" "i think i do," oridin agreed. "my erratic experiments have revealed a certain mathematical function, _j_, which theoretically opens the door to action without probability. is that what you want, caddo? the value of _j_?" "the mathematical bombsight!" caddo said. "it removes probability and makes certainty of everything. with my calculations based on certainty, i'll be fate itself! i can conquer the world, chain the universe and govern creation." oridin laughed quietly. "alexander, caesar, napoleon, genghis khan and hitler spoke those words and they were willing to bargain with the devil himself to make them come true," he said. "i suppose i am the devil, for i know the answer and i can tell you the answer--for a price." "you'll give it to me for nothing!" caddo patted the blister, now in the holster at his side. "is that your only offer?" oridin asked, still wearing an amused half-smile. "it is!" oridin rose and moved toward a safe under two clocks on the wall across the room. one of these clocks gave the terrestrial days, hours and minutes according to the general meridian time. the other registered the four-hour rotation of azair. "wait!" caddo halted oridin. "no tricks. give me the combination and i'll open the safe!" oridin turned to the space pirate. "the safe is unlocked. the formula is inside." caddo's eyes betrayed his suspicion. the most valuable secret in the world was in an unlocked safe! warily caddo stepped forward. he hesitated, wondering if even his neutralizing force was enough to protect him. "there's no danger. go ahead. help yourself," oridin urged. caddo was desperate. he touched the handle of the door. it was unlocked. he flung it open. inside the safe was a single sheet of white paper. caddo seized it eagerly. his eyes widened in amazement as he read: "the certainty of success in any course of operations, expressed in mathematical terms, represents the sum of all factors, beginning at the starting point, which must be described as _real zero_, and ending with the objective, also reduced to a real numerical value. the constant of certainty, _j_, can be the determining factor which leads an operation from the beginning to the objective." caddo read the paper and reread it again and again. "is this all of it?" he asked, turning to oridin. "every bit," oridin replied. "the formula is simple, like the one to determine the sum of an arithmetical progression--the first number of the progression plus the last number, multiplied by the number of terms in the progression and divided by two. in your case the progression lies between what you have and what you want. the certainty of getting it is the sum of all the factors." * * * * * caddo sat down in a chair at the desk. he seemed to forget his suspicions of oridin, who had placed a stack of paper beside him. caddo was engrossed in the formula and caddo, as a mathematician, knew that everything in the world could be expressed in figures. what would napoleon, or hitler, have given for this formula! "the beginning is _real zero_!" caddo spoke aloud. "which is different from a mathematical zero," oridin said. "i might say that zero, like absolute vacuum, never occurs. even if we have two apples and eat two of them the atoms of the apples continue to exist. in the formula you have a small fraction instead of zero. it serves the same purpose. if you multiply a number x by zero, the answer is zero. multiply a fraction approaching zero, . , , by another number and that number approaches zero too. if that number is a fraction it will be even closer to zero than our _real zero_. in fact, we are dealing with trans-zero numbers, just like the transfinite numbers discovered by georg cantor." "yes, yes!" caddo said eagerly. he picked up a pencil. he scribbled furiously. his objective was all of the power in the world expressed in ergs; all of the gold in the world, expressed in dollars; all of the land, expressed in acres; the people, in individuals. oridin moved softly behind him. a multiple-calculator made its appearance in the room. paper flew from under caddo's pencil. sweat poured from his space-browned face. the two clocks on the wall recorded the turning of the earth and the planetoid azair. caddo forgot about oridin. he forgot about everything except the figures that revolved in his brain. oridin moved out into the warm artificial atmosphere of his planetoid. he was a recluse again. he was alone. a momentary contact with the greed, and avarice of the human race had been wiped away. far out in space was a glow of rockets. a ship was going to land. it had seemed only a short time since caddo had landed. but that was three terrestrial days ago. this was the patrol. "i've a prisoner for you," oridin informed the captain. "it's caddo." "caddo! he's the no. universal enemy. man, you'll grow rich with the rewards offered on nine planets for his capture." "you can have the reward," oridin said. "take him away. he's a nuisance." they found caddo in the lounge of oridin's house chewing on a book of logarithms. his mind was gone. he could only babble figures. his fingers twitched with cramps from writing with a pencil and punching the keys of the calculating machine. every spark of vitality had been taken from his body. the batteries of his force armor had burned out. "what's the matter with him?" the captain asked. "he wanted too much," oridin replied. "i gave him a simple little formula for success, but the formula ceases to be simple as the definition for success grows more demanding. had he sought perfection, caddo would have seen that even this was unrecognizable, although the certainty was only halfway to infinity--" "sorry, mr. oridin, but i'm not a mathematician," the captain said. "there's nothing difficult in the formula. it proves that certainty is unrecognizable. you'll have to admit that a goal, to be reached has to follow a path and that path is determined by two points. the beginning is one and the second one makes the ultimate objective certain. therefore the second point is certainty. but certainty is unrecognizable--" oridin brought forth his formula and allowed the captain to read it. the patrol officer blinked his eyes and scratched his head. oridin wrote his formula out: j = (a + ) times infinity/ "_j_ is certainty, _a_ our starting point and is unity, or perfection," oridin explained. "our starting point is close to zero, but not zero. but for convenience we'll say that it's a fraction so close that we can call it zero. then certainty, _j_, is one-half of infinity, which you'll have to agree does not approach infinity and may be well within the realm of human comprehension, although we will not recognize perfection because we do not know what number is halfway to infinity. caddo overlooked the fact that he went further and further into the transinfinite with each number he added to his equation, for there are an infinity of numbers between any two whole numbers and any two fractions and their sum is always infinity." the patrol captain already was muttering to himself and oridin hurried him out of the house and into the patrol ship with his prisoner. after the space craft had gone, oridin returned to his living quarters and replaced his formula in the unlocked safe. he cleaned the litter made by caddo and sat down. once again, oridin was a recluse and he would remain so until someone else had a dream of conquering the universe. the star mouse by fredric brown robinson crusoe ... gulliver ... paul bunyan; the story of their adventures is nothing compared to the saga of mitkey. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories spring . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] mitkey, the mouse, wasn't mitkey then. he was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plaster of the house of the great herr professor oberburger, formerly of vienna and heidelberg; then a refugee from the excessive admiration of more powerful of his fellow-countrymen. the excessive admiration had concerned, not herr oberburger himself, but a certain gas which had been a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel--which might have been a highly-successful something else. if, of course, the professor had given them the correct formula. which he--well, anyway, the professor had made good his escape and now lived in a house in connecticut. and so did mitkey. a small gray mouse, and a small gray man. nothing unusual about either of them. particularly there was nothing unusual about mitkey; he had a family and he liked cheese and if there were rotarians among mice, he would have been a rotarian. the herr professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. a confirmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but he considered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constant verbal communion with himself while he worked. that fact, it turned out later, was important, because mitkey had excellent ears and heard those night-long soliloquies. he didn't understand them, of course. if he thought about them at all, he merely thought of the professor as a large and noisy super-mouse who squeaked over-much. "und now," he would say to himself, "ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broperly machined. it should fidt vithin vun vun-hundredth thousandth uf an indtch. ahhh, it iss berfect. und now--" night after night, day after day, month after month. the gleaming thing grew, and the gleam in herr oberburger's eyes grew apace. it was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, and it rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the room that served the herr professor for all purposes. the house in which he and mitkey lived was a four room structure, but the professor hadn't yet found it out, seemingly. originally, he had planned to use the big room as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep on a cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the little cooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted down golden grains of tnt into a dangerous soup which he salted and peppered with strange condiments, but did not eat. "und now i shall bour it into tubes, und see vether vun tube adjacendt to another eggsplodes der secondt tube vhen der virst tube iss--" that was the night mitkey almost decided to move himself and his family to a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turn handsprings on its foundations. but mitkey didn't move after all, because there were compensations. new mouse-holes all over, and--joy of joy!--a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the professor kept, among other things, food. of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or the house would not have remained around the mouse-holes. and of course mitkey could not guess what was coming nor understand the herr professor's brand of english (nor any other brand of english, for that matter) or he would not have let even a crack in the refrigerator tempt him. the professor was jubilant that morning. "der fuel, idt vorks! der secondt tube, idt did not eggsplode. und der virst, in _seggtions_, as i had eggspectedt! und it is more bowerful; there will be blenty of room for der combartment--" ah, yes, the compartment. that was where mitkey came in, although even the professor didn't know it yet. in fact the professor didn't even know that mitkey existed. "und now," he was saying to his favorite listener, "idt is budt a madter of combining der fuel tubes so they work in obbosite bairs. und then--" that was the moment when the herr professor's eyes first fell on mitkey. rather, they fell upon a pair of gray whiskers and a black, shiny little nose protruding from a hole in the baseboards. "vell!" he said, "vot haff ve here! mitkey mouse himself! mitkey, how vould you like to go for a ride, negst veek? ve shall see." * * * * * that is how it came about that the next time the professor sent into town for supplies, his order included a mousetrap--not one of the vicious kind that kills, but one of the wire-cage kind. and it had not been set, with cheese, for more than ten minutes before mitkey's sharp little nose had smelled out that cheese and he had followed his nose into captivity. not, however, an unpleasant captivity. mitkey was an honored guest. the cage reposed now on the table at which the professor did most of his work, and cheese in indigestion-giving abundance was pushed through the bars, and the professor didn't talk to himself any more. "you see, mitkey, i vas going to sendt to der laboratory in hardtford for a vhite mouse, budt vhy should i, mit you here? i am sure you are more soundt und healthy und able to vithstand a long chourney than those laboratory mices. no? ah, you viggle your viskers und that means yes, no? und being used to living in dargk holes, you should suffer less than they from glaustrophobia, no?" and mitkey grew fat and happy and forgot all about trying to get out of the cage. i fear that he even forgot about the family he had abandoned, but he knew, if he knew anything, that he need not worry about them in the slightest. at least not until and unless the professor discovered and repaired the hole in the refrigerator. and the professor's mind was most emphatically not on refrigerators. "und so, mitkey, ve shall place this vane so--it iss only of assistance in der landing, in an atmosphere. it und these vill bring you down safely und slowly enough that der shock-absorbers in der movable combartment vill keep you from bumping your head too hard, i think." of course, mitkey missed the ominous note to that "i think" qualification because he missed all the rest of it. he did not, as has been explained, speak english. not then. but herr oberburger talked to him just the same. he showed him pictures. "did you effer see der mouse you vas named after, mitkey? vhat? no? loogk, this is der original mitkey mouse, by valt dissney. budt i think you are cuter, mitkey." probably the professor was a bit crazy to talk that way to a little gray mouse. in fact, he must have been crazy to make a rocket that worked. for the odd thing was that the herr professor was not really an inventor. there was, as he carefully explained to mitkey, not one single thing about that rocket that was _new_. the herr professor was a technician; he could take other people's ideas and make them work. his only real invention--the rocket fuel that wasn't one--had been turned over to the united states government and had proved to be something already known and discarded because it was too expensive for practical use. * * * * * as he explained very carefully to mitkey, "it iss burely a matter of absolute accuracy and mathematical correctness, mitkey. idt iss all here--ve merely combine--and ve achieff vhat, mitkey? "eggscape velocity, mitkey! chust barely, it adds up to eggscape velocity. maybe. there are yet unknown facgtors, mitkey, in der ubper atmosphere, der troposphere, der stratosphere. ve think ve know eggsactly how mudch air there iss to calculate resistance against, but are ve absolutely sure? no, mitkey, ve are not. ve haff not been there. und der marchin iss so narrow that so mudch as an air current might affect idt." but mitkey cared not a whit. in the shadow of the tapering aluminum-alloy cylinder he waxed fat and happy. "der tag, mitkey, der tag! und i shall not lie to you, mitkey. i shall not giff you valse assurances. you go on a dancherous chourney, mein little friendt. "a vifty-vifty chance ve giff you, mitkey. not der moon or bust, but der moon _und_ bust, or else maybe safely back to earth. you see, my boor little mitkey, der moon iss not made of green cheese und if it were, you vould not live to eat it because there iss not enough atmosphere to bring you down safely und vith your viskers still on. [illustration: "not der moon or bust, but der moon und bust!"] "und vhy then, you may vell ask, do i send you? because der rocket may not attain eggscape velocity. und in that case, it iss still an eggsperiment, budt a different vun. der rocket, if it goes not to der moon, falls back on der earth, no? und in that case certain instruments shall giff us further information than ve haff yet about things up there in space. und you shall giff us information, by vether or not you are yet alife, vether der shock absorbers und vanes are sufficient in an earth-equivalent atmosphere. you see? "then ladter, vhen ve send rockets to venus maybe vhere an atmosphere eggsists, ve shall haff data to calculate the needed size of vanes und shock-absorbers, no? und in either case, und vether or not you return, mitkey, you shall be vamous! you shall be der virst liffing greature to go oudt beyond der stratosphere of der earth, out into space. "mitkey, you shall be der star-mouse! i enfy you, mitkey, und i only vish i vere your size, so i could go, too." der tag, and the door to the compartment. "gootbye, little mitkey mouse." darkness. silence. noise! "der rocket--if it goes not to der moon--falls back on der earth, no?" that was what the herr professor thought. but the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. even star-mice. all because of prxl. * * * * * the herr professor found himself very lonely. after having had mitkey to talk to, soliloquies were somehow empty and adequate. there may be some who say that the company of a small gray mouse is a poor substitute for a wife; but others may disagree. and, anyway, the professor had never had a wife, and he _had_ a mouse to talk to, so he missed one and, if he missed the other, he didn't know it. during the long night after the launching of the rocket, he had been very busy with his telescope, a sweet little eight-inch reflector, checking its course as it gathered momentum. the exhaust explosions made a tiny fluctuating point of light that was possible to follow, if one knew where to look. but the following day there seemed to be nothing to do, and he was too excited to sleep, although he tried. so he compromised by doing a spot of housekeeping, cleaning the pots and pans. it was while he was so engaged that he heard a series of frantic little squeaks and discovered that another small gray mouse, with shorter whiskers and a shorter tail than mitkey, had walked into the wire-cage mousetrap. "vell, vell," said the professor, "vot haff ve here? minnie? iss it minnie come to look for her mitkey?" the professor was not a biologist, but he happened to be right. it _was_ minnie. rather, it was mitkey's mate, so the name was appropriate. what strange vagary of mind had induced her to walk into an unbaited trap, the professor neither knew nor cared, but he was delighted. he promptly remedied the lack of bait by pushing a sizable piece of cheese through the bars. thus it was that minnie came to fill the place of her far-traveling spouse as repository for the professor's confidences. whether she worried about her family or not there is no way of knowing, but she need not have done so. they were now large enough to fend for themselves, particularly in a house that offered abundant cover and easy access to the refrigerator. "ah, und now it iss dargk enough, minnie, that ve can loogk for that husband of yours. his viery trail across the sky. true, minnie, it iss a very small viery trail und der astronomers vill not notice it, because they do not know vhere to loogk. but ve do. "he iss going to be a very vamous mouse, minnie, this mitkey of ours, vhen ve tell der vorld about him und about mein rocket. you see, minnie ve haff not told them yet. ve shall vait und giff der gomplete story all at vunce. by dawn of tomorrow ve'll-- "ah, there he iss, minnie! vaint, but there. i'd hold you up to der scope und let you loogk, but it vould not be vocused right for your eyes, und i do not know how to-- "almost vun hundred thousand miles, minnie, und still agcelerating, but not for much longer. our mitkey iss on schedule; in fagt he iss going vaster than ve had vigured, no? it iss sure now that he vill eggscape the gravitation of der earth, und fall upon der moon!" of course, it was purely coincidental that minnie squeaked. "ah, yess, minnie, little minnie. i know, i know. ve shall neffer see our mitkey again, und i almost vish our eggsperiment hadt vailed. budt there are gompensations, minnie. he shall be der most vamous of all mices. der star-mouse! virst liffing greature effer to go beyond der gravitational bull of earth!" the night was long. occasionally high clouds obscured vision. "minnie, i shall make you more gomfortable than in that so-small vire cage. you vould like to seem to be vree, vould you not, vithout bars, like der animals at modern zoos, vith moats insteadt?" * * * * * and so, to fill in an hour when a cloud obscured the sky, the herr professor made minnie her new home. it was the end of a wooden crate, about half an inch thick and a foot square, laid flat on the table, and with no visible barrier around it. but he covered the top with metal foil at the edges, and he placed the board on another larger board which also had a strip of metal foil surrounding the island of minnie's home. and wires from the two areas of metal foil to opposite terminals of a small transformer which he placed near by. "und now, minnie, i shall blace you on your island, vhich shall be liberally supplied mitt cheese und vater, und you shall vind it iss an eggcelent blace to liff. but you vill get a mild shock or two vhen you try to step off der edge of der island. it vill not hurt much, but you vill not like it, und after a few tries you vill learn not to try again, no? und--" and night again. minnie happy on her island, her lesson well learned. she would no longer so much as step on the inner strip of metal foil. it was a mouse-paradise of an island, though. there was a cliff of cheese bigger than minnie herself. it kept her busy. mouse and cheese; soon one would be a transmutation of the other. but professor oberburger wasn't thinking about that. the professor was worried. when he had calculated and re-calculated and aimed his eight-inch reflector through the hole in the roof and turned out the lights-- yes, there _are_ advantages to being a bachelor after all. if one wants a hole in the roof, one simply knocks a hole in the roof and there is nobody to tell one that one is crazy. if winter comes, or if it rains, one can always call a carpenter or use a tarpaulin. but the faint trail of light wasn't there. the professor frowned and re-calculated and re-re-calculated and shifted his telescope three-tenths of a minute and still the rocket wasn't there. "minnie, something iss wrong. either der tubes haff stopped viring, or--" or the rocket was no longer traversing a straight line relative to its point of departure. by straight, of course, is meant parabollically curved relative to everything other than velocity. so the herr professor did the only thing remaining for him to do, and began to search, with the telescope, in widening circles. it was two hours before he found it, five degrees off course already and veering more and more into a--well, there was only one thing you could call it. a tailspin. the darned thing was going in circles, circles which appeared to constitute an orbit about something that couldn't possibly be there. then narrowing into a concentric spiral. then--out. gone. darkness. no rocket flares. the professor's face was pale as he turned to minnie. "it iss _imbossible_, minnie. mein own eyes, but it could not be. even if vun side stopped viring, it could not haff gone into such sudden circles." his pencil verified a suspicion. "und, minnie, it decellerated vaster than bossible. even mitt _no_ tubes viring, its momentum vould haff been more--" the rest of the night--telescope and calculus--yielded no clue. that is, no believable clue. some force not inherent in the rocket itself, and not accountable by gravitation--even of a hypothetical body--had acted. "mein poor mitkey." [illustration: "poor mitkey"] the gray, inscrutable dawn. "mein minnie, it vill haff to be a secret. ve dare not bublish vhat ve saw, for it vould not be believed. i am not sure i believe it myself, minnie. berhaps because i vas offertired vrom not sleeping, i chust imachined that i saw--" later. "but, minnie, ve shall hope. vun hundred vifty thousand miles out, it vas. it vill fall back upon der earth. but i gannot tell vhere! i thought that if it did, i vould be able to galculate its course, und--but after those goncentric cirgles--minnie, not even _einstein_ could galculate vhere it vill land. not effen _me_. all ve can do iss hope that ve shall hear of vhere it falls." cloudy day. black night jealous of its mysteries. "minnie, our poor mitkey. there iss _nothing_ could have gauzed--" but something had. prxl. prxl is an asteroid. it isn't called that by earthly astronomers, because--for excellent reasons--they have not discovered it. so we will call it by the nearest possible transliteration of the name its inhabitants use. yes, it's inhabited. come to think of it, professor oberburger's attempt to send a rocket to the moon had some strange results. or rather, prxl did. you wouldn't think that an asteroid could reform a drunk, would you? but one charles winslow, a besotted citizen of bridgeport, connecticut, never took a drink when--right on grove street--a mouse asked him the road to hartford. the mouse was wearing bright red pants and vivid yellow gloves-- but that was fifteen months after the professor lost his rocket. we'd better start over again. * * * * * prxl is an asteroid. one of those despised celestial bodies which terrestrial astronomers call vermin of the sky, because the darned things leave trails across the plates that clutter up the more important observations of novae and nebulae. fifty thousand fleas on the dark dog of night. tiny things, most of them. astronomers have been discovering recently that some of them come close to earth. amazingly close. there was excitement in when amor came within ten million miles; astronomically, a mere mashie shot. then apollo cut that almost in half, and in adonis came within less than one and a half million miles. in , hermes, less than half a million but the astronomers got really excited when they calculated its orbit and found that the little mile-long asteroid _can_ come within a mere , miles, closer than earth's own moon. some day they may be still more excited, if and when they spot the / -mile asteroid prxl, that obstacle of space, making a transit across the moon and discover that it frequently comes within a mere hundred thousand miles of our rapidly whirling world. only in event of a transit will they ever discover it, though, for prxl does not reflect light. it hasn't, anyway, for several million years since its inhabitants coated it with a black, light-absorbing pigment derived from its interior. monumental task, painting a world, for creatures half an inch tall. but worth it, at the time. when they'd shifted its orbit, they were safe from their enemies. there were giants in those days--eight-inch tall marauding pirates from diemos. got to earth a couple of times too, before they faded out of the picture. pleasant little giants who killed because they enjoyed it. records in now-buried cities on diemos might explain what happened to the dinosaurs. and why the promising cro-magnons disappeared at the height of their promise only a cosmic few minutes after the dinosaurs went west. but prxl survived. tiny world no longer reflecting the sun's rays, lost to the cosmic killers when its orbit was shifted. prxl. still civilized, with a civilization millions of years old. its coat of blackness preserved and renewed regularly, more through tradition than fear of enemies in these later degenerate days. mighty but stagnant civilization, standing still on a world that whizzes like a bullet. and mitkey mouse. * * * * * klarloth, head scientist of a race of scientists, tapped his assistant bemj on what would have been bemj's shoulder if he had had one. "look," he said, "what approaches prxl. obviously artificial propulsion." bemj looked into the wall-plate and then directed a thought-wave at the mechanism that jumped the magnification of a thousand-fold through an alteration of the electronic field. the image leaped, blurred, then steadied. "fabricated," said bemj. "extremely crude, i must say. primitive explosive-powered rocket. wait, i'll check where it came from." he took the readings from the dials about the viewplate, and hurled them as thoughts against the psychocoil of the computer, then waited while that most complicated of machines digested all the factors and prepared the answer. then, eagerly, he slid his mind into rapport with its projector. klarloth likewise listened in to the silent broadcast. exact point on earth and exact time of departure. untranslatable expression of curve of trajectory, and point on that curve where deflected by gravitational pull of prxl. the destination--or rather the original intended destination--of the rocket was obvious, earth's moon. time and place of arrival on prxl if present course of rocket was unchanged. "earth," said klarloth meditatively. "they were a long way from rocket travel the last time we checked them. some sort of a crusade, or battle of beliefs, going on, wasn't there?" bemj nodded. "catapults. bows and arrows. they've taken a long stride since, even if this is only an early experimental thing of a rocket. shall we destroy it before it gets here?" klarloth shook his head thoughtfully. "let's look it over. may save us a trip to earth; we can judge their present state of development pretty well from the rocket itself." "but then we'll have to--" "of course. call the station. tell them to train their attracto-repulsors on it and to swing it into a temporary orbit until they prepare a landing-cradle. and not forget to damp out the explosive before they bring it down." "temporary force-field around point of landing--in case?" "naturally." so despite the almost complete absence of atmosphere in which the vanes could have functioned, the rocket came down safely and so softly that mitkey, in the dark compartment, knew only that the awful noise had stopped. mitkey felt better. he ate some more of the cheese with which the compartment was liberally provided. then he resumed trying to gnaw a hole in the inch-thick wood with which the compartment was lined. that wooden lining was a kind thought of the herr professor for mitkey's mental well-being. he knew that trying to gnaw his way out would give mitkey something to do en route which would keep him from getting the screaming meamies. the idea had worked; being busy, mitkey hadn't suffered mentally from his dark confinement. and now that things were quiet, he chewed away more industriously and more happily than ever, sublimely unaware that when he got through the wood, he'd find only metal which he couldn't chew. but better people than mitkey have found things they couldn't chew. meanwhile, klarloth and bemj and several thousand other prxlians stood gazing up at the huge rocket which, even lying on its side, towered high over their heads. some of the younger ones, forgetting the invisible field of force, walked too close and came back, ruefully rubbing bumped heads. klarloth himself was at the psychograph. "there _is_ life inside the rocket," he told bemj. "but the impressions are confused. one creature, but i cannot follow its thought processes. at the moment it seems to be doing something with its teeth." "it could not be an earthling, one of the dominant race. one of them is much larger than this huge rocket. gigantic creatures. perhaps, unable to construct a rocket large enough to hold one of themselves, they sent an experimental creature, such as our wooraths." "i believe you've guessed right, bemj. well, when we have explored its mind thoroughly, we may still learn enough to save us a check-up trip to earth. i am going to open the door." "but air--creatures of earth would need a heavy, almost a dense atmosphere. it could not live." "we retain the force-field, of course. it will keep the air in. obviously there is a source of supply of air within the rocket or the creature would not have survived the trip." klarloth operated controls, and the force-field itself put forth invisible pseudo-pods and turned the outer screw-door, then reached within and unlatched the inner door to the compartment itself. * * * * * all prxl watched breathlessly as a monstrous gray head pushed out of the huge aperture yawning overhead. thick whiskers, each as long as the body of a prxlian-- mitkey jumped down, and took a forward step that bumped his black nose hard--into something that wasn't there. he squeaked, and jumped backwards against the rocket. there was disgust in bemj's face as he looked up at the monster. "obviously much less intelligent than a woorath. might just as well turn on the ray." "not at all," interrupted klarloth. "you forget certain very obvious facts. the creature is unintelligent, of course, but the subconscious of every animal holds in itself every memory, every impression, every sense-image, to which it has ever been subjected. if this creature has ever heard the speech of the earthlings, or seen any of their works--besides this rocket--every word and every picture is indellibly graven. you see now what i mean?" "naturally. how stupid of me, klarloth. well, one thing is obvious from the rocket itself: we have nothing to fear from the science of earth for at least a few millenia. so there is no hurry, which is fortunate. for to send back the creature's memory to the time of its birth, and to follow each sensory impression in the psychograph will require--well, a time at least equivalent to the age of the creature, whatever that is, plus the time necessary for us to interpret and assimilate each." "but that will not be necessary, bemj." "no? oh, you mean the x- waves?" "exactly. focused upon this creature's brain-center, they can, without disturbing his memories, be so delicately adjusted as to increase his intelligence--now probably about . in the scale--to the point where he is a reasoning creature. almost automatically, during the process, he will assimilate his own memories, and understand them just as he would if he had been intelligent at the time he received those impressions. "see, bemj? he will automatically sort out irrelevant data, and will be able to answer our questions." "but would you make him as intelligent as--?" "as we? no, the x- waves would not work so far. i would say to about . on the scale. that, judging from the rocket coupled with what we remember of earthlings from our last trip there, is about their present place on the intelligence scale." "ummm, yes. at that level, he would comprehend his experiences on earth just sufficiently that he would not be dangerous to us, too. equal to an intelligent earthling. just about right for our purpose. then, shall we teach him our language?" "wait," said klarloth. he studied the psychograph closely for a while. "no, i do not think so. he will have a language of his own. i see in his subconscious, memories of many long conversations. strangely, they all seem to be monologues by one person. but he will have a language--a simple one. it would take him a long time, even under treatment, to grasp the concepts of our own method of communication. but we can learn his, while he is under the x- machine, in a few minutes." "does he understand, now, any of that language?" klarloth studied the psychograph again. "no, i do not believe he--wait, there is one word that seems to mean something to him. the word 'mitkey.' it seems to be his name, and i believe that, from hearing it many times, he vaguely associates it with himself." "and quarters for him--with air-locks and such?" "of course. order them built." v to say it was a strange experience for mitkey is understatement. knowledge is a strange thing, even when it is acquired gradually. to have it thrust upon one-- and there were little things that had to be straightened out. like the matter of vocal chords. his weren't adapted to the language he now found he knew. bemj fixed that; you would hardly call it an operation because mitkey--even with his new awareness--didn't know what was going on, and he was wide awake at the time. and they didn't explain to mitkey about the j-dimension with which one can get at the inwardness of things without penetrating the outside. they figured things like that weren't in mitkey's line, and anyway they were more interested in learning from him than teaching him. bemj and klarloth, and a dozen others deemed worthy of the privilege. if one of them wasn't talking to him, another was. their questioning helped his own growing understanding. he would not, usually, know that he knew the answer to a question until it was asked. then he'd piece together, without knowing just how he did it (any more than you or i know _how_ we know things) and give them the answer. bemj: "iss this language vhich you sbeak a universal vun?" and mitkey, even though he'd never thought about it before, had the answer ready: "no, it iss nodt. it iss englitch, but i remember der herr brofessor sbeaking of other tongues. i belieff he sboke another himself originally, budt in american he always sboke englitch to become more vamiliar mitt it. it iss a beaudiful sbeech, is it nodt?" "hmmmm," said bemj. klarloth: "und your race, the mices. are they treated vell?" "nodt by most people," mitkey told him. and explained. "i vould like to do something for them," he added. "loogk, could i nodt take back mitt me this brocess vhich you used upon me? abbly it to other mices, und greate a race of super-mices?" "vhy not?" asked bemj. he saw klarloth looking at him strangely, and threw his mind into rapport with the chief scientist's, with mitkey left out of the silent communion. "yes, of course," bemj told klarloth, "it will lead to trouble on earth, grave trouble. two equal classes of beings so dissimilar as mice and men cannot live together in amity. but why should that concern us, other than favorably? the resultant mess will slow down progress on earth--give us a few more millennia of peace before earthlings discover we are here, and trouble starts. you know these earthlings." "but you would give them the x- waves? they might--" "no, of course not. but we can explain to mitkey here how to make a very crude and limited machine for them. a primitive one which would suffice for nothing more than the specific task of converting mouse mentality from . to . , mitkey's own level and that of the bifurcated earthlings." "it is possible," communicated klarloth. "it is certain that for aeons to come they will be incapable of understanding its basic principle." "but could they not use even a crude machine to raise their own level of intelligence?" "you forget, bemj, the basic limitation of the x- rays; that no one can possibly design a projector capable of raising any mentality to a point on the scale higher than his own. not even we." all this, of course, over mitkey's head, in silent prxlian. more interviews, and more. klarloth again: "mitkey, ve varn you of vun thing. avoid carelessness vith electricity. der new molecular rearranchement of your brain center--it iss unstable, und--" bemj: "mitkey, are you sure your herr brofessor iss der most advanced of all who eggsperiment vith der rockets?" "in cheneral, yess, bemj. there are others who on vun specific boint, such as eggsplosives, mathematics, astrovisics, may know more, but not much more. und for combining these knowledges, he iss ahead." "it iss vell," said bemj. * * * * * small gray mouse towering like a dinosaur over tinier half-inch prxlians. meek, herbivorous creature though he was, mitkey could have killed any one of them with a single bite. but, of course, it never occurred to him to do so, nor to them to fear that he might. they turned him inside out mentally. they did a pretty good job of study on him physically, too, but that was through the j-dimension, and mitkey didn't even know about it. they found out what made him tick, and they found out everything he knew and some things he didn't even know he knew. and they grew quite fond of him. "mitkey," said klarloth one day, "all der civilized races on earth year glothing, do they nodt? veil, if you are to raise der level of mices to men, vould it not be vitting that you vear glothes, too?" "an eggcelent idea, herr klarloth. und i know chust vhat kind i vould like. der herr brofessor vunce showed me a bicture of a mouse bainted by der artist dissney, und der mouse vore glothing. der mouse vas not a real-life vun, budt an imachinary mouse in a barable, und der brofessor named me after der dissney mouse." "vot kind of glothing vas it, mitkey?" that was on the eve of mitkey's departure. originally, bemj had suggested awaiting the moment when prxl's eccentric orbit would again take it within a hundred and fifty thousand miles of earth. but, as klarloth pointed out, that would be fifty-five earth-years ahead, and mitkey wouldn't last that long. not unless they--and bemj agreed that they had better not risk sending a secret like that back to earth. "bright red bants mitt two big yellow buttons in frondt und two in back, und yellow shoes for der back feet und a pair of yellow gloves for der vront. a hole in der seat of der bants to aggomodate der tail." [illustration: mouse --warning-- fine of bucks mo. imprisonment or both to any person caught tying knots in or plucking hairs out of creature's tail--_police dept._ hot franks tours all points of interest every hour ] [illustration: "a hole in der seat of der bants to aggomodate der tail." ] "ogay, mitkey. such shall be ready for you in fife minutes." so they compromised by refueling mitkey's rocket with something that would cancel out the million and a quarter odd miles he would have to travel. that secret they didn't have to worry about, because the fuel would be gone by the time the rocket landed. day of departure. "ve haff done our best, mitkey, to set und time der rocket so it vill land on or near der spot from vhich you left earth. but you gannot eggspect agguracy in a voyach so long as this. but you vill land near. the rest iss up to you. ve haff equvipped the rocket ship for effery contingency." "thank you, herr klarloth, herr bemj. gootbye." "gootbye, mitkey. ve hate to loose you." "gootbye, mitkey." "gootbye, gootbye...." vi for a million and a quarter miles, the aim was really excellent. the rocket landed in long island sound, ten miles out from bridgeport, about sixty miles from the house of professor oberburger near hartford. they had prepared for a water landing, of course. the rocket went down to the bottom, but before it was more than a few dozen feet under the surface, mitkey opened the door--especially re-equipped to open from the inside--and stepped out. over his regular clothes he wore a neat little diving suit that would have protected him at any reasonable depth, and which, being lighter than water, brought him to the surface quickly where he was able to open his helmet. he had enough synthetic food to last him for a week, but it wasn't necessary, as things turned out. the night-boat from boston carried him in to bridgeport on its anchor chain, and once in sight of land he was able to divest himself of the diving suit and let it sink to the bottom after he'd punctured the tiny compartments that made it float, as he'd promised klarloth he would do. almost instinctively, mitkey knew that he'd do well to avoid human beings until he'd reached professor oberburger and told his story. his worst danger proved to be the rats at the wharf where he swam ashore. they were ten times mitkey's size and had teeth that could have taken him apart in two bites. but mind has always triumphed over matter. mitkey pointed an imperious yellow glove and said, "scram," and the rats scrammed. they'd never seen anything like mitkey before, and they were impressed. [illustration: "scram!"] so for that matter, was the drunk of whom mitkey inquired the way to hartford. we mentioned that episode before. that was the only time mitkey tried direct communication with strange human beings. he took, of course, every precaution. he addressed his remarks from a strategic position only inches away from a hole into which he could have popped. but it was the drunk who did the popping, without even waiting to answer mitkey's question. [illustration: "i beg your pardon sir, but, could you direct me to hartford?"] but he got there, finally. he made his way afoot to the north side of town and hid out behind a gas station until he heard a motorist who had pulled in for gasoline inquire the way to hartford. and mitkey was a stowaway when the car started up. the rest wasn't hard. the calculations of the prxlians showed that the starting point of the rocket was five earth miles north-west of what showed on their telescopomaps as a city, and which from the professor's conversation mitkey knew would be hartford. he got there. vii "hello, brofessor." the herr professor oberburger looked up, startled. there was no one in sight. "vot?" he asked, of the air. "who iss?" "it iss i, brofessor. mitkey, der mouse whom you sent to der moon. but i vas not there. insteadt, i--" "vot?? it iss imbossible. somebody blays der choke. budt--budt nobody _knows_ about that rocket. vhen it vailed, i didn't told nobody. nobody budt me knows--" "and me, brofessor." the herr professor sighed heavily. "offervork. i am going vhat they call battly in der bel--" "no, brofessor. this is really me, mitkey. i can talk now. chust like you." "you say you can--i do not belief it. vhy can i not see you, then. vhere are you? vhy don't you--" "i am hiding, brofessor, in der valll chust behind der big hole. i vanted to be sure efferything vas ogay before i showed myself. then you vould not get eggcited und throw something at me maybe." "vot? vhy, mitkey, if it iss really you und i am nodt asleep or going--vhy, mitkey, you know better than to think i might do something like that!" "ogay, brofessor." mitkey stepped out of the hole in the wall, and the professor looked at him and rubbed his eyes and looked again and rubbed his eyes and-- "i _am_ grazy," he said finally. "red bants he vears yet, und yellow--it gannot be. i _am_ grazy." "no, brofessor. listen, i'll tell you all aboudt." and mitkey told him. gray dawn, and a small gray mouse still talking earnestly. "but, mitkey--" "yess, brofessor. i see your boint, that you think an intelligent race of mices und an intelligent race of men couldt nodt get along side by sides. but it vould not be side by sides; as i said, there are only a ferry few beople in the smallest continent of australia. und it vould cost little to bring them back und turn offer that continent to us mices. ve vould call it moustralia instead australia, und ve vould instead of sydney call der capital dissney, in honor of--" "but, mitkey--" "but, brofessor, look vot ve offer for that continent. _all_ mices vould go there. ve civilize a few und the few help us catch others und bring them in to put them under der ray machine, und the others help catch more under build more machines und it grows like a snowball rolling down hill. und ve sign a non-aggression pact mitt humans und stay on moustralia und raise our own food und--" "but, mitkey--" "und look vot ve offer you in eggschange, herr brofessor! ve vill eggsterminate your vorst enemy--der _rats_. ve do not like them either. und vun battalion of vun thousand mices, armed mitt gas masks und small gas bombs could go right in effery hole after der rats und could eggsterminate effery rat in a city in vun day or two. in der whole vorld ve could eggsterminate effery last rat in a year, und at the same time catch und civilize effery mouse und ship him to moustralia, und--" "but, mitkey--" "vot, brofessor?" "it vould vork, but it voul dnot work. you could eggsterminate der rats, yess. but how long vould it be before conflicts of interests vould lead to der mices trying to eggsterminate der people or der people trying to eggsterminate der--" "they vould not dare, brofessor! ve could make veapons that vould--" "you see, mitkey?" "but it vould not habben. if men vill honor our rights, ve vill honor--" the herr professor sighed. "i--i vill act as your intermediary, mitkey, und offer your broposition, und--vell, it iss true that getting rid of rats vould be a greadt boon to der human race. budt--" "thank you, brofessor." "by der vay, mitkey. i haff minnie. your vife, i guess it iss, unless there vas other mices around. she iss in der other room; i put her there chust before you arriffed, so she vould be in der dark und could sleep. you vant to see her?" "vife?" said mitkey. it had been so long that he had really forgotten the family he had perforce abandoned. the memory returned slowly. "veil," he said "--ummm, yess. ve vill get her und i shall construct quvick a small x- prochector und--yess, it vill help you in your negotiations mitt der governments if there are sefferal of us already so they can see i am not chust a freak like they might otherwise suspegt." viii it wasn't deliberate. it couldn't have been, because the professor didn't know about klarloth's warning to mitkey about carelessness with electricity--"der new molecular rearrangement of your brain center--it iss unstable, und--" and the professor was still back in the lighted room when mitkey ran into the room where minnie was in her barless cage. she was asleep, and the sight of her--memory of his earlier days came back like a flash and suddenly mitkey knew how lonesome he had been. "minnie!" he called, forgetting that she could not understand. and stepped up on the board where she lay. "squeak!" the mild electrical current between the two strips of tinfoil got him. there was silence for a while. then: "mitkey," called the herr professor. "come on back und ve vill discuss this--" he stepped through the doorway and saw them, there in the gray light of dawn, two small gray mice cuddled happily together. he couldn't tell which was which, because mitkey's teeth had torn off the red and yellow garments which had suddenly been strange, confining and obnoxious things. "vot on earth?" asked professor oberburger. then he remembered the current, and guessed. "mitkey! can you no longer talk? iss der--" silence. then the professor smiled. "mitkey," he said, "my little star-mouse. i think you are more happier now." [illustration: "gootbye, mitkey"] he watched them a moment, fondly, then reached down and flipped the switch that broke the electrical barrier. of course they didn't know they were free, but when the professor picked them up and placed them carefully on the floor, one ran immediately for the hole in the wall. the other followed, but turned around and looked back--still a trace of puzzlement in the little black eyes, a puzzlement that faded. "gootbye, mitkey. you vill be happier this vay. und there vill always be cheese." "squeak," said the little gray mouse, and it popped into the hole. "gootbye--" it might, or might not, have meant. * * * * * [transcriber's note: section heads for sections i to iv are missing] gravy train by daniel f. galouye _ever hear of evil fairies who grant three wishes? mcworther's was more efficient. one wish was plenty to bring catastrophe!_ [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from worlds of if science fiction, march . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] i at one hundred and thirty, life was indeed gratifying for titus mcworther. but for one missing detail, it would have been perfect. with his wife, edna, he had planned well for retirement. his idyllic estate consisted of a second-hand planetoid, thirty miles in circumference, which was the only habitable piece of matter in its system. complete with supplementary gravity generator, a compact atmosphere, a mantle of lush topsoil and a carefully selected biota, mcworther's world was both his delight and his pride. its principal asset was, of course, its isolation. well away from the mainstream of galactic civilization, mcworther's star was smugly hidden behind a dark nebula, through which he and edna plunged twice a year to the fringe of the cluster--just to observe and mock convention, if for nothing else. it was an ideal setup. but, after two sedentary years, titus realized he still needed one item to make his retirement complete. so he dispatched this tight-beamed message to the packet order department of rear-sobucks and company in the west cluster federation's hub city: dear sir: please send one automatic bather with back-scrubbing attachment and toy boat docks, as listed in your videolog under order no. - c. charge same to credit account no. w -b d. sincerely yours, titus mcworther, potentate mcworther's world he listed the coordinates of the star and the orbital factor of his planetoid. * * * * * unfortunately, the hyper-spatial line between mcworther's world and the nearest relay center was partly coincident with the link to the politically noncommitted world of gauyuth-vi. this condition, together with the fact that components of a communication are sent by separate pulse, sometimes leads to the embarrassing phenomenon known as "message interfusion," which is retransmission of the right text with the wrong signature. and it so happened that as titus mcworther's order was en route, the system was also being burdened with this intelligence to the ganymede extension of the western cluster's state department: dear sir: this will verify our agreement and authorize implementation of interstellar aid arrangements as set forth in conferences with your ambassador. if such arrangements produce mutual satisfaction, we will quite readily declare concurrence, in principle at least, with the political aims of the western cluster. respectfully yours, ogarm netath, prime minister gauyuth-vi appended to the signature were the coordinates of gauyuth and the orbital factor of its number six planet. * * * * * wharton hoverly, undersecretary of cosmic aid for the western cluster, plucked at his thick, gray mustache as he reread the space-o-gram. he punched the videobox stud. "mallston!" the younger and more composed face of his assistant stared from the screen. "yes, sir?" "anything yet?" "not a thing. we have no record of a--mcworther's world." "what do you suppose?" "well, it seems authentic enough. we do know ambassador summerson has been working in that general area." "and you think summerson signed an aid agreement with this potentate?" "i'd say the message speaks for itself." again, hoverly worried his mustache. "did you check with summerson?" "he's on extended leave." "what do you think we ought to do?" "mcworther's world must be a critical area. and evidently we're going to get what we want out of the deal, since the potentate speaks of concurrence with western cluster aims." impatiently, the undersecretary glanced out the window. ganymede was well out of the jovian umbra now. if he didn't leave soon, he'd be late for his conference with the commerce department on farside luna. "all right, mallston," he said. "put mcworther's world on a class a aid schedule. that ought to hold the potentate until summerson gets back." * * * * * in the commercial section of hub city, rear-sobucks and company occupied a monstrous building whose emblematic tip pierced the clouds. on the two hundredth floor, the twenty-seventh vice-president strode through the rail gate, tossed the secretary a "don't-bother-to-announce-me" glance and went on into the inner office of the twenty-sixth vice-president. "got something i thought you'd be interested in, v.r.," he told the limp-faced man behind the desk. "there may be a promotion angle." "what is it?" v.r. asked, not exactly gripping his chair with anticipation. the other placed the space-o-gram on the desk. "it's from an ogarm netath, _prime minister_ of a place called gauyuth-six. he wants an automatic bather." v.r. extended a "so what?" glare. "don't you see? big shots like that don't place personal orders. but here's one who thinks so much of a rear-sobucks item that he forgets all about convention." "and so, wheeler, you want to capitalize on his good name in some sort of promotion gimmick," v.r. said through taut lips. wheeler shrank. "but i thought--" "never mind what you thought. fill his order. send it compliments of--let's see, gauyuth-six is uncommitted--compliments of the western cluster." * * * * * it was a fine morning on mcworther's world. cotton-candy clouds floated over the fields. dreaming herons, balanced on slender legs, gave the shallows of the lake a tufted appearance. a delightful breeze, artificially generated at the equator, wafted flowering stalks and rocked the air car and spaceabout at their moorings. titus snorted on the veranda and reached for his julep. he was a chunky little man, with the ruddiness of good health tinting his face and overflowing onto his partly bald pate. "where are you, titus?" an anxious voice disturbed the quiet of the house. "out here, love." edna appeared in the doorway. despite her age, there was still the fascination in her timeless eyes that had snared titus more than ninety years ago. "the chef burned the beans again," she said, frowning. "guess i'll have to fix it." "you know it's not the cooker. it's that darned gravity." he realized now it was a weight fluctuation that had nudged him from his nap. "i've got it _set_ that way, love," he explained. "we did not get clouds in the contract. but by varying the gravity control we can have them for nothing. it all has to do with atmospheric pressure." edna cast a resigned glance skyward. "if that's the way you want it--fleecy clouds and burnt beans--" the guttural scream of braking jets rattled the windows and sent the herons winging for the safety of the other hemisphere. hesitating on the fringe of the atmosphere, the freighter altered its approach and landed beside the house. titus went out to meet the skipper and his three assistants whose arms were filled with printed forms. "you potentate mcworther?" the skipper asked. titus smiled in embarrassment. "it's a gag. i just call myself that." "we got your order," the other snapped. "where do you want it?" titus' small eyes widened with an inner vision of the automatic bather--a vision which went on in speculation to dispose of the crude shower-masseur, for which he and edna were getting a bit too old. "if you'll put it on the veranda--" he paused and shouted back toward the house. "edna, get out the grapplers. we're in business." "fun-ny," the skipper observed with dry derision. then he signaled to his waiting assistants. they came forward and, one by one, thrust their stacks of printed forms against titus' chest. his arms came up in a reflex to accept the offerings. but, as the third assistant's contribution sent the stack soaring in front of his face, he went down under the weight. when he had extricated himself from the mound of paper, the men had returned to their ship. and now its sides were folding down and scores of huge crates were drifting out on repulsor beams and fluttering to the ground. soon the freighter was gone and edna was at his side. "what _have_ you gotten us into now, titus?" "honest, love--i don't know." suddenly his ears were splitting with the thunderous roar of a thousand ships plunging down to the surface as far as he could see around the perimeter of his small world. each pulled to a halt a few feet from the ground, opened its sides and disgorged vast mounds of crates and sacks, boxes and barrels, naked hills of coarse material that hissed like gravel as it spewed from chutes, gleaming masses of machinery. confounded, titus seized one of the slips of paper. it was an invoice listing two hundred earth movers, seventy-five instant pavers, five hundred concrete mixers. matching his frown, edna read a second sheet and demanded, "what on earth do you expect to do with a hundred thousand barrels of wheat germ oil? four thousand kegs of eight-penny nails? forty-five hundred tons of soybeans?" * * * * * at his secluded villa, prime minister netath was entertaining his foreign minister, ugaza bataul. netath leaned against the terrace bar and proposed a toast. "to an era of plenty." bataul smiled. "at the expense of the western cluster." they gulped the drinks and netath stared down into his empty glass. "we're quite fortunate that the western cluster's aspirations are extending to this sector." "as long as we can be sure that there won't be any _military_ advances." bataul added the qualification with misgiving. "oh, there's no danger of that. actually, we're lucky we didn't try to get on the eastern cluster's gravy train. we'd have had to make a lot of concessions." heralding its own approach with a sputtering rumble, the station 'copter came in low over the trees and dropped down on the lawn. netath walked over as his chauffeur climbed out of the cab and used antigrav grapples to float a large crate out of the freight compartment. "just picked it up at the space terminal," the man explained. "must be that aid shipment." bataul laughed. "you mean the first batch of credit certificates, maybe." the chauffeur pressed the "unpack" stud. the sides of the crate fell outward. "what _is_ it?" netath drew back, surveying the ivory, tanklike thing with its sparkling fixtures and flexible appendages. bataul bent and read the words on the inscription plate: "deluxe automatic bather-- - c." by then, netath had found the torn, soiled delivery tag. he read the part of the writing that was still legible: "... _sincerely hope this expression of western amity meets with your satisfaction. if we can serve you again, please don't hesitate._..." infuriated, he imparted a vindictive kick to the crate and crumpled the paper. "_that's_ the cosmic aid we were expecting?" bataul sputtered. "capitalist western dogs!" netath exclaimed. "they were just trifling with our planetary honor!" "it's an insult against our racial character!" the foreign minister said severely. "they _know_ we have no use for a bather, shedding our skin as we do once a day." netath forced restraint into his features. "we will not lose our diplomatic poise. there is always the chance a mistake has been made." he drew the contacter out of his pocket and shouted into its grid, "miss yalera?" "yes, sir?" came the instant answer. "take a space-o-gram to solaria." ii when the initial error was made at the hyper-spatial relay station, a pattern had been set. committed categorically to the memory banks were the false associations between the state department's ganymede extension and potentate mcworther, between premier netath and rear-sobucks. thus, it was somewhat to be expected that undersecretary hoverly should find himself chewing on the under-bristles of his mustache as he read the latest space-o-gram. dear sir: needless to say, we are somewhat disappointed over the western cluster's meager response to our desperate need. perhaps ambassador summerson misrepresented our agreement. in that event, we feel sure that consultation with his excellency will set the record straight. we would appreciate prompt attention to this detail. otherwise, in the interest of our people, we shall feel compelled to seek satisfaction elsewhere. respectfully yours, titus mcworther, potentate hoverly tossed the message on his desk, punched the audio-com button and called for his assistant. when mallston arrived, the undersecretary was still pacing. "did you take care of the mcworther world aid consignment?" he asked. mallston nodded. "delivery should have been made day before yesterday. full class a schedule." "well, it wasn't enough!" hoverly extended a stiff finger toward the space-o-gram. "read that." looking up finally, mallston said, "evidently we dropped the ball." "indeed we did. ambassador summerson must have promised the potentate the whole works." hoverly resumed pacing. "i should have guessed as much. president roswell only last week hinted that the western cluster should level its galactic commerce sights on that entire sector." mallston pondered the gravity of the space-o-gram. "maybe we should lay the mcworther development before the president." bristling, the undersecretary said, "and call attention to our own incompetence? we'll straighten this matter out by doing what we should have done in the first place--by putting the potentate on the double-a priority list. full and immediate delivery under class b through k schedules." mallston started out, but paused at the door. "how about cultural exchange?" "we'll play it safe by assuming summerson shot the works in that category too. round up every uncommitted cultural group in the cluster." * * * * * shaking his head deprecatingly, the twenty-seventh vice-president stood before the desk of the next highest official in the rear-sobucks hierarchy. "well, wheeler," v.r. clipped without looking up. "what is it this time?" "i'm afraid netath didn't take too kindly to our gesture." "netath? netath?" v.r. milked the name for its significance. "ogarm netath. the prime minister of that gauyuth place. the automatic bather." "oh, _that_ one." wheeler handed over the space-o-gram and v.r. muttered through the message: dear sir: i'm sure you made a mistake filling my order. you've got to come pick up your shipment right away. we're up to our ears and it's shaking us to pieces. yours in disappointment, ogarm netath, prime minister growling, v.r. dropped an effervescent pill into a glass of water. "you can't get anywhere with these back-planet bumpkins. i doubt that this netath ever _had_ a bath. send him a supplementary manual of operating instructions." wheeler started for the door. but v.r. called after him. "and bill the prime minister for that article. it'll teach him to show a little bit of appreciation." * * * * * titus winced before the persistent tremors that came through the floor of his cellar. he made another adjustment on the gravity control deflecting the planetoid's center of pseudomass another few feet. the ground beneath him finally quieted. "three days," he mumbled, dragging himself up the stairs. edna received him with hands on hips. "three days--what?" "getting things balanced again." "what are you going to do about all that stuff cluttering up our beautiful planetoid?" she was near tears. with edna dogging his steps, he returned to the veranda, where his julep was now quite thin and warm in the rays of the setting sun. "we'll have to find out where it came from first," he said, staring dismally over the mountains of machinery and grain, the tumbled stacks of crates and barrels and kegs, the lesser rows of wheeled and winged vehicles. "seems to me," edna persisted, "that the invoices will show that." she gestured at what remained of the stacks of printed forms. the rest of the slips were strewn over the ground as far as he could see. "only the _first_ sheet will show the origin--_if_ we could ever find it," titus explained. he went out to the air car, warmed it up and sent it churning skyward. near the attenuated top of the atmosphere, he was able to see exactly how much extraneous stuff had been dumped on his world. the main area of disposal seemed to have been within a two-mile radius of the house. an ever-widening helical course, wending its way alternately from night to day, eventually brought him on a great circle that sliced over both poles. then, with his searchlights still burning, he spiraled inward, covering the other hemisphere. the rest of his world was in primal order. he started for home around the daylight side. but even above the noise of his own rotorjets, the stridence of descending freighters erupted in a pandemonium of sound all around him. great clouds of rockets, clustered in fleets, were darkening the sky and raining down onto the surface. he barely managed to pull out from under one of the formations before it could pinch him against the ground. swearing in oaths that he had not used in years, he headed for the nearest group of ships. before he could close in, they had discharged their cargoes and thundered off into space again. he altered course for another detachment of freighters, only to meet with the same frustrating results. by the time he had aimed his craft at a third group, all the ships had blasted away, leaving everywhere great, gleaming mounds and stacks and irregular rows of crates and containers that completely obscured the surface. enraged, titus gunned the craft for home. he picked his way between several monstrous peaks of grain, some of them soaring nearly all the way up through the six-hundred-foot-thick atmosphere, and threw on his brakes to avoid collision with a tremendous pyramid of what looked like corn kernels. with stark apprehension, he envisioned his world shaking apart under the eccentric forces. but he quelled his fears with logic: this new addition of mass, apparently distributed evenly over all but the four square miles that had already served as a dumping ground, would be unbalanced only to a negligible degree. * * * * * titus flicked on his landing lights as he headed into the night. but from over the horizon came a glare considerably stronger than the candlepower of his own electrical system. as he pulled up to the mooring pylon, the explanation was evident. scores of pullman crafts were packed so tightly around his house that the blunt noses of several were sticking out over the veranda. he cut off the idling jets. the militant strains of a venurian march, blaring from the instruments of a hundred-piece symphony, swelled up mightily all around him. the orchestra itself was wedged between two residential crafts while the roof of mcworther's generating house served as the conductor's podium. on the veranda, a full troupe of simalean ballet dancers swirled and caracoled, not seeming to mind that they were occasionally overflowing the tiles and flouncing not so lightly through edna's caladiums. his wife stood helplessly by, still gripping the autobroom which she had evidently wielded without success in an attempt to rout the intruders. dismayed, titus elbowed his way through a dedicated choral group that was patriotically rendering the "fayothian anthem," sidestepped a tumbling foursome obviously from one of the lesser javapa planets and pushed aside a debating team which was having little luck making itself heard above the general cacophony. edna swept out to meet him. "titus, they just won't leave!" "who are they? what do they want?" "i don't know." she was having a difficult time restraining herself. "they asked for the ministry of something or other. then they said they were cooped up so long that they had to get some practice." titus bellowed for attention. but nobody turned an ear, except a pirouetting ballerina who whirled to a stop nearby, glissaded over in front of him and made a theatrical display of bending over and planting a set of lip-prints on his forehead--a gesture that fed considerable fuel to edna's vexation. "you're cute," the dancer tittered. "you got the word on this place, pudgy? what is it--a stopover station?" before he could answer, one of the tumblers shouted, "it's snowing!" the choral group broke reverently into the ancient carol "noel" while the orchestra paused on an upbeat and swung into a jazzed-up "jingle bells." perplexed, titus stared at the dancing snowflakes. but that was impossible! it _never_ snowed here on mcworther's world! then he remembered the grain peak he had skirted on the way home. it had extended high above the infrared and ultraviolet shields--into the naked, hot zone where restless winds had wafted the kernels eastward. he picked up one of the "flakes." _popcorn!_ iii many light years away, the emperor of the eastern cluster whirled around, kicked his bejeweled train out of the way and faced his chief adviser. "so they've opened up a new aid offensive?" "and a most vital one." the adviser blew on his spectacles and burnished the lenses against his sleeve. "a place called mcworther. our intelligence got its coordinates from their consignment documents." "never heard of it." "that's what's so insidious about this whole capitalist plot. they've kept it under their hats." "and why is it so vital?" the adviser directed the emperor's attention to a space globe suspended from the ceiling. he pressed two buttons on the wall and twin beams of light intersected within the sphere. "that's mcworther's location." "why--why--" the emperor stammered. "that outflanks us completely!" "what concerns me is how many other undisclosed but settled worlds lie in that same general area." "a whole raft of them, no doubt," the emperor said pessimistically. "what are we going to do?" "in this critical sector we've got to make friends--and fast! we'll begin with the mcworther place." "how far do you want to go?" "all the way. empty the surplus bins. clear out the warehouses. let mcworther have every available pound of material and equipment." "terms?" "terms be damned! we let the western cluster steal a march on us. we've got to recoup. everything goes as an outright gift--with all the cultural trimmings thrown in." * * * * * titus splashed into the cellar and struck out for the hypertransmitter. it was a peculiar flood. suffusing the water was a thick scum that flashed iridescently as it caught the glint of light from the ceiling. he stuck his finger into the dross and applied it to the tip of his tongue. syrup! he thought of the thousands of barrels that had been dumped into the lake and surmised that the contaminated water was backing up through the drainage system. he altered course for the pumps. and, like ships in convoy, a score of virtuosos invaded the cellar, paddling in his wake. the soprano's piercing voice assailed his ears. "in all my theatrical experience, i have never been subjected to such indignity! i insist--" but a violinist pushed forward, wielding his bow like a stiff finger. "you, sir, are holding back on us. no doubt you know what our future instructions are." "i've never seen such fascist highhandedness," complained a diminutive choreographer in the uniform of a palosov rocket dancer. "in the name of the ministry of culture of the eastern federation, i demand to see a representative of his imperial highness!" ignoring them, titus trudged on to the pumps and set them for maximum drain-off. the simalean ballerina did a series of rapid turns and watched the spray and the pattern of ripples that issued from her darting feet. "exquisite!" she exuberated. "i shall have to speak with the _maître de ballet_ about a nymphal sequence!" "come on, pop." one of the tumblers confronted titus. "what's the gimmick? why are they keeping us loafing around here?" "why?" roared a dramatist, allowing his voice full rein in the acoustic inadequacy of the cellar. "i'll tell you: it's a capitalist scheme to abduct the top talent of the glorious workers' federation!" hands clamped over his ears, titus finally made it to the hypertransmitter. he jiggled its dials, beat on the cabinet, lifted a foot from the water and gave it a couple of kicks broadside. no results. it was obviously shorted out from the flood. and none of the pullman crafts was equipped with long-range communications gear. titus waded from the cellar, plodded through the house, leaving pools of syrupy water in his wake, and stalked onto the veranda. the scene was no less hectic than it had been. there were two orchestras now. and they were waging a war of decibels to determine whether the "east cluster blastoff march" or the "west cluster anthem" should prevail over mcworther's world. two debating teams were holding forth on the comparative benefits of proletarian solidarity and the free enterprise system. beyond the caladium bed, edna, who seemed to have finally succumbed to frustrated abandon, had struck a face-to-the-sun and wind-in-her-hair posture for a portraitist who was drowning futility in artistic endeavor. but there was neither wind nor sun to accommodate the pose, titus lamented. for, after yesterday's deliveries by the bright red cargo ships, which had obviously been from the eastern cluster, there was little left of mcworther's world that could be recognized. the immediate area around the house had been spared in the deluge of material. but, beyond, great sloping expanses of grain and crates, barrels, boxes, machinery, bulging sacks and drums stretched up and away like the inner walls of a crater. fortunately, disposal onto the surface of mcworther's world had stopped. but not delivery to the system. coruscating pinpoints of flame, far out in space, signified the presence of thousands upon thousands of cargo carriers that were dropping off their freight in solar orbit. the items of merchandise themselves were indistinguishable. but their composite existence was beginning to take on the appearance of a great ring of fragmented particles stretching around the sun. and titus supposed that it was only the reliability of the mass-fending generators attached to each article that tentatively kept them all separate and prevented them from plunging like a devastating hailstorm onto the surface of his world. he slumped to the ground and bracketed his cheeks between his palms. for some unaccountable reason, it seemed that the productivity of the entire universe was being showered down on his private planetoid in one vast gravy-train effect. only he was drowning in the gravy. * * * * * "and that's my story." undersecretary of cosmic aid hoverly laid his hands on the conference table. "and we now have mcworther's world on a total aid schedule." president roswell, an angular man with a troubled face, drummed his fingertips together. "gentlemen, this is most serious." on his right, ambassador summerson's head bobbed in accord. the gesture spread next to the chief of intelligence, then to hoyerly, thus making the circuit back to roswell. "to sum up, then," said the president, "you, hoverly, authorized aid for a mcworther's world in the - area." the undersecretary glanced away uneasily. "but you, summerson," roswell continued, "have no record of having signed aid agreements with such a place." "that's right," the ambassador verified. "but deciding to accommodate mcworther's world was the most fantastic stroke of good luck imaginable." hoverly squinted. "i don't follow you." "when you sent aid to the potentate, not only did you pick what will undoubtedly develop into the most critical political area of the millennium, but you also beat the easties to the draw in a sector that they had staked out all for themselves." "a stroke of sheer luck," president roswell concurred. the roving ambassador leaned back smiling. "the chance timing was perfect too. we beat them by less than two weeks." but the intelligence chief's face was rigid with dejection. "we got there 'firstest,' to use an ancient expression, but not with the 'mostest.' our agents in imperial city report that the amount of aid authorized for mcworther's world is unbelievable. the entire eastern cluster is going on a full austerity basis to support the program." "that shows what value they place on mcworther's world and the sector it opens up," roswell offered. "when they found out we'd moved in ahead of them, their reaction was frantic." summerson rose. "this, then, gentlemen, is it." "it certainly is." roswell's voice was heavy with despondency. "the most god-awful aid war the cluster has ever seen." "we can't back out," the ambassador warned. "we've got to get busy and face up to the task." "with every resource at our disposal. to ignore the challenge would be to surrender this entire section of the galaxy to the easties." the president was silent a moment. "gentlemen, i am herewith sounding a call to economic arms. cancel all other aid commitments and activity. throw everything we have got, everything we can ever hope to produce, at mcworther's world." "i think you'd better call on the potentate personally," summerson proposed. "that," said roswell, "is exactly what i intend to do." * * * * * adjusting the drape of his robe, the emperor sent his eyes flicking over the report. finally he lurched from his chair with a resounding "eureka!" "so you see how it is, your imperial highness," his chief adviser offered. "by cutting in on their mcworther world operation, we have indeed touched a sensitive western spot." "there's no question about that," the emperor said lustily. he was a portly man whose sartorial excesses made him seem even more imposing. his eyes, recessed under thickset brows, flared with triumph as he said, "mcworther's world must figure prominently in their planning. from the way they cut loose with everything they had when they found out we were stepping in too, damned if i'm not convinced this new system will be the pivotal point of their entire future strategy." "then we'd better order double production quotas on every world that flies the eastern flag." "_triple_ quotas. and have my space yacht refitted by tomorrow." "you're going somewhere, highness?" asked the adviser. "this potentate mcworther is likely to be the third most important political figure in the galaxy. i'm not going to lose any time getting over there and pumping his hand." * * * * * his face flushed with rage, ogarm netath tossed the space-o-gram at his foreign minister, then snatched it back out of bataul's hands before he had a chance to read it. "it's a bill!" netath's voice quivered. "they sent us a bill for that damned bather monstrosity!" bataul's brow, to all appearances, was ready for spring planting. "let me have another look at it." netath stood there trembling while the foreign minister sent his eyes darting over the paper. "it's from rear-sobucks!" bataul exclaimed. "a retail concern that obviously handles automatic bathers!" "but it was our aid shipment, wasn't it?" "apparently not. it says here, '... for merchandise previously extended _in behalf of_ the western cluster....'" "i don't understand." bataul's features struggled through a gamut of expressions. "i think i'm just beginning to. do you remember last year when we had that communications survey made? between here and the nearest western relay station, there was that single system. i think some crackpot had laid claim--of course. mcworther's his name. calls himself a potentate." netath stiffened. "and you think--?" "i think both we and mcworther are victims of message interfusion," bataul said flatly. "and our aid shipments--?" "i'd bet mcworther must be wringing his hands over more loot than he'll ever be able to count." netath started punching buttons on his desk. "we've got work to do." "what kind?" "first you're going to get off a message to this rear-sobucks bunch and tell them what they can do with their bill _and_ their automatic bather--if it'll fit. you can also explain what's happened." "this time we'll send the message around the _right_ leg of the cluster," bataul assured. "then we're hopping over to this mcworther system and laying down the law to that character. _that_ i want to do personally." * * * * * "this," said twenty-seventh vice-president wheeler of rear-sobucks, "explains it all." "communications interfusion?" the twenty-sixth vice-president asked. "absolutely, v.r. just like premier netath says." "then there's a rear-sobucks customer who has been unnecessarily inconvenienced and still hasn't been satisfied?" with a curt nod, wheeler confirmed the other's fear. v.r. rose from his desk and wagged a finger at the other. "i still don't understand it all, wheeler. but i can't avoid the impression that you're somehow responsible for the mess." wheeler cowered. "_you're_ going to take a trip--now!" v.r. went on, gathering steam. "_you're_ going to deliver a bather personally to this potentate mcworther. _you're_ going to extend the apologies of the entire rear-sobucks organization!" iv titus poured his tenth consecutive julep--directly from the bottle, without the benefit of ice, sugar or mint--and leaned back in his chair. his occupancy of a corner of the veranda had been a hard-won concession. almost indifferent now, he stared at the hundreds of virtuosos and shouted, "go home!" but there was little zing in his voice and the words were, of course, lost in the confused sea of sound--musical, argumentative, operatic and otherwise. heedless, the orchestras played, the ballet dancers whirled, painters sketched, gymnasts tumbled, dramatists soliloquized and the vocalists made it plain that they would give no quarter. mcworther's world shud-shuddered. and the towering peaks of machinery and grain, cases and crates rumbled ominously as their slopes shifted. titus' ears popped and he suddenly felt a giddiness that was all out of proportion to the number of juleps he had consumed. an all-too-brief silence fell over the multitude. then, as stability returned to the planetoid, they dived back into their various activities. they were damned fools, mcworther thought. even if it meant risking their lives, they would be willing to stay there and consort in their olympian ecstasy of artistic communion. it was a field day, old home week, esoteric _anschluss_, a fraternal blowout--all rolled into one. a distant explosion rent what was left of the compact atmosphere. and, as an immediate consequence, additional hundreds of tons of grain _hissed_ down a nearby slope and eased into the lake. somewhat concerned, titus stared at the myriad points of light coruscating deep out in space. what was happening was obvious: there were millions, perhaps billions of articles of freight in the same orbit--all maintaining their distances from the planetoid and from one another by virtue of their mass-repulsion generators. and, where that many electronic units were concerned, the breakdown factor became a predictable quantity. mcworther's world could now expect to be the target of a plunging chunk of cargo once every four or five minutes. another few hours, titus realized, and that interval would be reduced to four or five seconds. for he could readily see the infinite streams of freighters that were still arriving and dropping off additional cargo. as a matter of fact, it was so thick out there now that only a faint, diffused light was coming through from mcworther's sun. titus poured himself another mintless, sugarless, iceless julep. * * * * * the insigne of the western cluster emblazoned on its side, a giant ship felt its way down through the atmosphere, sidled this way and that as it squeezed through the barrier of anchored pullman crafts, pulled up and hovered over the southern edge of the veranda. at that particular moment, titus had been quite fascinated with the tumblers' practice session. one of the gymnasts, preparing for a back-flip, had taken a boost from the cupped hands of another. only the resulting arc through the air was executed with slow-motion rhythm that took the performer to a height of perhaps twenty feet before he floated back to the ground. at the same time, titus' ears popped again and he had the odd sensation that the deck chair was shrinking away beneath him. the newly arrived ship lowered an escalator to the surface and the pilot glided down, landing only a few feet from mcworther. "there seems to be some mistake," he said. "i was given these coordinates and orbital factor for a--" he checked his notebook--"mcworther's world." "this," said titus stiffly, "_is_ mcworther's world." cupping his hands, the pilot called back into the ship. "we're on the right place." an alarmed face poked out of the hatch. "_this_ is it?" titus lurched to his feet, returning an equally startled expression. the man coming clown the escalator was president vance roswell of the western federation! he had seen the face on thousands of newscasts. roswell, sickened, stared at the mountains of supplies on the obscured surface of the planetoid. he tilted his head back and took in the glimmering sea of cargo out in space, the flaring trails of exhaust jets that criss-crossed in an infinite pattern as endless streams of ships jockeyed into position to discharge more freight. then he dropped to the veranda railing and buried his face hopelessly in his hands. by then, one of the orchestra conductors, who had also recognized the president, had abruptly brought his baton down to terminate the "lyraen overture." he led his ensemble into a stirring rendition of the "west cluster anthem." without interrupting his misery, roswell elevated a limp hand and signaled for quiet. but even before the musicians tapered to silence on a jagged, perplexed note, the other orchestra blared forth with the "east cluster blastoff march," all its members standing and facing the northern edge of the veranda. titus watched the impressive vessel float to the surface, its almost invisible repulsor beams jostling the lesser pullman ships out of its way. splashed across its side was the fist-clutching-galaxy symbol of the eastern federation. he was still gawking when the hatch opened, ushering onto the tiled surface none other than the emperor himself--an immense, brilliantly robed man who swept like a bowling ball through his retinue of aides. * * * * * there were two distant explosions, one close on the heels of the other, and the planetoid convulsed. that time, titus imagined, he had seen one of the masses of cargo plunging to the surface. the emperor drew up before titus. but although his lips moved, no audible sound came from his mouth, since he was in the immediate range of the eastern symphony orchestra's bass section. scowling, he whirled, threw up this arms and bellowed for silence. quiet came as though someone had pulled a plug. "now," he said, propping his fists on his hips and flaring his robe out even further, "perhaps someone will enlighten me. i'm looking for mcworther's world. it's supposed to be here." titus poured a triple, undiluted julep and gulped down half of it. he said, "you're standing on it." "_this!_ that's impossible! what's the population?" "two--not counting the transients." titus started to offer the emperor the rest of his julep, thought better of it and drank it himself. roswell withdrew from his dejection, looked up and nodded, verifying the emperor's stark suspicion. it was apparent that the president was only then aware of the emperor's identity. and the latter was obviously no less surprised on recognizing his counterpart from the western cluster. they only stared uncertainly at each other while the hundreds of virtuosos, sensing the propriety of demonstrating their loyalty, split into two groups and took sides behind their respective leaders. roswell laughed finally. it was a high-pitched, unnatural sound that conveyed no glee at all and grew only more ragged as his shifting stare once again took in the completely ruined merchandise on the surface, the practically irretrievable cargoes adrift in space. his pitiable outburst suggested an infinity of futility over the wanton waste. it spoke wordlessly of sterility for hundreds of productive worlds over the years ahead--economic sterility, and its inevitable consequence of military impotence. the emperor watched him for a moment, then dropped to the veranda rail beside him. he didn't join in the almost hysterical laughter. but his glum features reflected sympathetic appreciation of roswell's predicament. and in his heavy silence was the admission that the circumstances were mutual. mcworther's world trembled again. titus inclined his head to one side, jiggling a finger in his ear to stop it from popping. he could have sworn, too, that he had seen the emperor and the president levitate a good several inches off the rail. edna stalked from the house, surveyed the new arrivals without giving any indication she had recognized them and wagged a finger in her husband's face. "titus, this has gone far enough!" she exclaimed. "if you don't--" "later, love," he pacified. "something's going wrong." she was taken aback by his understatement. but he hadn't meant it that way. he had merely expressed suspicion over his recurrent sensations of lightness. * * * * * almost at the same time, two other ships dropped down at the edge of the veranda. the hatch of the first sprang open and disgorged a thin man in a swallow-tail coat who drew rigidly erect and announced: "his most august excellency, prime minister netath of gauyuth-six!" ogarm netath, indignation branding his features, strode out. "where's this potentate mcworther character?" he demanded. a hundred extended fingers singled out titus, who was just then pouring a thirteenth julep. netath stomped over. "you, sir, have got _my_ aid consignments!" by that time, the other ship had thrown open its hatch and a short, stout man in a business suit emerged. "i am wheeler of rear-sobucks and company," he disclosed, standing to one side so that two men working with antigrav grapples could wrestle a large crate onto the veranda. "i have an apology and an automatic bather for potentate mcworther." but titus turned his back on the man, abruptly facing his wife. "good god! what day is it?" she frowned in puzzlement. "why, wednesday." there was a sharp explosion nearby as another article of cargo came hurtling down from space. "and it's almost noon!" she nodded, still perplexed. "get into the spaceabout, love--_quick_!" she hesitated and he gave her a shove. but he paused and faced the others. "you got just about fifteen minutes to climb into your contraptions and clear out--all of you! because by then we'll be fresh out of gravity!" and they'd be lucky if they had _that much_ time, he realized as he followed edna into the small craft. he had known he would have to face the inevitable crisis on wednesday. but all along he had been off one day in his calculations, such that he had been sure today was only tuesday. "what is it, titus?" his wife asked as he strapped himself in beside her. "the supplementary gravity generator hasn't been refueled! it's sputtering out!" from space, he watched the end of mcworther's world. the atmosphere went first, _swooshing_ outward as a result of abrupt decompression and leaving a halo of frozen water crystals in its wake. then the cargo that was piled on the surface recoiled from its own cumulative pressure and shot out into space. the topsoil followed suit, dispersing like a dust storm, while the lakes boiled in one instant and their vapor froze in the next. before any of the hurtling mess could reach his spaceabout, titus followed the pullman crafts, the rear-sobucks delivery vehicle and the presidential and imperial yachts into hyperspace. * * * * * titus and edna mcworther have given up rustic retirement. instead they are living out their declining years in a floating villa just off the jersey coast. life is still gratifying, with the exception of one detail. but titus is resolved that he and his wife will have to be content with the shower-masseur for the rest of their lives. at any rate, he'll be damned if he'll put in another order for an automatic bather, with or without a back-scrubbing attachment. the addicts by william morrison illustrated by ed. alexander [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from galaxy science fiction january . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] wives always try to cure husbands of bad habits, even on lonely asteroids! you must understand that palmer loved his wife as much as ever, or he would never have thought of his simple little scheme at all. it was entirely for her own good, as he had told himself a dozen times in the past day. and with that he stilled whatever qualms of conscience he might otherwise have had. he didn't think of himself as being something of a murderer. she was sitting at the artificial fireplace, a cheerful relic of ancient days, reading just as peacefully as if she had been back home on mars, instead of on this desolate outpost of space. she had adjusted quickly to the loneliness and the strangeness of this life--to the absence of friends, the need for conserving air, the strange feeling of an artificial gravity that varied slightly at the whim of impurities in the station fuel. to everything, in fact, but her husband. she seemed to sense his eyes on her, for she looked up and smiled. "feeling all right, dear?" she asked. "naturally. how about you?" "as well as can be expected." "not very good, then." she didn't reply, and he thought, _she hates to admit it, but she really envies me. well, i'll fix it so that she needn't any more._ and he stared through the thick, transparent metal window at the beauty of the stars, their light undimmed by dust or atmosphere. the stories told about the wretchedness of the lighthouse keepers who lived on asteroids didn't apply at all to this particular bit of cosmic rock. life here had been wonderful, incredibly satisfying. at least it had been that way for him. and now it would be the same way for his wife as well. he would have denied it hotly if you had accused him of finding her repulsive. but to certain drunks, the sober man or woman is an offense, and palmer was much more than a drunk. he was a marak addict, and in the eyes of the marak fiends, all things and all people were wonderful, except those who did not share their taste for the drug. the latter were miserable, depraved creatures, practically subhuman. of course that was not the way most of them put it. certainly it was not the way palmer did. he regarded his wife, he told himself, as an unfortunate individual whom he loved very much, one whom it was his duty to make happy. that her new-found happiness would also hasten her death was merely an unfortunate coincidence. she was sure to die anyway, before long, so why not have her live out her last days in the peace and contentment that only marak could bring? louise herself would have had an answer to that, if he had ever put the question to her. he was careful never to do so. she laid the book aside and looked up at him again. she said, "jim, darling, do you think you could get the television set working again?" "not without a mesotron rectifier." "even the radio would be a comfort." "it wouldn't do any good, any way. too much static from both mars and earth this time of year." that was the beauty of the marak, he thought. it changed his mood, and left him calm and in full command of his faculties, able to handle any problem that came up. he himself, of course, missed neither the radio nor the television, and he never touched the fine library of micro-books. he didn't need them. a shadow flitted by outside the thick window, blotting out for a moment the blaze of stars. it was the shadow of death, as he knew, and he was able to smile even at that. even death was wonderful. when it finally came, it would find him happy. he would not shudder away from it, as he saw louise doing now at the sight of the ominous shadow. he smiled at his wife again, remembering the six years they had lived together. it had been a short married life, but--again the word suggested itself to him--a wonderful one. there had been only one quarrel of importance, in the second year, and after that they had got along perfectly. and then, two years ago, he had begun to take marak, and after that he couldn't have quarreled with anyone. it was a paragon among drugs, and it was one of the mysteries of his existence that anybody should object to his using it. louise had tried to argue with him after she had found out, but he had turned every exchange of views into a peaceful discussion, which from his side, at least, was brimming over with good humor. he had even been good-humored when she tried to slip the antidote into his food. it was this attitude of his that had so often left her baffled and enraged, and he had a good chuckle out of that, too. imagine a wife getting angry because her husband was too good-natured. but she was never going to get angry again. he would see to that. not after tonight. a big change was going to take place in her life. she had picked up another book, and for the moment he pitied her. he knew that she wasn't interested in any books. she was merely restless, looking for something to do with herself, seeking some method of killing time before the shadows outside killed it for her for good and all. she couldn't understand his being so peaceful and contented, doing nothing at all. she threw the second book down and snarled--yes, that was the word, "you're such a fool, jim! you sit there, smug and sure of yourself, your mind blank, just waiting--waiting for them to kill you and me. and you seem actually happy when i mention it." "i'm happy at anything and everything, dear." "at the thought of dying too?" "living or dying--it doesn't make any difference. whatever happens, i'm incapable of being unhappy." "if it weren't for the drug, we'd both live. you'd think of a way to kill them before they killed us." "there is no way." "there must be. you just can't think of it while the drug has you in its grip." "the drug doesn't have you, dear." he asked without sarcasm, "why don't you think of a way?" "because i lack the training you have. because i don't have the scientific knowledge, and all the equipment scattered around means nothing to me." "there's nothing to be done." her fists clenched. "if you weren't under the influence of the drug--" "you know that it doesn't affect the ability to think. tests have shown that." "tests conducted by addicts themselves!" "the fact that they can conduct the tests should be proof enough that there's nothing wrong with their minds." "but there _is_!" she shouted. "i can see it in you. oh, i know that you can still add and subtract, and you can draw lines under two words which mean the same thing, but that isn't really thinking. real thinking means the ability to tackle real problems--hard problems that you can't handle merely with paper and pencil. it means having the incentive to use your brain for a long time at a stretch. and that's what the drug has ruined. it has taken away all your incentive." "i still go about my duties." "not as well as you used to, and even at that, only because they've become a habit. just as you talk to me, because i've become a habit. if you'd let me give you the antidote--" he chuckled at the absurdity of her suggestion. once an addict had been cured, he could not become addicted again. the antidote acted to produce a permanent immunization against the effects of the drug. it was the realization of this fact that made addicts fight so hard against any attempt to cure them. and she thought that she could convince him by argument! he said, "_you_ talk of not being able to think!" "i know," she replied hotly. "_i'm_ the one who blunders. _i'm_ the fool, for arguing with you, when i realize that it's impossible to convince a marak addict." "that's it," he nodded, and chuckled again. but that wasn't quite it. for he was also chuckling at his plan. she had thought him unable to tackle a real problem. well, he would tackle one tonight. then she would simply adopt his point of view, and she would no longer be unhappy. after she had accepted the solution he had provided, she would wonder how she could ever have opposed him. he fell into one of his dozes and hardly noticed her glaring at him. when he came out of it at last, it was to hear her say, "we have to stay alive as long as possible. for the sake of the lighthouse." "of course, my dear. i don't dispute that at all." "and the longer we stay alive, the more chance there is that some ship will pick us up." "oh, no, there's no chance at all," he asserted cheerfully. "you know that as well as i do. no use deceiving yourself, my love." that, he observed to himself, was the way of non-addicts. they couldn't look facts in the face. they had to cling to a blind and silly optimism which no facts justified. _he_ knew that there was no hope. _he_ was able to review the facts calmly, judiciously, to see the inevitability of their dying--and to take pleasure even in that. he reviewed them for her now. "let us see, sweetheart, whether i've lost my ability to analyze a situation. we're here with our pretty little lighthouse in the middle of a group of asteroids between mars and earth. ships have been wrecked here, and our task is to prevent further wrecks. the lighthouse sends out a standard high-frequency beam whose intensity and phase permit astrogators to estimate their distance and direction from us. ordinarily, there's nothing for us to do. but on the rare occasions when the beam fails--" "that will be the end." "on those occasions," he continued, unruffled by her interruption, "i am supposed to leave my cosy little shelter, so thoughtfully equipped with all the comforts of earth or mars, and make repairs as rapidly as possible. under the usual conditions, lighthousekeeping is a boring task. in fact, it has been known to drive people insane. that's why it's generally assigned to happily married couples like us, who are accustomed to living quietly, without excitement." "and that," she added bitterly, "is why even happily married couples are usually relieved after one year." "but, darling," he said, his tone cheerful, "you mustn't blame anyone. who would have expected that a maverick meteor would come at us and displace us from our orbit? and who would have expected that the meteor would have collided first with the outer asteroids, and picked up a cargo of--those?" he gestured toward the window, where a shadow had momentarily paused. by the light that shone through, he could see that the creature was relatively harmless-looking. it had what appeared to be a round, humorous face whose unhumorous intentions would be revealed only at the moment of the kill. the seeming face was actually featureless, for it was not a face at all. it had neither eyes, nor nose, nor mouth. the effect of features was given by the odd blend of colors. almost escaping notice because of their unusual position and their dull brown hue were the stomach fangs, in neat rows which could be extended and retracted like those of a snake. he noticed that louise had shuddered again, and said, in the manner of a man making conversation, "interesting, aren't they? they're rock breathers, you know. they need very little oxygen, and they extract that from the silicates and other oxygen-containing compounds of the rock." "don't talk about them." "all right, if you don't want me to. but about us--you see, my dear, no one expected us to be lost. and even if the lighthouse service has started to look for us, it'll take a long time to find us." "we have food, water, air. if not for those beasts, we'd last until a rescue ship appeared." "but even a rescue ship wouldn't be able to reach us unless we kept the beam going. so far, we've been lucky. it's really functioned remarkably well. but sooner or later it'll go out of order, and then i'll have to go out and fix it. you agree to that, don't you, louise, dear?" she nodded. she said quietly, "the beam must be kept in order." "that's when the creatures will get me," he said, almost with satisfaction. "i may kill one or two of them, although the way i feel toward everything, i hate to kill anything at all. but you know, sweetheart, that there are more than a dozen of them altogether, and it's clumsy shooting in a spacesuit at beasts which move as swiftly as they do." "and if you don't succeed in fixing what's wrong, if they get you--" she broke down suddenly and began to cry. he looked at her with compassion, and smoothed her hair. and yet, under the influence of the drug, he enjoyed even her crying. it was, as he never tired of repeating to himself and to her a wonderful drug. under its spell, a man--or a woman--could really enjoy life. tonight she would begin to enjoy life along with him. * * * * * their chronometer functioned perfectly, and they still regulated their living habits by it, using greenwich earth time. at seven in the evening they sat down to a fine meal. knowing that tomorrow they might die, louise had decided that tonight they would eat and drink as well as they could, and she had selected a christmas special. she had merely to pull a lever, and the food had slid into the oven, to be cooked at once by an intense beam of high-frequency radiation. jim himself had chosen the wine and the brandy--one of the peculiarities of the marak was that it did not affect the actual enjoyment of alcoholic drinks in the slightest, and one of the sights of the solar system was to see an addict who was also drunk. but it was a rare sight, for the marak itself created such a pervading sensation of well-being that it often acted as a cure for alcoholism. once an alcoholic had experienced its effect, he had no need to get drunk to forget his troubles. he enjoyed his troubles instead, and drank the alcohol for its own sake, for its ability to provide a slightly different sensation, and not for its ability to release him from an unhappy world. so tonight palmer drank moderately, taking just enough, as it seemed to him, to stimulate his brain. and he did what he now realized he should have done long ago. unobserved, he placed a tablet of marak in his own wineglass and one in louise's. the slight bitterness of taste would be hardly perceptible. and after that louise would be an addict too. that was the way the marak worked. there was nothing mysterious about the craving. it was simply that once you had experienced how delightful it was, you wouldn't do without it. the tablet he had taken that morning was losing its effect, but he felt so pleased at what he was doing that he didn't mind even that. for the next half hour he would enjoy himself simply by looking at louise, and thinking that now at last they would be united again, no longer kept apart by her silly ideas about doing something to save themselves. and then the drug would take effect, and they would feel themselves lifted to the stars together, never to come down to this substitute for earth again until the beam failed, and they went out together to make the repairs, and the shadows closed in on them. he had made sure that louise had her back to him when he dropped the tablet into her glass, and he saw that she suspected nothing. she drank her wine, he noticed, without even commenting on the taste. he felt a sudden impulse to kiss her, and, somewhat to her surprise, he did so. then he sat down again and went on with the dinner. he waited. an hour later he knew that he had made her happy. she was laughing as she hadn't laughed for a long time. she laughed at the humorous things he said, at the flattering way he raised his glass to her, even at what she saw through the window. sometimes it seemed to him that she was laughing at nothing at all. he tried to think of how he had reacted the first time he had taken the drug. he hadn't been quite so aggressively cheerful, not quite so--hysterical. but then, the drug didn't have exactly the same effect on everyone. she wasn't as well balanced as he had been. the important thing was that she was happy. curiously enough, he himself wasn't happy at all. it took about five seconds for the thought to become clear to him, five seconds in which he passed from dull amazement to an enraged and horrified comprehension. he sprang to his feet, overturning the table at which they still sat. and he saw that she wasn't surprised at all, that she still stared at him with a secret satisfaction. "you've cured me!" he cried. "you've fed me the antidote!" and he began to curse. he remembered the other time she had tried it, the time when he had been on the alert, and had easily detected the strange metallic taste of the stuff. he had spat it out, and under the influence of the drug from which she had hoped to save him, he had laughed at her. now he was unable to laugh. he had been so intent on feeding the tablet to her that he had forgotten to guard himself, and he had been caught. he was normal now--her idea of being normal--and he would never again know the wonderful feeling the drug gave. he began to realize his situation on this horrible lonely asteroid. he cast a glance at the window and at what must be waiting outside, and it was his turn to shudder. he noticed that she was still smiling. he said bitterly, "you're the addict now and i'm cured." she stopped smiling and said quietly, "jim, listen to me. you're wrong, completely wrong. i didn't give you the antidote, and you didn't give me the drug." "i put it in your wineglass myself." she shook her head. "that was a tablet i substituted for yours. it's an anti-virus dose from our medicine chest. you took one of the same things. that's why you feel so depressed. you're not under the influence of the drug any more." he took a deep breath. "but i'm not cured?" "no. i knew that i wouldn't be able to slip you the antidote. the taste is too strong. later you'll be able to start taking the drug again. that is, if you want to, after experiencing for a time what it is to be normal. but not now. you have to keep your head clear. you have to think of something to save us." "but there's nothing to think of!" he shouted angrily. "i told you that the drug doesn't affect the intelligence!" "i still don't believe you. if you'd only exert yourself, use your mind--" he said savagely, "i'm not going to bother. give me those marak tablets." she backed away from him. "i thought you might want them. i took no chances. i threw them out." "out there?" a horrified and incredulous look was on his face. "you mean that i'm stuck here without them? louise, you fool, there's no help for us! the other way, at least, we'd have died happy. but now--" he stared out the window. the shadows were there in full force. not one now, but two, three--he counted half a dozen. it was almost as if they knew that the end had come. they had reason to be happy, he thought with despair. and perhaps-- he shrank back from the thought, but it forced itself into his mind--perhaps, now that all happiness had gone, and wretchedness had taken its place, he might as well end everything. there would be no days to spend torturing himself in anticipation of a horrible death. louise exclaimed suddenly, "jim, _look_! they're _frolicking_!" he looked. the beasts certainly were gay. one of them leaped from the airless surface of the asteroid and sailed over its fellow. he had never seen them do that before. usually they clung to the rocky surface. another was spinning around oddly, as if it had lost its sense of balance. louise said, "_they've_ swallowed the tablets! over a hundred doses--enough to drug every beast on the asteroid!" for a moment palmer stared at the gamboling alien drug addicts. then he put on his spacesuit and took his gun, and, without the slightest danger to himself, went out and shot them one by one. he noted, with a kind of grim envy, that they died happy. juggernaut of space ray cummings never had the mind of man conceived so horrible a doom as was reaching for earth. never had a greater need for earth's valiant champions been needed. and yet the only ones who could fight the menace--were five futile humans, prisoners on another world. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] my name is robert rance. you've heard of me, of course--through the recent weird affair of the crimson comet, if for nothing else. it seems to me rather ironic: for five years i have been reporting popular science items on the split-wave band of non-visual broadcasting. station wana-nyc--the main outlet of _amalgamated newscasters' association_, for whom i work. i struggled for personal publicity. then i was plunged--certainly entirely against my will--into the blood-chilling, gruesome adventure which is now popularly known as "the death of the crimson comet." out of it has come publicity beyond my wildest dreams. and now that i've got it, i don't want it. i'm not a hero, of dauntless, fearless courage. i'm not a scientific genius, who has made possible to earth the new era of interplanetary travel. but i've been called all that by broadcasting asses who are my friends. i'm just a plain american, who, when his life is in danger gets frightened as the devil, fighting to get himself out of a jam, and with not much thought of anything else. i didn't relish that crimson comet business, and i don't want ever to experience anything like it again. i'm not alone in this. there were four others in it with me. they don't like all this public fuss being made over them any more than i do. they weren't heroic. they just tried their best not to get killed. so on their behalf, and my own, i'm writing this narrative of exactly what happened to us. not the professionally glamorized version which you've heard so many times. just the facts. the thing must have been brewing, under cover, for many months. like a smouldering, unnoticed fire. no one knows; we can only guess at what happened. but looking back on it now, there were incidents, seemingly unrelated at the time, which now i can see were significant. the first of them was in august, --about a year ago. i had just finished a broadcast on some trivial, popular science subject, which i had tried to make sound important to my listeners. and dr. johns of the white mountains observatory telephoned me. i knew him quite well; he had often steered me into little subjects for my broadcasts, but this, i could see at once, was something different the tel-grid showed his thin face without its usual smile. his grey hair was rumpled; his eyes bloodshot. he looked as though he hadn't slept for much too long. "i thought you might want to come up and see me, bob," he suggested. "sure i will. i always appreciate your tips, dr. johns." his smile was queer. "i haven't got anything--not that you can use," he said. "certainly not yet. i guess i just figure i'll feel better, talking about it. when can you arrive?" "i'll come right away," i told him. "not busy tonight. i'll be there by midnight." we disconnected. i was just about to leave when shorty dirk walked in on me. shorty was--and still is--connected with the _american newsprint publishers_--a reporter in the crime division, specializing in reporting the work of the bureau of missing persons. he and i were good friends, perhaps because we are so different. i'm big and rangy, slow-going and easy-tempered. in college i was a good athlete, but now this radio work was putting quite a bit of soft poundage on me which didn't belong--poundage which, i do assure you, the crimson comet business got rid of in a hurry. like all of us five, i was something like an undernourished greyhound when we got back. shorty isn't much over five and a half feet, thin and wiry and alert--a sort of little human dynamo; a freckle-faced fellow with a shock of bristly red hair and a good-natured grin. "where you going?" he asked. i told him. "i'll go with you," he said. he grinned. "i'm only here, bob, because i haven't got anything better to do." * * * * * we took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. it was a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the heavens. shorty and i didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the white mountains, on what dr. johns might have to say. shorty wasn't much interested in astronomy, anyway--to him, as he often said, it was an uninteresting enigma. he mentioned that tonight. "good," i said. "then, how is crime coming? many people missing lately?" things were dull, he assured me. nothing but the usual run of stuff that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few relatives were interested. as it happened, the crimson comet affair caused five mysterious disappearances, shorty, myself and three others. i think i can understand now why it happened that i knew them all. i must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science. that involved shorty, because he was so much with me. and as for the other three--looking back on it now i realize that each of them vanished soon after having been with me. i was being trailed and was seized last. we landed on the private stage of the big observatory about midnight and presently were with dr. johns in his study. what he had to tell us didn't seem very startling at the time. but in the light of what was to happen, looking back on it now i can see its deadly significance. like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all the world! grim, stealthy events creeping upon us--little things here on earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars. "here at the observatory," dr. johns was saying, "we thought that somehow we must be making miscalculations. a fraction of a second in the axial and orbital movements of the earth, which involved the visual movement of all the starfield. but we checked and rechecked. and then other observatories reported it." the earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the sun apparently were changing infinitesimally. "too bad," shorty commented. "i'm sure sorry." but dr. johns didn't smile. "there seem to be many unrelated things," he said. "you can shrug any of them off. but then, if it once occurs to you that they might be connected--" "what other things?" i asked. meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. nothing which had not occurred before, of course--unusual, freakish storms in many parts of the earth. "and for a month now," dr. johns went on, "there has been noticeable a peculiar purple radiance in the air at night." "purple radiance?" shorty echoed. "hadn't noticed it." "because it isn't visible to the naked eye," dr. johns retorted. "but it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. slowed it down. and our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects so that we know if we could see it--it would be a purplish glow." and there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently had located. i had heard that much--had mentioned it in one of my broadcasts. "we call it a comet," dr. johns explained, "because there's a crimson radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the sun. but its nucleus seems sizable--five hundred miles in diameter possibly. a planetoid, with a radiance. you might just possibly call it that." "and it's just about now crossing the orbit of mars," i said. "that was the last report made public, wasn't it?" dr. johns nodded. "our calculations of its orbit--made a month ago--showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of earth. but that's all changed now. it's erratic." i was beginning to see why he was startled. this new crimson comet wasn't obeying the normal laws of celestial mechanics. it was swimming erratically in space. could it be a solid body as big as five hundred miles in diameter? solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of the earth's axial and orbital disturbances? "and this purple radiance," dr. johns said soberly, "we've just been wondering if that could be coming from the comet." * * * * * i need not specify all the weird theories that dr. johns and i talked of that evening. with me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid always as i could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. but with him, a man of cold logic and careful science--well, it must have been a premonition. was this crimson comet hurling a lethal radiance at us, attacking the earth? a tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science enabling it to direct its own course through space, peopled with weird enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us? you couldn't make such speculations public. people would laugh. but some wouldn't. some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. and dr. johns had sent for me--a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting of wild tales. "you two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "and if it goes on, you can announce it, bob." he shrugged again, and tried to laugh lugubriously. "i feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world with a couple of news-hounds. and yet, somehow, i also feel that maybe everyone of us on earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was before!" and we certainly were! that was the general gist of our talk that night with dr. johns. i never found out more from him--i had no time. the thing struck at me four days later. during those four days, it happened that quite by chance i met the three other people who were destined to be plunged with shorty and myself into adventure. the first was peter mack. i was walking at night in washington square, in new york city--small remaining tradition of little old new york. to me it's like a monks' garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building walls with the canyon of fifth avenue running into it. the night was hot and clear. the little tent of blue over the square was star-filled. i chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench. "got a light?" there was a young fellow on the bench with me. he shifted toward me. he was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age, hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. a slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. he had a grimy cigarette butt between his fingers. "i can do better than that," i smiled. i gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him. "thanks." he would have turned away, but i stopped him. i don't know why, but there seemed something about him that was likable. he needed a shave badly; his clothes were torn. i had a look at his eyes, red-rimmed, bloodshot. just a down-and-outer on a park bench. but you don't see many of them these days. "maybe you haven't got a job," i said. "i can tell you a dozen places--easy work too--in case you're a stranger in town." "i'm not," he said. "thanks for the cigarette. i'm just minding my own business." i shrugged; and as he gave me a resentful look and shifted back to his own end of the bench, i let him alone. i know now a lot of things that were the matter with peter mack, but he has asked me not to go into details. it isn't important anyway; resentfulness at a girl; the escape mechanism of too much drink; trouble with the authorities in a lot of minor ways. and then a sort of sullen resentment at everything and everybody. a derelict who could salvage himself but he didn't want to. * * * * * anyway, that was peter mack. and then there was vivian la marr. i met her back stage at the _gayety_ with shorty who was there to see the stage manager who was to be a witness in some trivial crime-affair that shorty was reporting. this vivian la marr was the main reason why the _gayety_ was having trouble with the anti-vice league and was about to lose its license. she came up to me back stage--a lush, artificial blonde, heavy with makeup; with an amazing expanse of flesh smooth as satin, and a negligible tinseled costume that the anti-vice league did not like at all but which pleased the _gayety's_ customers very much. "you're robert rance," she said. "i saw your picture an' wasn't you televized a few times." i agreed that was so. "i also heard one of your astronomy lectures," she added with a wry grimace. "i was wonderin' how a guy like that could live with himself." she looked me up and down. "now i see you ain't so bad," she said. she was grinning. "much obliged," i said. "maybe i can teach you astronomy some time!" "from you i would be glad to learn anything," she retorted, mockingly. we were standing by the stage door where it was cooler, and a moment later she was called back on the stage. that was vivian la marr. the other person who was destined to be involved with us was j. walter blaine, the international financier. i interviewed him at his fifth avenue club. he tells me now that i may say what i like concerning my impression of him that first time i met him. so i will be absolutely frank. a man of multi-millions and international importance makes many friends, and inevitably many enemies. seldom can he know what people really think of him. his enemies exaggerate the worst, and his friends mostly fawn. blaine's personal reputation, by hearsay, had reached me, of course. i had no expectation of liking him, and, very frankly, i didn't. i found him a big man, as tall as myself, heavy, portly from easy living. but i must say his appearance was impressive--a big mane of shaggy hair, a rather handsome, large-featured face, keen dark eyes under heavy brows, a jutting chin. he was playing chess with a fellow club member and i sat down to watch. i know something about chess and i think his playing very well displayed his character. he won, with skill of aggressive attack. but there was about it something you didn't like. his incisive moving of his men, as though there could be no doubt that it was the correct move; and his whole attitude made you hope it wasn't. it was a quite informal game. once blaine made an obvious, rather silly mistake, exposing a piece. his opponent offered to have him take it back. he didn't; he pretended it was what he wanted to do, taking the loss rather than admit his error. then he was finished and turned to me. i was there to interview him for the editor of a booklet being issued by the royal astronomical society of london. it seems that the society was issuing a booklet with little character sketches of the people from whom they had obtained donations--sort of a tribute of thanks. i was commissioned to write the one on blaine. "did they tell you how much i gave them?" he demanded of me now. i shook my head. "no," i said. his smile was ironic. "i gave them a hundred pounds. what they wanted, and expected, was ten thousand. so now you'll write something very nice about me which they hope will flatter me so i'll give them more. don't bother, young man." blaine was a bachelor. my first impression of him was that he was doing some woman a favor by keeping himself in that category. so much for j. walter blaine. it was the next night that the weird thing struck at me. i was walking along the edge of the park, alone on my way to the mid-town office of amalgamated newscasters. the street was fairly brightly lighted. i recall that there chanced to be no pedestrians near me, just an empty length of grey-white stone pavement in front of me, with the park on one side. and quite suddenly it was as though i had stepped through a black door into nothingness! i could have been stricken blind, yet it was not that, for in another split-second i could see a dim, red radiance and hear voices. then i could see the shapes of people--three men and a woman--stumbling like myself on a strange earthy ground here in the red darkness. "look! here comes another one of us!" it was a terrified man's voice, vaguely familiar. "my gawd, it's the handsome astronomer! _i_ know him!" the voice of vivian la marr. and then there was shorty's voice! "bob! bob rance!" i could feel him gripping me and there was the vague outline of his frightened white face at my shoulder. "bob! tell us--what's happened to all of us?" and vivian cried: "hang onto him! there he goes!" i was trying to speak but my tongue was thick, my throat dry and congested. things were dim and hazy in my mind; and i could feel the cool blankness stealing through my muscles. the touch of hands on my arms faded, until at last there was no more sensation. i made one last great effort to bring myself out of the fog. then i felt myself falling into a soundless blackness. ii i think i did not quite lose consciousness. i was aware that i had fallen to the earthy ground, with shorty and vivian bending over me. my head was roaring; i was bathed in cold sweat. then i began to feel better, trying to sit up, with shorty's arm holding me. "you're all right now, bob? can't you speak?" "yes. i--guess so." whatever had happened which had brought me here when an instant ago, it seemed, i was walking alone by the park, none of us could imagine. the identical experience had happened to shorty, to vivian la marr; and to peter mack, and j. walter blaine. "but--where are we?" i demanded, when in another moment i was strong enough to struggle upright in the crimson glowing darkness. "damned if we know," shorty said. it seemed a sort of underground grotto. i could begin to make out its rocky walls and ceiling now, with that glow like a crimson phosphorescence streaming from them. one by one my companions had found themselves here. blaine was the first. then at intervals it seemed as though the wall across the grotto had opened and shorty, vivian and mack came stumbling in, standing an instant, dazed, and then falling, as i had fallen, almost in a normal faint. "no way of getting out of this damned place," shorty was saying. "the rock-wall over there moves like a door, but we haven't been able to open it." how much time had passed since we were stricken with this weird thing, none of us could guess. suddenly i was startled. my clothes were too big for me. my body felt thin; i had lost twenty or thirty pounds. and in the dim crimson glow now i could see mack, vivian and blaine fairly well. all of them thinner than i remembered them, with faces drawn and haggard and big glowing smouldering eyes. and we men had a growth of beard. weeks could have passed! vivian laughed lugubriously as she met my startled stare. "de-glamorized," she said. "i feel like a lost alley cat." she was clad in a thin, summer street dress. her lush lissome curves were gone so that it hung drably on her. the vivid artificial blonde hair was darkish at the roots; it fell in a tangled mass to her shoulders. her makeup was gone; her lips pallid. "we're all about starved to death, if you ask me," she added. "he brought us food a while ago," blaine put in. "try to eat it," mack said. "there's some of it over by the wall. if that's what we've been living on, no wonder we're starved." "he? food?" i stammered. since blaine had found himself here, what seemed like perhaps twelve hours had passed. our captor had come twice. they had only seen him dimly. "but he's human--semi-human, anyway," shorty said. "and he seems to talk english a little." "look!" vivian suddenly murmured. "here he comes again." the red glow across the cave for an instant brightened. it seemed as though a rock had slid aside and closed again. a dim upright shape moved toward us; stopped and stood regarding us with eyes that gleamed green, smouldering in the dimness. "the great mind--ready--see you soon," the figure's weird, guttural voice said. i moved forward, unsteadily on my feet. "i want to talk to you," i said. i could see him now, quite plainly. a man? i suppose you could call him that. he was about five feet tall, squat and square, with high square shoulders, a rectangular torso and two legs which seemed encased in a flexible metal grey fabric. his head was round, set upon a triangular neck with its apex under his chin--a bullet head, hairless, with a weird, box-like face, square-chinned and broad square nose. his two arms, long and powerful-looking, dangled at his sides. * * * * * this, we were soon to learn, was a radak. i recall my first clear impression that there was about him a queer sense of power. and something else, mysterious, yet even more apparent. an automaton-like quality. it was as though here were an individual who was only acting his role as a tiny part of some great, organized thing. a cog in a machine. the german nazis of my father's boyhood, must have been like that. and here with these radaks of the crimson comet it seemed intensified to be almost gruesome. you could not tell why, but you could sense it. human individuals who lived only to do what they were told. a great mental force dominating them from birth to death, so that they thought what they were told to think; only did what they were told to do. this radak answered our questions now; he seemed willing enough to talk, though in many ways his knowledge of our language, newly absorbed by his weird brain, was inadequate. i think it best to summarize briefly here, the total of what we learned and saw of the strange little world and its people. in actuality we were destined to see very little. doomed little world! and since its death now, as you all know, most of its secrets will forever remain a mystery. it was some five hundred earth-miles in diameter, doubtless of immense density because we were not aware of much change of gravitational force. of its past history, no one knows much. somewhere out in interplanetary space it must once have had a normal orbit. i shall explain more of that later. two human races were here now. the radaks--there were perhaps something like a thousand or two of them--were the rulers. the others were the lei--a primitive, gentle people, no more than slaves to the dominating radaks. nature always had been cruel, uncompromising, here on zelos. (which was the word their native language seemed to call their world.) both radaks and lei lived always in great underground caverns with which this section of the surface was honeycombed. above them, on the outer surface, weird storms and erratic extremes of heat and cold were prevalent. and out there strange monsters roamed--the deathless things, as they were called, since it was impossible to kill them. creatures of indescribable horrible quality who seemed unwilling to come into the confines of the underground corridors and grottos, so that all the humans were of necessity driven here, eking out a drab and grim existence. how the strange science of the radaks developed will forever remain a mystery. perhaps it was brought here from some other planet. despite the science, life here was primitive--a struggle for the bare necessities. queerly enough, the radak science seemed not concerned with better living. they had a few small space-fliers--the secret of interplanetary travel was known to them. perhaps only recently--that seems rather certain. beyond that, there was nothing save the weird, mysterious mechanisms by which at last they had been able to control the space-movements of their tiny world. it was all here, in what they called the "great cavern of machines." shorty and i were there for a brief time--an unforgettable time of horror. "the great mind will see us soon?" i was saying now to this radak who stood stiff and stolid beside me. "who--what is that?" we were soon to see. another radak appeared, motioning us imperiously to follow him. neither of these fellows seemed to have any weapons on them, though of course there was no way of telling. shorty nudged me, muttering something about starting a fight. "you're crazy," i whispered. "we'd be killed." "the great mind--want see you now," one of the radaks said. he led us, and we followed him, with the other radak behind us, out into a dim rock-corridor gleaming with that same crimson phosphorescence. the banker, blaine, pushed past me. "i'll attend to this," he said. "this ruler, whoever he is, he can be bought. i'll get him to take us back to earth--promise him riches--" the ragged, cadaverous mack gave blaine a glance of contempt. "i guess it's strange to you, not being able to buy everything with your money, isn't it?" he commented. a distant murmur of voices sounded ahead of us now, and we could see where the light-glow widened as the corridor emerged into another grotto. more radaks were around us now, herding us with their stiff, jerky movements, jabbering with their strange guttural voices. the murmur ahead of us grew louder; then we emerged from the tunnel. * * * * * it was at first almost like being above ground--a huge grotto with red-glowing ceiling high up, dim in the crimson haze. to the sides the precipitous rock-walls widened rapidly out. ahead of us, down a ragged, undulating slope, there was only a red haze of distance. there seemed to be distant fields, with things growing in them. there was a spindly blue and red stalk-like vegetation growing like trees perhaps to a height of a hundred feet. and off to the left, under the trees, there were mound-shaped little buildings. we were on a broad level space at the top of the slope. a hundred or more radaks were here, some crowding at us, but most standing stiff, gazing at us with gleaming, animal-like eyes. and now i saw radak women and children among them--the women broader-hipped, narrower shouldered. but they were all cast in the same mold--even the children stood at attention, like rows of little statues waiting for something to move them, with only their eyes in motion. most of the murmuring voices were further down the slope. a crowd of figures milled about, down there, trying to see us better. a thousand perhaps. the lei, the slaves of this little world. certainly they seemed far more human than the radaks--slim and slight, and some of them as tall as shorty. they were dressed in simple flowing fabric garments. a bronzed-skinned people, the women with long-flowing hair. "you come--this way," the radak said. "now--you stand still--the great mind speak to you." ruler of the crimson comet. he sat on a sort of stone throne with a leafy canopy over him. our captors shoved us forward until we stood in a wavering line, all of us staring blankly at this being whose mentality encompassed and dominated every living human on his tiny world. he looked as though once he had had the aspect of a radak. but that perhaps was a hundred or two hundred earth-years ago. he sat now with his shriveled, wrinkled grey body small as a child, encased in a single garment of woven fabric. his round head, devoid of hair, wobbled on a spindly neck. skin like shriveled grey parchment covered his shrunken bony face giving him a mummy-like appearance of immense age. his shiny, smooth-grey skull seemed bloated by the pulsating brain-tissue within it. it bulged in places, with worm-like knots under the scalp, dilating, quivering, as his huge green-glowing eyes regarded us. then he spoke, slowly with a measured, sonorous voice of weird sepulchral tone. and what he said--it was as though here we faced a mental power too great to resist; as though there could be no question but that his thoughts must be our thoughts. i felt it with a sudden strange shudder--a radiance of thought from him, beating down, destroying whatever was within me of independent individualism. and the realization swept me; if i yielded to this radiance--these thought-waves, whatever they might be, then all that was robert rance would be gone. i would be nothing but an automaton. he was saying, "you will listen. there are things i shall explain to you earthmen. i have sent to earth and brought you here--because each of you has a knowledge of many things on earth that i wish to know." * * * * * i listened, numbed, somewhat perhaps as though hypnotized. in this radak ruler's judgment, blaine the banker, mack the derelict, shorty, myself and vivian--the sum total of the myriad things that were stacked in our brains--were what now must go into his. certainly a varied, representative strata of earth-knowledge. "you want to learn everything we know?" blaine suddenly said. "how can you do that? suppose we don't want to teach you? and why do you want to learn it? what are your plans? what i want to know is--do you realize who and what i am, on earth?" of us all, undoubtedly the dominating nature of j. walter blaine made him best able to resist that weird mental force that was engulfing us. yet his manner, his querulous, arrogant questions under these strange, unearthly conditions here on the crimson comet certainly were fatuous, childish. mack gave a short, disagreeable laugh. "on earth, okay," mack muttered. "but you don't amount to much here." "money of course, won't mean anything to you," blaine was saying. "but i have other things on earth--things you would want. look here, if you'll send all these people away, i'll have a talk with you. i'll--" he got no further. it seemed that a look of wonderment was upon the shriveled, ancient grey face. the eyes were darting little green fires. the measured voice said, "i shall attend to you later--" and then droned into the radak tongue. four of the squat little men marched upon blaine, seizing him. "what in the devil--stop that!" blaine remonstrated. there was a scuffle beginning. i recall that i shouted, "blaine! take it easy! you'll be killed!" amazing power of these squat little men! a claw-like hand was clapped over blaine's mouth; his flailing arms and kicking legs were pinned by the radak's clutches; and then they picked him up and carted him away. "i shall begin with you, peter mack," the radak ruler said quietly. "come forward, bend before me." for a second mack hesitated, flinging shorty and me a questioning glance. but we had nothing to offer. then the shabby, lanky figure of the bearded mack shambled forward, guided by two radaks until he was standing with head bent before the ruler. down the slope the murmurs of the crowd of lei rose into a babble. the milling throng of slave-people a hundred yards or so from us crowded curiously forward to see mack better. there was a sudden, low-voiced command from the radak ruler. a dozen or more of the squat, grey radaks ran at the lei, cuffing them, knocking them back ... i saw a young lei girl, slim, with flowing white and tawny hair framing her face. the little automaton radak ran at her, struck her in the mouth so that the blood spurted out. and through it all, near me a row of radak children stood stiffly at attention, motionless, with only their round green eyes turning sidewise to watch the scene. then the ancient radak ruler's smouldering gaze was upon mack's head. an awed silence fell over the scene as mack stood motionless. who shall say by what weird and gruesome process mack was now being sapped! no one on earth knows what a thought is. no one can say what is within our brain cells to constitute knowledge. but something is there, something in our conscious and subconscious minds upon which our memory can draw. and we do know that thought is a wave of vibration--an infinitely tiny, infinitely rapid vibration. a thing that at least has a tangible entity. and this radak's mind now was drawing, sapping from mack. a minute. five minutes. in the tense silence, i felt shorty clutch at me, heard him mutter: "god, it's weird!" mack now was drooping. a mental agony, rasping his nerves now, drawing vitality from him so that he drooped, swayed, and suddenly let out a groan. mental anguish, with screaming nerves translating it into physical pain. "it's torture!" vivian murmured. "look at him--stop it! stop it!" mack had fallen to the ground, writhing now, mumbling with futile hands clawing at his face and head as though to pluck away that damnable, torturing gaze. but still, calmly, inexorably the green-eyed, monstrous little radak held him--this shriveled radak ruler, avidly, greedily drawing in the knowledge of mack's past life--those myriad little things of earth-life stored within mack's brain. surely it must have been a torture most horrible. * * * * * shorty and i were starting to leap forward in protest. but vivian was ahead of us, raging, rushing heedlessly at the old radak. she almost reached him. she was screaming, "you--you rotten damn thing--you--" her hand went up to strike him. it was all a sudden chaos, just a few seconds. radaks caught shorty and me; with almost machine-like strength their arms pinned us. i think i yelled at shorty not to struggle. in that same second, i saw vivian's arm with clenched fist trying to hit the radak ruler, but a little squat grey figure standing guard there, jumped and seized her. it was an amazing tableau. at the threatened blow, the ruler shrank back. his whole little body quivered, pulsated; and on the weird, almost unhuman face, there was a look, not of fear, but of strange revulsion--as though the threat of that physical blow were something too horrible to contemplate. "vivian! vivian--you--they'll kill you! run--vivian, run--" mack was staggering to his feet, stumbling, half falling. but he reached vivian, clutched her. both of them were confused, dazed so that all they could do was stand there, holding onto each other. i saw mack gazing defiantly at the oncoming radaks--mack who on earth probably wouldn't have lifted a hand to help anyone, ready now to fight to protect this girl. "you will all--stand--away from them." it was the ruler's quiet, measured voice. and abruptly i saw that his shriveled hand had gone to his belt. a weapon was hanging there--a little pot-bellied black cylinder. his fingers shifted it, seemed aiming it at vivian and mack. shorty and i were struggling, but the radaks held us. and we were both shouting. then there was a soundless, almost invisible flash, just a vague spitting glow of light from the little cylinder. it leaped and for a second clung upon mack and the girl. they seemed to stiffen. just that; nothing else. still clutching each other they stood transfixed, and on their faces there was a blankness, a strange emptiness. "you will walk together, hand in hand," the ruler's soft voice was droning. "one of my radaks will lead you to the upper exit. and then you will walk together alone--out into the realm of the deathless things." he added something in his own language. a little radak moved in front of mack and vivian now. hand in hand they were standing docile, and then they were following the radak--following him with slow measured steps, their faces blank, their eyes staring straight ahead of them. like somnambulists, walking in their sleep. "good lord," shorty murmured. "that could be the way we were abducted on earth! do you suppose--" * * * * * his words were cut off. the ruler had given another command. the radaks gripping us were pulling us away--shoving us back into the dim crimson tunnel from which they had brought us. i turned to look behind me. the stiff figures of mack and vivian still were visible, walking in a trance, following the square, box-like little radak who marched silently ahead of them. for a moment they wound along the edge of the slope; then the crimson murk of radiance enveloped them and they were gone. roughly shorty and i were shoved along the tunnel by our captors. then a rock panel slid aside. we were shoved in, and the panel slid closed. "well," shorty murmured. "that's that. we're in a jam, bob--a damn weird jam." it was soundless in here, and darker than out in the main open grotto. but still there was that dim crimson glow. we were in a small cave-cell now. the air was hot, fetid, earthy. presently we could see a little better. there was nothing but black, spongy ground, glowing red rock walls and a rock ceiling close over us. in the dimness i fumbled, feeling the wall, trying to find the crevice of the sliding door panel; but could not. time passed. shorty and i both realized now that we were weak and faint from hunger--not altogether the hunger from missing a meal or so, but the depletion of long under-nourishment. together we lay down on the fibrous ground. i think at that moment i was more despairing than ever before in my life. i seemed unable to cope with even the thought of what we might possibly plan. i closed my eyes. i seemed just to want to drift into the blessed relief of sleep. "this is one jam we might not get out of, bob," shorty murmured presently. "yes, looks so." then suddenly both of us were galvanized into alertness. the door-panel was sliding open with a little rasp and an influx of brighter red glow. outside in the corridor we saw a group of radaks on guard. but none of them came in. they moved aside and a figure came past them--a lei girl. her slim body was draped in a bluish garment of thatch. her long tawny hair flowed down over her shoulders. she was carrying a slab on which there was food and drink for us. then she set the slab on the ground near us. she was between us and the door, almost a silhouette but i could see that her hand was at her lips and her glowing eyes seemed warning us to be silent. for an instant she leaned close toward me. "i am tahn--the wife of taro, the lei." her voice barely whispered it. "you say nothing. i come again--with taro's plan to help you! we would save you and your earth--if we can!" silent, shorty and i just stared. then she had turned and was gone. the rock panel slid closed upon us. iii i must explain now what was happening to mack and vivian as they afterward told it to me. mack recalls quite clearly that moment of dazed, numbed anguish when he writhed on the ground with the horrible sapping gaze of the radak ruler upon him. then he heard vivian scream, saw her rushing at the shriveled old radak. he called, "vivian! run--they'll kill you--" he found himself staggering to his feet, stumbling until he was by her side. he felt her clutch him, both of them standing there, numbed and dazed, terrified, with the feeling that the rushing radaks would instantly kill them. he remembers that the girl and himself took a stumbling step forward. to mack it was like stumbling through a suddenly appearing black curtain of emptiness. just an abyss of soundless nothingness, except that there seemed still to be vivian's clutch on his arm. no, it was her hand holding his as they stood peering at a distant blur of red radiance. "viv--where are we? what happened?" "pete--i'm frightened--can't--see anything--" but the red radiance was growing, spreading to dispel the blank empty darkness so that in a moment he could see the drab, disheveled form of the girl beside him, her moist, cold hand convulsively clutching his, and the red light on her pallid, terrified face. and in the distance now there were outlines--a sort of red line that looked like a shimmering cliff with jagged spires upstanding in a row. "vivian--everything's gone--the radaks--we're not where we were--bob and shorty--gone--" the red glow in a moment had brightened to be far more luminous than they remembered it in the caverns. obviously there was a sky overhead now--a lurid, murky, blood-red haze of infinite distance. this was the outer surface of the little planetoid. the realm of the deathless monsters! mack realized it with a shudder of terror. he and vivian now could see that they were standing upon a little rise of ground, in what could have been called a forest. everywhere great stalks of spindly blue and grey vegetation towered into the air. growing things of fantastic shape, woven in places to be a solid jungle. or again there were open glades of rocky ground--buttes and little spires, small ravines and crevices. all of it bathed in crimson, as though here were a bloody landscape of unutterable horror. the horror of things not yet seen ... things lurking-- "oh pete, what can we do?" hungry and faint she swayed against him. but in the blood-red light she was trying to smile. "you tell us what we ought to do--i will help us do it, pete. i'm not--not afraid." but the terror of despair was clutching at both of them. mack tried to gather his wits. alone here on an alien world. could they find food and drink? wander here, until some ghastly monster engulfed them? or should they try to get back underground? why? to have the murderous radaks fall upon them and kill them? but the will to live in every human is very strong. no one will lie down and just hopelessly wait for death. "viv--those cliffs over there--cliffs with the spires--there ought to be tunnels maybe at the bottom of them. if we could get back--maybe get to bob and shorty--" his voice trailed away. it all seemed so hopeless. then he felt the girl clutch at his arm. "look! maybe that's water? i'm so thirsty--" "i see it. maybe it is. come on." in a nearby open glade, surrounded by stalks of the towering fibrous vegetation, what could have been a shallow pool of water was spread on the open rocks. a little pool, twenty feet or so in diameter. rivulets extended off to the sides of it in crevices of the rock-surfaces. it was quite shallow, seemingly only a few inches deep. the red radiant glow that suffused everything stained it like blood, but it was translucent so that the rocks showed through it. was it water? as they approached, vivian stepped over one of the branching rivulet arms. the translucent red stuff suddenly lifted from the rocks, the little tentacle arm of it wrapping itself around her ankle! * * * * * the girl screamed. in a panic mack reached down, plucking at the red mass. ghastly horror! it was like quivering, sticky glue. frantically he tore at it. warm, pulsating, protoplasm. it stuck to his fingers, greedily fastening upon his flesh until he wiped it away. vivian, too, was frantically flailing at the stuff. and in that second mack was aware that the whole twenty-foot spread of it on the rocks was in motion now--rolling itself up from the rocks, congealing, gathering itself into a great circular mass. huge, eight-foot ball of blood-red, pulsating protoplasm. yet now it seemed there was a nucleus, a little central part, more solid than the rest, suddenly growing to look almost like a head and face in the center of the mass. red-gleaming eyes; a sucking mouth, yawning. all this mack saw in a horrified second or two while still he was flailing to cast away the broken, pulpy arm of the monster. and he saw now that the great ball of it was rocking. then it started to roll and bump toward them! "vivian! run--good lord, here it comes!" they fled. but behind them it was coming, gathering speed, bumping and squishing over the rocks. mack tried to keep his wits. the monstrous thing was only twenty feet behind them now. and as it rolled, it was expanding. a lashing ball twice as high as their heads. then ahead of them mack saw a narrow pass between two huge rocks--a space some three feet wide. he shoved vivian into it--a space too small for the monster to follow. it was a crevice only some ten feet long. they dashed through it. mack turned to see what the crimson deathless thing would do. it had hit the rocks, and now it was oozing through the narrow space--thin red streamer of protoplasm feeding itself through the crevice. mack and vivian had fled to one side, and as the jet of red pulp came through, out on the other side it rolled itself again into a ball--ghastly thing that kept on going down the slope! in a moment it was a hundred feet away. panting, mack clutched his companion and they stared. the bumping, rolling circular mass had reached a patch of forest. it slowed; stopped. "pete, look!" the girl's terrified, awed voice murmured it. "look at it now!" there in the forest glade the monstrous crimson ball was sagging, flattening, spreading itself out into a thin, translucent layer on the rocky ground. then it was motionless, quiescent, waiting. "well!" mack breathed. "at least we know now what to avoid! we--" but again vivian gripped him. "what's that over there?" her shaking hand gestured to one side. it was an upright blob moving in a patch of trees. a tree hid it; then it showed again. it stopped, seemed to turn upon itself. still upright. then again it moved. suddenly mack gasped, "a man! look--see it now--a man--why--why it's blaine!" startled relief was in his voice. the figure came to another open space, where the crimson glow in the air showed it plainly. it was blaine. he was moving along, gazing around as though searching. "blaine! blaine!" mack called. the banker turned at the voice; saw mack and vivian who now were running toward him. "you mack--vivian--you're safe--" "yes, sure!" it was a blessed relief to mack. "i've been looking for you," blaine called. he was running to meet them. "and i've got something--something important! a weapon--" the three reached each other. blaine and mack gripped hands. then suddenly vivian gasped: "another! another of those things--" out among the trees beyond where blaine had been a moment before, a slithering red shape was visible. another of the deathless things which soundlessly had been stalking blaine. like a huge thirty-foot crimson python it was sliding through the vegetation. its neck and head came up, reared up as for a second it stopped, peering with red-green eyes seeking its prey. then it lowered its head and came slithering rapidly forward! * * * * * i must go back now for just a moment to recount what had happened to blaine, from that moment when the radak guards hustled him away from their shriveled ancient ruler. ignoring his protests, he was shoved along a corridor, thrown into a cave-cell and its door-slide closed upon him. but he wasn't alone there for long. presently the slide opened again and a figure came in. it was obviously a radak, but of somewhat a different type. the same square, powerful look. but this one was taller, almost as tall as blaine. grey-skinned, lean and muscular. he seemed fairly young, thirty earth-years perhaps. "i have come for to talk to you," the visitor announced. he sat stiffly on a rock by a wall of the cave. his grey-black woven garment swished as he motioned blaine to sit on the ground before him. "you are very interesting to me. sit down." "thanks. i'll stand," blaine said. "you speak my language very well." "that i should." the radak's smile made his strange face wrinkle into a grimace. "i am ratan. our great mind sent me to your earth. i picked you earthmen, and ordered you seized. i will tell you about that. you can be very helpful to us, i am thinking. perhaps especially so. i am commanded to tell you our plans." carefully blaine listened to the strange things this ratan quite calmly was telling him. with their weird mechanisms, the radaks now were directing their tiny world through space, toward our earth. already they were bathing earth with a radiance which was disturbing the earth's axial and orbital rotations--that vague, dim purple haze which dr. johns had described to shorty and me. then when zelos was closer to earth, the vibratory beam would be intensified. the earth would be drawn from its orbit. engulfed in this weird gravitational force, it would follow zelos back from the sun--out into interplanetary space.... the abduction of the earth! blaine knew little of science, but enough to realize what soon would happen on earth.... "storms--the disturbance of all your atmospheric pressures--" ratan was saying with his ironic smile, "that will very soon kill many of your people. and then will come the congealing cold. certain it is that human life on your earth will not withstand it." our atmosphere, not adapted to insulate the cold of space-- there was no need for this ratan to picture for blaine the wild devastation of earth. "perhaps even before we have drawn you out to the orbit of saturn," ratan was saying, "then there will be no earthman still living." the end of human earth-life. it might take another earth-year, or many. but it was coming. inevitable. a thing that the radak great-mind had long planned, and that already was being successfully accomplished.... there are on earth now as i write this brief narrative, many scientists working to understand the theories of the strange, diabolic mechanisms of the bandit crimson comet. the projection of some new application of gravitational force. the purple ray was something of that nature, of course. a link between zelos and earth, like a chain binding them together--a powerful little tug pulling a great ocean liner. and the same force unquestionably was what made zelos itself mobile in space. that much we know definitely because in miniature, but doubtless of the same approximate nature, the purple gravitational ray is the motive power for the radak space-ship which we now have intact. "so you are planning to kill everyone on earth," blaine said. his heart was pounding, but he tried to hold his voice calm. he stood with folded arms, gazing at ratan. "and what will that gain you?" "our little planet here we do not like," ratan retorted. "many space-ships we will build, and when your earth-people are gone, then we will migrate to your much better world. the lei, and the radaks to rule them. the great mind has planned it all. we have been secretly to your earth, we have studied life there. it will be much better for us than this. the great mind will rule your whole world for a while--until he dies. and then--do you not see something unusual in me?" "what?" blaine demanded. "i am the appointed one to be the next great mind. when i was born it was decided. i have been trained for that. just for that, nothing else." * * * * * blaine could see it in him now. that air of quiet, confident dominance. "i see what you mean," blaine agreed. "i am like that, on earth. you realize it?" "it is why i chose to bring you here," ratan said. "i can be very helpful to you," blaine added. "my companions--they are just captives. but i would like to be more than that." the banker shrugged. "i bow to the inevitable. if you are to seize my world, then i would like to do the best for myself. that's good sense, isn't it?" was he gaining this fellow's confidence? the big radak smiled also. "what do you mean?" "on earth i am very powerful. i have money, property." "of what good could that be to me?" ratan smiled. "and when i get there--i have it all anyway." "what i mean," blaine persisted, "i am an organizer. i know the resources of earth--" "and to that i agree," ratan interrupted. "you mean, you would join us, as a friend." "for a position of power among you radaks, yes. you will find i can handle the lei." he smiled cannily. "on earth they called me ruthless. i could bend men to my will--and always to my own profit." blaine's keen, appraising gaze was watching the radak. ratan was smiling; he could understand talk like this, and it was obvious that he liked it.... blaine's heart was pounding. at ratan's broad grey belt a little pot-bellied metal cylinder was hanging. he gestured to it casually. "what is that, ratan?" "that? it is a weapon of ours. very important. there are only very few of us who may carry it. a rak-gun, perhaps your language would term it." "let me see it. how does it work?" but ratan was only fingering it lovingly. he made no move to detach it from his belt. he was smiling. "it is what brought you from earth." he seemed willing enough to describe it. the projection of a vibration akin to thought-waves, but infinitely more intense. in effect it paralyzed the conscious mind, yet left the motor area intact. the victim, to all intents and purposes was a somnambulist. the subconscious mind, with will power numbed, then was open to any suggestive stimulus which it received. the victim's muscles instinctively obeyed commands. and the memory areas recorded nothing. shorty and i had seen it happen to vivian and mack. blaine did not know of that. but it had happened to him, on earth, as it had to all of us. "and, then, after a time it wears off?" "exactly. an hour--what you would call an hour on earth, perhaps. but another shock of it can be given. you were under its influence for about three weeks--the time it took for our space-ship to bring us here." "and you fed me very badly," blaine commented. he was taut inside now. he took a casual step forward so that he was almost within reach of the seated radak. "is that thing easy to operate?" blaine's heart leaped as ratan unclipped the little cylinder from his belt. "very simple," the radak said. "just a pressure on this little lever. but it will be years before the great mind or myself would let you handle one of these." "i was thinking," blaine said, "when we get to earth you yourself will not be the great ruler. but if, perhaps, the great mind should suddenly die? then it would be only the great ratan, with me to help him--" blaine had leaned forward confidentially and lowered his voice. "did you ever think of that?" surely at least the idea of murdering his commander was startling to ratan, and for that instant he was off his guard. just a second, but it was enough for blaine. the banker abruptly reached, snatched the cylinder and leaped backward. "now you damned villain--" * * * * * blaine raised the cylinder level. with a roar, ratan was on his feet. there was a soundless, vague little flash. ratan, tensing his muscles for a leap abruptly relaxed, wavered. "quiet now! stand still!" blaine ordered sharply. he stood listening, with the quiescent, blankly staring ratan before him. had ratan's roar of startled anger aroused any guards out in the corridor? it seemed not. there was only silence. "now we will go out of here," blaine said softly. "we will go out. you know where robert rance is now. you will lead me to him." with hands outstretched, the big radak moved to the door, slid it open. at this moment shorty and i were confined in another cave-cell not far away. ratan knew it; he was leading blaine there. but suddenly, at a corridor intersection, voices sounded! radaks were coming. "crouch down!" blaine commanded. "be quiet! not a sound from you!" there was a wall recess. blaine shoved his numbed captive into it. together they crouched. and now blaine saw that in a sheath at ratan's belt, there was a knife. he drew it out; held it in his other hand and kept the cylinder ready. two radaks were coming. they were talking together in their own language. they stopped nearby, evidently with the intention of parting here at the intersection. blaine listened. then he whispered to ratan: "answer me softly. what are they saying? tell me in english." "those earth-people banished--into the realm of--deathless--monsters--and they will die--of course." ratan's words were mumbled, queerly mouthed, like one who talks in his sleep. blaine assumed that all of us were out there on the upper surface, not just vivian and mack. swiftly he changed his plans. "in a moment when i command you," he whispered, "you will lead me there. you know where the earth-people would probably be now? out which exit they went? answer me--softly." "by the--big cliff with the--rock spires.... the exit is--down this left corridor." tensely blaine waited. the nearby radaks parted and moved away. "now, lead me," he whispered. again they moved forward, down the left-hand corridor-branch now. and suddenly behind blaine there was a shout. he whirled. one of the radaks had changed his mind and was coming back, calling something to his fellow. blaine had no time to get himself and ratan out of sight. the radak saw them--saw the stiffly walking ratan, and blaine with the cylinder in his hand. with a startled shout, the little radak leaped at blaine. the flash met him; he stopped in his tracks, stood stiff. but from the other direction, his companion was coming. and now the commotion was bringing others. blaine could hear several of the guttural voices and the thuds of their oncoming footsteps. with a leap blaine went past ratan. the squat little shape of the other radak came charging down the center of the narrow corridor. his greenish eye-beams were weird in the crimson gloom. again blaine fired his cylinder. but this time evidently he missed and in another second the radak was on him. the shock of the impact flung them both to the ground. the cylinder was knocked from blaine's hand. he felt his adversary's arms clutching him, squeezing him with machine-like strength. in another moment blaine's ribs would have smashed. but his left hand still gripped the knife. with despairing effort he drove it into the radak's side. ghastly knife-thrust! it went in with a crunch, a rasp as it severed the strange flesh. there was a hiss as hot fluid spurted. the radak's scream was horrible. his arms fell away. blaine disentangled himself. on the ground near him he saw the cylinder, snatched it, dropped it into his pocket. a commotion was all around him now. oncoming radaks in several of the branching corridors. but ahead of blaine there seemed no one. he ran. behind him he could dimly see the squat little figures gazing at their dead fellow, and surrounding the stricken ratan. no one seemed to notice the fleeing blaine as he ran the length of the winding corridor until at last he was out upon the crimson upper surface. for a time he wandered. he did not see any of the crimson monsters, or at least did not recognize them for what they were. then he heard mack shouting at him; saw mack and vivian running toward him. "i've got something important--a weapon," he called to mack. then abruptly the three of them saw that huge, python-like crimson thing which had been silently stalking blaine. "look!" vivian gasped. "another of them!" it was slithering rapidly at them now, no more than fifty feet away. its green-swaying eye-beams clung to them. for that instant they were standing stricken with terror. to one side of them there was the brink of an abyss a few yards away, and to the other, and behind them, a ragged little cliff. "got to try and climb those rocks!" mack gasped. "can't get past that snake thing--we're trapped--" but blaine swept him aside. the cylinder was in blaine's hand now. "this will stop it!" he muttered. "you two--get behind me!" the monstrous thirty-foot thing was only half its own length away from them now. then, as its head reared over a projection of the uneven, rocky ground, blaine carefully aimed the cylinder and fired. but the monster didn't stop! there was no conscious, thinking brain in that ghastly, pulsating crimson head! just motor-ganglia reacting to the impulses of instinct! blaine fired again. but the monster kept on coming and in another second was upon them! iv back in our cave-cell, shorty and i stared blankly after the figure of the lei woman, tahn, as she motioned to the radak guards who slid our door-panel closed. again we were alone. "well," shorty murmured. "what do you make of that? the wife of some lei named taro, she said." and that she would come back and try to get us out of here. that her husband had some plan-- eagerly, shorty and i waited. would it be an hour, or a day? both of us were thinking of blaine, locked somewhere around here, perhaps in a cell like ours. or had the radaks killed him by now? and vivian and mack, wandering out there in the realm of the things you couldn't kill. "guess they're done for," shorty said, when i mentioned them. "unless we can get out there to them--" shorty's smile was ironic. "that would fix everything, of course. don't be an ass, bob. if we were out there, we'd all be trying to get back. for what? so the radaks would jump on us and kill us." it was all so utterly hopeless. but it was queer, that instinct all five of us had, to try and keep together. the young lei woman had brought us food and drink. shorty and i slumped on the earthern floor now and sampled the food. nauseous stuff, indescribable. "if it's been weeks since we left the earth," shorty said, "no wonder we're nearly starved to death." but we managed to eat and drink some of it, and then exhausted by the nerve tension of what we had been through, we drifted off into an uneasy slumber. the rasp of the sliding door-panel jerked us into alertness. i had the feeling that only a little time had passed. the panel slid open just a foot or two, and a figure came in. it was tahn. both shorty and i were on our feet. "you came as you hoped," i said softly. "we're ready. just tell us what you want us to do." she barely whispered, "the radak guards just now are changing. there is no one outside. we go, quickly." "go where?" shorty demanded. "to my husband, taro. he is in a corridor near here. come now, quickly." the faintly red corridor outside was empty. swiftly tahn led us along it, around several sharp bends, past a cross-corridor intersection. i was tense, expecting every moment that radaks would leap upon us from the shadows. but so far we had escaped notice, though obviously there were many radaks near here. several times we passed the dim oval openings of little grottos, and often there were guttural, chattering voices from within them. "won't the guards discover we're gone?" shorty murmured. "perhaps not for maybe much time. i am in charge of you, i bring you food and drink. the guards stay outside, should you try to break out." our tunnel was descending now. and suddenly from the dimness to one side, there came a murmur: "tahn! tahn--" a young lei man was crouching in a shadowed recess. it was tahn's husband, taro. "she has brought you, earthmen. that is good." we crouched down with him. he was a youngish fellow, tall, slim and powerfully built. his single draped garment exposed one bronze shoulder. his grey-black hair was chopped at the base of his neck, with a narrow band of bright-colored fabric tied around his forehead. with his high-cheek bones, hawk-like nose and gleaming dark eyes he could have been a stalwart young savage of earth. "i want to help you," he was saying. "your coming here fits my plans, and believe me i have worked on them a long time. tahn and i, making the radaks trust us." "say," shorty murmured, "you certainly are fluent with english." the young lei's face wrinkled into a smile. "why should i not, my wife and i? we lei learn things quickly. perhaps a different mind-quality from yours, almost at once to absorb what we hear. ratan--he is next to the great mind as leader of the radaks--he chose tahn and me to go on the expedition to earth. we were carefully watched, or we would have escaped to warn you. it was tahn who took care of you on the way here." * * * * * he told us then of the weird radak-gun, with its flash of mind-current--the weapon which probably just at this exact moment no more than half a mile away in this maze of subterranean corridors, blaine was snatching from ratan.... and tahn told us, too, of the radak plot to devastate earth. "you have some plan?" shorty murmured. he told us then that he knew how to get into the cavern of machines--a huge, guarded grotto where all the diabolic, giant mechanisms of the radaks were housed. the power plant of little zelos, and the source of the purple radiance which was bathing earth. "if we can kill the guards and get into the cavern--only the great mind himself--or ratan--will be there. no one else but those two are allowed there. no one else knows the secrets of the mechanisms to operate them." "so we just get in and overcome the great mind himself," shorty commented. he gave a mock shudder with an attempt to be humorous. "all right. figure that's done. then what?" taro's plan was certainly desperate, but at least it promised the possibility of success. "do you know where the earthman blaine is?" i demanded. tahn said, "he is in a cave-cell. i am ordered to take him food and drink very soon." "what weapons have you got?" shorty asked. "say, if you could get one of those brain-paralyzing guns--" taro shook his head. "never could i even get near one. the great mind always carries one--and so does ratan. but there is no chance--" "we must get to blaine," i said. "and then try and find vivian and mack. we've all got to be together--" we planned it for a few moments more. then cautiously taro and tahn led us to a corridor intersection. "we will hide here," he said, gesturing to another shadowed recess where the ragged rocks of the wall jutted out in an overhang. "tahn can go best." the young lei turned to his wife. "tahn, listen. you get food and drink. you take it to blaine's cell. there are not always guards perhaps. you watch your chance--" "listen!" shorty suddenly interjected. "maybe i'm crazy, but there's some kind of commotion around here." we could all hear it now--a distant murmur of turmoil down one of the side corridors. taro nodded. "something is wrong. and blaine's cell is down that way. you earthmen wait here! i will go with tahn. then we come back to you." * * * * * they were gone only a few moments. from a little distance they had stood unnoticed, watching and listening. blaine had escaped! he had seized ratan's thought-gun; turned it upon ratan and one of the guards; had stricken them. and had knifed another guard, and vanished. "well! good for blaine," shorty murmured. "he's smarter than all the rest of us put together! and he's got one of those guns! where'd he go--" "they think perhaps out to the outer surface," taro said. "he ran that way." "to find mack and vivian!" i exclaimed. "well, that's what we want to do. show us that exit, taro." "i will go with you," the young lei said quietly. but there was no mistaking his shudder and the grim look on his face. "tahn, you stay here." "i will go with my husband," she retorted. "taro, please--" we took her. it seemed that the commotion at blaine's cell must have drawn all the radaks from these other passages. we were not discovered as we threaded our way back, until presently we were ascending a winding tunnel which ended at the crimson upper surface. how long it took us to sight mack, vivian and blaine i do not know. it seemed an eternity of apprehension, as taro and tahn cautiously led us along winding rocky defiles and past patches of that weird, fantastic forest. shorty and i saw none of the monsters. but there were many times when suddenly, without explanation, taro turned us from where we would have wandered. then we were far enough from the tunnel entrances so that we dared talk without possibility that the radaks would hear us. "blaine! blaine--where are you?" "mack! vivian--are you here?" it was tahn who first saw them. we were in a cluster of rocks with a brink ahead of us. i could see lower ground perhaps fifty feet down--a precipitous descent close ahead of us. it chanced that tahn was leading, and suddenly she turned, gave a cry, and then pointed over the brink. "there they are! down there! look--look at them--" we crowded to the brink. fifty feet down this ragged wall, blaine, vivian and mack stood backed against it. an abyss was near them. and in front of them a great crimson, python-like thing was slithering, almost upon them now, with blaine futilely firing his gun at it! there was nothing we could do; and for those seconds all four of us stood staring, mute, numbed with horror. the scene on the ledge below us was clear as though on a little stage. the monster in another second would be upon its victims. i saw blaine throw down his gun in despair. his voice floated up to us. "damn thing won't work! got to--try to run--" then, suddenly we saw mack leap forward, not toward where he might have a wild chance of climbing up our ragged little cliff-wall, but the other way--toward the brink that dropped down to another terrace, between the brink and the monster's slithering length. his intention was obvious--to lead the monster over that other brink after him.... to sacrifice himself so that his companions might escape. in the chaos of that second we saw mack get past the monster's head and neck. its head turned. and then, before mack could hurl himself down the hundred-foot drop, a loop of the great crimson body lashed out. it seemed that a tentacle whipped separate from the undulating snake-like body--a tentacle that seized mack, looped around him and flung him into the air. just a ghastly second or two as mack's whirling body came up diagonally toward us in the air, and then fell back, into a ragged cluster of rocks beyond the monster's tail. horribly we could hear the thud as it struck. for another second the great crimson head of the monster seemed to rear, with swaying eye-beams searching. but mack's body was hidden by the rock-cluster. * * * * * then, suddenly the gruesome python shape, head down, began oozing over the brink beside it. flowing mass of protoplasm. it thinned out as it sagged down the hundred-foot drop--thinned until it was a narrow ribbon--a blood-red rivulet of waterfall. then it was all on the lower level, gathering itself together until in a moment it was a great congealed, quivering crimson ball with the head in the center. for another instant it pulsated; then it bumped and rolled down a ragged slope, reached a little patch of distant vegetation where we could dimly see it spreading itself thinly out.... spread like a blood-red pool, quiescent, waiting. with taro and tahn, shorty and i climbed down the ragged little descent, joined vivian and blaine. "he tried to save us," the white-faced vivian murmured. "yes," i agreed. "we saw it." we found his broken body in the cluster of rocks fifty feet away. he was still conscious but we thought he was dying. one of his arms hung limp. blood was coming from a head wound. but his pallid face was trying to smile. "my leg and arm," he mumbled. "can't move them." one of his legs undoubtedly was broken. as we told him that the monster had gone his gaze seemed only on vivian. "thought it would kill you, viv," he muttered. "didn't want that." then he fainted. he had been trying to get up on one elbow as vivian knelt with an arm under his head. then his eyes closed, and he sagged, went limp. "we must stop that blood from his head," tahn murmured. "and then try and get him into one of the tunnels." vivian jumped up. "here's what we need--bandages." she flashed us a little twisted smile as she tore off her waist and skirt and ripped them into strips. "here--bandages." she handed the strips of fabric to tahn. then she grinned at me. "this underdress--not too becoming, is it?" she gestured at the brief undergarment that now partly covered her, and her whimsical smile broadened. "well this time, anyway, i had a good motive, didn't i?" shorty and i carried the still unconscious mack back to one of the tunnel entrances. and taro led us to a shadowed, cave-like little place where we laid him down. good luck seemed with us. we had encountered, so far, no radaks. "you and tahn will stay with him," i told vivian. and shorty and i had decided that blaine had best stay also. for once blaine had to do something against his will. "think i'm too old to help you young fellows now?" he said. "all right, maybe i am." certainly he was in no physical condition to be much help in the desperate venture we were planning. he handed me the radak-gun, showed me how to use it. i dropped it in my pocket. "good luck to you," blaine said. "thanks. we'll need it," i acknowledged. then shorty, taro and i left them. taro had hidden the only weapons he could get, near here. we found them--sheathed knives that the lei used in the underground fields. they were odd-shaped knives; they seemed made of a highly polished, metallic stone. i thumbed one. it was sharp. "very handy," shorty commented. "come on, taro, let's go. where is this cavern of machines?" it was perhaps half an earth-mile, low down in the maze of underground passages. shorty clutched his knife; i held the radak-gun as we followed taro down the dim, descending crimson tunnel. v "there's one of the guards!" shorty whispered. "see him?" i pushed shorty back. "no, two of them! the other one's sitting down. you and taro keep behind me. i'll tackle them with the radak-gun." we could see the square grey figures of two radaks down the little length of tunnel ahead of us. they were by an opening that seemed to lead sharply downward, with a glow of radiance streaming up. and now in the heavy underground silence we could hear the faint muffled thrum and whine of mechanisms. my hand silently gripped taro. all three of us crouched. "that's the entrance to the cavern of machines?" i whispered. "yes." "two guards. are there liable to be more of them around?" taro shook his head. "i think not. though i cannot surely say." "the machines are operating," shorty said. "hear them? that means only the great mind, or ratan will be down there in the cavern?" "yes," the young lei agreed. "it's most likely not ratan," i said. "blaine got him--struck him insensible. or would he be recovered by now?" taro had no way of guessing. with an ordinary radak the shock would have lasted longer than this. "but ratan's mind is trained--developed--more powerful as you would say. he could recover more quickly." "are there other entrances?" shorty asked. "they'd have guards at them. if we make any commotion down there, and a bunch of radaks come rushing us--" "this is the only entrance." "right," shorty chuckled. "come on then, let's finish off these fellows." he fingered his knife. "you tackle 'em with that gun, bob. but if you miss, trust me--i'll slip this knife into them--" with taro and shorty behind me i crept soundlessly forward. in my hand the pot bellied little radak gun, so unfamiliar, gave me an uneasy feeling. suppose i should miss. an uproar from these guards might bring dozens of others. "how close do i have to get?" i whispered to taro. "this now--close enough." one of the radaks was standing up, lounging with his back to the wall. the other was lying down. to send my flash clinging to the heads of both of them, i would have to shift my aim, and fire twice. my hand trembled a little. then i pressed the lever. there was that vaguely visible flash. the gun-hilt in my grip vibrated, and at the muzzle of it there was a faint little hiss. a hit! the radak on the ground seemed to stiffen. he raised his head, staring blankly. the radak who was standing noticed it. he started, whirled around toward us. it took all my will power to withhold my second flash for that instant. but i did; and then as the standing figure steadied, i fired again. "got him!" shorty murmured. "good work, bob! come on!" we ran forward. the standing radak was motionless, gazing with vacant stare. shorty dashed up to him. "lie down, you're asleep! if you're not, you ought to be." but the radak did not move, just turned his empty gaze toward the sound of shorty's voice. i got it. "they don't speak english! tell them, taro." the lei murmured commandingly in his own language, and in a moment the two guards were lying inert with closed eyes. "mighty neat," shorty whispered. "come on--here we go." beyond the guards an earthen ramp led sleepily downward, winding to a circular spiral. then presently we emerged upon a little ledge with the great cavern of machines spread out before us. "crouch down! we will see who is here," taro whispered. there was awe in his voice. "we must not be seen until we attack." it was a huge, vault-like cavern, with glowing roof high over our heads, and we were about twenty feet above its lower level, with a narrow, steep ramp leading down from near us. i saw that it was a weird, dim grotto, lurid with swaying, prismatic glows of colored radiance, and throbbing, humming with a myriad mechanical voices. distant railed terraces held frameworks of metal, where opalescent tubes were glowing. beams of light-radiance seemed to carry the power from one strange mechanism to the next, like wires connecting them in series. no lei, no ordinary radak, and certainly least of all us earthmen, could by any chance have understood the scientific details of what we were seeing. i recall there was a convergence of beams, high up in mid-air at the center of the cavern, where a shower of tiny electrolyte sparks glittered like a fountain of pyrotechnics. and out of it a narrow concentrated beam of violet-purple glow shot upward to a grid in the ceiling--the gravitational force, doubtless, which from there was conducted to some point above where it was hurled into space. how long i stared, awed, i have no idea. then i was aware of taro beside me, whispering, "it is the great mind who is down there. he has just come into sight--down by that yellow glow." the floor of the cavern held a dozen or more of the huge mechanisms, and in the center of them there was a throbbing space that seemed to hold the controls of all these intricate machines. down there in the weird glow we could now see the lone figure of the ancient radak leader--shriveled and bent, he moved around, occasionally reaching to shift some lever or make some adjustment. "he must not see us coming!" taro whispered. his voice was tense. and on his face now as the multi-colored glow bathed it, there was unmistakable terror. this young lei, like all his people, born and bred to fear the dominance of the great mind--to attack that little figure, to taro was almost unthinkable. taro had planned this; dreamed of it. but faced with it now, there was only terror sweeping him, so that had he been here alone, easily he could have turned and fled. shorty and i had no such inhibitions. "what in the devil," shorty murmured. "he's got a radak-gun--sure, i've no doubt of it. we've got to duck that. but once i get close to him--" shorty's gesture with his knife was significant. for minutes more we tensely waited. then we got down the ramp without being seen, and on the lower floor we crouched between two of the giant whining machines. "easy now!" i whispered. "you two--keep behind me--" i held the radak-gun in my hand. we waited another moment; then ducked forward and crouched again, behind a great glowing mechanism through which two beams of colored light were passing. we were only some twenty feet from the leader now. close enough for my shot, or for us to rush him. he was bending down over a glowing dial. green light from it streamed upward, bathed his weird mummy-like countenance so that suddenly he seemed like some horrible ghoul intent upon a task diabolic, gruesome. "let him have it!" shorty whispered. "now's your chance!" i must confess my heart was racing, with a sudden nameless premonition of terror. thoughts are instant things. i tried to tell myself that this was just a weazened old man. helpless, with three of us about to leap on him. of course he was helpless! with sudden relief i saw that he had discarded his belt. it hung on the peg of a rack, several feet away from him--his belt, with his radak-gun! shorty saw it at the same instant. "there's his gun, bob! he can't reach it! we've got him!" of course ... i leveled my weapon. i was sighting it ... i shall always wonder if my racing thoughts were projected then to warn the radak leader. or did he sense us in some other way? i was standing a little out into an aisle between two big mechanisms when suddenly he lifted his head, turned and saw me. the movement, and my own startled reaction, spoiled my aim ... mustn't fire until i was sure.... i recall that in that split-second i was aware that the old radak had not moved. he was just staring at me with glittering eyes and his shrunken grey face horrible with the intensity of his menace. he knew of course that he couldn't reach his weapon. he didn't try.... * * * * * just a helpless, weazened old man. but as i sighted my gun i was aware of the power radiating from him. the power of his mind, pitted now against mine; his will commanding me to drop my weapon and my own brain demanding my muscles to sight it, to fire it. conflict most horrible. it was as though every fibre of me was being outraged, seared and torn. my nerves screaming.... and my mind was screaming--kill him! got to kill him now!... don't drop the gun! hold your fingers tight! but i could feel my fingers loosening their grip. the muzzle was swaying. everything seemed blurring before me, swimming into a phantasmagoria of horror.... it was all in a second or two. i heard shorty mutter a startled oath beside me. but it was taro, despite that he must have been unutterably frightened, who kept his wits. he uttered a grim shout, jumped to his feet, sidewise away from me. it did what taro had hoped. for just an instant that baleful gaze left me, fastened on taro. then it swung back--but in that instant i had recovered myself, leveled the gun and fired. new horror! the radak leader's gaze, again on me, seemed to meet the flash of my gun in mid-air between us. i could imagine there must have been a conflict there--a little almost soundless, almost invisible puff of deranged vibrations. and the derangement must have been forced backward to me. all in the flash of a thought. to my conscious mind there was only my pressing the gun-lever, and then a bursting explosion at my hand as the radak-gun flew into fragments! one of them struck my forehead; i staggered back, went down. but i was aware that shorty, with taro close after him, had leaped--shorty, with knife upraised, his catapulting body hitting the crouching, ghoul-like figure. shorty thinks now his knife never reached its mark. there was just the impact of his body, knocking the weazened figure backward. the radak screamed a shrill, weirdly horrible cry. but it ended in a gurgle--just for an instant, a gruesome, liquid gurgle. then there was only shorty's gasp of horror. i was scrambling to my feet. i crouched, stricken, staring. shorty had drawn back, standing staring. and taro too had checked his rush. all three of us, frozen with revulsion. on the floor, weird in a green-red glow from a nearby machine, the weazened, mummy body of the radak lay huddled. a thing which had been nearly all of mental quality. and now it had encountered a physical blow, to which every atom of its weird makeup was foreign. and what a second before had been living, solid substance now was dissolving! the clothes sagged, deflated. a bubbling ooze was where the face had been. just a brief moment, and then before us the radak's garments lay crumpled and flat in a little pool of stenching putrescence! i turned away, sickened. then shorty recovered himself. "it--that damned thing screamed! others will come--" "hurry now! smash the machines! it is what we came for--" taro gasped. i made a leap for the control panels; then stopped, whirled around. there was a cry from behind and above me. on a narrow, railed little balcony which connected with the ramp down which we had come, the figure of a radak was standing! a tall grey shape! it was ratan, though i did not know who it was then. he had a knife in his hand, and he was in the act of leaping over the rail to land upon me! i had no time to avoid him. his body came sprawling, landed on my shoulders, bore me down. * * * * * simultaneously i was aware that shorty and taro were smashing at the control apparatus. it crackled, tinkled like breaking glass, with a huge flash of colored light and sparks that sent shorty and taro reeling backward, dazed so that they did not see what was happening to me. then they were up, at it again, hurling broken fragments of the controls at the nearby grids, tubes and prisms. and in that same second, the multi-colored flash spread--deranged--weird current. like burning powder-trains it leaped everywhere around the grotto. puffs, sparks of fountain-glare, the hissing, whining, screeching of breaking machines.... on the floor i struggled with ratan on top of me. he had no gun--just a long, thin knife with polished blade that glittered as he tried to thrust it into my throat. my own knife was gone. i reached, clutched at the grey wrist, turning the knife so that it went past my throat. then i heaved upward. in the struggle ratan dropped his knife and neither of us could reach it. locked together we rolled, pummeling, scrambling. then i knew that i had him. my fist landed on his hawk-nosed grey face--a solid blow that made him scream with revulsion and pain. then i had heaved him off, staggered to my feet. i seemed to be in a cloud of yellow-green, choking, acrid vapour through which only dimly i could see ratan struggling erect. and there was shorty's voice: "bob! bob, where are you? got to get out of here! taro--taro--" it seemed that somewhere near me, taro was coughing, choking. then i realized that the shape of ratan was plunging at me through the heavy chemical smoke. i was swaying, but i squared off, hit him solidly in the face again. he went down, and i leaped on him, lifting his head and shoulders, then banging his head back against the corner of a mechanism-frame--pounding it again and again until suddenly i was aware that it had smashed and was dripping upon me. with a shudder i cast the inert body away and leaped to my feet. "bob! got to get out of here! taro--" shorty was still shouting. green-yellow vapour was swirling around me. electrolyte flashes seemed everywhere--the whole grotto, an inferno of pyrotechnics. then i saw the figure of shorty staggering to help taro from where he had fallen. i swayed and joined them. "that ramp," i gasped. "behind us! come on--" we tried to hold our breath as we staggered up the ramp. then there seemed a little puff of breathable air. as we plunged into the exit tunnel, for an instant i turned. the big grotto was alive with swirling turgid smoke and flames and leaping, bursting light-fire. and a bedlam of weird bursting sounds. the death of the monstrous radak science, screaming with its agony of dissolution. coughing and choking, we ran up the tunnel, with the sounds and the glare fading behind us; and the pure air reviving us. "all the radaks will be after us," shorty panted. "faster, taro!" distant cries were all around us in the maze of tunnels. the alarm was spreading everywhere. we saw a few plunging radak shapes, but were able to avoid them. taro was leading us; i gripped him as we ran. "you say you know where they keep their space-flyer?" "yes. not far from blaine and the others." then we reached the girls and blaine, who were crouching in that tunnel recess with the still unconscious mack. vivian and tahn just stared at us white-faced, with little cries of relief. blaine gasped, "you did it!" "we sure did," shorty agreed. "come on--the space-ship--" "you and i--we'll carry mack--" i said. shorty nodded, and we lifted him. carrying mack slowed us. but his emaciated body was light. in a moment i slung him over my shoulders, and with shorty steadying him, we made better speed. it wasn't far, but there were radak figures everywhere now. weirdly, only one of them came near us. shorty and taro were ready to attack him. the squat little shape came plunging along a side tunnel, apparently heading for us. he seemed to be gibbering, mouthing, then screaming. but he ignored us, running, knife in hand, until he bashed himself into a rock.... * * * * * we ran on, and then suddenly i realized that we had emerged into that huge underground space where first we had met the great mind. taro ran toward a wall, found some hidden mechanism. i saw, in the crimson radiance, that by the wall a hundred yards or so away, a big slide had opened. a small, gleaming, pot-bellied cylinder was standing there. it came automatically out on rollers, and stopped in the open--a little thirty foot space-flyer. and over it, high up, the ceiling of the vast cavern seemed to have opened; the murky purple-red of the sky was up there. all this i saw in those few seconds. but there was far more here. a turmoil of sounds and moving, milling figures. a scene of weird, ghastly horror so that for a moment i stood swaying with the limp body of mack slung over my shoulders and my companions clustered around me. down the slope where the little lei village stood under the trees in the red gloom, a crowd of lei were struggling. and everywhere among them, squat grey shapes of radaks were plunging.... radaks with knives and scimitar-like swords, and some with rock-chunks and bludgeons ... radaks screaming, running amok. i saw one lunge with a knife at a lei woman. the knife went into her and she fell; and the radak kept on going until he crashed into a tree. the great mind was dead. ratan, who might have taken his place, was dead. the mental force of all this little radak world was gone. the lei themselves had not been under its control. for generations they had been cowed, terrified into sullen obedience, but that was all. with the radaks it was different. they were born, bred and trained to be automatons. to think what they were told to think. mentally dominated, controlled so that the very essence of their mind was shaped and held together by their leader. and now they had no leader! for them, there was nothing left but mental chaos, so that gibbering with the insanity of minds unhinged, they were plunging here in wild, unreasoning chaos, obeying their instinct to kill. "my people--i must help them!" taro's unutterable horror at last found voice. he would have plunged down the slope with his young wife after him. but vivian seized tahn, clung to her. i shouted at shorty, "hold him! don't let him go!" shorty hung on to him. "no, you don't!" "you can't help them!" i protested. "and we can't operate the space-ship! you want earth-people to help your world--got to get back there, we--" the words died in my throat. we all saw that none of us could get to the lei now, even if we had tried. a group of a hundred or more of the screaming, gibbering radaks had swept between us and the lei village. but the way to the space-ship still seemed open. we ran for it. one of the radaks, by chance perhaps, turned toward us; and all the ones near him, like sheep followed him. a horde of grey, maniac things charging us.... we got to the gleaming little cylinder with only an instant to spare--reached it, tumbled through its doorway. i laid mack on the white grid of its floor. shorty banged the door-slide, hanged it as the bodies of the radaks thudded against it. taro ran for the controls and in another instant the little ship quivered and lifted. there was a transparent bulls-eye window panel near me. for a second i had a glimpse of horrible, snarling, maniac faces pressed against it. then they fell away; and in a moment we were out through the upper opening, slanting upward with the crimson surface of little zelos dropping down. then we were in space, with the brilliant, beautiful miracle of the universe glittering around us.... * * * * * i think there is little more i need add. you have all heard and read, of course, of the events of this past year. the secret of space-flying! we have it now. earth-scientists, studying the radak ship, had no difficulty in constructing others far larger. fortunately our earth-materials proved adaptable; there was nothing vital that we lacked. many large ships were swiftly built, and an armed force went to zelos. haste was necessary, as you will recall, for when the mechanisms of the radaks were smashed, it was soon found that the crimson comet was plunging directly toward our sun. j. walter blaine wanted no publicity when he freely gave the millions necessary for the scientific research and the myriad activities which went into the building of the space-ships. you all offered your own donations, and they were refused only because blaine felt he had earned the privilege of financing the enterprise. he wants me now to extend his thanks to you. our first expedition to zelos was when, in its sunward plunge, it had crossed our earth-orbit and was at its closest point to us. and the expedition found that no more than a thousand of the lei had been killed by the maniac radaks, who in those terrible hours after our departure, plunged around, screaming until they bashed themselves to destruction, or were killed by the lei. taro and tahn were with our first expedition to the doomed little world, and they stayed there throughout all the several trips of the many big ships which evacuated the lei. i am glad that it was finally decided not to bring the lei here to earth. they would have been just curiosities here; and then lost, whirled away into the maelstrom of our huge world. surely it was the best of good fortune for them when our exploring ships found that venus was uninhabited, and with conditions for life so propitious. and now the lei, with taro and tahn to lead them, are masters of a great world of their own. with the friendly world of earth nearest to them. surely we will prove a helpful, friendly, neighboring world, with no greedy thought of anything more than that. zelos is gone now. i was one of those who saw it go--that night about a month ago. it was a little dot in the sky, with a great flaming streamer of the sun licking upward as though eager to meet it. and then it was gone. i recall the earnest solicitations of so many of you who prayed that mack would get well. he wants me to thank you all again. i saw him only last week, in the little mountain home where he and vivian went after their wedding trip. that astoundingly pretentious wedding they had--well, that was because blaine insisted on doing it. he may insist again, if and when a layette is needed. i don't know about that. but mack, who now has an executive position in one of blaine's many industries, got their little house himself. he and vivian remained firm on that. and as i said at the beginning, you must see now that none of us are glamorous heroes. we're all at our regular jobs, with the crimson comet just a gruesome memory. so now, kind friends--please forget us. except me. i'm certainly no hero, but, well, i won't mind if you'll remember that i broadcast twice a week on subjects of popular astronomy--station wana-nyc. and the gods laughed by fredric brown hank was spinning quite a space lie--something about earrings wearing their owners. the crew got a boot out of the yarn--until they got to thinking. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories spring . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] you know how it is when you're with a work crew on one of the asteroids. you're there, stuck for the month you signed up for, with four other guys and nothing to do but talk. space on the little tugs that you go in and return in, and live in while you're there, is at such a premium that there isn't room for a book or a magazine nor equipment for games. and you're out of radio range except for the usual once-a-terrestrial-day, system-wide newscasts. so talking is the only indoor sport you can go in for. talking and listening. you've plenty of time for both because a work-day, in space-suits, is only four hours and that with four fifteen-minute back-to-the-ship rest periods, so you actually work only three hours and spend half that time getting in and out the airlock. but those are union rules, and no asteroid mining outfit tries to chisel on them. anyway, what i'm trying to say is that talk is cheap on one of those work crews. with most of the day to do nothing else, you listen to some real whoppers, stories that would make the old-time liars clubs back on earth seem like sunday-school meetings. and if your mind runs that way, you've got plenty of time to think up some yourself. charlie dean was on our crew, and charlie could tell some dillies. he'd been on mars back in the old days when there was still trouble with the _bolies_, and when living on mars was a lot like living on earth back in the days of indian fighting. the _bolies_ thought and fought a lot like amerinds, even though they were quadrupeds that looked like alligators on stilts--if you can picture an alligator on stilts--and used blow-guns instead of bows and arrows. or was it crossbows that the amerinds used against the colonists? anyway, charlie's just finished a whopper that was really too good for the first tryout of the trip. we'd just landed, you see, and were resting up from doing nothing en route, and usually the yarns start off easy and believable and don't work up to real depth-of-space lying until along about the fourth week when everybody's bored stiff. "so we took this head _bolie_," charlie was ending up, "and you know what kind of flappy little ears they've got, and we put a couple of zircon-studded earrings in its ears and let it go, and back it went to the others, and then darned if--" well, i won't go on with charlie's yarn, because it hasn't got anything to do with this story except that it brought earrings into the conversation. when charlie'd finished, zeb werrah stood up and sniffed. "air's getting kind of bad in here," he said. "reckon i'll go out and get my first shift over with. anybody want to come?" ray went with him--our tug had equipment for only two men to work outside at a time--and the rest of us helped them into suits and out the lock, and then settled down for some more talk, there being nothing else to do. zeb's remark about the air had been just a crack at charlie's story, of course. "how'd you happen to have zircon earrings along?" blake powers asked charlie, when things had quieted down again. blake was skipper for the voyages, but now that we were anchored down on our asteroid, he was just one of the boys, until we took off again. "in with the slum for trading," charlie said. "when you're going to any place in the system that might be inhabited and you don't know by what kind of critters, you take a little of almost everything. you never know what's going to strike the fancy of any civilized or semi-civilized race you might hit. "it might be mirrors--i've known dime-store mirrors to bring in twice their weight in radium salt--or it might be paper clips or harmonicas, or salted peanuts or plaster statuettes." he turned to me and said, "you know that, hank. you've been on a 'first' trip or two. so have you, blake." * * * * * blake nodded. "i remember i was on the crew of the ship that landed first on phobos. you know what the phobonians turned out to be like, of course. they had about everything we had, and damned if we could do a lick of trading until the captain of our ship put something back in a box and happened to put a rubber band around the box. they went nuts; they'd never seen anything that had _elasticity_. rubber or anything like it simply wasn't known on phobos. we managed to find a few dozen rubber bands in the ship's office and practically bought out phobos with them. "one of the crew was wearing old-fashioned suspenders with elastic in them, and he traded them for a bucket of phobonian sele-stones. had to hold up his pants with a piece of rope for the rest of the trip, but when he got back to earth he was rich. me, i was wearing a belt. i've worn suspenders ever since, but i never got back to phobos. not that it would matter if i did; interplanet's doing a regular trade in rubber there now, and it's down to twenty credits a pound or thereabouts." blake shook his head gloomily and then turned to me. he said, "hank, what went on ganymede? you were on that ship that went out there a few months ago, weren't you--the first one that got through? i've never read or heard much about that trip." "me either," charlie said. "except that the ganymedeans turned out to be humanoid beings about four feet tall and didn't wear a thing except earrings. kind of immodest, wasn't it?" i grinned. "you wouldn't have thought so if you'd seen the ganymedeans. with them, it didn't matter. anyway, they didn't wear earrings." "you're crazy," charlie said. "sure, i know you were on that expedition and i wasn't, but you're still crazy, because i had a quick look at some of the pictures they brought back. the natives wore earrings." "no," i said. "earrings wore _them_." blake sighed deeply. "i knew it, i knew it," he said. "there was something wrong with this trip from the start. charlie pops off the first day with a yarn that should have been worked up to gradually. and now you say--or is there something wrong with my _sense of earring_?" i chuckled. "not a thing, skipper." charlie said, "i've heard of men biting dogs, but earrings wearing people is a new one. hank, i hate to say it--but just consider it said." anyway, i had their attention. and now was as good a time as any. i said, "if you read about the trip, you know we left earth about eight months ago, for a six-months' round trip. there were six of us in the m- ; me and two others made up the crew and there were three specialists to do the studying and exploring. not the really top-flight specialists, though, because the trip was too risky to send them. that was the third ship to try for ganymede and the other two had cracked up on outer jovian satellites that the observatories hadn't spotted from earth because they are too small to show up in the scopes at that distance. "when you get there you find there's practically an asteroid belt around jupiter, most of them so black they don't reflect light to speak of and you can't see them till they hit you or you hit them. but most of them--" "skip the satellites," blake interrupted, "unless they wore earrings." "or unless earrings wore _them_," said charlie. "neither," i admitted. "all right, so we were lucky and got through the belt. and landed. like i said, there were six of us. lecky, the biologist. haynes geologist and mineralogist. and hilda race, who loved little flowers and was a botanist, egad! you'd have loved hilda--at a distance. somebody must have wanted to get rid of her, and sent her on that trip. she gushed; you know the type. "and then there was art willis and dick carney. they gave dick skipper's rating for the trip; he knew enough astrogation to get us through. so dick was skipper and art and i were flunkies and gunmen. our main job was to go along with the specialists whenever they left the ship and stand guard over them against whatever dangers might pop up." "and did anything pop?" charlie demanded. "i'm coming to that," i told him. "we found ganymede not so bad, as places go. gravity low, of course, but you could get around easily and keep your balance once you got used to it. and the air was breathable for a couple of hours; after that you found yourself panting like a dog. "lot of funny animals, but none of them were very dangerous. no reptilian life; all of it mammalian, but a funny kind of mammalian if you know what i mean." * * * * * blake said, "i don't want to know what you mean. get to the natives and the earrings." i said, "but of course with animals like that, you never _know_ whether they're dangerous until you've been around them for a while. you can't judge by size or looks. like if you'd never seen a snake, you'd never guess that a little coral snake was dangerous, would you? and a martian zeezee looks for all the world like an overgrown guinea-pig. but without a gun--or with one, for that matter--i'd rather face a grizzly bear or a--" "the earrings," said blake. "you were talking about earrings." i said, "oh, yes; earrings. well, the natives wore them--for now, i'll put it that way, to make it easier to tell. one earring apiece, even though they had two ears. gave them a sort of lopsided look, because they were pretty fair-sized earrings--like hoops of plain gold, two or three inches in diameter. "anyway, the tribe we landed near wore them that way. we could see the village--a very primitive sort of place made of mud huts--from where we landed. we had a council of war and decided that three of us would stay in the ship and the other three go to the village. lecky, the biologist, and art willis and i with guns. we didn't know what we might run into, see? and lecky was chosen because he was pretty much of a linguist. he had a flair for languages and could talk them almost as soon as he heard them. * * * * * "they'd heard us land and a bunch of them--about forty, i guess--met us half-way between the ship and the village. and they were friendly. funny people. quiet and dignified and acting not at all like you'd expect savages to act toward people landing out of the sky. you know how most primitives react--either they practically worship you or else they try to kill you. "we went to the village with them--and there were about forty more of them there; they'd split forces just as we did, for the reception committee. another sign of intelligence. they recognized lecky as leader, and started jabbering to him in a lingo that sounded more like a pig grunting than a man talking. and pretty soon lecky was making an experimental grunt or two in return. "everything seemed on the up and up, and no danger. and they weren't paying much attention to art and me, so we decided to wander off for a stroll around outside of the village to see what the country in general was like and whether there were any dangerous beasties or what-not. we didn't see any animals, but we did see another native. he acted different from the others--very different. he threw a spear at us and then ran. and it was art who noticed that this native didn't wear an earring. "and then breathing began to get a bit hard for us--we'd been away from the ship over an hour--so we went back to the village to collect lecky and take him to the ship. he was getting along so well that he hated to leave, but he was starting to pant, too, so we talked him into it. he was wearing one of the earrings, and said they'd given it to him as a present, and he'd made them a return present of a pocket slide-rule he happened to have with him. "'why a slide-rule?' i asked him. 'those things cost money and we've got plenty of junk that would make them happier.' "'that's what you think,' he said. 'they figured out how to multiply and divide with it almost as soon as i showed it to them. i showed them how to extract square roots, and i was starting on cube roots when you fellows came back.' "i whistled and took a close look to see if maybe he was kidding me. he didn't seem to be. but i noticed that he was walking strangely and--well, acting just a bit strangely, somehow, although i couldn't put my finger on what it was. i decided finally that he was just a bit over-excited. this was lecky's first trip off earth, so that was natural enough. "inside the ship, as soon as lecky got his breath back--the last hundred yards pretty well winded us--he started in to tell haynes and hilda race about the ganymedeans. most of it was too technical for me, but i got that they had some strange contradictions in them. as far as their way of life was concerned, they were more primitive than australian bushmen. but they had brains and a philosophy and a knowledge of mathematics and pure science. they'd told him some things about atomic structure that excited hell out of him. he was in a dither to get back to earth where he could get at equipment to check some of those things. "and he said the earring was a sign of membership in the tribe--they'd acknowledged him as a friend and compatriot and what-not by giving it to him." blake asked, "was it gold?" "i'm coming to that," i told him. i was feeling cramped from sitting so long in one position on the bunk, and i stood up and stretched. there isn't much room to stretch in an asteroid tug and my hand hit against the pistol resting in the clips on the wall. i said, "what's the pistol for, blake?" he shrugged. "rules. has to be one hand weapon on every space-craft. heaven knows why, on an asteroid ship. unless the council thinks some day an asteroid may get mad at us when we tow it out of orbit so it cracks up another. say, did i ever tell you about the time we had a little twenty-ton rock in tow and--" "shut up blake," charlie said. "he's just getting to those damn earrings." "yeah, the earrings," i said. i took the pistol down from the wall and looked at it. it was an old-fashioned metal project weapon, twenty-shot, circa . it was loaded and usable, but dirty. it hurts me to see a dirty gun. i went on talking, but i sat back down on the bunk, took an old handkerchief out of my duffle-box and started to clean and polish the hand-gun while i talked. i said, "he wouldn't let us take the earring off. acted just a little funny about it when haynes wanted to analyze the metal. told haynes he could get one of his own if he wanted to mess with it. and then he went back to rhapsodizing over the superior knowledge the ganymedeans had shown. "next day all of them wanted to go to the village, but we'd made the rule that not more than three of the six of us would be outside the ship at once, and they'd have to take turns. since lecky could talk their grunt-lingo, he and hilda went first, and art went along to guard them. looked safe enough to work that proportion now--two scientists to one guard. outside of that one native that had thrown a spear at art and me, there hadn't been a sign of danger. and he'd looked like a half-wit and missed us by twenty feet anyway. we hadn't even bothered to shoot at him. "they were back, panting for breath, in less than two hours. hilda race's eyes were shining and she was wearing one of the rings in her left ear. she looked as proud as though it was a royal crown making her queen of mars or something. she gushed about it, as soon as she got her wind back and stopped panting. "i went on the next trip, with lecky and haynes. "haynes was kind of grumpy, for some reason, and said they weren't going to put one of those rings in his ear, even if he did want one for analysis. they could just hand it to him, or else. "again nobody paid much attention to me after we got there, and i wandered around the village. i was on the outskirts of it when i heard a yell--and i ran back to the center of town but fast, because it sounded like haynes. "there was a crowd around a spot in the middle of--well, call it the compound. took me a minute to wedge my way through, scattering natives to all sides as i went. and when i got to the middle of things, haynes was just getting up, and there was a big stain of red on the front of his white linen coat. "i grabbed him to help him up, and said, 'haynes, what's the matter? you hurt?' "he shook his head slowly, as though he was kind of dazed, and then he said, 'i'm all right, hank. i'm all right. i just stumbled and fell.' then he saw me looking at that red stain, and smiled. i guess it was a smile, but it didn't look natural. he said, 'that's not blood, hank. some native red wine i happened to spill. part of the ceremony.' * * * * * "i started to ask what ceremony, and then i saw he was wearing one of the gold earrings. i thought that was damn funny, but he started talking to lecky, and he looked and acted all right--well, fairly all right. lecky was telling him what a few of the grunts meant, and he acted awful interested--but somehow i got the idea he was pretending most of that interest so he wouldn't have to talk to me. he acted as though he was thinking hard, inside, and maybe he was making up a better story to cover that stain on his clothes and the fact that he'd changed his mind so quick about the earring. "i was getting the notion that something was rotten in the state of ganymede, but i didn't know what. i decided to keep my yap shut and my eyes open till i found out. "i'd have plenty of time to study haynes later, though, so i wandered off again to the edge of the village and just outside it. and it occurred to me that if there was anything i wasn't supposed to see, i might stand a better chance of seeing it if i got under cover. there were plenty of bushes around and i picked out a good clump of them and hid. from the way my lungs worked, i figured i had maybe a half hour before we'd have to start back for the ship. "and less than half that time had gone by before i saw something." i stopped talking to hold the pistol up to the light and squint through the barrel. it was getting pretty clean, but there were a couple of spots left up near the muzzle end. blake said, "let me guess. you saw a martian traag-hound standing on his tail, singing annie laurie." "worse than that," i said "i saw one of those ganymede natives get his legs bit off. and it annoyed him." "it would annoy anyone," said blake. "even me, and i'm a pretty mild-tempered guy. what bit them off?" "i never found out," i told him. "it was something under water. there was a stream there, going by the village, and there must have been something like crocodiles in it. two natives came out of the village and started to wade across the stream. about half-way over one of them gave a yelp and went down. "the other grabbed him and pulled him up on the other bank. and both his legs were gone just above the knees. "and the damnedest thing happened. the native with his legs off stood up on the stumps of them and started talking--or grunting--quite calmly to his companion, who grunted back. and if tone of voice meant anything, he was annoyed. nothing more. he tried walking on the stumps of his legs, and found he couldn't go very fast. "and then he gave a gesture that looked for all the world like a shrug, and reached up and took off his earring and held it out to the other native. and then came the strangest part. "the other native took it--_and the very instant the ring left the hand of the first one_--the one with his legs off--_he fell down dead_. the other one picked up the corpse and threw it in the water, and went on. "and as soon as he was out of sight i went back to get lecky and haynes and take them to the ship. they were ready to leave when i got there. "i thought i was worried a bit, but i hadn't seen anything yet. not till i started back to the ship with lecky and haynes. haynes, first thing i noticed, had the stain gone from the front of his coat. wine or--whatever it was--somebody'd managed to get it out for him, and the coat wasn't even wet. but it was torn, pierced. i hadn't noticed that before. but there was a place there that looked like a spear had gone through his coat. "and then he happened to get in front of me, and i saw that there was another tear or rip just like it _in back_ of his coat. taken together, it was like somebody'd pushed a spear through him, from front to back. when he'd yelled. "but if a spear'd gone through him like that, then he was dead. and there he was walking ahead of me back to the ship. with one of those earrings in his left ear--and i couldn't help but remember about that native and the thing in the river. that native was sure enough dead, too, with his legs off like that, but he hadn't found it out until he'd handed that earring away. * * * * * "i can tell you i was plenty thoughtful that evening, watching everybody, and it seemed to me that they were all acting strange. especially hilda--you'd have to watch a hippopotamus acting kittenish to get an idea. haynes and lecky seemed thoughtful and subdued, like they were planning something, maybe. after a while art came up from the glory hole and he was wearing one of those rings. "gave me a kind of shiver to realize that--if what i was thinking could possibly be true--then there was only me and dick left. and i'd better start comparing notes with dick pretty soon. he was working on a report, but i knew pretty soon he'd make his routine inspection trip through the storerooms before turning in, and i'd corner him then. "meanwhile, i watched the other four and i got surer and surer. and more and more scared. they were trying their darndest to act natural, but once in a while one of them would slip. for one thing, they'd _forget to talk_. i mean, one of them would turn to another as though he was saying something, but he wouldn't. and then, as though remembering, he'd start in the middle of it--like he'd been talking without words before, telepathically. "and pretty soon dick gets up and goes out, and i followed him. we got to one of the side storerooms and i closed the door. 'dick,' i asked, 'have you noticed it?' and he wanted to know what i was talking about. "so i told him. i said, 'those four people out there--they _aren't the ones we started with_. what happened to art and hilda and lecky and haynes? what the hell goes on here? haven't you noticed _anything_ out of the ordinary?' "and dick sighed, kind of, and said, 'well, it didn't work. we need more practice, then. come on and we'll tell you all about it.' and he opened the door and held out his hand to me--and the sleeve of his shirt pulled back a little from the wrist and he was wearing one of those gold things, like the others, only he was wearing it as a bracelet instead of an earring. "i--well, i was too dumbfounded to say anything. i didn't take the hand he held out, but i followed him back into the main room. and then--while lecky, who seemed to be the leader, i think--held a gun on me, they told me about it. "and it was even screwier, and worse, than i'd dare guess. "they didn't have any name for themselves, because they had no language--what you'd really call a spoken or written language--of their own. you see, they were telepathic, and you don't need a language for that. if you tried to translate their thought for themselves, the nearest word you could find for it would be "we"--the first person plural pronoun. individually, they identified themselves to one another by numbers rather than names. "and just as they had no language of their own, they had no real bodies of their own, nor active minds of their own. they were parasitic in a sense that earthmen can't conceive. they were _entities_, apart from--well, it's difficult to explain, but in a way they had no real existence when not attached to a body they could animate and _think with_. the easiest way to put it is that a detached--uh--_earring god_, which is what the ganymedean natives called them--was asleep, dormant, ineffective. had no power of thought or motion in itself." charlie and blake were looking bewildered. charlie said, "you're trying to say, hank, that when one of them came in contact with a person, they took over that person and ran him and thought with his mind but--uh--kept their own identity? and what happened to the person they took over?" i said, "as near as i could make out, he stayed there, too, as it were, but was dominated by the entity. i mean, there remained all his memories, and his individuality, but something else was in the driver's seat. running him. didn't matter whether he was alive or dead, either, as long as his body wasn't in too bad shape. like haynes--they'd had to kill him to put an earring on him. he was dead, in that if that ring was removed, he'd have fallen flat and never got up again, unless it was put back. "like the native whose legs had been cut off. the entity running him had decided the body was no longer practicable for use, so he handed himself back to the other native, see? and they'd find another body in better shape for him to use. "they didn't tell me where they came from, except that it was outside the solar system, nor just how they got to ganymede. not by themselves, though, because they couldn't even exist by themselves. they must have got as far as ganymede as parasites of visitors that had landed there at some time or other. maybe millions of years ago. and they couldn't get off ganymede, of course, till we landed there. space travel hadn't developed on ganymede--" * * * * * charlie interrupted me again, "but if they were so smart, why didn't they develop it themselves?" "they couldn't," i told him. "they weren't any smarter than the minds they occupied. well, a little smarter, in a way, because they could use those minds to their full capacity and people--terrestrial or ganymedean--don't do that. but even the full capacity of the mind of a ganymedean savage wasn't sufficient to develop a space-ship. "but now they had _us_--i mean, they had lecky and haynes and hilda and art and dick--and they had our space-ship, and they were going to earth, because they knew all about it and about conditions there from our minds. they planned, simply, to take over earth and--uh--_run_ it. they didn't explain the details of how they propagate, but i gathered that there wouldn't be any shortage of earrings to go around, on earth. earrings or bracelets or, however, they'd attach themselves. "bracelets, probably, or arm or leg bands, because wearing earrings like that would be too conspicuous on earth, and they'd have to work in secret for a while. take over a few people at a time, without letting the others know what was going on. "and lecky--or the thing that was running lecky--told me they'd been using me as a guinea pig, that they could have put a ring on me, taken me over, at any time. but they wanted a check on how they were doing at imitating normal people. they wanted to know whether or not i got suspicious and guessed the truth. "so dick--or the thing that was running him--had kept himself out of sight under dick's sleeve, so if i got suspicious of the others, i'd talk it over with dick--just as i really did do. and that let them know they needed a lot more practice animating those bodies before they took the ship back to earth to start their campaign there. "and, well, that was the whole story and they told it to me to watch my reactions, as a normal human. and then lecky took a ring out of his pocket and held it out toward me with one hand, keeping the pistol on me with the other hand. "he told me i might as well put it on because if i didn't, he could shoot me first and then put it on me--but that they greatly preferred to take over undamaged bodies and that it would be better for me, too, if i--that is, my body--didn't die first. "but naturally, i didn't see it that way. i pretended to reach out for the ring, hesitantly, but instead i batted the gun out of his hand, and made a dive for it as it hit the floor. "i got it, too, just as they all came for me. and i fired three shots into them before i saw that it wasn't even annoying them. damn it, the only way you can stop a body animated by one of those rings is to make it fix it so it can't move, like cutting off the legs or something. a bullet in the heart doesn't worry it. "but i'd backed to the door and got out of it--out into the ganymedean night, without even a coat on. it was colder than hell, too. and after i got out there, there just wasn't any place to go. except back in the ship, and i wasn't going there. "they didn't come out after me--didn't bother to. they knew that within three hours--four at the outside--i'd be unconscious from insufficient oxygen. if the cold, or something else, didn't get me first. "maybe there was some way out, but i didn't see one. i just sat down on a stone about a hundred yards from the ship and tried to think of something i could do. but--" * * * * * i didn't go anywhere with the "but--" and there was a moment's silence, and then charlie said, "well?" and blake said, "what did you do?" "nothing," i said. "i couldn't think of a thing to do. i just sat there." "till morning?" "no. i lost consciousness before morning. i came to while it was still dark, in the ship." blake was looking at me with a puzzled frown. he said, "the hell. you mean--" and then charlie let out a sudden yip and dived head-first out of the bunk he'd been lying on, and grabbed the gun out of my hand. i'd just finished cleaning it and slipped the cartridge-clip back in. and then, with it in his hand, he stood there staring at me as though he'd never seen me before. blake said, "sit down, charlie. don't you know when you're being ribbed? but--uh--better keep the gun, just the same." charlie kept the gun all right, and turned it around to point at me. he said, "i'm making a damn fool out of myself all right, but--hank, _roll up your sleeves_." i grinned and stood up. i said, "don't forget my ankles, too." but there was something dead serious in his face, and i didn't push him too far. blake said, "he could even have it on him somewhere else, with adhesive tape. i mean on the million-to-one chance that he wasn't kidding...." charlie nodded without turning to look at blake. he said, "hank, i hate to ask it, but--" i sighed, and then chuckled. i said, "well, i was just going to take a shower anyway." it was hot in the ship, and i was wearing only shoes and a pair of coveralls. paying no attention to blake and charlie, i slipped them off and stepped through the oilsilk curtains of the little shower cubicle. and turned on the water. over the sound of the shower, i could hear blake laughing and charlie cursing softly to himself. and when i came out of the shower, drying myself, even charlie was grinning. blake said, "and i thought that yarn charlie just told was a dilly. this trip is backwards; we'll end up having to tell each other the truth." there was a sharp rapping on the hull beside the airlock, and charlie dean went to open it. he growled, "if you tell zeb and ray what chumps you made out of us, i'll beat your damn ears in. you and your earring gods...." * * * * * portion of telepathic report of no. , on asteroid j- a to no. , on terra: "_as planned, i tested credulity of terrestrial minds by telling them the true story of what happened on ganymede._ _found them capable of acceptance thereof._ _this proves that our idea of embedding ourselves within the flesh of these terrestrial creatures was an excellent one and is essential to the success of our plan. true, this is less simple than our method on ganymede, but we must continue to perform the operation upon each terrestrial being as we take him over. bracelets or other appendages would arouse suspicion._ _there is no necessity in wasting a month here. i shall now take command of the ship and return. we will report no ore present here. the four of us who will animate the four terrestrials now aboard this ship will report to you on terra...._" the star of satan by henry hasse more than the wreck of the _martian princess_ lay on the lazily spinning asteroid. that uncharted star of satan harbored madness in awful, human form. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] hype garth was suddenly awake. he lay there on his cot in the dark, listening intently for the sound he knew would shortly come through the receptor. it almost frightened him, this subconscious awareness of his. he often wondered about it and wished he could explain it. always, during their sleep period, just a minute before a message came through he was wide awake and waiting, knowing. he supposed nerves had something to do with it. or the time he'd spent out here? nerves were bound to go raw and perhaps play strange tricks when two men were thrown together in this black isolated hell of outer space. and garth had been out here for twenty-three full years and seen his partners come and go. from the other side of the room came prokle's slow, sonorous breathing. garth suddenly hated his partner for his ability to sleep at this moment. garth reached out and touched the huge, nine-foot receptube by his bed; a faintly glowing violet permeated the darkness. his whole attention centered in a strained, concentrated listening. then the sound came, as he knew it would: first the crisp, crackling static; then the familiar and hated voice of the sender at martian headquarters, stabbing the darkness almost viciously: "salvage station m ! attention m ! passenger liner _callisto_, enroute jupiter to mars, radios they have just encountered uncharted asteroid swarm on the martian side of the belt. they have passed through unscathed. but attention to this, m : captain lambert of the _callisto_ reports that he detected a light on the surface of one of the larger masses! this may have been a distress signal-flare, and if so, can mean but one thing: that the sole remaining life-boat unaccounted for from the wreck of the _martian princess_ twenty days ago landed on this asteroid; and the party, or some of them, have managed to survive. this seems hardly possible, but we must investigate. "proceed at once in search of this uncharted swarm. approximate position when encountered by the _callisto_, exact center of the belt, two hours behind the lanisar group, orbital plane about twenty degrees from regular passenger route. mass in question cannot be mistaken, largest of the group, about twenty miles diameter. proceed at once, m ! end of message." garth knew it was not the end of the message. that martian sender always reserved some little sardonic touch to send to garth. garth's jaw tightened, he waited about five seconds, and then, raspingly, it came: "oh, just a moment, m --garth listening i hope--here's a tip for you. as you probably know, j. p. chiswell is among those still missing in that life-boat. if you two can locate that party, who knows--it may mean unconditional pardon for _both_ of you! end of message." there came the hint of an amused chuckle before the tube went dead. garth's face was grim. j. p. chiswell, president of emv lines! unconditional pardon. yes, for prokle, perhaps, if they were lucky, but never for him, and that rat of a martian sender knew it. garth, in the early days, had been a source of considerable annoyance in the spaceways, and he was now serving forty years. the longest sentence in the entire history of the salvage stations. * * * * * garth arose and clicked on the light in the little cubicle. he crossed over and shook prokle, grinning in anticipation of the grumbling protest he knew his partner would make. "message just came through," garth said. "sounds urgent." "go to sleep you damn idiot, and let me," prokle mumbled. "i was just dreaming i was back in chicago." prokle only lived for the time when he'd get back to chicago, and garth knew he never would. so did prokle. garth grinned broader and shook his partner harder. "come on, snap out of it. this is important, i tell you." prokle rolled over, half opened one eye and muttered, "nothing's more important than sleep, out here. hell, can't it wait 'til tomorrow--" "i'll let you be the judge of that," garth said with calm emphasis. "it's an uncharted swarm." the effect was electric. instantly prokle was awake and on his feet, fumbling with his space equipment, no more questions asked. garth smiled to himself, and moved over to his own equipment. he had been out here a long time and had often seen the effect of those magical words, "uncharted swarm." but never had he known them to work in quite the way they did on prokle. _uncharted swarm!_ to men such as they, that meant much--or it meant nothing. but above all things it meant a _chance_, and eternal hope. it had all begun twenty years ago when the group of four men over on station j had found gold on one of the uncharted asteroid swarms. they had pledged secrecy and worked it the smart way, leaving the swarm unreported. they had mined the gold until the rocks sped too far away in their orbit for them to venture out in safety; but they had obtained enough to buy off the duration of their penal terms, and had gone back to earth very rich men. some years later malcolm and schroeder, on m , had made a similar strike, but platinum. they worked it the same secret way. malcolm had died, and there were rumors his partner had murdered him. schroeder, through the obvious channels, had bought off his remaining sentence. through the years there were other such rumors, and "uncharted swarm" had become magic words to all salvage station men. secrecy, jealousy, hope continued to prevail. except with garth. garth knew that all the precious metals in all the asteroids would not suffice to buy his freedom. * * * * * the two men stepped from their sleeping quarters out onto the metal platform which had been garth's world for twenty-three years, prokle's for two. it was a tiny world, extending in each direction for a mere quarter of a mile to end abruptly at the edge of the eternal darkness. man-made, glass-domed, it was the tiniest of all the salvage stations. garth had been stationed there at his own request, defiantly, alone at first. he had worked alone pirating the spaceways, not liking the company of many men. he still didn't. but he did like the single men they sent out to him now when necessary. and it was frequently necessary. the trouble was, either their sentences expired too quickly, or they did! garth's last two partners had done that--one stumbling clumsily over a precipice while exploring, shattering his oxygen helmet; the other being crushed in his solo cruiser between two asteroid masses from which garth himself only narrowly escaped. and prokle he liked perhaps best of all. prokle was the reckless type and it was those who always, somehow, managed to survive. it was prokle, too, who had hung the name "hype" on garth and made him like it. he had first called him "hyper" because of that amazing, premonitory sensitivity of his; then shortened it to "hype." garth had at first resented it, then bore it laughingly, then liked it. and it was not only at the receptube that his strange "awareness" was in evidence. he used to tell prokle an hour or two in advance when a supply ship was arriving at their station--and they were supposed to arrive in secret! he could uncannily sense the proximity of dangerous chasms on the asteroids they explored. and once, just before boarding a derelict freighter, garth had told prokle to wait; they waited, and five minutes later the freighter was torn asunder by a terrific explosion, caused by seeping fumes. now, as they crossed over to the safety lock where their cruiser waited, garth told prokle the content of the message. but all the latter heard was "uncharted swarm." there was a gleam in his eyes garth had seen before, which caused him to say abruptly: "look here, prokle, that gold lust is going to be your finish some day. i can see it coming." "what else is there to live for out here?" prokle flared up. "work. first of all we're going to follow instructions implicitly. later we'll have plenty of time to explore and prospect; this swarm is our exclusive property. but just remember old man chiswell's with that missing party, and that might mean plenty, to you anyway, if we can find 'em." prokle's mind came back from its flight. "yeah, that's right. that _is_ an angle." he seemed to consider it for the first time. "that _is_ an angle," he repeated. "say, how many are supposed to be in that missing party, anyway?" "the entire passenger list of the _martian princess_ is accounted for," replied garth, "except six persons. and the missing life-boat is one of the very small ones, accommodating but six. draw your own conclusions." "sure, that's what i'm trying to do. but it just don't add up. look here, hype, those life-boats are all provisioned about the same, ain't they? oxygen for three or four days, and food for a day or two at the most?" "that's about right. close enough." "then _you_ add it up. the _martian princess_ was wrecked twenty-one days ago. three weeks to the very day. how do you figure a party of six could have survived that long?" garth shook his head sadly. "you jump to conclusions like a venusian polywog. nobody's said that the six, or that any of them, have survived. a light was seen, that's all; maybe it was a meteor. anyway it's not for us to believe it or doubt it, our job is to find out." "still, it's damn funny where that life-boat could have got to," prokle growled. "the way this whole section's been scoured. our own detector would have picked it out anywhere in a thousand-mile radius." "yes, i've been thinking of that. and i sort of lean to the belief they landed somewhere; captain lambert was probably right about that light he saw." "but after three weeks," prokle protested, "and only a few days' oxygen and provisions? for six that'd be impossible, and even for one man--well, that's a long stretch on oxygen and food." garth turned to his partner and said, "you know, prokle, that's one thing i like about you. you're unimaginative. you're always yourself. you never can put yourself in the other fellow's place. you and me, we don't put a high value on our lives anymore, but other people still value life highly, they cling to it tenaciously. isn't that quaint?" "skip the sarcasm," prokle said. "i know what you mean. the oldest story in the world, the survival of the fittest." "exactly. they can't all have survived. but i'm sure someone did." * * * * * they reached the edge of their half-mile world and stepped into the lock where the two-man cruiser waited, garth having decided against the solo cruisers. something told him they ought to stick together on this venture. they sped away into the blackness, prokle at the controls. garth looked back at their tiny glass-enclosed world and the wreck of the _martian princess_ anchored there, bordering almost one entire edge. she was a rather helpless looking "princess" now, but her lines were still regal. garth smiled as he remembered the wreck, three weeks ago. station m , with its larger crew, had done most of the rescue work; but the hull of the huge liner had drifted toward m and so garth and prokle got the salvage job, to the envy of every other station this side of the belt. but that was the inviolable law of the stations. the two men were now leisurely engaged in putting the liner back into condition for the inspection crew who would be due out here at the end of the month. garth grimaced, remembering the earliest days of these stations. the few prisoners out here then had at first been sullen, stubborn, unresponding to the occasional messages of salvage work flashed out to them. but there had been no attempt to force the men to do the work. no pretense of discipline. supply ships had stopped every three months, briefly as possible, then went on their way. less than a year of this, and the sheer stark _ennui_ of the black outer hell had proved to be the real disciplinary master. there were only three stations then, a handful of men on each, who soon vied with each other for the too infrequent salvage jobs. garth had to hand it to the psychological genius who devised the plan! prokle brought him abruptly out of his reminiscences. "what do you say, hype? sight for the lanisar group?" garth examined the chart which showed the position and orbit of every known asteroid swarm. he consulted their present position and made swift calculation. "sure. lanisar's coming on fast, but we won't cross it for an hour yet. the baby we want is about two hours behind it, according to headquarters, but on the _inside_. remember, that's plenty dangerous territory in the middle of the belt for a flea-cruiser like this, without a repulsor. how does that suit you?" prokle revealed how it suited him when he said: "it's an uncharted swarm, ain't it?" * * * * * they skirted the edge of the belt, easily avoiding the occasional smaller swarms. the charted lanisar group, easily recognizable and already thoroughly explored, intersected them in less than an hour. prokle turned their tiny craft deeper into the belt. here there were long stretches of comparative emptiness, but these became ever more infrequent. dark masses began looming out of nowhere, but luckily they were tinged faintly from the light of the distant sun. many of these veered crazily, or hurtled across their bow, seeming much closer than they actually were. some of the larger pieces eventually formed miniature solar systems in themselves. after more than an hour of this both men were nerve-wracked and exhausted. but they dared not relax for a moment. this was deeper, presumably, into the belt than any men had ever gone with a cruiser as tiny as theirs. they now seemed to be in a veritable sea of leprous light reflecting from the pock-marked masses speeding around them. prokle had just turned a worried face to garth, and the latter moved forward to take the controls ... when the swarm abruptly thinned. they were in the comparative emptiness of space again, with only tiny pebbles peppering their hull harmlessly. prokle slumped in relief. but the relief was brief. "look," garth said, pointing. far ahead, directly in their trajectory, a pinpoint of light was discernible. it did not remain a pinpoint long. they watched it grow nearer and larger and slowly take shape. another swarm, seemingly a large one. but gradually they saw that it was, rather, one very large mass with lesser ones speeding along behind it. the large mass turned lazily on a vertical axis, the sunlight striking it sharply. then, without the slightest warning, prokle gave a short gurgling cry. he lurched up from the seat and backward against garth, clutching at him. garth could only stare at prokle in amazement as the latter pointed, in a kind of horror, through the glassite prow. garth pressed forward and looked. now he saw clearly. an involuntary sharp gasp hissed through his clenched teeth. the large rock ahead, turning on its axis, had suddenly presented a new contour. due to its formation and the way the sun struck it, it now seemed almost a perfect, though rough-hewn, death's-head! in fascination rather than horror, garth watched the rock turning slowly. a minute later, considerably larger, the semblance was directly facing them--undeniably the rough shape of a human skull, all leprously sun-illumined, seeming to grin a sardonic welcome as it came nearer. deep shadowy gorges were in the places where the eyes would have been. then it slowly revolved away, and the semblance was lost. "very cute, huh?" garth said, quickly taking over the controls. "nature's a grand comedian sometimes. i've seen some queer sights out here, but never anything like that!" and he added with grim humor: "well, that's undoubtedly the baby we're looking for, the one we've got to contact. about twenty miles diameter. glad you came along?" prokle hadn't quite gotten over the initial shock. he started to snap a reply, then clamped his teeth as he remembered something. he smiled wryly and said: "if it's got gold teeth, i won't mind landing on that thing at all!" * * * * * regulating their speed to that of the asteroid, garth swung their cruiser behind it and came closer in a gradually contracting spiral. meanwhile they kept a sharp lookout for the distress flare the captain of the _callisto_ had presumably seen. they detected no light, however. they only saw below them a terrain that might have been lifted from an ink-sketch of grotesquerie by goya or sidney sime. this was a cold and unutterable outer hell running rampant. this was a new canto for dante. the rock was like a broken-off black tip of a mountain surging suddenly toward them, with jagged pinnacles reaching out to grasp and deep black gullies agape. garth allowed the cruiser to drift just beyond gravity, away from the sunward side. peering at the scene below, he shook his head. "i wouldn't want to attempt a landing there. safer to use the magnibullet--there's usually enough metallic content at the core of these rocks to make it feasible, and we're only a few hundred yards away." they donned space-suits and moved into the air-lock. there the magnibullet, a heavy magnetized projectile, rested in a powerful compressed air tube. from it led a thin cable, wound upon a pivoted spool. garth opened the outer door and swung the compression tube around. he released the power and the magnibullet shot "down," or "out," straight for the asteroid. the cable unreeled behind it until it struck. the cruiser was now a tiny satellite, revolving slowly as the rock revolved, but connected to it by the taut strand of wire. the two men moved along the wire hand over hand until the gravity of the rock gripped them, to pull them slowly downward. they alighted on a precipitous plateau bordering on the sunward side. all was an amorphous mass of guttered rock, of serrate pinnacles and precipices and sudden chasms. bizzare and ever-changing shadows played slowly over the naked, revolving surface. as they stood there staring around, prokle clicked on the radiophone in his helmet and said: "hype, i thought of something. how could there be a signal flare here anyway? no oxygen." "how do you know?" garth replied. "surprising thing, but there often is air, a thin sort, on asteroids this large--deep down in the crevices. i've even seen various kinds of moss, lichen, and other sparse growth on some of these rocks. come to think of it, that might conceivably serve as food. you know--to men who cling tenaciously to life?" prokle shuddered at the thought. he said, "well, shall i take the light side and you the dark? that way we could circle this rock in a couple of hours." "wait a minute!" garth said severely as prokle started off. "you haven't worked a rock this size before. first we're looking for that missing life-boat and not for a gold or platinum vein--remember that. second, we work only on the dark side, because it's safer. yes, i mean it. on a rock this size there's always a certain bombardment of fragments--some no larger than your fist. over here we can see 'em coming, on the light side we can't. i'm cautious on this point because the first partner i ever had out here went that way with a hole smashed clear through him. now, you take the left, i'll take the right, keep always on the side away from the sun by working away from the direction of rotation." as prokle moved away garth called a final instruction: "contact me every once in a while, and watch the chasms especially for that light." * * * * * prokle was just a little resentful as he moved away. much as he liked garth, he sometimes didn't like his dictatorial manner. as for any of that missing party being left alive here--it was sheerly fantastic. they were wasting time which they might be putting to better and more personal advantage. prokle looked into the blackness and saw two tiny points of light moving swiftly toward him. he ducked involuntarily. but the meteoric fragments passed high above his head, and he turned in time to see one and then the other hit on a pinnacle far behind him. he decided suddenly that garth was right on that point, at least. he came to a chasm and peered down into stygian blackness. no light there. he muttered disgruntedly and leaped far across to the opposite edge, limned by the faint tinge of starlight. he stopped and looked back and garth was already out of sight below the rock's ragged horizon. he forged cautiously ahead, leaping chasms and skirting pinnacles and stumbling over dangerously sharp rocks. prokle stopped at his eighth or ninth chasm and scanned the utter blackness. still no light. why should there be? fantastic to think a human being could subsist on this place for three weeks. prokle muttered to himself in ever-increasing sullenness. he hated this derelict rock and this blackness and garth and-- then without faintest warning the white flash of a ray spurted up from the depths, past prokle's left ear, and hung for a moment against the darkness of space. it vanished. and just as prokle, in his surprise, stumbled backward and fell prone, it spurted up again to burn the lip of the cliff at his feet. then all below was dark again. prokle lay there a moment in silence, blessing the protecting darkness which he had cursed only a moment before. then, hardly moving, he chuckled grimly and clicked on his phone. "hype! for the love of--hey, hype, can you hear me?" garth's voice came faintly in reply. prokle continued: "hype, listen. i hate to admit it, but i guess you were right. there's someone here all right, and i've got him spotted. i've got him spotted so damn good that i don't dare move! he's got a ray-pistol and he just took two pot shots at me." garth's voice came again, thinly: "if this is your idea of a joke, it's out of place and very unfunny." "it's unfunny all right! you get over here damn quick! and hype, be careful. i'll keep talking to guide you." ten minutes later garth crept cautiously to his partner's side and whispered: "you're sure it wasn't a meteor you saw?" "do meteors singe your ears? it was a ray, i tell you! it came from down there." garth crept to the edge of the chasm and rolled a fragment of rock over the rim. it bounded steeply down in the dark, but they could hear no sound due to the helmets they wore. no answering ray flashed up. for a minute garth lay there, peering down cautiously. then he crept back. "you're right," he told prokle, "someone's down there." "see something?" garth shook his head. "oh, i see, it's one of those--those things of yours again. well, you've never been wrong yet on those premonitions, but this time you don't need it. can you tell if there's more than one?" "not sure," garth said, "but i don't think so. just _someone_. lord knows where he got the ray-pistol, those life-boats aren't equipped with 'em. he was probably carrying one." "but good lord, why take pot shots at us? he must know who we are! he must know we're here to get him off this blasted rock!" garth looked straight at prokle and spoke calmly: "maybe he knows it and maybe not. twenty-one days, prokle, remember? imagine three weeks on this place, knowing there's only a chance in a million of you being located. maybe watching the others die off one by one. you'd hate to be the last, prokle, wouldn't you? but remember what i said about some men loving life more than others, clinging to it longer, even when it means...." garth didn't finish, but prokle nodded and said the last word for him. "madness. you're right, hype, that's all it can mean. we've got a madman on our hands. let's go home." * * * * * garth shook his head and pointed across the chasm. fifty yards away the opposite precipice, a bit higher, was limned raggedly against the stars. "our best bet is to get over there unobserved. it may not be easy dealing with him." prokle patted his own ray-pistol at his side. "no," garth cautioned. "we don't want to use those and i don't think we'll have to." slowly, circuitously and with much effort they gained the opposite rim. it took them nearly ten minutes but the negotiation was masterful and noiseless. finally, from behind a protecting rock formation they peered again into the depths, their eyes becoming slowly accustomed to that darker darkness. then garth silently pointed. "what is it?" prokle whispered. "i don't see a thing." "keep looking. a little to the right." then prokle saw it. the missing life-boat, lying quite still there below, like a tiny silver bug with its nose smashed. and that disseminated whatever slight doubt they may have had. "what now?" prokle whispered. "we've got to go down!" garth said hoarsely. "nothing else. this side doesn't seem so steep; if we get to a point where we can see him, we'll talk to him." "can't do that, unless he's got a phone, too!" "we'll see about that when we have to. keep looking down there a while, let your eyes get used to it." presently, garth first, they began the descent. it was slow and ticklish work, but now they could dimly see their way enough to proceed in safety. garth followed a little gully which at times was only arm's width. for perhaps two hundred feet they descended; then garth stopped so suddenly that prokle bumped into him and nearly lost balance. "what is it?" prokle forged carefully forward. garth merely pointed. they had come nearer to the bottom than they supposed. they now stood upon a narrow ledge scarcely forty feet above the sharp little valley. and below the edge of their protecting ledge they saw a light. that was not surprising. it was half expected. but the light wasn't a signal-flare, it was a crude, open bonfire. "well, hype, you were right about that, too!" prokle murmured. "that means there's air of some kind down here." hype nodded, and pointed to another ledge perhaps twenty feet below them, and to the right. carefully they negotiated to it. again they peered below. * * * * * then, for the first time, they saw the man, but only a silhouette. really a smallish figure, but looming up large beside the flickering fire. he stood quite still, one hand at his hip grasping a ray-pistol, peering up at the opposite precipice edge; the edge where he had fired at prokle. very still he stood and very still the two men above him watched. then the figure turned, still very cautious, toward the fire. he bent and threw several handfuls of something on the blaze. it immediately leaped high, illumining the rocky terrain for a hundred feet around. the two men crouched back, but the light did not quite touch the ledge where they stood. his hand still by his hip, the tiny figure turned in a complete circle and surveyed the line of cliffs above him. then, still peering around, he huddled miserably by the fire, seeking warmth. but that brief glimpse was enough. both men had recognized the grotesque figure below. and it was prokle who pronounced the name first, in a hoarse whisper: "chiswell! j. p. chiswell, president of emv lines! of all men to survive in this hellish place, it had to be him." "why not?" garth snapped venomously. his lips were tight and his face was pale beneath his helmet. he was remembering again, with all the old bitterness, the exceedingly unethical ruse by which he'd been captured in the spaceways many years ago--the ruse engineered by chiswell himself. "why shouldn't it be him?" he went on. "the survival of the fittest, remember? look at that ray-gun!" for a moment prokle was uncomprehending; then he said in a rush of fierce words: "hype, i'll bet you're right! of course, you're right! the survival of the fittest, and with that gun old chiswell _was_ the fittest. i'll bet you he murdered the others and kept all the provisions of that life-boat for himself! there's no other way he could have subsisted here so long." garth nodded grimly. "maybe. some of 'em may have been lost in space somewhere, though. we've no proof of murder yet; but i know he's capable of it if it means his own hide." "sure, i know that, too. look at the two pot shots he took at me! we've got a maniac on our hands, hype, what'll we do now?" "for one thing, he hasn't a helmet. i'm gonna get out of this damned uncomfortable head-gear." cautiously garth unscrewed the helmet at his neck; lifted it slightly, and sniffed the air. then he threw it back, where it dangled from his shoulders. "don't breathe too deeply," he warned prokle who followed his example. garth reached into a rocky cleft near by and brought out a handful of greenish, lichen-like growth. "see there? that's the stuff i told you sometimes grows on these big rocks. maybe it's what he's burning down there. he could dry it out if the sun hits down this far. all right, i'm going to call to him now, so watch out for that ray-gun." with that, garth peered down and called loudly: "chiswell! j. p. chiswell!" * * * * * through that thin air his voice rang clear as a bell of doom; echoed eerily between rocky walls and went shivering away into the black distance. the man below at the fire was on his feet and facing them with a fierce snarl. his hand darted up and a ray flashed toward the voice, to splutter harmlessly on the rock some distance from where the men stood in darkness. that act alone proved to them he was mad; from where they stood they could have rayed him with ease. but they didn't need that mad act as proof of the man's madness. for in the full glare of the fire his face was a fierce caricature. even from their distance they could see the wild gleam of his eyes as he leaned tautly forward trying to pierce the dark; could see the gaunt face, beak-like nose, shaggy brows and tangled growth of beard; they could see the flick of his tongue over lips drawn tight, and could hear the animal snarl that rumbled warningly out of that throat. there in the red glare of fire-light he was a demon out of hell. for only a moment he stood there tautly facing them, fiercely peering; then, with an agile bound he leaped away from the fire and scuttled like a huge beetle toward the opposite cliff. they could only see him dimly now, but they saw him turn in a posture of defiance, arms spread out as though protecting the cliff behind him. "whew!" prokle breathed. "that goes double for me," said garth. "come on." he leaped the remaining distance to the base of their cliff, and prokle alighted easily beside him. they peered across at chiswell. "there's a sort of cave over there," prokle exclaimed, "and he's standing in front of it! say, he's gone mad all right, but there's something else behind his madness." garth nodded. he grasped his partner's arm and moved forward slowly, saying: "careful now; we'll try to reason with him." they had almost reached the fire when they saw chiswell's hand come up again with unexpected swiftness. they fell flat upon the rock, and just in time, as the ray flashed close above them. garth realized they must have been easily visible in the fire-glow, and could have kicked himself for a fool. but now prokle was chuckling. "didn't you notice?" he whispered. "that last ray was dim, it didn't much more than reach us. his charge must be getting low. a couple more like that and it'll be finished." a few minutes they lay there, watching, as chiswell made no further move. they could see the cave plainer now, a cave as high as chiswell's head, but narrow, extending darkly back into the towering rock. without warning prokle leaped up, ran a few feet forward and flopped down again, just as chiswell's ray stabbed over him. "prokle! you damn fool!" garth crept forward beside him. "it's all right. i doubt if he has another full charge in that gun now." "chiswell!" garth called, but softly. "we're your friends, don't you understand that? put down the gun. we've come to take you away from here!" for the first time, then, they heard the madman's voice. it was just as soft as garth's had been, but cunning. the voice spoke five words: "i know what you want!" "we want to get you off that rock, that's what we want." then garth added: "the _martian princess_, don't you remember? the space-wreck? all the others were saved--don't you want to be saved? "you sound like some street-corner missionary," prokle said, chuckling. and again the madman's words came--cunning, but with a certain cool menace: "i know what you want!" "see?" prokle said. "you can't reason with him. hell, i wonder what he does think we want?" prokle leaped up, stood exposed in the dying fire-light. again the ray spurted. gravity was light, and before prokle could fall away from it, the ray caught him in the chest. prokle fell and garth cursed. "it's all right, all right!" prokle assured him quickly. "just scorched my suit a little. well, that finishes his ray." "you're still a fool!" garth snapped. * * * * * now, from where chiswell crouched they heard an animal-scream of rage as he realized how he'd been tricked: "damn you!" and they heard the clatter of the gun as he flung it toward them. and their blood ran cold as chiswell burst forth in a profane and garbled rush of mad words. the speech was so inarticulate, that it wasn't until he was nearly out of breath that they began to gather the purport: "... damn tricky are you? but i know you. i know why you're here, too ... want to get me away do you--but you won't!... it's all mine, do you hear, all mine!... mine!... you'll never get it.... i was here first ... keep away from me, keep away!... you just try it ... ha ha!... all mine!" the rush of words ended in a high pitched scream. they couldn't see him clearly now at all, but they could imagine froth on his lips. they heard his gurgling breath for a moment, then it died away and he was abruptly, cunningly silent. prokle grabbed his partner's arm so tightly it hurt. his whispered voice was hoarse with emotion. "hype! did you hear? did you? it means--it must mean--tell me i'm right, hype! tell me!" garth jerked his arm away. he frowned, but there was a light in his eyes nearly as bright as prokle's. "sure," he said, trying to keep his voice calm. "i guess maybe i'm thinking the same thing you are." "gold! it's happened, hype, it's happened at last! and chiswell found it for us; no wonder he's protecting that entrance over there, it's a vein!" prokle laughed almost shrilly. "i never thought we'd make a strike, hype. never really. this means back to earth, back to chicago. we can buy off the rest of our time! there are ways, if you work it right!" but hype garth, long ago pirate of the spaceways, was looking at his partner silently and calmly. prokle saw that look and stopped suddenly, abashed. he remembered. "oh, i'm--damn, hype, that's right. i didn't think--" "sure, prokle. i'm serving forty years on the station. might as well be life, for it was chiswell and his crowd who put me there and were tickled to get me there. sure, you can buy _your_ time, through the obvious channels, but not me. for me there's only one slight chance, a chance in a million. know what that is?" garth laughed softly. "one chance in a million, and here it is in my lap! if i can get chiswell away from here and back to the station, his sanity might return. i think it would! this sort of madness is only temporary. and then--_then_--he might be very appreciative." "_you_ of all persons oughta know better'n that, hype!" but garth went on musingly: "yes, he might be appreciative to the extent of fixing pardons for both of us. and if he isn't ... why, then i'd just have to persuade him, wouldn't i? and i know some very good methods." his eyes glittered. "damn it, hype, listen! you know what'd happen then as well as i do. suppose he did fix the pardons, even willingly. d'you think we'd ever get out here to this gold again? never! we could never beat out the chiswell interests." garth, smiling thinly, looked straight at prokle. "sure, i realize that perfectly. you want the gold, sure. but to get it, and get away with it, you're going to have to dispose of chiswell over there. and if you do that, there goes _my_ one chance of a pardon. nice little stalemate, huh?" and garth, as he watched his partner's indecision, was suddenly enjoying the grim stalemate. but prokle wasn't. he stared sullenly at garth for a moment, rubbed his chin and grumbled baffledly in his throat. garth grinned back at him. suddenly across to them came chiswell's jumbled words again, this time tinged with fear: "whispering, are you? i hear you over there, plotting. you just try it! ... rob me--no! ... ah-h-h! ... two of 'em! ... two ... no, you can't! ... it isn't fair, i'm all alone!" this time his voice ended in a little sob of terror, perhaps because he realized for the first time the odds against him; perhaps because he remembered that he'd thrown his gun away. garth, from where he lay, reached out and threw a handful of dry matted lichen upon the fire. for only a few seconds it blazed up, to reveal chiswell crouched before his cave, a wild sight, trembling and waiting. and it revealed something else. * * * * * "look!" again prokle grabbed garth's arm in his excitement. but garth had seen it, too, within the cave behind chiswell. along the sides, only dimly discernible in outline, were masses of something that was not rock. seemingly sacks of something. that was enough for prokle; and garth, too, was sure his own eyes were blazing as he tried not to let prokle's fanaticism get him. "can you beat that for luck?" prokle was whispering. "he's started getting the gold out already! or it's platinum maybe! anyway it's going to save us a lot of time and work. lord knows how _he_ ever expected to get it away from here, but--well, i guess i'd have started mining, too, if i was in his shoes. come on, hype, let's get over there!" prokle had quite lost sight of the issue. garth kept his own voice calm as he said: "not yet; it'll wait. well, which is it going to be?" prokle was still staring over at the cave. now he looked back at garth. "which--what did you say?" "i said: what happened to our little stalemate? you know, the one we were at a moment ago?" the light in prokle's eyes died. "but--but hype--you can't be serious--to pass up this?" "i've got to pass it up, pal. you know that all the wealth on this rock couldn't buy my freedom! there's my passport to freedom, crouching over there in front of that cave. and he's got to stay alive." prokle was becoming angry. "you're--you're just exaggerating!" garth merely shook his head, smiling wryly. "all right, hype, i've got an idea. we'll finish off chiswell--we've _got_ to do that. then we'll mine the gold. we'll get every ounce that's here, and that ought to be plenty! then i could get back to earth myself--and with all that wealth i could help _you_! i'd make the proper contacts, bribe the right people--you know how it's done. and i'd really try, hype. and you know you can trust me!" "yes, i know i can. and i know you'd try, prokle. but you simply haven't any idea what you'd be up against, trying to buy a pardon for _me_. any other man, yes. but you see, prokle, the earth corporations would never let it go through. they know i'd soon be back pirating the space lanes again, and i would, too! i hear that pirating has been pretty tame since i've been away, if you know what i mean." garth smiled reminiscently. across to them came chiswell's whimpering, his half-sobs of fright as he heard them whispering. he was like a trapped wild animal, not quite daring to flee for fear they would pounce upon him. prokle's sullenness was slowly mounting to anger again. there was sweat upon his brow. his face twisted with indecision. neither man had moved from where they lay, prone beside the dying fire. garth looked at his partner and said: "i'm going to leave it squarely to you, prokle. the decision's all yours." "damn you, hype!" hype simply watched. he wasn't smiling any more, for already he knew what the decision would be. he saw the fanatic light return to his partner's eyes. he saw his jaw set determinedly. prokle wiped the sweat from his brow, and his body tensed. the lure of the gold.... prokle twisted around to face garth squarely then, but he couldn't look at him squarely as he said in a voice that was hardly audible: "i--i can't give it up, hype! it's too much to ask!" and with a sudden little push he was on his feet and bounding low across the space toward the cave and chiswell. * * * * * the action was too sudden for garth to do anything. he couldn't even get to his feet, much less intervene. he saw two leaps carry prokle halfway across the space. he heard a frightened little cry from chiswell, and suddenly he felt very sorry for him. the last twenty feet prokle literally soared, almost horizontally. he leaped too wide, but managed to reach out and grasp the startled chiswell by the throat. they fell lazily to the ground in a tangled heap, chiswell bleating in thin terror like a lamb with a wolf at its throat. trapped animals can be very dangerous in their terror. prokle's hold loosened and he rolled over lightly. from his distance, garth saw chiswell's hand come up. he glimpsed something massive in it. he cried out a warning, and prokle twisted around. but not in time. garth saw the mass of rock descend, and he heard an awful crunching sound as it smashed prokle's skull. chiswell bleated no longer. the bleat was a snarl as he leaped astride prokle and without waiting to see if he were dead, gripped his neck with unbelievable strength. garth heard the vertebrae snap sickeningly, and still the madman clung. he clung until he was quite sure prokle wasn't going to move any more, and then his hands slowly loosened. he leaped aside, and with the mien of a sculptor surveying his masterpiece he gazed on the thing at his feet. then, uttering horrible little throat noises he grasped prokle's hands and dragged him to the cave and into the darkness beyond. garth staggered blindly to his feet and stood there swaying. prokle was dead, but there was something else. a semblance of thought and reason was trying to flow back to his brain, but it came too slowly. garth moved toward the cave just as chiswell emerged. if there had been any doubt before that the man was mad there could not be now. as garth approached him he stood there half erect, gibbering, ghastly in the pale ghost-light of the sun that was just beginning to reach down into the chasm. garth stood before the disgusting thing that was no longer a man. his fist moved only a foot and caught the thing in the throat. on chiswell's face as he sailed backward there was a look of mild surprise, as if he could not quite understand how it happened or why; but when he hit the rocky wall he crumpled and lay still. garth looked at his fist wonderingly. he passed a hand across his brow. that's what he had needed. clear, concise thought was coming back. he entered the cave and stood a full minute there in the darkness, before he remembered the torch at his side. he lifted it, and was about to flood the cave with light. then that familiar premonitory "awareness" was with him again; abruptly, startlingly, vividly it came, engulfing him. it told him not to click on that light. garth stood stock still for a moment, hand half lifted, indecision creeping on him. prokle's body was in here, he knew that. but--yes, that's what had brought the numb fear a minute ago! that's why this was different! _why had that madman dragged prokle in here?_ for the first time in his life garth disregarded his warning premonition. he clicked on the torch. * * * * * out on the station, in the long dreary days to come, garth was to remember that scene. his torch remained on for only about ten seconds. but in those seconds he remembered telling prokle, "some of the party may have been lost in space somewhere"--but now he knew none of them had been. he recalled telling about the lichen and moss here, which desperate men might conceivably use as food--but now he knew chiswell had not. his ears rang again with the madman's words, "all mine!"--and now he knew their horrible purport. he remembered when the fire had flared up and they had glimpsed dim masses of something along the sides of the cave, something that was not rock, something that was seemingly sacks of gold--but now he knew those dim shapes were not sacks of gold. it was not gold that chiswell guarded so viciously, for there was no gold here. in those few seconds before he clicked off the torch garth felt his mind slowly slipping away into a chaos of vertiginous horror, but he caught it on the brink. he retained enough of sanity to realize why he must not leave his dead friend here. he emerged with the body of prokle into the palely creeping sunlight. he saw the thing that was chiswell stir and breathe and try to sit up. garth reached for his ray-pistol, aimed it and tried to press the button. then he let his hand drop. that was strange--he had thought he felt sorry for the thing there before him, but now he didn't feel sorry. he simply didn't feel anything. but _he_ had prokle! with the body lightly across his shoulders garth began the ascent of the cliff to where the cruiser waited. he did not once look back. an idiotic desire to laugh seized him, but he did not laugh; he knew that if once he laughed it would be wildly, and he could never stop, and he'd become as mad as the thing down there.... dead man's planet by r. r. winterbotham for unmarked ages a dead man kept his ghostly vigil on that barren, frozen asteroid. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "a life-saver!" mick said, bringing the space freighter down with a gentle bump on the huge, shapeless mass of rock and iron that floated between mars and jupiter. the term huge was purely relative, for the asteroid was scarcely ten miles in diameter at its thickest point, and its axis could not have been more than twelve miles long. mick switched off the rockets, opened a locker and pulled forth a suit of heavy, furlined, airtight garments which he slipped over his uniform. the communication speaker buzzed. "hey, mick! are you still on the bridge?" alf rankin was calling from the charting room. "yes, alf. what's the trouble." mick conner was sealing his space suit. "this isn't an ordinary asteroid, mick. it isn't barren. there's stuff growing on it." "that's nothing to get goggle-eyed about, alf. there's moss on eros which is smaller than this. and there are different kinds of plants and one intermediate--animal-vegetable--organism on juno." "hm-m!" of course this was a surprise to alf, who had never made a landing on the asteroids before. science had rather neglected the asteroids during the rapid development of interplanetary flight, yet there were many interesting sights to be seen on the , minor planets that floated between jupiter and mars. "get on your space togs and oxygen helmet and we'll fix that broken jet," mick said. "we'll be ready to go in three hours." mick sealed his helmet and stepped into the automatic lock leading from the control bridge to the roof of the streamlined rocket. he held tightly to the rail of the observation platform, knowing that the gravity of this nameless planet was next to zero. a man might jump one thousand feet into the sky without exertion and, if he wasn't careful, he might fling himself so high that he would be unable to land--he might become a satellite of this grain of cosmic dust. mick hooked the lifeline from his belt to the rail of the platform and stepped over the side. instead of falling, he floated a few inches a second downward to the ground. in gravity like this a man might jump off mt. everest--if there were an everest--and land without injury. alf, the square-jawed giant who manned the engines of the rocket ship, emerged from the lower locks and fastened his lifeline to the iron ladder extending to the ground. "look at that stuff, mick," alf spoke into his radio telephone. he pointed to a dense growth, barely visible in jupiter's light, just north of the ship. "it looks like corn. good old american maize!" mick who had been examining the damaged portion of the starboard rockets, glanced in the direction alf was pointing. in even, nicely cultivated rows, stood tasseled stalks. "you don't suppose this place is inhabited by men!" alf's voice was awed. "it can't be. there's no air," mick replied. "anyhow, it isn't corn. it must be something else. you know there are doubles all over the system. the martian pumpkins aren't even vegetables, but they're a species of mollusk. even if this is corn, it's different, because corn depends on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." "maybe there's carbon dioxide in the rocks." "then this wouldn't be like terrestrial maize. its leaves would serve some other purpose." "mick! look!" * * * * * as alf spoke the rows of corn seemed to move. bright phosphorescent beads seemed to pop from the tassels and float toward the two human beings. like a rain of meteors, the brilliant specks came floating through the sky. but the brilliant shower fell with tantalizing slowness. then one of the sparks dropped short, twenty feet from the feet of the spacemen. as it touched the ground, there was a bluish spark, and the rock beneath it glowed with heat. "look out!" mick cried. his hand unsnapped the lifeline. his legs doubled beneath his body and he shot upward into the air. suddenly he plunged into daylight. the corona-crowned sun was sticking its head over the horizon. as alf shot into the sky beside him, mick noted that the ground was still dark, and that the terminator line that delineated night and day, still was a mile or so to the eastward, floating rapidly toward them. there were other things about this weird planet that also struck mick's eyes. it was filled with growing things. most of these were single stalks, crowned with a bluish bud. but there was a terrestrial note to some of the plants that clung to the rocks and sand of the asteroid. to the south was a huge tree, with gnarled branches and leaves. tucked away in a small gully were reddish flowers that looked like roses in the distance. there were vines clinging to the rocks. the corn that had first attracted attention of the spacemen, occupied a small, rectangular patch and the stalks were so evenly spaced that the field suggested artificial cultivation. slowly they came back toward the ground. below was one of the budded stalks which slowly nodded its tip toward the terrestrials as their feet came in contact with the soil. mick was ready this time. his gun was in his hand as the little white bead emerged from the tip of the bud. the gun sent a streak of flame into the middle of the stalk, and the plant was sliced as neatly as a knife could have cut through a stem. "it's not nearly as pleasant here as i expected," alf panted into the phone of his space suit. "who ever thought we'd have to fight plants on an asteroid?" mick did not answer. still clutching his gun, he was walking toward a little path that led into a gully in the rocks. he moved cautiously, halting at each turn in the little path, searching the gully ahead of him. the path indicated animals, for plants do not walk. alf trailed behind, keeping his eyes peeled for fire-shooting plants, and carefully gauging his steps to keep himself from sailing high into the sky. in the steep places along the path, there were steps carved into the rock. "it looks--almost human," came from mick, "but why would a human being need steps in this gravity?" at the end of the gully was a cliff, fully one hundred feet high flanked by a mound of sand. the path led toward this mound and in the center was an iron door, looking all the world like the outer locks of a space ship. toward this door the two men walked. whatever doubts they had of a human touch on this asteroid vanished at the sight of the door. it was possible for nature to duplicate her works on two different planets. the physiology of martians, venusians and terrestrials had much in common. the processes of biochemistry are limited and living types are always similar to some degree. even on earth many species of animals and plants which have no direct relationship may possess resemblances--the fish and the whale, or certain reptiles and amphibians. but the airlocks of space ships were human inventions. there was small likelihood that another race in the universe would mark its doors with the roman letters: universal lock company st. louis, missouri the two spacemen stared speechlessly at the evidence of human habitation. then slowly the door swung open. they waited for someone to emerge, but the silence of space remained unbroken. the locks were empty, yet they had opened. was someone watching them from inside? if so, why didn't he hail them? "hello there!" mick spoke on the universal wavelength into his microphone. no answer came. "maybe his radio's out of whack," alf said. "shall we go in?" alf started forward, but mick seized his arm. "look!" he whispered. "up there, above the door!" just above the door was a ledge, which neither man had noticed at first. on this ledge stood a human figure. he wore no space suit, no oxygen helmet and his head was bare. an empty pistol holster dangled at his side and his hands were on his hips. he was standing motionless in the cold of space watching the two terrestrials below him. "great guns!" the figure didn't move. he didn't even blink his eyes. he only stared. not a flicker of movement crossed his face. "he's dead," mick said. he bent his legs and shot up to the ledge beside the man. "dead and turned to stone!" "stone?" "ice, rather. he's frozen hard as a rock. probably he's been here for years. not enough heat to thaw him out." "but why hasn't he fallen down?" alf asked. "why should he? there's hardly enough gravity to pull him down; there's no wind to blow him down. there are no earthquakes on a planet as small as this." "how did he get there?" mick shrugged his shoulders. it was a puzzle, certainly; but there were possible solutions. the first and most logical was that this fellow had exposed himself, rather than to die a lingering death from starvation or lack of oxygen. "let's take a look at his quarters," mick suggested. he dropped lightly to the ground and entered the lock. he quickly inspected the lock control apparatus, making sure that the outer doors would function properly. then he closed the locks and opened the inner doors. the glass of mick's space helmet frosted as warm air from the interior struck its surface. wiping away the mist he stepped aside. * * * * * standing in the center of the room, smiling at them, was an exact replica of the man they had seen on the ledge. but this one was alive! "welcome to dead man's planet!" the faint human voice drifted to the ears of the men. "you may remove your helmets. the air here is pure and there is plenty of it." the man's greenish eyes drifted down over the figures of the human beings facing him. "but you needn't point your guns at me." the welcome was not as warm as the two spacemen might have expected from an exile on the asteroid. there was a note in the pale-faced man's voice that sounded false. it was not distrust that mick felt, nor a sense of danger, for there was nothing to indicate that this lonely man intended to harm his visitors; but some subconscious reasoning in the spaceman's brain seemed to detect an uncanny sort of insincerity. mick could not forget the grisly object on the ledge above the doorway. why hadn't the dead man been buried? the pallid host watched the spacemen skin themselves of their airtight suits and sniff the warm, sweet air of the buried spaceship. "you're men," he said. "men!" "my name's michael conner, a space pilot; this is alf rankin, co-pilot and engineer. we fused and blew a rocket on the earth-jupiter orbit and we landed here to make repairs." the pallid man smiled. there was the cunning of the fox and the savage craft of a spider in his expression. "call me ghor," he said. mick's eyes cruised over the pointed face. ghor was a strange name. it wasn't terrestrial and it didn't sound like any of the martian dialects. ghor might be a criminal, preferring exile to a life in prison. "you're a strange man, ghor," mick said. "you present a mystery. are you from mars? how does it happen you live on this godforsaken bit of rock?" "i was born here," ghor said. "oh!" there was an awkward pause after this unexpected answer. mick's eyes unconsciously lifted toward the roof, above which stood the frozen human figure. "he was my father." ghor spoke simply. his words were carefully and slowly enunciated. mick supposed that ghor was unused to talking and his brain worked slowly in the matter of words. but that brain was keen. it seemed to read mick's thoughts, answering an unspoken question about the dead man. "you must have an interesting history," alf suggested. "i have," ghor replied. "but so have you. tell me how you happened to find my home. you might have repaired your ship and gone on, without discovering me." "there was a field of queer acting plants--they looked like maize, except that they tried to kill us." "oh! my cornfield! i forgot the nasty habit the cornstalks have." "you mean that stuff was corn?" alf asked. "real roasting ears?" "well, almost." ghor's lips cracked into another of his nerve-racking smiles. "you see the plants are really native of dead man's planet, but i modified them into something quite close to terrestrial maize." "by grafting and cross fertilization?" "oh no. there is a much different process of propagation of the species here, much simpler. my corn was regenerated." ghor hobbled across the room toward an ultra-violet lamp beneath which were two pots of flowers, both looking much like american beauty roses. ghor returned, with the same mincing steps, walking as if a leg injury had limited the use of his knees. "these flowers are beautiful," ghor said, like a doctor of philosophy announcing the first premise of a step in mathematics. "yes," mick replied. "we noticed numbers of them growing in the rocks." "i know. i placed them there, to make dead man's planet beautiful. but they are quite useless." "oh, i wouldn't say that." "i know what i am talking about. on earth, roses serve many purposes aside from beauty. they help maintain the atmosphere by exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen; they fertilize the soil; they supply insects, such as bees, with food. these roses extract carbon from the rocks and give nothing in return, except their beauty. the soil is not fertilized. there are no insects to feed. this flower has no pollen, for it is purely ornamental, developed by myself for beauty's sake." he took his fingers and pinched off the rose. as it dropped to the floor, a whitish, gleaming pellet half emerged from the flower, but ghor quickly ground it underfoot. "you see? that little projectile might have killed me. the flower is vicious. like other plants on this planet it utilizes organic radioactivity to destroy other living plants." "so that was what it was." mick said. "organic radioactivity!" ghor did not reply. his eyes were on the stem of the plant. it was swaying gently, as if it possessed muscles. a little green bubble formed on the end of the stem. "watch!" ghor whispered. the bubble enlarged and suddenly burst. there, in full bloom, was another rose, just like the first that ghor had broken from the stem. "you see, gentlemen, your planet is not the only one that might have the legend of the hydra! you cut off the head of any plant and another grows in its place. sometimes two heads grow and by the process of division--analogous with cell division--a new plant individual is formed. the botanical life of dead man's planet carries regeneration forward to such a degree that even the loss of a leaf, or of a thorn is replaced in a few minutes, often in a few seconds. the plant life is so hardy that when my father, whose name i never knew, attempted to clear this space with fire, he found he had twice the growth of plants after the fire." "it's clear now," alf said. "how did he do it?" "by transplanting and controlled regeneration," ghor said, smiling. "he carried his experiments far. most of the trees here were developed by him. he found that certain injections transformed cell structures so that he could cause the regenerated parts to assume almost any shape he desired. my father's trees are nothing but ngye stalks--mere weeds--so transformed that they resemble the oaks, the elms, and the chestnuts of the earth." "and the corn, i suppose is merely a synthetic product?" mick asked. "it is a triumph of my own. the product is quite edible and tastes, i assume, much like terrestrial maize, which i have never eaten. the cells possess the same number of genes and chromosomes as indian maize and it is, therefore, biologically related, although the two types have never been in contact." "but there must be some difference. maize doesn't throw radioactive particles at cornhuskers!" "that," smiled ghor, "is probably an environmental factor. and it is possible some of the genes are not exactly like maize genes." * * * * * ghor and the two earthmen talked for hours. he showed off his little establishment, buried to conserve heat, under the sand of the asteroid. it was equipped with air purifying apparatus, electrical devices and heaters, all supplied with plant generated power. ghor cooked a meal, entirely vegetarian, that tasted little different from its terrestrial counterpart. the bread was indistinguishable from that made from wheat flour, the potatoes had exactly the same taste as terrestrial tubers--in fact every item had its counterpart on earth, yet it was supplied from carefully developed plants of the asteroid. ghor told other facts about his home. dead man's planet turned on its axis once every nine and one-half hours. its average temperature was about forty degrees below zero and this temperature remained fairly constant because of the small diameter and surface of the asteroid. mick's perplexity over the degree of trust to be placed in ghor wavered as the conversation continued through the day. ghor's actions did not appear suspicious. ghor himself, pale and weak and a product of zero gravity, was hardly to be feared, except through trickery. but there were words, sentences and phrases dropped by the exile from time to time that indicated deep mystery and hidden horror. there were certain unanswered questions that were clues to questions that were not asked. behind this mystery, mick noted a beseeching look that appeared from time to time on ghor's pinched face. it was the air of a man asking pardon for a crime. yet, what crime had been committed? ghor's experiments were contribution to universal knowledge. on earth they would be hailed as discoveries and ghor would be honored and rewarded for his work. surely ghor had committed no crime in his development of alien plants into terrestrial forms. ghor's work had been done in the same manner that an experienced airplane pilot flies blind in a fog. he had never seen corn and potatoes, yet he had created them. his sole guides were books in the library and sound motion pictures bearing on botany that had been left behind by ghor's nameless father. ghor was more than a robinson crusoe; he was a tarzan in the jungle of space. the only unseemly exhibit in this island of the sky was the frozen body of ghor's father on the ledge above the buried space ship. this, however, could be considered in the light of environment. on an airless bit of rock, where nothing decayed, burial in the ground was like offering the human body as food for the roots of millions of obscene plants. burial seemed more of a sacrilege than the placing of the body on a rock as a flesh and blood monument. after a rest during the short, five-hour night, ghor offered to take the spacemen back to their ship to make repairs. "it isn't that i wish to hurry your departure," he said, "but i realize that my life here is very dull. except to tell you of my work, i have nothing to offer in the way of entertainment." "wouldn't you want to go back to terra with us?" mick asked. again that cunning, deceptive expression crossed ghor's face. "no," he said. he did not elaborate. * * * * * ghor's method of avoiding the radioactive pellets cast from the buds of the weird plants of the asteroid, was akin to the degaussing process used by ships in mine-infested waters. the plants sensed their enemies through the minute electrical currents that are present in all living organisms, ghor explained. they cast their pellets at all alien organisms that came near. "you mean grow near?" "there are a few mobile plants on dead man's planet." ghor explained. they had emerged from the locks of the ship and they were moving down the gulley. ghor walked in his usual stiff-legged stride and clad as he was in a spacesuit, he appeared to be some sort of mechanical monster. as they emerged from the gulley and came to the place where mick had slashed down the budded stalk with his ray gun, ghor halted. the shriveled burned bud lay on the ground, but the stalk had disappeared. the earphones in mick's spacesuit caught ghor's startled gasp: "ngye!" "it attacked us yesterday after we jumped out of the corn patch," alf was explaining. "mick knocked it over with his ray gun." "it is the first one that has ventured on this side of the planet in several years," ghor explained. "it's one of the mobile plants i was speaking of. you see, the stem has regenerated a new bud and has moved on." "we saw several of them--" "several!" ghor seemed to stiffen. "gentlemen. it is not safe here. we must go back to my cabin. the ngye is one plant that is deadly." "i thought your father made trees out of them," mick said. "at first they were docile. my father developed many kinds of plants from them and i myself created the corn from hybrid ngye plants, but the process of survival played a curious prank by developing in the untouched plants a sense of hatred for these new variations, as well as an everlasting enmity for my father and myself. it was as if these plants resented being made over into alien forms. my father developed a poisonous substance which he spread on the soil which drove the ngye plants to the other side of the planet. apparently they have come back. it means, my friends, that mankind must go to war to save himself and his products." ghor already was walking rapidly back toward the gully. "couldn't you make some other poison to get rid of them again?" alf asked. "i might, but it would take time. and--" ghor seemed to choke, "--it was the poison that killed my father." as ghor reached the first turn in the gulley, he halted and then sprang back. a gleaming spark landed at his feet and heated the rock to incandescense. "trapped!" he groaned. "there's a forest of ngyes in the path ahead of us." mick pushed forward, his ray gun in hand. he caught a glimpse of a forest of leafless stems, surmounted by ugly, bulging bulbs. ghor tugged mick back, just as a shower of sparks shot from the stalks. "how do they know where we are?" mick asked. "doesn't our degaussing equipment work?" "the ngye has more sensitive perception than most plants. you forget the radio waves from our phones. the plants are able to find us by those." "maybe we can rush them," mick suggested. "alf and i can use our ray guns to burn a path through to the cabin--" ghor shook his head. "no. before we seared half of them, the rest would have melted us into grease. besides, fire won't work with them. it will only multiply our enemies." a warning cry came from alf. "they're behind us, too!" mick glanced down the gulley. a moving forest was circling the bend. the ngyes seemed to progress with an amoebic motion, as if their roots tugged them along over the loosely packed soil. "quick, alf! take ghor's arm. we can jump for it!" as mick shouted, he seized ghor's right arm. alf took the left arm of the asteroid man. the three shot upward into the air, propelled by the earth-born strength of the spacemen. the ground where they stood a moment before turned red beneath a shower of tiny radioactive pellets. * * * * * as they shot into the sunlit sky, their eyes saw ngyes on all sides. they lined the valley. the cornfield was ablaze with light as the budded plants and hybrid maize battled for existence. even the rocks above the gulley sprouted hundreds of the swaying stems. "we're in for it," mick said. "wherever we land, we'll be in a patch of them. we'd better shut off our telephones and try to slip through--" "no! our steps on the soil will be sensed by the roots. we'd never walk a dozen yards. but you might make it by jumping--" ghor broke off suddenly. his head turned toward a grove of the enemy stalks directly below. two of the stalks had bent close to the ground, placing their bulbs beneath the roots of a third. suddenly the bent stalks straightened, catapulting the third stalk into the air, like an arrow toward the three floating men. mick's gun blasted the stalk and it withered in flame in mid-air. but other stalks were shooting toward them now. ghor was struggling desperately. "let me go!" he whispered. "turn loose of my arm. remember, the gravity here will not let me fall faster than you." ghor suddenly wrenched loose. from a pocket of his spacesuit flashed a knife. "stop!" it was alf who first sensed ghor's intention, but his action was too slow to stop what followed. the knife slashed through the fabroid spacesuit, deep into the neck of the asteroid man. a spray of red blood shot into the airless sky. a curious sort of tremor seemed to shake the stalks below. the reddish spray seemed to strike fear into the waving buds. the living forest pushed back away from the spray of human blood. when the men dropped to the ground the ngyes were retreating. but ghor lay lifeless beside them. "that was the poison that killed the ngyes--and that killed his father," mick said. "human blood! it's ghastly." "we'll put him on the ledge," alf said. "i think he'd like that. lord! to think that we didn't trust him at first. he's a hero, mick! a hero as great as any in the history of mankind!" a day later the two terrestrials, protected by the degaussers, completed the repairs on their space ship. "i think we ought to go back to the cabin, alf," mick suggested. "yeah. we ought to pay our respects to ghor. we owe him more than he'll ever know." once more they stumbled up the gulley. they kicked aside a few dead ngye stalks that had been killed by the lifeblood of ghor as they followed the turns of the pathway. at last they reached the locks. "mick!" alf was pointing to the ledge above the locks. only one human figure, its arms akimbo, eyes staring down the gulley, stood on the ledge. ghor was gone. slowly the locks opened. through the door, unhelmeted, unprotected by a spacesuit, came ghor. "he's alive!" ghor smiled--that same crooked, half mysterious smile. he lifted his hand and held a microphone close to his lips. "i hoped you wouldn't come back. i didn't want you to know i was a failure." "a failure! man, you're a hero!" mick said. "i'm not a man. if i had been a man, i would have died. but, you see, i am not a man. i am a product of my father's botany. you see, i, like all of the things that look like terrestrial things on this planet, was developed from the lowly ngye. it had been my hope that i was no longer a plant, but a man. i had read men's books; studied his pictures; learned his arts. but i am not a man. i am a failure." from the door came another being--an identical image of ghor. "this," ghor said, "is my son. the result of my wound yesterday." mick walked forward and took the hands of the two asteroid men. "if you're not men," he said, "you're something greater." space oasis by raymond z. gallun space-weary rocketmen dreamed of an asteroid earth. but power-mad norman haynes had other plans--and he spread his control lines in a doom-net for that oasis in space. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] i found nick mavrocordatus scanning the bulletin board at the haynes shipping office on enterprize asteroid, when i came back with a load of ore from the meteor swarms. he looked at me with that funny curve on his lips, that might have been called a smile, and said, "hi, chet," as casually as though we'd seen each other within the last twenty-four hours.... "queer laws they got in the space code, eh? the one that insists on the posting of casualty lists, for instance. you'd think the haynes company would like to keep such things dark." i didn't say anything for a moment, as my eyes went down those narrow, typed columns on the bulletin board: joe tiffany--dead--space armor defect.... hermann schmidt and lan harool--missing--vicinity of pallas.... irvin davidson--hospitalized--space blindness.... there was a score of names of men i didn't know, in that space-blindness column. and beneath, there was a much longer line of common earth-born and martian john-henrys, with the laconic tag added at the top--_hospitalized_--_mental_. ditto marks saved the trouble of retyping the tag itself, after each name. one name caught my eye. ted bradley was listed there. ted bradley from st. louis, my and nick mavrocordatus' home town. it gave me a little jolt, and a momentary lump somewhere under my adam's apple. i knew the state bradley would be in. not a man any more--no longer keen and sure of himself. a year out here among the asteroids had changed all that forever. shoving from one drifting, meteoric lump to another, in a tiny space boat. chipping at those huge, grey masses with a test hammer that makes no sound in the voidal vacuum. crawling over jagged surfaces, looking for ores of radium and tantalum and carium--stuff fabulously costly enough to be worth collecting, for shipment back to the industries of earth, at fabulous freight rates, on rocket craft whose pay-load is so small, and where every gram of mass is at premium. no, ted bradley would never be himself again. like so many others. it was an old story. the almost complete lack of gravity, out here among the asteroids, had disturbed his nerve-centers, while cosmic rays seeped through his leaded helmet, slowly damaging his brain. there was more to it than the airlessness, and absence of weight, and the cosmic rays. there was the utter silence, and the steady stars, and the blackness between them, and the blackness of the shadows, like the fangs of devils in the blazing sunshine. all of this was harder than the soul of any living being. and on top of all this, there was usually defeat and shattered hope. not many futures were made among the asteroids by those who dug for their living. prices of things brought from earth in fragile, costly space craft were too high. moments of freedom and company were too rare, and so, hard-won wealth ran like water. ted bradley was gone from us. call him a corpse, really. in the hospital here on enterprize, he was either a raving maniac, or else--almost worse--he was like a little child, crooning over the wonder of his fingers. it got me for a second. but then i shrugged. i'd been out here two years. an old timer. i knew how empires were built. i knew, better than most, how to get along out here. be fatalistic and casual. don't worry. don't plan too much. that way i'd stayed right-side-up. i'd even had quite a lot of fun, being an adventurer, against that gigantic, awesome background of the void. i didn't consider my thoughts about ted bradley worth mentioning to nick mavrocordatus. he was probably thinking about ted, too, and that was enough. "come on, nick," i said. "they've got my ore weighed and analyzed for content in the hopper rooms. i'm going into the pay-office and get my dough. then we might shove off to the iridium circle, or some other joint, and have us a time, huh?" nick laughed, then, good-naturedly, triumphantly. i gave him a sharp glance, noticing that under his faintly bitter air, there seemed to be something big. some idea that gripped him, confused him, thrilled him. his small, knotty body was taut with it; his dark eyes, under the curly black hair that straggled down his forehead, glowed with a far-away look. of course, he was still very young--only twenty-two, which to me, at twenty-five, with a six-months edge of asteroid-lore beyond his year and a half of experience, made me feel old and disillusioned and practical, by comparison. "all right, chet," he said at last. "let's get your money. celebrations are in order--on me, though. but i guess we'd better soft-pedal them some. i've got a lot to tell you, and more to do." i didn't give his words proper attention, just then. i swaggered into the pay office, where a couple of stenogs clicked typewriters, and where norman haynes, acting head of the haynes shipping company, sat at his desk, under the painted portrait of his uncle, that grizzled old veteran, art haynes, who had retired years ago, and who now lived on earth. i knew old art only by reputation. but that was enough to arouse my deep respect. between nephew and uncle there was a difference as great as between night and day. the one, the founder, unafraid to dirty his hands and face death, and build for the future. tough, yes, but square, and willing to pay bonuses to miners even while he'd been struggling to expand his company, and open up vast, new space trails. the other, an arm-chair director, holding on tight, now, to an asteroid empire, legally free of his control, but whose full resources came eventually into his hands at the expense of others, because he controlled the fragile, difficult supply lines. at sight of me, norman haynes arose from his chair. he was very tall, and he wore an immaculate business suit. he was smooth-shaven, with a neat haircut, in contrast to my shaggy locks and bristles. across his face spread a smile of greeting as broad as it was false. "well--chet wallace," he said. "you've done some marvelous meteor mining, this trip: nineteen hundred dollars' worth of radium-actinium ore! splendid! maybe you'll do even better next time!" * * * * * yeah! i'd seen and heard norman haynes act and talk like this before. he handed out the same line to all of the miners. to me it was forever irritating. always i'd wanted to turn that long nose of his back against his right ear. he and his words were both phony. always he used a condescending tone. and i felt that he was a bloodsucker. my anger was further increased, now, because of ted bradley. i guess i sneered. "don't worry about those nineteen hundred dollars, mr. haynes," i said. "when i buy grub, and a few things i need, and have a little blow, you'll have the money all back." beside the office railing there was a machine--a cigarette vendor. into a roller system at its top, i inserted two five-dollar bills from my pay. there was a faint whir as the robot photographic apparatus checked the denominations of the notes, and proved their authenticity. two packs of cigarettes slipped down into the receiver arrangement. "five bucks apiece, haynes," i said. "at a fair shipping rate, cigarettes brought out from earth aren't worth much more than three bucks. but you're just a dirty chiseller, not satisfied with a fair profit. costs here in the asteroids are naturally plenty steep; but you make a bad situation worse by charging at least twenty-five per-cent more than's reasonable! a venutian stink-louse is more of a gentleman than you are, haynes!" oh, there was a satanic satisfaction in feeling the snarl in my throat, and seeing haynes' face go purplish red, and then white with surprise and fury. some other space men had entered the pay office, and they hid their grins of pleasure behind calloused palms. first i thought norman haynes would swing at me. but he didn't. he lacked that kind of nerve. he began to sputter and curse under his breath, and i thought of a snake hissing. i felt the danger of it, though--danger that broods and plans, and doesn't come out into the open, but waits its chance to strike. knowing that it was there, sizzling in haynes' mind, gave me a thrill. casually i tossed one of the packs of cigarettes to nick mavrocordatus, who had come with me into the pay office. he gave me a nudge, which meant we'd better scram. when we were out of the building, he held me off from going to any of the few tawdry saloons there under the small, glassed-in airdome of enterprize city, the one shabby scrap of civilization and excuse for comfort. "no drinks now, chet," nick whispered. "can't chance it. got to keep on our toes. in one way i'm glad you talked down to that--whatever you want to call him. but you've made us the worst possible enemy we could have--now." i shrugged. "what were you gonna tell me before, nick?" i demanded. "i gathered you had something plenty big in view." he answered me so abruptly that i didn't quite believe my ears at first. "pa and sis and geedeh and i, have made good, chet," he said. "we found--not just pickings--but a real fortune in ore, on planetoid . so rich is the deposit that we could buy our own smelting and purifying machinery, and hire ships under our own control, to take the refined metals back to earth!" "you're kidding, nick," i said amazedly. "not a bit of it," he returned. * * * * * then i was pumping his hand, congratulating him. really good luck was a phenomenon among the asteroids. that friends of mine, among the thousands of hopeful ones that i didn't know, should grab the jack-pot, seemed almost impossible. "i suppose you'll all be leaving us soon," i told him. "going back to earth, living the lives of millionaires. i'm glad for you all, kid. your pa can raise his flowers and grapes, instead of starting up in the truck-garden business again. your sis, irene, can study her painting and her music, like she wants to." anybody can see the way my thoughts were going just then. when you start out green for the minor planets, that's part of what's in your mind, first--get rich, come back to earth. nick sighed heavily as we walked along. that funny smile was on his lips again. he glanced around, and the emerald light of the illuminators was on his young face. then he said, "i don't think it's quite safe to talk here, chet. better come to our old space jaloppy, the _corfu_." the _corfu_ was on the ways outside the dome. we put on space suits to reach it. inside, the old crate smelled of cooking odors, some of them maybe accumulated over the eighteen months the mavrocordatuses had been asteroid mining. old ships are hard to ventilate, with their imperfect air-purifiers. the instruments in the control room, were battered and patched; and from the living quarters to the rear, issued a duet of snores--one throaty and rattly, pa mavrocordatus' beyond doubt; and the other an intermittent hiss, originating unquestionably in the dust-filtering hairs in the larynx of geedeh, the little martian scientist, whom nick had befriended. "i can't figure you out, nick," i said. "rich, and not leaving this hell-hole of space. you're an idiot." "so are you, chet," he returned knowingly. "in my place, you wouldn't go either--at least not without regrets. in spite of all hell, there's something big here in space that gets you. you feel like nothing, yourself. but you feel that you're part of something terribly huge and terribly important. you'd be happy on earth for a week; then you'd begin to smother inside. the minor planets have become our home, chet. it's too late to break the ties." slowly it soaked into my mind that nick was right. "not to say anything bad against old mother earth, chet," he continued. "far from it! that's just what's needed out here--a little touch of our native scene. growing things. a piece of blue sky, maybe. enough gravity to make a man believe in solid ground again." right then i began to smell nick's plan, not only what it was, but all the impractical dreamer part of it. i began to grin, but there was a kind of sadness in me, too. "sure! sure, nick!" i chided. "the idea's as old as the hills! rejuvenate some asteroid. bring in soil and water and air from earth. install a big gravity-generating unit. ha! have you any idea how many ships it would take to bring those thousands and thousands of tons of stuff out here--even to get started?" * * * * * i was talking loud. my voice was booming through the rusty hull of the _corfu_, making ringing echoes. so just about as i finished, they were all around me. pa mavrocordatus, in pajamas and ragged dressing gown, his handle-bar moustaches bristling. geedeh, the tiny martian, draped in a checkered earthly blanket, his great eyes blinking, and his tiny fingers, with fleshy knobs at their ends instead of nails, twiddling nervously near the center of his barrel-chest. and irene, too, standing straight and defiant and little, in her blue smock. irene hadn't been sleeping. probably she'd been washing dishes, and straightening up the galley after supper. she still had a dish towel in her hands. wealth hadn't altered the mavrocordatus' mode of life, yet. irene looked like a bold little kewpie, her dark head of tousled, curly hair, not up to my shoulder. she was exquisitely pretty; but now she was somewhat irritated. she shook a finger up at me, angrily. "you think nick has a dumb idea, eh, chet wallace?" she accused. "that's only because you don't know what you're talking about! we won't have to bring a drop of water, or a molecule of air or soil, out from earth! you ask geedeh!" i turned toward the little martian. the dark pupil-slits, and the yellow irises of his huge eyes, covered me. "irene has spoken the truth, chet," he told me in his slow, labored english. "the asteroid belt, the many hundreds of fragments that compose it, are the remains of a planet that exploded. so there is soil on many of the asteroids. dried out--yes--after most of the water and air disappeared into space, following the catastrophe. but the soil can still be useful. and there is still water, not in free, liquid form, but combined in ancient rock strata; gypsum, especially. it is like on mars, when the atmosphere began to get too thin for us to breathe, and the water very scarce on the dusty deserts." i said nothing, wished i had kept silent. "we roasted gypsum in atomic furnaces," geedeh finished, "driving the water out as steam, and reclaiming it for our underground cities. the same can be done here among the minor planets. and since water is hydrogen dioxide, oxygen can be obtained from it, too, by electrolysis. nitrogen and carbon dioxide, necessary to complete the new atmosphere, which will be prevented from leaking into space by the force of the artificial gravity, can be obtained from native nitrates, and other compounds. only vital parts of the machinery need be brought out from earth and mars by rocket. the rest can be made here, from native materials." geedeh's voice, as he spoke to me, was a soft, sibilant whisper, like the rustle of red dust in a cold, thin, martian wind. "you bet," pa mavrocordatus enthused. "nick's got a good idea. i'm gonna raise my flowers! i'm gonna raise tomatoes and cabbages and carrots, right here on one of them asteroids!" it struck me as funny--asteroids--cabbages! nothing i could think of, could seem quite that far apart. black, airless vacuum, rough rocks, and raw, spacial sunshine! and things from a truck garden! it didn't match. but then, pa mavrocordatus didn't match the asteroids either! he'd had a truck garden once, outside of st. louis. and yet he was out here in space, and had been for a year and a half! well, even if the idea _was_ practical, i thought first that they were still just dreaming--kidding themselves that it would be a cinch to accomplish. and not being able to fight through. then i glanced back at nick. that look on his face was there again. a strange mixture of confidence, worry, grimness, and vision. it came to me then that he was no kid at all. * * * * * "let me in on the job?" i asked hopefully. "sure!" nick returned. "we wouldn't be telling you all this, if we didn't want you. that's why we came back to enterprize--hoping to find you around some place." so i was in. part of a wild scheme of progress--more thrilling and inspiring because it seemed so wild. an asteroid made into a tiny, artificial earth! a boon to void-weary space men! a source of cheap food supplies, as well as a place to rest up. a new stage of colonization--empire building! and then i thought i heard a sound--a faint clinking outside of the hull of the _corfu_. at once, i was alert--taut. maybe half of my sudden worry was intuition, or a form of telepathy. when you've been out in deep space, a million miles away from any other living soul, you feel a vast, hollow loneliness, that perhaps is mostly the absence of human telepathy waves from other minds. but when you have people around you once more, your sixth sense seems keener for the period of lack. that was why i was sure of an eavesdropper, sensing his presence. with proper sub-microphonic equipment, a man outside a space ship can hear every word spoken inside. nick felt it too. "but we'd better look and see," he whispered. "norman haynes keeps spies around. and he may have heard rumors. you can't keep a project like ours secret very long. it's too big." my pulses jumped with fear, as i piled into my space suit. but when nick and i got through the airlock together, there was nobody in sight. only some footprints in the faint rocket dust of the ways, covering our own footprints, where we'd passed before, coming to the _corfu_. our flashlights showed them plainly. "having a rejuvenated asteroid in these parts, producing fresh food and so forth, would take a lot of trade away from the haynes shipping company, wouldn't it?" i said when we were back in the cabin once more. "norman haynes wouldn't be practically boss of the minor planets anymore, would he? he wouldn't like that. he'll fight us." "we need you, chet," irene said, her eyes appealing. that was enough for me. "we'd better blast off right away," nick added. "we're going to asteroid , chet. its new name is paradise. it's the one we've picked." ii asteroid was the usual thing. a torn, jagged, airless fragment. it was no paradise yet, unless it was a paradise of devils. nick had a thousand men hired--space roustabouts, and a lot of mechanics and technicians, mostly fresh from earth. sure, it's hard handling a bunch like that, but there was nothing in this difficulty that we didn't know was part of the job. some of our outfit gave us horse-laughs, but they worked. the pay was good. the ships came through with the packed loads of machinery. atomic forges blazed, purifying native meteoric iron to complete the vast gravity-generating machine, sunk in a shaft at the center of the planetoid, ten miles down. geedeh directed most of the work. nick and i saw that orders were carried out, swearing, sweating, and making speeches intended to inspire. and then the trouble started. a rocket, bringing in food, and money to pay our crews, blew up in space, just as it was coming close. the light of the blast was blinding and awesome, making even the bright stars seem to vanish for a moment. atomic rocket fuel going up. gobs of molten metal dripped groundward, like real meteors heated in an atmosphere which still didn't exist. it could have been an accident. you can't always control titanic atomic power, and space ships fly to pieces quite frequently. but then i had a suspicion that maybe this wasn't an accident. nick and i were in the open plain to see it happen. he'd just come from the airtight barracks we'd built. his face didn't change much behind the quartz crystal of his oxygen helmet--it only sobered a trifle. while the fiery wreckage of the rocket was still falling in shreds and fragments, he spoke, his voice clicking in my receptor phones: "yeah, chet.... and there's trouble on asteroid , too, where our mines are located. i just got the radio message, back at the office. sabotage, and some men killed. it seems that some of the workmen are trying to break things up for us. harley's in charge. i think he can handle matters--for a while." "i hope so," i answered fervently. "if the work only turns out right at this end. with that ship smashed, we'll be on short rations for a week. and we've lost some important machinery. the pay money's insured, but the men won't like the delay." i didn't expect much trouble from the crew--yet. it was irene that really helped the most--mastered the situation. she'd taken over the management of the kitchens since the start of the work. but now she had an additional job. she talked to that rough crew of ours. "we're going to win, boys!" she told them. "we know what we've got to do: our task is for the good of every one of us--and for many people yet to come!" simple, straightforward, inspiring talk. funny what men will do for a pretty girl--against hell itself. but that wasn't all of it. the paintings of hers, that she'd hung in our recreation room, showed what asteroid _could_ be, when we were finished with it. space men are the toughest kind of adventurers that ever lived. but adventurers are always optimists, sentimentalists, romanticists, no matter how hard the exterior. and space men, by the very nature of the appalling region to which they belong, believe in miracles. * * * * * they cheered the thought--most of those tough men. i cheered, too. but the miracle hadn't happened yet, and in the back of my mind, there was always the fear that it wouldn't happen. those crags were still bleak and star-washed. deader than any tomb! it wasn't an impossible wonder--technically--to change all this. but perhaps it was impossible, anyway--because of norman haynes! he was the only person who had the power and the reason to stop all that we were attempting. the sabotage and killings must be incited by him--certain members of our crews must be in his hire. quite probably the rocket that had blown up had been secretly mined with explosive, under his orders, too. but there is nothing harder to fight than those subtle methods. we had no proof, and no easy means of getting it. we could only go on with our task. geedeh and the rest of us worked hopefully. one segment of asteroid , had been part of the surface of that old world that had exploded. from here we spread the dry soil over the planetoid's jagged terrain, drawing it in atom trucks. more soil was brought in from other asteroids. the great rock-roasting furnaces were put up. gypsum was heated in them, releasing its water in great clouds of steam, which the artificial gravity kept from drifting off into space. some of the water, under electrolysis, yielded oxygen. nitrogen came from nitrates. our gravity machine needed readjustments now and then. to a large extent, the thousands of parts that composed it were electrical. great coils converted magnetic force into gravitation. one ship reached us all right, bringing seeds and food. another didn't. it blew up in space, the second to go. then somebody tried to get geedeh, the martian, with a heat ray. another food ship failed to arrive. then norman haynes came to visit us. he landed before we had a chance to refuse to receive him. he had a body-guard of a dozen men. he was our enemy, but we couldn't prove it. he seemed to have forgotten the little brush between himself and me, at his office. "splendid layout you've got, wallace and mavrocordatus!" he said to nick and me, pronouncing nick's name perfectly. he sounded very much like his usual self. "of course there's bound to be difficulties. trouble with crews, and so on. it's hard to get people to believe in a project as fantastic as this. i didn't quite believe in it, either, at first. but the facts are proved, now that the groundwork is laid. you'll need help, fellows. i can give it to you." he was smiling, but under the smile i could see a snaky smirk, which probably he didn't know showed. i felt fury rising inside me. he was trying to get control of our project, now that he saw for sure that it could amount to something. competition he feared, but if he had control he could enforce his high prices, keep his empire, and expand his wealth by millions of dollars. his dirty work must have been partly an attempt to force the issue. "thanks," nick told him quietly. "but we prefer to do everything alone." our visitor shrugged, standing there at the door of his space boat. "okay," he breezed. "get in touch with me, if you feel you need me!" some hours later, a radiogram came through from earth. "_congratulations!_" it read. "_stick to your guns! i like people with imagination. maybe i'll be back in harness soon myself.--art haynes._" * * * * * "he's probably just being sarcastic," i said bitterly. "old devil!" pa mavrocordatus growled. two men were killed just thirty minutes after the message was received. a little thin-faced fellow named sparr did it. but he got away in a space boat before we could catch him. a paid killer and trouble maker. the incident put our crew more on edge than before. a half dozen of the newcomers--mechanics from earth--quit abruptly. our food was almost gone. we got another shipload in, but the growing unrest didn't abate, though we kept on for another month. there was similar trouble on , where the mavrocordatus money came from. but maybe we'd make the grade, anyway. we had a pretty dense atmosphere already, on paradise asteroid. the black sky had turned blue now. the ground was moist with water. earthly buildings were going up. pa mavrocordatus had had seeds and small trees and things planted. it was that deceptive moment of success, before the real blow came. after sunset one night, i heard shots. i raced out of the barracks, geedeh, irene, and pa mavrocordatus following me. we all carried blast tubes. we found nick in a gorge, his body half burned through, just above his right hip. but he was still alive. he had a blast tube in one hand. two men lay on the rocks and earth in front of him, dead. beside them, glinting in our flashlight beams, was an aluminum cylinder. "it's a bacteria culture container, chet," nick whispered. "they had me caught, and they bragged a little before i did some fast moving, and got one of their blast tubes. venutian black-rot germs. they were going to dump them in the drinking water supply. they mentioned--haynes...." nick couldn't say much more than that. but he'd saved our lives. he died there in my arms, a hero to progress, a little breeze in the new atmosphere he'd helped to create rumpling his curly hair. he'd died for his dream of beauty and betterment. poor little irene couldn't even cry. her face was white, and she was stricken mute. her pa was shaken by great sobs, and he babbled threats. i told him to shut up. geedeh cursed in his own language, his voice a soft, deadly hiss, his little fists clenching and unclenching. "too bad nick had to kill these men!" i growled. "we could have made 'em talk. we'd have evidence. the law would take care of norman haynes!" "but we ain't got nothing!" pa mavrocordatus groaned. "nothing!" geedeh's face was twisted into a martian snarl of hate. irene stared, as though she were somewhere far away. i tried putting my arm around her, to bring her back to us. it was a minute before she seemed to realize i was there. "irene," i said. "i love you. we all love you. buck up, kid. we can't quit now--ever! we'd be letting nick down." she just nodded. she couldn't talk. * * * * * a couple of hours later i was meeting our workers in our office. most of them tried to be decent about it. "we'd like to stick, wallace. but how can we? nothing to eat...." that was what most of them said, in one way or another. and how could i answer them? some were not so regretful, of course. some were downright ugly. a little crazy with space perhaps, or else hopped up with propaganda that secret agents in haynes' hire had been spreading among them. "why should we work for you anyway?" they snarled. "even for good money, most of which we haven't collected? you're probably like what we're used to. just fixing up another place here, to clip us in the end, charging us prices sky high. your 'paradise' is just a little fancier, that's all." so they turned away, and the exodus began. the freight ships blasted off, one by one, with loads of men. we couldn't stop them. and soon the silence closed in. we were left alone to bury nick. the small sun was bright on the rough pinnacles, and their naked grey stone was bluely murky in the new air. there was a humid warmth of summer around us. just then, i didn't even feel exactly angry, in the blackness of failure, norman haynes had won, so far. what would be his next step in completing our final defeat? i spent some time in the office, going over records. presently pa mavrocordatus came rushing from the barracks. his whole fat body sagged, as he paused before me. his face was like paste. he didn't seem quite alive. "irene," he croaked. "she's gone ... too...." i ran with him to her quarters. there was some disorder. a picture of her mother was tipped over on a little metal dressing table. a rug was rumpled, and there was some clothing scattered on the floor. that was all. geedeh had entered her quarters, too. "kidnapped," he hissed. what haynes meant to accomplish by having his agents, carry off irene, i couldn't imagine. the hate i felt blurred all but the thought of getting her back to safety. the urge was like a dagger-point, sharp and clear in the chaos of memories. i knew how much she meant to me now. "i need a rocket," i said quietly. "the fastest we've got. i want to radio the space patrol, too." "there are no ships left here," geedeh returned. "the men took them all, except a little flier, which they meant us to have. but somebody has smashed it. our big radio transmitter is smashed, also." a minute later i was clawing in the wreckage of tubes and wires, there in the radio room. the apparatus was completely beyond repair. for the time being we were helpless, stranded on our asteroid. for a moment i felt little shouts of madness shrieking in my brain. but geedeh's stabbing glance warned me that this was not the way. i fought back, out of that flash of mania. "we'd better break out all of our weapons, geedeh," i said. "haynes has gone too deep to back out now. he's in danger of the patrol if we talk, so he'll have to strike at us soon." thus we prepared ourselves as well as we could, for attack. geedeh, pa mavrocordatus, and i. we equipped ourselves with our best armament--atomic rifles. pa mavrocordatus had gotten over most of his confusion. he was still sick with grief, but necessity seemed to have steadied him. he clutched his rifle grimly as we took up positions behind rock masses at the edge of the landing field. iii we waited silently. the asteroid turned on its axis. the brief night came. then we saw the rockets approaching--flaming in on shreds of blue-white rocket fire. as the two ships slowed for a landing, the three of us discharged a volley. our atomic bullets burst on impact, dazzling in the dark. the concussion was terrific. "got one!" i heard pa mavrocordatus shout after a moment, his voice thin through the ringing in my ears. my dazzled eyes saw one ship lying on its side on the landing field, its meteor armor unpunctured by our small missiles, but with its landing rockets damaged. the other ship had grounded itself perfectly. we were ready to fire again, when the paralytic waves swept over us. i saw geedeh half rise, doubling backward in a rigid spasm, his rifle flying wide. then i knew no more, until i heard norman haynes speaking to us. we were bound firmly, and it was daylight again, and our captor and his score of henchmen were smirking. "i'm just trying to figure out how to make your deaths seem as accidental as possible," haynes said, looking at me. "a couple of men of mine seem to have bungled a little business of bacteria. maybe they blabbed before you fellows killed them. now, of course, i can't take any chances. too bad your reconditioned asteroid has to appear a failure for a while. but i can't let my taking over seem too obvious. have to wait a while. i may be able to start up something here later, when people sort of forget." "what have you done with irene?" i stormed blackly. haynes' look was quizzical. "why ask me?" he answered. "she probably ran off with one of your roustabouts. or else they decided that she'd be nice company to have around, and made her go along." he laughed cynically. maybe he was telling the truth about not knowing where irene was. but if this was true, it didn't make me feel much better. if some of his gang, who'd been working with us, had kidnapped her, there was no telling how badly she'd fare. my fears showed on my face, and norman haynes seemed to enjoy them, though he was nervous, dangerously so. it was getting daylight again, now. he kept glancing at the sky, twiddling his soft hands. he didn't like physical danger. "your gravity generator seems to be the answer to my prayers, wallace," he informed me. "at full force it'll develop at least fifty earth gravities, before breaking down and melting itself. we've inspected it. power like that'll destroy all of you. it will look like an accident--a breakdown of the machinery." though pa mavrocordatus kept cursing haynes continuously, and geedeh kept calling him names that no earthman could have translated into our less vitriolic english, our captor paid them no attention. he kept directing his threats at me. that was how i knew he was still thinking of the time in his office at enterprize, when i'd called him by his true colors. he still held that grudge, and he meant to pay me back with fifty gravities. which means that every pound of earth-weight would be increased to fifty pounds! in a grip like that a man as big as me would weigh a good four tons! that meant a heart stopped by the load of the blood it tried to pump, and tissues crushed by their own weight! like being on the surface of some dead star of medium dimensions, where gravity is terrific! * * * * * at haynes' order, six of his twenty henchmen picked up geedeh and pa and me. the whole bunch was an ugly looking lot, the scum of the space ports. some of these men were commanded to stay on the surface of the planetoid, while we were carried to the elevator shed. in the cage we descended at dizzying speed to that vault at the center of where the gravity machinery was housed in its crystal shell. at that depth, under the load of the column of air above, the atmospheric pressure was very high. one could not breathe comfortably in that stuffy medium. "courage!" geedeh gasped to pa mavrocordatus and me, while his great eyes kept roving around, looking for some chance that wasn't there. haynes began to examine the machinery. he was smirking again. "simple to do!" he said to his companions. "set the robot control for gradually increasing power, so that we'll have time to get away. break the manual controls, so that no readjustments can be made. you can cut our friends loose now, zinder, so there won't be any ropes to show this was a put-up job. but keep your blasters on these men--all of you!" this was the end, all right. i was sure of it. i'd die without even knowing what had happened to irene. irene, whom i knew now that i loved.... we'd been freed of our bonds when the surface phone rang. the lookout party, whom haynes had left above, was calling. our captor snapped on the switch of the speaker. a voice boomed in that busy cavern of metal giants, green light, and glinting crystal: "listen, chief! there's a bunch of specks to the right of the sun. they're getting bigger fast. must be a flock of space ships. couldn't be any of yours. what'll we do?" i saw haynes' weak features go sallow. briefly my spirits rose. i couldn't imagine whom those ships could belong to. but they must be rescuers of some kind. they were coming to stop norman haynes' madness. but haynes was clever, as he quickly proved. "friends of wallace here, i suppose. maybe even space patrol boats," he said over his phone to the lookout party. "you'll all have to take a discomfort for a while. we'll use gravity on them, too! they'll never land successfully." pa mavrocordatus looked at me and geedeh. "what's he mean--use gravity?" geedeh was a bit quicker than i in giving the obvious answer. "just as with us," he said. "increase the output of the gravity generator here to a certain degree. from space, the increase will be practically unnoticeable. the rockets will try to land--but without taking into consideration the multiplied attractive force, they will crash!" "many birds with one stone!" haynes chuckled gleefully. "you will have a short reprieve, friends, while i take care of these intruders, whoever they are. i can't use too great a gravity on them at first. it might warn them, if they notice that their ships are accelerating too rapidly. they might as well be part of my 'accident', even if they do happen to be police. the space patrol has accidents now and then, just like anybody else!" haynes started to work the manual controls of the generator. the area in which he and his several aides stood, was shielded against the greater attraction, having been thus arranged by us for testing purposes. the shrill hum of the machines grew louder. i felt the weight of my prone body increase suffocatingly. the heat increased too, as the great coils, gleaming in the glow of illuminators, gradually absorbed more power. and i knew that, out in space, those slender fingers of force were reaching and strengthening, invisible and treacherous. our unknown friends were doomed. not only were they doomed, but our whole idea was destined to failure. the dream that nick had died for. the vast progress that it meant. worlds out here--worlds with largely a self-sufficient production--real colonization. fair play. norman haynes would resist all that, because progress would weaken his power here. he was master of the asteroids, because he was master of their imports and exports. and unless he could control the rejuvenated asteroids himself, they would never be. with him directing, they would not represent a real improvement--only another means of robbing from the colonists. and colonists weren't rich. i could see those same thoughts, that gouged savagely into my own brain, burning in geedeh's cat eyes, where he sprawled near me. being a martian, born to a lesser gravity than the terrestrial, he was suffering more than i--physically. but perhaps my mental torture was worse. geedeh was irene's friend, but i loved her. she was gone--lost somewhere--maybe dead. that, for me, was the worst--much worse than that crushing weight. i couldn't let things remain the way they were! my seething fury and need lashed me on, even in my helplessness. god--what could i do? i tried to figure something out. could i break the gravity machinery some way? impossible, now, certainly! i tried to remember my high school physics. principles that might be used to give warning signals, and so forth. and just what that awful gravity would do to things. close to me was the base of the domelike crystal shell that covered the gravity generator. it wasn't a vital part, certainly, just stout quartz. but it was the only thing i could reach. as i lay there on the floor, i drew my foot back, doubling my knee. i stamped down against the quartz with all my strength. the first blow cracked it. the second drove my metal-shod boot-heel through with a crashing sound. a small hole, eighteen inches long, was made in the barrier. the sounds of the great machinery went on as before. the gravity kept slowly increasing. geedeh, suffering more, now, looked at me puzzledly. pa mavrocordatus stared anxiously. and norman haynes at the surface phone laughed unpleasantly. "cracking up, eh, wallace?" he sneered. "i know who your would-be helpers on those space ships are, now. i suppose i should be surprised at their identities. they're calling to you. want to listen? my men above have locked this surface phone to our ship radio." [illustration: _"cracking up, eh, wallace?" norman haynes sneered._] he turned up the volume of the reproducer. irene's voice was the first in the speaker. "chet!" she was urging. "chet wallace! pa! geedeh! do you hear me? i left of my own free will. i couldn't waste time, going to the space patrol for help--they'd want proof, and that would take a while to present. so--there was only one person and i thought you'd mistrust him.... why don't you answer? or have you left too? i'm turning the mike over to somebody else, now. i found him on enterprize, just come from earth, mr. arthur haynes...." iv i gasped, listening to irene. i didn't know what surprised and confused me most--her being alive and safe, or what she'd done about old art haynes. could i trust old art? i had no way of telling. had irene told him about his nephew, or had she kept silent? did he know he was opposed to norman haynes, or did he think it was somebody else who had sabotaged the project? where would his loyalties be, if he found out? it was a ticklish situation. as soon as irene's ragged, excited breathing died away in the speaker, norman haynes took it upon himself to clarify his own stand, and my uncertainties. he looked at geedeh and pa and me, tense and suffering in the grip of the gravity, and tortured with doubt. "uncle art is an old fool," he said. "so he thinks he'll come back to the asteroids, and replace me in the business, does he? well, he should have died long ago, and now is as good a time as any! he might as well be part of the accident, too, along with those space bums of yours. nobody'll ever know!" it was tragic that old art couldn't have heard that. but his nephew wasn't broadcasting. he was just listening quietly. and now his uncle's voice was coming through: "we're blasting in to land, wallace, if you're listening. there won't be any more trouble, now. i'll see to that! we'll find out who's back of this sabotage. we'll put an end to it!" for me it was bitter, black irony--old art proving himself our friend, now! he didn't know his enemy. he was nearly ninety--a grim old fighter, with real vision. irene too, who meant everything to me. she didn't know that with the intensified gravity those incoming ships would be smashed and blazing! my mind was growing a bit dim in the strangling pressure of the artificial gravitation. sweat was streaming from me in the smothering heat that added to the oppressiveness of the heavy air. pa mavrocordatus was groaning the name of his daughter. geedeh's great eyes were fixed on me in helpless suffering. through the shrill sounds of the engines i listened for more words from irene and old art. but none came. they must know their doom by now. they must be fighting savagely and hopelessly to get away. still some distance from , they were already caught, deep in the web of invisible force. after some moments, i heard a distant crash, a roll of sound. what was it? a huge rocket, hitting the jagged crags above, at meteoric speed? crumpling, destroying itself and those inside it? i thought my heart would burst with the added weight of my anxiety. the first crash was only the beginning. others followed in quick succession--inexorably. and there was a faint, far-off roar, coming down from ten miles above. and that roar was the roar of titanic rain. of floods of water coming down this shaft, where the gravity machine was! all the countless tons of water that we'd baked from ancient rocks, and which had been mostly suspended as vapor in our synthetic atmosphere, was condensing now, coming down in torrents! * * * * * norman haynes kept grinning satanically, while he and his aides attended to the gravity machine. triumph showed in his eyes. but presently he began to look puzzled, as that soughing roar that accompanied the crashing din, increased. it was a little early for the space ships to be smashing up, anyway. i could feel a grim smile coming over my lips, against my will. had my guesses and hopes, which had seemed so unsubstantial, been correct? norman haynes was glancing doubtfully at the reproducer. i could see that he was wondering why his surface watchers didn't communicate any more--and tell him what was happening up there on the crust of . i knew the answers, now! geedeh did, too. the excitement of knowledge was in his withered, pain-wracked face. those distant crashes were not what i'd feared they might be, but part of what i'd hoped for. they were gigantic thunder-claps--the noise of terrific lightning bolts! norman haynes had made a simple oversight in his plan to destroy those incoming space craft. there was a fearsome electrical storm going on above--one of inconceivable proportions--utterly beyond the earthly! doubtless all of norman haynes' surface watchers, up above, had been killed by that sudden deluge of electricity! the multiplied gravitation up there, had pinned them down, so that they could neither escape, nor warn their chief! before norman haynes understood what was happening, foam-flecked muddy water was at the door of the machinery room, rushing and gurgling past the threshold! he and his helpers stared at it stupidly, and i laughed at them. "you didn't realize it, did you, haynes?" i grunted. "you didn't realize that increased gravity would increase the weight of the atmosphere, as well as of everything else! and increased weight of the air, means increased atmospheric pressure, too, pushing molecules together, creating greater density. and what happens? go back to your high school physics, haynes! it's like when you store air in the tank of a compressor pump. the moisture in it liquifies. and in the case of an atmosphere as big as has now, static electricity would be suddenly and violently condensed, besides." norman haynes stared at me, stunned with consternation. but his recovery was fairly prompt. his sudden sneer had a rattish desperation. "hell," he said. "just a thunder storm. a lot of rain. what of it? the gravity machine still works. the ships will still be destroyed." i knew that that was true--unless what i'd planned happened. those rockets, manned by our old construction crew, and irene, and old art haynes, had been too close to asteroid for the last couple of minutes, to effect an escape, even if the sudden dark clouds had warned them that something dangerous was afoot. "watch this--haynes," geedeh panted, and it was hard for the acting head of the haynes shipping company to guess what the little martian meant, at first. * * * * * under the pull of that terrific gravity, the water was coming into that room like an avalanche. geedeh and pa and i were floundering in it feebly, held to the floor by that awful weight. i was sure we'd drown. but as we coughed and sputtered, the flood found its way through the hole i'd kicked, low down in the side of the crystal dome that covered that gigantic machinery. there was a flash of electrical flame, as the water interfered with the functioning of the apparatus. it was pandemonium, then. every man for himself. geedeh, the scientist, and i, who, under the force of grim need, had somehow contrived to plan this finale, had the advantage of knowledge. we'd figured out a little of what to do. the gravity winked off suddenly--reaching the low of practically nothing, here at the center of this tiny world, whose normal attraction, even at the surface, was very small. we struggled to our feet, in a muddy swirl that was now a yard in depth. but before we could take advantage of our sudden lightness, and leap clear, the gravity machines gave a last gasp of power, and we were pulled down again, smothering. then, with a grating roar, the apparatus stopped. the bedlam ceased, except for a low whine of expanding atmosphere, and screams from haynes and his men. presently, i felt all hell stabbing through me. my ears rang as with the after effects of some colossal explosion. my whole body ached. i clutched at geedeh, who seemed on the point of collapse. pa mavrocordatus managed to help me.... but strained by gravity vastly stronger than that of mars, and now facing a circumstance even more dangerous, tough little geedeh still had his wits, fortunately for us all. he pointed to an airtight crystal cage at one edge of the chamber. the cage was necessary in routine testing of the machinery here, which called for variations in the output of the gravity generators, and consequent great variations in air pressure. "inside the cage--all of us!" geedeh squeaked. "quickly! bends!..." do you know what the air pressure is, at the bottom of a ten-mile shaft, even at normal earth gravity? yeah, something pretty high! then you can imagine what it had just been like, here, at six or seven gravities! but when the generators had quit entirely, there had been that sudden loss of weight in the air, sudden expansion, thinning, loss of pressure! the three of us got inside the cage, and sealed the door. i spun valves. there was a hiss of entering atmosphere, and the pressure rose again, far above the norm of sea-level, on earth. i felt better at once, but i knew it had been a close call. we looked out at norman haynes and his henchmen. they weren't drowning, now. tottering, they stood with their heads well above the flood. it was something else that was killing them. not suffocation, either. their faces were bloated and congested in the glow of illuminators. their bodies seemed to swell. norman haynes raised his blast tube, as did several of the others, trying to fire at the crystal shelter where we had taken refuge. norman haynes must have known his failure, then. why had it happened. how we had won. it may be that he even realized some justice in his hideous punishment. he had tried to obstruct progress and fair play. the blast tube dropped from his fingers. he opened his mouth to shriek in his agony. but dark blood gushed forth, and, with his henchmen, he toppled back into the water. * * * * * "bends!" geedeh said again. "haynes had a worse case of bends than any deep-sea diver ever experienced." the flood had almost stopped, now, outside the cage. we waited. vengeance was complete. and it wasn't quite as satisfying as i might once have thought. presently they were with us. irene. and old art--proving that the haynes name was still great, even though one who bore it had soiled it some. we emerged from our sealed cage, after the pressure around us was gradually lowered to normal. "i didn't think it was norman who was guilty," old art breathed sadly when he spoke to us. "i knew he was high-handed, but i didn't realize it was as bad as it was. i guess norman got what he deserved," he finished, and there were tears in his heavy voice. we went to the surface in the elevator. we needed space suits again, up there, with the air as expanded as it was. a lot of the atmosphere was leaking away from , being held down only by the tiny natural gravity. but there was nothing that couldn't be repaired and replaced. "we must have pumps rigged to draw the water out of the vault, so that we can dry and repair the gravity machinery, and start it again," geedeh stated. we started again, almost as we had done at the first, for quite a bit of the air and water had been whisked into space. we lived in space-suits for days, rebuilding and repairing the damaged machinery. then with the aid of art haynes, and with extended credit now that our plans were made fully known and approved, we imported machinery to pump the water from the vault. we hired specialists to come in, each of them with a trained crew of men to do the work that our old crews lacked the technical skill to do. slowly, our planet of hope grew again, and there were bulletins sent through the asteroid belt that workers were wanted again on paradise asteroid. the specialists left, replaced by the crews that had worked on the asteroid before. with unlimited credit, our great freighting ships piled materials in regular formation, and the returning crews set their ships down on the landing fields, the men pouring eagerly forth, ready to set up the buildings that would be the nucleus of another earth in space. with our old crews returned, it took about a hundred hours to accomplish this. asteroid was almost the same as before the final trouble with norman haynes, now, except that the air was a little thinner. but that could be quickly taken care of. pa mavrocordatus was working with his vineyards and trees, and his tomato and cabbage patches, again. the big trouble was all finished, now. the dream was coming true. a little earth, fresh and green, for tired miners of the path of minor planets. space madness could never be so common now. and cheap, fresh products would be theirs. v irene and i walked in the warm night. the crews were whooping it up in the lighted barracks. somebody was playing a harmonica. the stars were brilliant, and there were a thousand things to think of. how we'd all struggled. how nick mavrocordatus, had dreamed and worked and died. how once the asteroids had been a planet, with almost human inhabitants, dreaming, planning, struggling, too. their rock carvings were everywhere. "it's the beginning, chet," irene whispered. "asteroid is the first. but there'll be others--other small, beautiful, living planets. there's a lot of work to be done. and when it's all finished that will be almost unfortunate--too tame." i knew what she meant. she was pioneer stuff, just as all of us were. the greatness of life was in its battles. on and on, to vaster and vaster heights. that was what had driven us into the interplanetary void in the first place. i kissed her. "don't worry, honey," i said. "there's no end to it. no point of final stagnation. it goes on and on. there'll always be a frontier--something bigger to reach and conquer...." and we looked up in awe toward the infinite stars. the wailing asteroid by murray leinster an avon original avon book division the hearst corporation eighth avenue new york , new york copyright, , by murray leinster. published by arrangement with the author. printed in the u.s.a. [transcriber's note: extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] * * * * * there was no life on the asteroid, but the miles of rock-hewn corridors through which the earth party wandered left no doubt about the purpose of the asteroid. it was a mighty fortress, stocked with weapons of destruction beyond man's power to understand. and yet there was no life here, nor had there been for untold centuries. what race had built this stronghold? what unimaginable power were they defending against? why was it abandoned? there was no answer, all was dead. but--not quite all. for in a room above the tomb-like fortress a powerful transmitter beamed its birdlike, fluting sounds toward earth. near it, on a huge star-map of the universe, with light-years measured by inches, ten tiny red sparks were moving, crawling inexorably toward the center. moving, at many times the speed of light, with the acquired mass of suns ... moving, on a course that would pass through the solar system. the unknown aliens would not even see our sun explode from the force of their passing, would not even notice the tiny speck called earth as it died.... * * * * * chapter the signals from space began a little after midnight, local time, on a friday. they were first picked up in the south pacific, just westward of the international date line. a satellite-watching station on an island named kalua was the first to receive them, though nobody heard the first four or five minutes. but it is certain that the very first message was picked up and recorded by the monitor instruments. the satellite-tracking unit on kalua was practically a duplicate of all its fellows. there was the station itself with a vertical antenna outside pointing at the stars. there were various lateral antennae held two feet above ground by concrete posts. in the instrument room in the building a light burned over a desk, three or four monitor lights glowed dimly to indicate that the self-recording instruments were properly operating, and there was a multiple-channel tape recorder built into the wall. its twin tape reels turned sedately, winding a brown plastic ribbon from one to the other at a moderate pace. the staff man on duty had gone to the installation's kitchen for a cup of coffee. no sound originated in the room, unless one counted the fluttering of a piece of weighted-down paper on the desk. outside, palm trees whispered and rustled their long fronds in the southeast trade wind under a sky full of glittering stars. beyond, there was the dull booming of surf upon the barrier reef of the island. but the instruments made no sound. only the tape reels moved. the signals began abruptly. they came out of a speaker and were instantly recorded. they were elfin and flutelike and musical. they were crisp and distinct. they did not form a melody, but nearly all the components of melody were there. pure musical notes, each with its own pitch, all of different lengths, like quarter-notes and eighth-notes in music. the sounds needed only rhythm and arrangement to form a plaintive tune. nothing happened. the sounds continued for something over a minute. they stopped long enough to seem to have ended. then they began again. when the staff man came back into the room with a coffee cup in his hand, he heard the flutings instantly. his jaw dropped. he said, "what the hell?" and went to look at the instruments. he spilled some of his coffee when he saw their readings. the tracking dials said that the signals came from a stationary source almost directly overhead. if they were from a stationary source, no plane was transmitting them. nor could they be coming from an artificial satellite. a plane would move at a moderate pace across the sky. a satellite would move faster. much faster. this source, according to the instruments, did not move at all. the staff man listened with a blank expression on his face. there was but one rational explanation, which he did not credit for an instant. the reasonable answer would have been that somebody, somewhere, had put a satellite out into an orbit requiring twenty-four hours for a circuit of the earth, instead of the ninety to one-hundred-twenty-four-minute orbits of the satellites known to sweep around the world from west to east and pole to pole. but the piping, musical sounds were not the sort of thing that modern physicists would have contrived to carry information about cosmic-particle frequency, space temperature, micrometeorites, and the like. the signals stopped again, and again resumed. the staff man was galvanized into activity. he rushed to waken other members of the outpost. when he got back, the signals continued for a minute and stopped altogether. but they were recorded on tape, with the instrument readings that had been made during their duration. the staff man played the tape back for his companions. they felt as he did. these were signals from space where man had never been. they had listened to the first message ever to reach mankind from the illimitable emptiness between the stars and planets. man was not alone. man was no longer isolated. man.... the staff of the tracking station was very much upset. most of the men were white-faced by the time the taped message had been re-played through to its end. they were frightened. considering everything, they had every reason to be. the second pick-up was in darjeeling, in northern india. the indian government was then passing through one of its periods of enthusiastic interest in science. it had set up a satellite-observation post in a former british cavalry stable on the outskirts of the town. the acting head of the observing staff happened to hear the second broadcast to reach earth. it arrived some seventy-nine minutes after the first reception, and it was picked up by two stations, kalua and darjeeling. the darjeeling observer was incredulous at what he heard--five repetitions of the same sequence of flutelike notes. after each pause--when it seemed that the signals had stopped before they actually did so--the reception was exactly the same as the one before. it was inconceivable that such a succession of sounds, lasting a full minute, could be exactly repeated by any natural chain of events. five repetitions were out of the question. the notes were signals. they were a communication which was repeated to be sure it was received. the third broadcast was heard in lebanon in addition to kalua and darjeeling. reception in all three places was simultaneous. a signal from a nearby satellite could not possibly have been picked up so far around the earth's curvature. the widening of the area of reception, too, proved that there was no new satellite aloft with an orbit period of exactly twenty-four hours, so that it hung motionless in the sky relative to earth. tracking observations, in fact, showed the source of the signals to move westward, as time passed, with the apparent motion of a star. no satellite of earth could possibly exist with such an orbit unless it was close enough to show a detectable parallax. this did not. a french station picked up the next batch of plaintive sounds. kalua, darjeeling, and lebanon still received. by the time the next signal was due, croydon, in england, had its giant radar-telescope trained on the part of the sky from which all the tracking stations agreed the signals came. croydon painstakingly made observations during four seventy-nine-minute intervals and four five-minute receptions of the fluting noises. it reported that there was a source of artificial signals at an extremely great distance, position right ascension so-and-so, declination such-and-such. the signals began every seventy-nine minutes. they could be heard by any receiving instrument capable of handling the microwave frequency involved. the broadcast was extremely broad-band. it covered more than two octaves and sharp tuning was not necessary. a man-made signal would have been confined to as narrow a wave-band as possible, to save power for one reason, so it could not be imagined that the signal was anything but artificial. yet no earth science could have sent a transmitter out so far. when sunrise arrived at the tracking station on kalua, it ceased to receive from space. on the other hand, tracking stations in the united states, the antilles, and south america began to pick up the cryptic sounds. the first released news of the happening was broadcast in the united states. in the south pacific and india and the near east and europe, the whole matter seemed too improbable for the notification of the public. news pressure in the united states, though, is very great. here the news rated broadcast, and got it. that was why joe burke did not happen to complete the business for which he'd taken sandy lund to a suitable, romantic spot. she was his secretary and the only permanent employee in the highly individual business he'd begun and operated. he'd known her all his life, and it seemed to him that for most of it he'd wanted to marry her. but something had happened to him when he was quite a small boy--and still happened at intervals--which interposed a mental block. he'd always wanted to be romantic with her, but there was a matter of two moons in a strange-starred sky, and trees with foliage like none on earth, and an overwhelming emotion. there was no rational explanation for it. there could be none. often he'd told himself that sandy was real and utterly desirable, and this lunatic repetitive experience was at worst insanity and at the least delusion. but he'd never been able to do more than stammer when talk between them went away from matter-of-fact things. tonight, though, he'd parked his car where a river sparkled in the moonlight. there was a scent of pine and arbutus in the air and a faint thread of romantic music came from his car's radio. he'd brought sandy here to propose to her. he was doggedly resolved to break the chains a psychological oddity had tied him up in. he cleared his throat. he'd taken sandy out to dinner, ostensibly to celebrate the completion of a development job for interiors, inc. burke had started burke development, inc., some four years out of college when he found he didn't like working for other people and could work for himself. its function was to develop designs and processes for companies too small to have research-and-development divisions of their own. the latest, now-finished, job was a wall-garden which those expensive interior decorators, interiors, inc., believed might appeal to the very rich. burke had made it. it was a hydroponic job. a rich man's house could have one or more walls which looked like a grassy sward stood on edge, with occasional small flowers or even fruits growing from its close-clipped surface.[a] [footnote a: transcriber's note: the following sentence has been deleted at this point: "interiors, inc., would push the idea of a a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarine where it would cation." this is a possible printer error. a later edition of this work also has this sentence deleted. it was done. a production-job room-wall had been shipped and the check for it banked. burke had toyed with the idea that growing vegetation like that might be useful in a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarine where it would keep the air fresh indefinitely. but such ideas were for the future. they had nothing to do with now. now burke was going to triumph over an obsessive dream. "i've got something to say, sandy," said burke painfully. she did not turn her head. there was moonlight, rippling water, and the tranquil noises of the night in springtime. a perfect setting for what burke had in mind, and what sandy knew about in advance. she waited, her eyes turned away from him so he wouldn't see that they were shining a little. "i'm something of an idiot," said burke, clumsily. "it's only fair to tell you about it. i'm subject to a psychological gimmick that a girl i--hm." he coughed. "i think i ought to tell you about it." "why?" asked sandy, still not looking in his direction. "because i want to be fair," said burke. "i'm a sort of crackpot. you've noticed it, of course." sandy considered. "no-o-o-o," she said measuredly. "i think you're pretty normal, except--no. i think you're all right." "unfortunately," he told her, "i'm not. ever since i was a kid i've been bothered by a delusion, if that's what it is. it doesn't make sense. it couldn't. but it made me take up engineering, i think, and ..." his voice trailed away. "and what?" "made an idiot out of me," said burke. "i was always pretty crazy about you, and it seems to me that i took you to a lot of dances and such in high school, but i couldn't act romantic. i wanted to, but i couldn't. there was this crazy delusion...." "i wondered, a little," said sandy, smiling. "i _wanted_ to be romantic about you," he told her urgently. "but this damned obsession kept me from it." "are you offering to be a brother to me now?" asked sandy. "no!" said burke explosively. "i'm fed up with myself. i want to be different. very different. with you!" sandy smiled again. "strangely enough, you interest me," she told him. "do go on!" but he was abruptly tongue-tied. he looked at her, struggling to speak. she waited. "i w-want to ask you to m-m-marry me," said burke desperately. "but i have to tell you about the other thing first. maybe you won't want...." her eyes were definitely shining now. there was soft music and rippling water and soft wind in the trees. it was definitely the time and place for romance. but the music on the car radio cut off abruptly. a harsh voice interrupted: "_special bulletin! special bulletin! messages of unknown origin are reaching earth from outer space! special bulletin! messages from outer space!_" burke reached over and turned up the sound. perhaps he was the only man in the world who would have spoiled such a moment to listen to a news broadcast, and even he wouldn't have done it for a broadcast on any other subject. he turned the sound high. "_this is a special broadcast from the academy of sciences in washington, d. c._" boomed the speaker. "_some thirteen hours ago a satellite-tracking station in the south pacific reported picking up signals of unknown origin and great strength, using the microwave frequencies also used by artificial satellites now in orbit around earth. the report was verified shortly afterward from india, then near east tracking stations made the same report. european listening posts and radar telescopes were on the alert when the sky area from which the signals come rose above the horizon. american stations have again verified the report within the last few minutes. artificial signals, plainly not made by men, are now reaching earth every seventy-nine minutes from remotest space. there is as yet no hint of what the messages may mean, but that they are an attempt at communication is certain. the signals have been recorded on tape, and the sounds which follow are those which have been sent to earth by alien, non-human, intelligent beings no one knows how far away._" a pause. then the car radio, with night sounds and the calls of nightbirds for background, gave out crisp, distinct fluting noises, like someone playing an arbitrary selection of musical notes on a strange wind instrument. the effect was plaintive, but burke stiffened in every muscle at the first of them. the fluting noises were higher and lower in turn. at intervals, they paused as if between groups of signals constituting a word. the enigmatic sounds went on for a full minute. then they stopped. the voice returned: "_these are the signals from space. what you have heard is apparently a complete message. it is repeated five times and then ceases. an hour and nineteen minutes later it is again repeated five times...._" the voice continued, while burke remained frozen and motionless in the parked car. sandy watched him, at first hopefully, and then bewilderedly. the voice said that the signal strength was very great. but the power for artificial-satellite broadcasts is only a fraction of a watt. these signals, considering the minimum distance from which they could come, had at least thousands of kilowatts behind them. somewhere out in space, farther than man's robot rockets had ever gone, huge amounts of electric energy were controlled to send these signals to earth. scientists were in disagreement about the possible distance the signals had traveled, whether they were meant solely for earth or not, and whether they were an attempt to open communication with humanity. but nobody doubted that the signals were artificial. they had been sent by technical means. they could not conceivably be natural phenomena. directional fixes said absolutely that they did not come from mars or jupiter or saturn. neptune and uranus and pluto were not nearly in the line of the signals' travel. of course venus and mercury were to sunward of earth, which ruled them out, since the signals arrived only on the night side of mankind's world. nobody could guess, as yet, where they did originate. burke sat utterly still, every muscle tense. he was so pale that even in the moonlight sandy saw it. she was alarmed. "joe! what's the matter?" "did you--hear that?" he asked thinly. "the signals?" "of course. but what...." "i recognized them," said burke, in a tone that was somehow despairing. "i've heard signals like that every so often since i was a kid." he swallowed. "it was sounds like that, and what went with them, that has been the--trouble with me. i was going to tell you about it--and ask you if you'd marry me anyway." he began to tremble a little, which was not at all like the joe burke that sandy knew. "i don't quite under--" "i'm afraid i've gone out of my head," he said unsteadily. "look, sandy! i was going to propose to you. instead, i'm going to take you back to the office. i'm going to play you a recording i made a year ago. i think that when you've heard it you'll decide you wouldn't want to marry me anyhow." sandy looked at him with astonished eyes. "you mean those signals from somewhere mean something special to you?" "very special," said burke. "they raise the question of whether i've been crazy, and am suddenly sane, or whether i've been sane up to now, and have suddenly gone crazy." the radio switched back to dance music. burke cut it off. he started the car's motor. he backed, swung around, and headed for the office and construction shed of burke development, inc. elsewhere, the profoundest minds of the planet gingerly examined the appalling fact that signals came to earth from a place where men could not be. a message came from something which was not human. it was a suggestion to make cold chills run up and down any educated spine. but burke drove tensely, and the road's surface sped toward the car's wheels and vanished under them. a warm breeze hummed and thuttered around the windshield. sandy sat very still. "the way i'm acting doesn't make sense, does it?" burke asked. "do you feel like you're riding with a lunatic?" "no," she said. "but i never thought that if you ever did get around to asking me to marry you, somebody from outer space would forbid the banns! can't you tell me what all this is about?" "i doubt it very much," he told her. "can you tell me what the signals are about?" she shook her head. he drove through the night. presently he said, "aside from my private angle on the matter, there are some queer things about this business. why should somebody out in space send us a broadcast? it's not from a planet, they say. if there's a spaceship on the way here, why warn us? if they want to be friends, they can't be sure we'll permit it. if they intend to be enemies, why throw away the advantage of surprise? in either case, it would be foolish to send cryptic messages on ahead. and any message would have to be cryptic." the car went whirring along the roadway. soon twinkling lights appeared among the trees. the small and larger buildings of burke development, inc., came gradually into view. they were dark objects in a large empty space on the very edge of burke's home town. "and why," he went on, "why send a complex message if they only wanted to say that they were space travelers on the way to earth?" the exit from the highway to burke development appeared. burke swung off the surfaced road and into the four-acre space his small and unusual business did not begin to fill up. "if it were an offer of communication, it should be short and simple. maybe an arithmetic sequence of dots, to say that they were intelligent beings and would like the sequence carried on if we had brains, too. then we'd know somebody friendly was coming and wanted to exchange ideas before, if necessary, swapping bombs." the car's headlights swept over the building in which the experimental work of burke development was done and on to the small house in which sandy kept the books and records of the firm. burke put on the brakes before the office door. "just to see if my head is working right," he said, "i raise a question about those signals. one doesn't send a long message to emptiness, repeated, in the hope that someone may be around to catch it. one calls, and sends a long message only when the call is answered. the call says who's wanted and who's calling, but nothing more. this isn't that sort of thing." he got out of the car and opened the door on her side, then unlocked the office door and went in. he switched on the lights inside. for a moment, sandy did not move. then she slowly got out of the car and entered the office which was so completely familiar. burke bent over the office safe, turning the tumbler-wheel to open it. he said over his shoulder, "that special bulletin will be repeated on all the news broadcasts. you've got a little radio here. turn it on, will you?" again slowly, sandy crossed the office and turned on the miniature radio on her desk. it warmed up and began to make noises. she dimmed it until it was barely audible. burke stood up with a reel of brown tape. he put it on the office recorder, usually used for the dictation of the day's lab log. "i have a dream sometimes," said burke. "a recurrent dream. i've had it every so often since i was eleven. i've tried to believe it was simply a freak, but sometimes i've suspected i was a telepath, getting some garbled message from somewhere unguessable. that has to be wrong. and again i've suspected that--well--that i might not be completely human. that i was planted here on earth, somehow, not knowing it, to be of use to--something not of earth. and that's crazy. so i've been pretty leery of being romantic about anybody. tonight i'd managed to persuade myself all those wild imaginings were absurd. and then the signals came." he paused and said unsteadily, "i made this tape a year ago. i was trying to convince myself that it was nonsense. listen. remember, i made this a year ago!" the reels began to spin on the recorder's face. burke's voice came out of the speaker, "_these are the sounds of the dream_," it said, and stopped. there was a moment of silence, while the twin reels spun silently. then sounds came from the recorder. they were musical notes, reproduced from the tape. sandy stared blankly. disconnected, arbitrary flutelike sounds came out into the office of burke development, inc. it was quite correct to call them elfin. they could be described as plaintive. they were not a melody, but a melody could have been made from them by rearrangement. they were very remarkably like the sounds from space. it was impossible to doubt that they were the same code, the same language, the same vocabulary of tones and durations. burke listened with a peculiarly tense expression on his face. when the recording ended, he looked at sandy. sandy was disturbed. "they're alike. but joe, how did it happen?" "i'll tell you later," he said grimly. "the important thing is, am i crazy or not?" the desk radio muttered. it was an hourly news broadcast. burke turned it up and a voice boomed: "_... one o'clock news. messages have been received from space in the century's most stupendous news event! full details will follow a word from our sponsor._" there followed an ardent description of the social advantage, personal satisfaction and business advancement that must instantly follow the use of a particular intestinal regulator. the commercial ended. "_from deepest space_," boomed the announcer's voice, "_comes a mystery! there is intelligent life in the void. it has communicated with us. today--_" because of the necessity to give the later details of a cafe-society divorce case, a torch murder and a graft scandal in a large city's municipal budget, the signals from space could not be fully treated in the five-minute hourly news program. but fifteen seconds were spared for a sample of the cryptic sounds from emptiness. burke listened to them with a grim expression. "i think," he said measuredly, "that i am sane. i have heard those noises before tonight. i know them--i'll take you home, sandy." he ushered her out of the office and into his car. "it's funny," he said as he drove back toward the highway. "this is probably the beginning of the most important event in human history. we've received a message from an intelligent race that can apparently travel through space. there's no way in the world to guess what it will bring about. it could be that we're going to learn sciences to make old earth a paradise. or it could mean that we'll be wiped out and a superior race will take over. funny, isn't it?" sandy said unsteadily, "no. not funny." "i mean," said burke, "when something really significant happens, which probably will determine earth's whole future, all i worry about is myself--that i'm crazy, or a telepath, or something. but that's convincingly human!" "what do you think i worry about?" asked sandy. "oh ..." burke hesitated, then said uncomfortably, "i was going to propose to you, and i didn't." "that's right," said sandy. "you didn't." burke drove for long minutes, frowning. "and i won't," he said flatly, after a time, "until i know it's all right to do so. i've no explanation for what's kept me from proposing to you up to now, but apparently it's not nonsense. i _did_ anticipate the sounds that came in tonight from space and--i've always known those sounds didn't belong on earth." then, driving doggedly through a warm and moonlit night, he told her exactly why the fluting sounds were familiar to him; how they'd affected his life up to now. he'd mentally rehearsed the story, anyhow, and it was reasonably well arranged. but told as fact, it was preposterous. she listened in complete silence. he finished the tale with his car parked before the boardinghouse in which sandy lived with her sister pam, they being all that was left of a family. if she hadn't known burke all her life, of course, sandy would have dismissed him and his story together. but she did know him. it did explain why he felt tongue-tied when he wished to be romantic, and even why he recorded a weird sequence of notes on a tape recorder. his actions were reasonable reactions to an unreasonable, repeated experience. his doubts and hesitations showed a sound mind trying to deal with the inexplicable. and now that the signals from space had come, it was understandable that he should react as if they were a personal matter for his attention. she had a disheartening mental picture of a place where strange trees waved long and ribbonlike leaves under an improbable sky. still ... "y--yes," she said slowly when he'd finished his uneasy account. "i don't understand, but i can see how you feel. i--i guess i'd feel the same way if i were a man and what you've experienced happened to me." she hesitated. "maybe there will be an explanation now, since those signals have come. they do match the ones you recorded from your dream. they're the ones you know about." "i can't believe it," said burke miserably, "and i can't dismiss it. i can't do anything until i find out why i know that somewhere there's a place with two moons and queer trees...." he did not mention the part of his experience sandy was most interested in--the person for whom he felt such anguished fear and such overwhelming joy when she was found. she didn't mention it either. "you go on home, joe," she said quietly. "get a good night's sleep. tomorrow we'll hear more about it and maybe it will all clear up. anyhow--whatever turns out, i--i'm glad you did intend to ask me to marry you. i intended to say yes." chapter burke was no less disturbed, but his disturbance was of a different kind. after he left sandy at the house where she and her sister boarded, he headed back to the plant. he wanted to think things out. the messages from space, of course, must presage events of overwhelming importance. the coming of intelligent aliens to earth might be comparable to the coming of white men to the american continents. they might bring superior techniques, irresistible weapons, and an assumption of superiority that would bring inevitable conflict with the aborigines of earth. judging by the actions of the white race on earth, if the newcomers were merely explorers it could mean the coming doom of humanity's independence. if they were invaders.... something like this would be pointed out soon after the news itself. some people would react with total despair, expecting the strangers to act like men. some might hope that a superior race would have developed a kindliness and altruism that on earth are rather rare. but there was no one at all who would not be apprehensive. some would panic. burke's reaction was strictly personal. nobody else in the world would have felt the same appalled, stunned emotion he felt when he heard the sounds from space. because to him they were familiar sounds. he paced up and down in the big, partitionless building in which the actual work of burke development, inc., was done. he'd done some reasonably good work in this place. the prototype of the hydroponic wall for interiors, inc., still stood against one wall. it was crude, but he'd made it work and then built a production model which had now been shipped off complete. a little to one side was a prototype of a special machine which stamped out small parts for american tool. that had been a tricky assignment! there were plastic and glass-wool and such oddments with which he'd done a process-design job for holmes yachts, and a box of small parts left over from the designing job that gave one aviation company the only practical small-plane retractable landing-gear. these things had a queer meaning for him now. he'd devised the wanted products. he'd developed certain needed processes. but now he began to be deeply suspicious of his own successes. each was a new reason for uneasiness. he grimly questioned whether his highly peculiar obsession had not been planted in him against the time when fluting noises would come from that illimitable void beyond earth's atmosphere. he examined, for the thousandth time, his special linkage with the space noises. in previous soul-searchings he'd pinpointed the time when the whole business began. he'd been eleven years old. he could even work out something close to an exact date. he was living with his aunt and uncle, his own parents being dead. his uncle had made a business trip to europe, alone, and had brought back souvenirs which were fascinating to eleven-year-old joe burke. there was a flint knife, and a carved ivory object which his uncle assured him was mammoth ivory. it had a deer's head incised into it. there were some fragments of pottery and a dull-surfaced black cube. they appealed to the small boy because his uncle said they'd belonged to men who lived when mammoths roamed the earth and cave men hunted the now-extinct huge beasts. cro-magnons, his uncle said, had owned the objects. he'd bought them from a french peasant who'd found a cave with pictures on its walls that dated back twenty thousand years. the french government had taken over the cave, but before reporting it the peasant had thriftily hidden away some small treasures to sell for himself. burke's uncle bought them and, in time, presented them to the local museum. all but the black cube, which burke had dropped. it had shattered into a million tissue-thin, shiny plates, which his aunt insisted on sweeping out. he'd tried to keep one of the plates, but his aunt had found it under his pillow and disposed of it. he remembered the matter solely because he'd examined his memories so often, trying to find something relevant to account for the beginning of his recurrent dream. somewhere shortly after his uncle's visit he had had a dream. like all dreams, it was not complete. it made no sense. but it wasn't a normal dream for an eleven-year-old boy. he was in a place where the sun had just set, but there were two moons in the sky. one was large and motionless. the other was small and moved swiftly across the heavens. from behind him came fluting signals like the messages that would later come from space. in the dream he was full-grown and he saw trees with extraordinary, ribbony leaves like no trees on earth. they wavered and shivered in a gentle breeze, but he ignored them as he did the fluting sounds behind him. he was searching desperately for someone. a child knows terror for himself, but not for anybody else. but burke, then aged eleven, dreamed that he was in an agony of fear for someone else. to breathe was torment. he held a weapon ready in his hand. he was prepared to do battle with any imaginable creature for the person he needed to find. and suddenly he saw a figure running behind the waving foliage. the relief was almost greater pain than the terror had been. it was a kind and amount of emotion that an eleven-year-old boy simply could not know, but burke experienced it. he gave a great shout, and bounded forward toward her--and the dream ended. he dreamed it three nights running, then it stopped, for awhile. then, a week later, he had the dream again, repeated in every detail. he had it a dozen times before he was twelve, and as many more before he was thirteen. it recurred at random intervals all through his teens, while he was in college, and after. when he grew up he found out that recurrent dreams are by no means unusual. but this was very far from a usual dream. from time to time, he observed new details in the dream. he knew that he was dreaming. his actions and his emotion did not vary, but he was able to survey them--like the way one can take note of items in a book one reads while quite absorbed in it. he came to notice the way the trees sent their roots out over the surface of the ground before dropping suckers down into it. he noticed a mass of masonry off to the left. he discovered that a hill in the distance was not a natural hill. he was able to remember markings on the large, stationary moon in the sky, and to realize that the smaller one was jagged and irregular in shape. the dream did not change, but his knowledge of the place of the dream increased. as he grew older, he was startled to realize that though the trees, for example, were not real, they were consistent with reality. the weapon he held in his hand was especially disturbing. its grip and barrel were transparent plastic, and in the barrel there was a sequence of peculiarly-shaped forms, in and about which wire had been wound. as a grown man he'd made such shapes in metal, once. he'd tried them out as magnets in a job for american tool. but they weren't magnets. they were something specific and alarming instead. he also came to know exactly what the mass of masonry was, and it was a sober engineering feat. no boy of eleven could have imagined it. and always there were the flutelike musical sounds coming from behind him. when he was twenty-five he'd memorized them. he'd heard them--dreamed them--hundreds of times. he tried to duplicate them on a flute and devised a special mute to get exactly the tone quality he remembered so well. he made a recording to study, but the study was futile. in a way, it was unwholesome to be so much obsessed by a dream. in a way, the dream was magnificently irrelevant to messages transmitted through millions of miles of emptiness. but the flutelike sounds linked it--now--to reality! he paced up and down in the empty, resonant building and muttered, "i ought to talk to the space-exploration people." then he laughed. that was ironical. all the crackpots in the world would be besieging all the authorities who might be concerned with the sounds from space, impassionedly informing them what julius caesar, or chief sitting bull, or some other departed shade, had told them about the matter via automatic writing or ouija boards. those who did not claim ghostly authority would explain that they had special talents, or a marvelous invention, or that they were members of the race which had sent the messages the satellite-tracking stations received. no. it would serve no purpose to inform the academy of sciences that he'd been dreaming signals like the ones that now agitated humanity. it was too absurd. but it was unthinkable for a person of burke's temperament to do nothing. so he set to work in exactly the fashion of one of the crackpots he disliked. actually, the job should have been undertaken in ponderous secrecy by committees from various learned societies, official bureaus, and all the armed forces. there should have been squabbles about how the task was to be divided up, bitter arguments about how much money was to be spent by whom, violent disagreements about research-and-development contracts. it should have been treated as a program of research, in which everybody could claim credit for all achievements and nobody was to blame for blunders. burke could not command resources for so ambitious an undertaking. and he knew that as a private project it was preposterous. but he began the sort of preliminary labor that an engineer does before he really sets to work. he jotted down some items that he didn't have to worry about. the wall-garden he'd made for interiors, inc., would fit neatly into whatever final result he got--if he got a final result. he had a manufacturing process available for glass-wool and plastics. if he could get hold of an inertia-controlled computer he'd be all set, but he doubted that he could. the crucial item was a memo he'd made from a memory of the dream weapon. it concerned certain oddly-shaped bits of metal, with fine wires wound eccentrically about them, which flew explosively to pieces when a current went through them. that was something to worry about right away. at three o'clock in the morning, then, burke routed out the laboratory notes on the small-sized metal-stamping machine he had designed for american tool. he'd tried to do the job with magnets, but they flew apart. he'd wound up with blank cartridges to provide the sudden, explosive stamping action required, but the notes on the quasi-magnets were complete. he went through them carefully. an electromagnet does not really attain its full power immediately after the current is turned on. there is an inductive resistance, inherent in a wound magnet, which means that the magnetism builds up gradually. from his memory of the elements in a transparent-plastic hand-weapon barrel, burke had concluded that it was possible to make a magnet without inductive resistance. he tried it. when the current went on it went to full strength immediately. in fact, it seemed to have a negative-induction effect. but the trouble was that it wasn't a magnet. it was something else. it wound up as scrap. now, very reflectively, he plugged in a metal lathe and carefully turned out a very tiny specimen of the peculiarly-shaped magnetic core. he wound it by hand, very painstakingly. it was a tricky job. it was six o'clock saturday morning when the specimen was finished. he connected the leads to a storage battery and threw the switch. the small object tore itself to bits, and the core landed fifteen feet from where it had been. burke beamed. he wasn't tired, but he wanted to think things over so he drove to a nearby diner and got coffee and a roll and reflected with satisfaction upon his accomplishment. at the cost of several hours' work he'd made a thing like a magnet, which wasn't a magnet, and which destroyed itself when turned on. as he drank his coffee, a radio news period came on. he listened. the signals still arrived from space, punctually, seventy-nine minutes apart. at this moment, : a.m., they were not heard on the atlantic coast, but the pacific coast still picked them up and they were heard in hawaii and again on the south pacific island of kalua. burke drove back to the plant. he was methodical, now. he reactivated the prototype wall-garden which he'd neglected while building the larger one for interiors, inc. the experimental one had been made in four sections so he could try different pumping systems and nutrient solutions. now he set the pumps to work. the plants looked ragged, but they'd perk up with proper lighting and circulation of the hydroponic liquid. then he went into the plant's small office building and sat down with drawing instruments to modify the design of the magnetic core. at eleven he'd worked out a rough theory and refined the design, with curves and angles all complete. at four the next morning a second, modified magnet-core was formed and polished. he'd heard the first newscast on friday night. it was now early sunday morning, and although he was tired, he was still not sleepy. he worked on doggedly, winding fine magnet wire on a noticeably complicated metal form. just before sunrise he tested it. when the current went on the wire windings seemed to swell. he'd held it in a small clamp while he tested it. the clamp overturned and broke the contact with the battery before the winding wire stretched to breaking-point. but it had not torn itself or anything else to bits. he was suddenly enormously weary and bleary-eyed. to anyone else in the world, the consequence of this second attempt to make what he thought of as a negative-induction magnet would seem an absolute failure. but burke now knew why the first had failed and what was wrong with the second. the third would work, just as the unfired hand-weapon of his dream would have worked. now he could justify to himself the association of a recurrent dream with a message from outer space. the dream now had two points of contact with reality. one was the sounds from emptiness, which matched those in the dream. the other was the hand-weapon of the dream, whose essential working part now plainly did something unknown in a normal world. but it would be impossible to pass on his information to anybody else. too many crackpots have claimed too many triumphs. his actual, unpredictable technical achievement would have little chance of winning official acceptance. especially since he would be considered a non-accredited source. burke had a small business of his own. he had an engineering degree. but he had no background of learned futility to gain a hearing for what he now knew. "crackpots of the world, unite!" he muttered to himself. he dragged himself out-of-doors to a cool, invigorating morning and drove somnolently to the diner he'd patronized before. the coffee he ordered was atrocious, but it waked him. he heard two truck drivers at the counter. "it's baloney!" said one of them scornfully. "there ain't no people out there! we'd'a heard from them before if there was. them scientists are crazy!" "nuts!" said the other earnestly. "one of their idle thoughts would crack your brain wide open, mac! they know what's up, and they're scared! if you wanna know, i'm scared too!" "of what?" "hell! did you ever drive at night, and have all the stars come in pairs like snake-eyes--like little mean eyes, lookin' down at you an' despisin' you? you've seen that, ain't you? whoever's signalin' could be lookin' down at us just like the stars do." the first man grunted. "i don't like it!" said the second man, fretfully. "if it was a man headin' out to go huntin' among the stars for somethin' he wanted, that's all right. that's like a man goin' huntin' in the woods with a gun. but i don't like somebody comin' our way from somewhere else. maybe he's huntin' us!" the two drivers paid for their coffee and went out. and burke reflected wryly that the second man had, after all, expressed a universal truth. we humans do not like to be hunted. the passion with which a man-killing wild beast is pursued comes from human vanity. we do not like the idea that any other creature can be better than we are. it is highly probable that if we ever have to face a superior race, we will die of it. so burke went back to the plant and began to make yet another of the peculiarly wound magnets-which-were-not-magnets. this was to have three of the odd-shaped cores, formed in line, of a single piece of swedish iron. as the windings were put on they'd be imbedded in plastic. over that would go a casing to keep them from expanding or stretching. it ought to be distinctively different from a magnet. it was an extremely long and utterly tedious job. he knew what he was doing, but he had doubts about the why. as he worked, though, he wrestled out a detailed theory. discoverers often work like that. it was said that columbus didn't know where he was going when he started out, didn't know where he was when he got there, and didn't know where he'd been when he got back. the history of the discovery of the triode tube has points of similarity. burke had begun with a device which destroyed itself when turned on, developed the idea into a device which swelled to uselessness when energized, and now hoped that it would turn out at the third try to be something the textbooks said was impossible. outside the construction shed, the world went about its business. while burke worked on through the sunday noon hour, a japanese radar telescope aimed at the night sky and made six successive position-findings on the source of the space signals. when sunset found him laboring doggedly at a metal lathe, croydon made eight. american radar telescopes had made others. carefully computed, the observations added up to the discovery of an independent motion of the signal source. it moved against the stars as if it were a solar-system body with an orbit in the asteroid belt some three hundred sixty million miles from the sun--as compared to earth's ninety-two million. at midnight on sunday, while burke painstakingly made micrometric examination of the triple magnet-core, harvard observatory reported that there should be a very minor asteroid at the spot in space from which the signals came. the coincidental asteroid was known as schull's object. it was listed as m- in the catalogs. it had been discovered in , was a very minor celestial body, had an estimated greatest diameter of less than two miles, and its brightness had been noticed to vary, suggesting that it was of irregular shape. it was too insignificant to have been kept under constant observation, but the signals from space appeared definitely to originate from its position. an hour after midnight, eastern standard time, palomar detected the infinitesimal speck of light which was schull's object at exactly the place the radar telescopes insisted was the signal source. satellite-watching stations now monitored the cryptic signals around the clock, and radar telescopes began to sweep space for possible answers to the space broadcast. there was an uncomfortable possibility that the transmitter might not be signaling earth, after all, but a fellow mystery of space--an associate or a sister-ship. more data turned up. m.i.t. made examination of the signals themselves. timed, the intervals between notes varied as if keyed by something alive. but successive broadcasts were identical to microseconds. the conclusion was that the original broadcast had been set up by hand, as it were, but that all were now transmitted mechanically--automatically--by a robot transmitter. it was monday morning when burke completed the last turn of the last winding of his three-element pseudo-magnet. there are many things which become something else when they change in degree. electromagnetic radiation may be long radio waves or radiant heat or yellow light or ultraviolet or x-rays, or who knows what, according to its frequency. it is different things with different properties at different wavelengths. burke believed that his cores and windings were something other than magnets because the "flux" they produced was of a different intensity. he did not believe it to be magnetism. at nine o'clock monday morning, he was clumsy from pure, weariness when he began to fit the outer case on the thing he'd worked so long to complete. the hand-weapon in his dream undoubtedly flung bullets through a rifled bore penetrating the very center of the multiple core. the design of the hand-weapon ruled out any possibility of a considerable recoil. it wasn't built to allow the hand to take a recoil. so there must be no recoil. on that basis, burke had made what finally amounted to a thick rod some six inches long and two in diameter. with the casing in place, it was absolutely solid. there was no play for the windings to expand into. he blinked at it. common sense said he ought to put it aside and test it when his mind was not nearly numb from fatigue. then sandy came into the constructions shed, looking for him. she'd arrived for work and seen his car outside the shed. her expression indicated several things: a certain uneasiness, and some embarrassment, and more than a little indignation. when she saw him unshaven and wobbly with weariness, she protested. "joe! you've been working since heaven knows when!" "since i left you," he admitted. "i got interested." "you look dreadful!" "maybe i'll look worse after i try out this thing i've made. i'm not sure." "when did you eat last?" she demanded. "and when did you sleep?" he shrugged tiredly, regarding the thing in his hands. he'd had enough experience contriving new things to know that no theory is right until something that depends on it has been made and works. he tended to be pessimistic. but this time he thought he had it. "is this working night and day a part of your reaction to those signals?" asked sandy unhappily. "if it is--" "let's try it," burke interrupted. "it's something i worked out from the dream. now i'll find out whether i'm crazy or not--maybe." he drew a deep breath. he had a sudden, deep and corrosive doubt of things which didn't make sense, like space signals and magnets which weren't magnets because they were capable of negative self-induction. "if this shows no sign of working, sandy...." "what?" he didn't answer. he went heavily over to the table where he had storage-battery current available. he plucked a momentary-contact switch out of a drawer and connected it to the wires from the small thing he'd made. then he hooked on the storage battery. "stand back, sandy," he said tiredly. "we'll see what happens." he flipped the momentary-contact switch. there was a crash and a roar. the six-inch thing leaped. it grazed burke's head and drew blood. it flashed across the room, a full thirty feet, and then smashed a water-cooler and imbedded itself in the brick wall beyond. a tool cabinet tottered and crashed to the floor. the storage battery spouted steam, swelled. burke grabbed sandy and plunged outside with her as the building filled with vaporized battery acid. outside, he put her down and rubbed his nose with his finger. "that was a surprise," he said with some animation. "are you all right?" "you--could have been killed!" she said in a whisper. "i wasn't," said burke. "if you're not hurt there's no harm done. it looks like the thing worked! lucky that was only a millisecond contact! negative self-induction.... i'll break some windows and come to the office." he did break windows, from the outside, so air could flow through the building and clear away the battery-acid steam. sandy watched him anxiously. "okay," he said. "i'll come quietly." he followed her to the office. he was so physically worn out, he tripped on the office step as he went in. "tell me the news on the signals," he said. "still coming in?" "yes." she looked at him again, worried. "joe ... sit down. here. what's happened?" "nothing except that i'm a genius at second hand. i didn't intend it that way, and maybe it can be covered up, but i've turned out to be sane. so i think, maybe you'd better get another job. since i'm sane i'll surely go bankrupt and maybe i'll end up in jail. but it's going to be interesting." his head drooped and he jerked it upright. "this is reaction," he said distinctly. "i'm tired. i wanted badly to find out whether i was crazy or not. i found out i haven't been. i'm not so sure i won't be presently." he made a stiff gesture and said, "take the day off, sandy. i'm going to rest awhile." then his head fell forward and he was asleep. burke slept for a long time. and this time dreamlessly. the thing he made had worked for much less than the tenth of a second, but it came out of his dream, ultimately, and it was linked with whatever sent messages from asteroid m- . there was still nothing intelligible about the whole affair. it contained no single rational element. but if there was no rational explanation, there was what now seemed reasonable action that could be taken. so he slept, and as usual the world went on its way unheeding. the fluting sounds from the sky remained the top news story of the day. there was no doubt of their artificiality, nor that they came from a small, tumbling, jagged rock which was one of the least of the more than fifteen hundred asteroids of the solar system. it was two hundred and seventy million miles from earth. the latest computations said that not less than twenty thousand kilowatts of power had been put into the transmitter to produce so strong and loud a signal on earth. no power-source of that order had been carried out to make the signals. but they were there. astronomers became suddenly important sources of news. they contradicted each other violently. eminent scientists observed truthfully that schull's object, as such, could not sustain life. it could not have an atmosphere, and its gravitational field would not hold even a moderately active microbe on its surface. therefore any life and any technology now on it must have come from somewhere else. the most eminent scientists said reluctantly that they could not deny the possibility that a spaceship from some other solar system had been wrecked on m- , and was now sending hopeless pleas for help to the local planetary bodies. others observed briskly that anything which smashed into an asteroid would vaporize, if it hit hard enough, or bounce away if it did not. so there was no evidence for a spaceship. there was only evidence for a transmitter. there was no explanation for that. it could be mentioned, said these skeptics, that there were other sources of radiation in space. there was the jansky radiation from the milky way, and radiations from clouds of ionized material in emptiness, and radio stars were well known. a radio asteroid was something new, but-- it was working astronomers, so to speak, who took action. they had been bouncing signals off of earth's moon, and various artificial satellites, and they'd flicked signals in the direction of mars and venus and believed that they got them back. the most probable returned radar signal from mars had been received by a radar telescope in west virginia. it had been turned temporarily into a transmitter and some four hundred kilowatts were poured into it to go out in a tight beam. the working astronomers took over that parabolic bowl again. they borrowed, begged, wheedled, and were suspected of stealing necessary equipment to put nearly eight hundred kilowatts into a microwave signal, this time beamed at asteroid m- . if intelligent beings received the signal, they might reply. if they did, the working astronomers would figure out what to do next. burke slept in the office of burke development, inc. his features were relaxed and peaceful. sandy was completely helpless before his tranquil exhaustion. but presently she used the telephone and spoke in a whisper to her younger sister, pam. in time, pam came in a cab bringing blankets and a pillow. she and sandy got burke to a pallet on the floor with a pillow under his head and a thickness of blanket over him. he slept on, unshaven and oblivious. pam said candidly, "if you can feel romantic about anything like that, sandy, i'll still love you, but i'll join the men in thinking that women are mysterious!" she departed in the cab and sandy took up a vigil over burke's slumbering form. _pravda_ announced in its evening edition of monday that soviet scientists would send out a giant space-probe, intended to orbit around venus, to investigate the space-signal source. the probe would carry a man. it would blast off within six weeks, preceded by drone fuel-carriers which would be overtaken by the probe and furnish fuel to it. _pravda_ threw in a claim that russians had been first to refuel an aeroplane in flight, and asserted that soviet physical science would make a space-voyage of two hundred seventy million miles mere ducksoup for their astronaut. editorially, american newspapers mentioned that the russians had tried similar things before, and that at least three coffins now floated in orbit around earth, not to mention the one on the moon. but if they tried it.... the american newspapers waited for a reaction from washington. it came. the most eminent of civilian scientists announced proudly that the united states would proceed to the design and testing of multi-stage rockets capable of landing a party on mars when earth and mars were in proper relative position. this having been accomplished, a rocket would then take off from mars for asteroid m- to investigate the radio transmissions from that peculiar mass of tumbling rock. it was blandly estimated that the americans might take off for mars in eighteen months. sandy watched over burke. there was nothing to do in the office. she did not read. near seven the telephone rang, and she frantically muffled its sound. it was pam, asking what sandy meant to do about dinner. sandy explained in an almost inaudible voice. pam said resignedly, "all right. i'll come out and bring something. lucky it's a warm day. we can sit in your car and eat. if i had to watch joe sleeping like that and needing a shave as he does, i'd lose my appetite." she hung up. when she arrived, burke was still asleep. sandy went outside. pam had brought hero sandwiches and coffee. they sat on the steps of the office and ate. "i know," said pam between sympathy and scorn, "i know you like the poor goof, sandy, but there ought to be some limit to your amorous servitude! there are office hours! you're supposed to knock off at five. it's seven-thirty now. and what will being decent to that unshaven adonis get you? he'll take you for granted, and go off and marry a nitwit of a blonde who'll hate you because you'd have been so much better for him. and she'll get you fired and what then?" "joe won't marry anybody else," said sandy forlornly. "if he could fall for anybody, it'd be me. he told me so. he started to propose to me friday night." "so?" said pam, with the superior air of a younger sister. "did he say enough for you to sue him?" "he can't fall in love with anybody," said sandy. "he wants to marry me, but he's emotionally tangled up with a female he's had dreams about since he was eleven." "i thought i'd heard everything," said pam. "but that--" sandy explained morosely. as she told it, it was not quite the same picture burke had given her. her account of the trees in burke's recurrent dream was accurate enough, and the two moons in the sky, and the fluting, arbitrary tones from behind him. pam had heard their duplicates, along with all the broadcast listeners in the united states. but as sandy told it, the running figure beyond the screen of foliage was not at all the shadowy movement burke described. sandy had her own ideas, and they colored her account. there was a stirring inside the small office building. burke had waked. he turned over and blinked, astonished to find himself with blankets over him and a pillow under his head. it was dark inside the office, too. "joe," called pam in the darkness, "sandy and i have been waiting for you to wake up. you took your time about it! we've got some coffee for you." burke got to his feet and stumbled to the light switch. "fine!" he said ruefully. "somebody got blankets for me, too! nice business, this!" they heard him moving about. he folded the blankets that had been laid on the floor for him. he moved across the room and turned on sandy's desk radio. it hummed, preliminary to playing. he came to the door. "i'm sorry," he apologized. "i worked pretty hard pretty long, and when the thing was finished i passed out. i feel better now. did you actually say you had some coffee?" sandy passed up a cardboard container. "pam's compliments," she said. "we've been waiting until you slept off your working binge. we didn't want to leave you. booger-men sound likelier than they used to." a voice from the radio broke in. " _... o'clock news. a signal has been beamed toward the space-broadcast transmitter by the parabolic reflector of the bradenville radar telescope, acting as a mirror to concentrate the message toward asteroid m- . so far there has been no reply. we are keeping a circuit open, and if or when an answer is received we will issue a special bulletin.... the san francisco giants announced today that in a three-way trade--_" burke had listened to nothing else while the news broadcast dealt with space signals, but other news did not mean very much to him just now. he sipped at the cardboard cup of coffee. "i think," said pam, "that since you've waked up i'll take my big sister home. you'll be all right now." "yes," said burke abstractedly. "i'll be all right now." "really, joe, you shouldn't work day and night without a break!" sandy said. "and you shouldn't have bothered to stand watch over me," he answered. "well, i guess the shed should be clear of battery fumes by now. i'll go over and see." burke came back in a few minutes. "this thing i made is pretty tough," he observed. "it smashed into a brick wall, but it was the wall that suffered." he fingered it thoughtfully. "i had that dream again just now," he volunteered. "while i was asleep on the floor. sandy, you know about such things better than i do. how much money have i in the bank? i'm going to build something and it'll probably cost a lot." sandy's hands had clenched when he mentioned the dream. so far, it had done more damage than any dream had a right to do. but it looked as if it were about to do more. she told him his balance in the bank. he nodded. "maybe i can stretch it," he observed. "i'm going to--" the music had stopped inside the office. the voice of an announcer interrupted. "_special bulletin! special bulletin! our signals to space have been answered! special bulletin! here is a direct report from the bradenton radar telescope which, within the hour, broadcast a message to space!_" a tinny, agitated voice came from the radio, punctuated by those tiny beeping sounds that say that a telephone talk is being recorded. "_a definite reply to the human signal to asteroid m- has been received. it is cryptic, like the first message from space, but is unmistakably a response to the eight-hundred-kilowatt message beamed toward the source of those world-wide-received strange sounds...._" the tinny voice went on. chapter in retrospect, events moved much faster than reason would suggest. the first signal from space had been received on a friday. at that time--when the first flutings were picked up by a tape recorder on kalua--the world had settled down to await the logical consequences of its history. it was not a comfortable settling-down, because the consequences were not likely to be pleasant. earth was beginning to be crowded, and there were whole nations whose populations labored bitterly with no hope of more than subsistence during their lifetime, and left a legacy of equal labor and scarcer food for their descendants. there were hydrogen bombs and good intentions, and politics and a yearning for peace, and practically all individual men felt helpless before a seemingly merciless march of ominous events. at that time, too, nearly everybody worked for somebody else, and a large part of the employed population justified its existence by the length of time spent at its place of employment. nobody worried about what he did there. in the richer nations, everybody wanted all the rewards earned for them by generations gone by, but nobody was concerned about leaving his children better off. an increasingly smaller number of people were willing to take responsibility for keeping things going. there'd been a time when half of earth fought valiantly to make the world safe for democracy. now, in the richer nations, most men seemed to believe that the world had been made safe for a four-card flush, which was the hand they'd been dealt and which nobody tried to better. then the signals came from space. they called for a showdown, and very few people were prepared for it. eminent men were called on to take command and arrange suitable measures. they immediately acted as eminent men so often do; they took action to retain their eminence. their first instinct was caution. when a man is important enough, it does not matter if he never does anything. it is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. they were not so concerned to do anything right. burke, however, was not important enough to mind making a mistake or two. and there were other non-famous people to whom the extra-terrestrial sounds suggested action instead of precautions. mostly they were engineers with no reputations to lose. they'd scrabbled together makeshift equipment, ignored official channels, and in four days--friday to monday--they had eight hundred kilowatts ready to fling out toward emptiness, in response to the signal from m- . the transmission they'd sent out was five minutes long. it began with a re-transmission of part of the message earth had received. this plainly identified the signal from earth as a response to the cryptic flutings. then there were hummings. one dot, two dots, three, and so on. these hummings assured whoever or whatever was out yonder that the inhabitants of earth could count. then it was demonstrated that two dots plus two dots were known to equal four dots, and that four and four added up to eight. the inhabitants of earth could add. there followed the doubtless interesting news that two and two and two and two was eight. humanity could multiply. arithmetic, in fact, filled up three minutes of the eight-hundred-kilowatt beam-signal. then a hearty human voice--the president of a great university--said warmly: "_greetings froth earth! we hope for splendid things from this opening of communication with another race whose technical achievements fill us with admiration._" more flutings repeated that the earth signal was intended for whoever or whatever used flutelike sounds for signaling purposes, and the message came to an end with an arch comment from the university president: "_we hope you'll answer!_" when this elaborate hodge-podge had been flung out to immensity, the prominent persons who'd devised it shook hands with each other. they were confident that if intelligent beings did exist where the mournful musical notes came from, interplanetary or interstellar communication could be said to have begun. the engineers who'd sweated together the equipment simply hoped their signal would reach its target. it did. it went out just after the end of a reception of a five-minute broadcast from m- . seventy-nine minutes should have passed before any other sound from m- . but an answer came much more quickly than that. in thirty-four minutes, five and three-tenth seconds, a new signal came from beyond the sky. it came in a rush. it came from the transmitter out in orbit far beyond mars. it came with the same volume. it started with an entirely new grouping of the piping tones. there was a specific crispness in their transmission, as if a different individual handled the transmitter-keys. the flutings went on for three minutes, then were replaced by entirely new sounds. these were sharp, distinct, crackling noises. a last sequence of the opening flutings, and the message ended abruptly. but silence did not follow. instead, a steady, sonorous, rhythmic series of beeping noises began and kept on interminably. they were remarkably like the directional signals of an airway beacon. when the news broadcasts of the united states reported the matter, the beeping sounds were still coming in. and they continued to come in for seventy-nine minutes. then they broke off and the new transmission was repeated. the original message was no longer sent. robot transmitter or no robot transmitter, the first message had been transmitted at regular intervals for something like seventy-six hours and then, instantly on receipt of the beginning of an answer, a new broadcast took its place. the reaction had been immediate. the distance between m- and earth could be computed exactly. the time needed for the earth signal to arrive was known exactly. and the instant--the very instant--the first sound from earth reached m- , the second message had begun. there was no pause to receive all the earth greeting, or even part of it. the reaction was immediate and automatic. automatic. that was the significant thing. the new message was already prepared when the earth signal arrived. it was set up to be transmitted on receipt of the earliest possible proof that it would be received. the effect of this rapid response was one of tremendous urgency--or absolute arrogance. the implication was that what earth had to say was unimportant. the earth signal had not been listened to. instead, earth was told something. something crisp and arbitrary. maybe there could be amiable chit-chat later on, but earth must listen first! the beepings could not be anything but a guide, a directional indicator, to be followed to m- . the message, now changed, might amount to an offer of friendship, but it also could be a command. if it were a command, the implications were horrifying. at the moment of first release, the news had only a limited effect. most of europe was asleep and much of asia had not waked up yet. but the united states was up and stirring. the news went to every corner of the nation with the speed of light. radio stations stopped all other transmissions to announce the frightening event. it is of record that four television stations on the north american continent actually broke into filmed commercials to announce that m- had made a response to the signal from earth. never before in history had a paid advertisement been thrust aside for news. in the united states, then, there was agitation, apprehension, indignation, and panic. perhaps the only place where anything like calmness remained was inside and outside the office of burke development, inc., where burke felt a singular relief at this evidence that he wasn't as much of a fool as he feared. "well," he thought. "it looks like there _is_ something or somebody out there. if i'd been sure about it earlier--but it probably wasn't time." "what does this mean?" asked sandy. "this horrible spell of around-the-clock working! are you still trying to do something about the space signals?" "listen, sandy," said burke. "i've been ashamed of that crazy dream of mine all my life. i've thought it was proof there was something wrong with me. i'll still have to keep it secret, or nice men in white coats will come and get me. but i'm going to do what all enterprising young men are advised to do--dream greatly and then try to realize my dream. it's quite impossible and it'll bankrupt me, but i think i'm going to have fun." he grinned at the two sisters as he led them firmly to sandy's car. "shoo!" he said pleasantly. "you'd better go home now. i'll be leaving in minutes, heading for schenectady first. i need some electric stuff. then i'll go elsewhere. there'll be some shipments arriving, sandy. take care of them for me, will you?" he closed the car door and waved, still grinning. pam fumed and started the motor. moments later their car trundled down the highway toward town. sandy clenched her fists. "what can you do with a man like that?" she demanded. "why do i bother with him?" "shall i answer," asked pam, "or shall i be discreetly sympathetic? i wouldn't want him! but unfortunately, if you do--" "i know," said sandy forlornly. "i know, dammit!" burke was not thinking of either of them then. he opened the office safe, put the six-inch object inside, and took out his checkbook. then he locked up, got into his car, and headed away from the plant and the town he'd been brought up in. he was unshaven and uncombed and this was an inappropriate time to start out on a drive of some hundreds of miles, but it was a pleasing sensation to know that a job had turned up that nobody else would even know how to start to work on. he drove very cheerfully to a cross-country expressway and turned onto it. he settled down at once to drive and to think. he drove practically all night. shortly after sunrise he stopped to buy a razor and brush and comb and to make himself presentable. he was the first customer on hand when a schenectady firm specializing in electronic apparatus for seagoing ships opened up for business. he ordered certain equipment from a list he'd written on an envelope while eating breakfast. the morning papers, naturally, were full of the story of the answer to the earth signal sent out to m- . the morning comedians made jokes about it, and in every one of the business offices burke visited there was some mention of it. he listened, but had nothing to say. the oddity of his purchases caused no remark. his was a small firm, but a man working in research and development needs strange stuff sometimes. he ordered two radar units to be modified in a particular fashion, air-circulation pumps of highly specialized design to be changed in this respect and that. he had trouble finding the electric generators he wanted and had to pay heavily for alterations in them, and even more heavily for a promise of delivery in days instead of weeks. he bought a self-contained diving suit. he was busy for three days, buying things by day, designing by night and finding out new things to order. on the second day, united states counter-intelligence reported that the russians were trying to signal m- on their own. an american satellite picked up the broadcast. the russians denied it, and continued to try. burke made arrangements for the delivery of aluminum-alloy bars, rods, girders, and plates; for plaster of paris in ton lots; for closed-circuit television equipment. once he called sandy to give her an order to be filled locally. it was lumber, mostly slender strips of lathing, to be on hand when he returned. "all kinds of material is turning up," said sandy. "there've been six deliveries this morning. i'm signing receipts for it because i don't know what else to do. but won't you please give me copies of the orders you've placed so i can check what arrives?" "i'll put 'em in the mail--airmail," promised burke. "but only six deliveries? there ought to be dozens! get after these people on long distance, will you?" and he gave her a list of names. burke said suddenly, "i had that dream again last night. twice in a week. that's unusual." "no comment," sandy said. she hung up, and burke was taken aback. but there was hardly any comment she could make. burke himself had no illusion that he would ever come to a place where there were two moons in the sky and trees with ribbonlike leaves. and if he did--unthinkable as that might be--he could not imagine finding the person for whom he felt such agonized anxiety. the dream, recurrent, fantastic, or whatnot, simply could not represent a reality of the past, present, or future. such things don't happen. but burke continued to be moved much more by the emotional urge of the repeated experience than by intellectual curiosity about his having dreamed repeatedly of signals exactly like those from space, long before such signals ever were. he made ready to try to do something about those signals. and, all reason to the contrary notwithstanding, to him they meant a world with two moons and strange vegetation and such emotion as nothing on earth had ever quite stirred up--though he felt pretty deeply about sandy, at that. so he went intently from one supplier of exotic equipment to another, spending what money he had for an impossibility. impossible because asteroid m- was not over two miles through at its largest dimension, and therefore could not possibly have an atmosphere and certainly not trees, and it could not own even a single moon! he spent one day at a small yachting port with a man for whom he'd worked out a special process of fiberglas yacht construction. through that process, holmes yachts could be owned by people who weren't millionaires. holmes was a large, languid, sunburned individual who built yachts because he liked them. he had much respect for burke, even after burke asked his help and explained what for. but that was the day the russians launched an unmanned space-probe headed toward m- . that development may have influenced holmes to do as burke asked. later on, it transpired that the probe originally had been designed and built as a cargo-carrier to take heavy loads to earth's moon. the russian space service had planned to present the rest of earth with a _fait accompli_ even more startling than the first sputnik. they had intended to send a fleet of drone cargo-rockets to the moon and then assemble them into a colony. broadcasts would triumphantly explain that the soviet social system was responsible for another technical achievement. but to get a man out to m- was now so much more important a propaganda device that the cargo-carriers were converted into fuel-tankers and the first sent aloft. at ten thousand miles up, when the third booster-stage should have given it a decisive thrust, one of the probe's rocket engines misfired. the space-probe tilted, veered wildly from its course, and went on accelerating splendidly toward nowhere. and still the steady, urgent beeping sounds continued to come to earth, with every seventy-nine minutes a broadcast containing one section of crackling sounds and a tone of extremest urgency. the day after the probe's ineffectual departure, burke got back to his plant. he brought holmes with him. together, they looked over the accumulated material for burke's enterprise and began to sort out the truckloads of plaster of paris, masses of punched-sheet aluminum, girders, rods, beams of shining metal, cased dynamos, crated pumps, tanks, and elaborately padded objects whose purpose was not immediately clear. sandy was overwhelmed by the job of inventorying, indexing, and otherwise making the material available for use as desired. there were bales of fluffy white cloth and drums and drums of liquids which insisted on leaking, and smelled very badly when they did. but burke found some items not yet on hand, and fretted, so sandy brought her sister pam into the office to add to the office force. sandy and pam worked quite as hard in the office as burke and holmes in the construction shed. they telephoned protests at delays, verified shipments, scolded shipping-clerks, argued with transportation-system expediters, wrote letters, answered letters, compared invoices with orders, sternly battled with negligence and delays of all kinds, and in between kept the books of burke development, inc., up to date so that at any instant burke could find out how much money he'd spent and how little remained. the two girls in the office were necessary to the operations which at first centered in the construction shed, but shortly began to show up outside. four workmen arrived from the holmes' yacht shipyard. they looked at blueprints and drawings made by holmes and burke together, regarded with pained expressions the material they were to use, and set to work. this was on the day the second russian space-probe lifted from somewhere in the caucasus mountains at : a.m., local time. the second probe did not veer off its proper line. its four boosters fired at appropriate intervals and it went streaking off toward emptiness almost straight away from the sun. it left behind it a thin whining transmission which was not at all like the beepings of the asteroid transmitter. in two days a framework of struts and laths took form outside the construction shed. it looked more like a mock-up of a radio telescope than anything else, but it was smaller and had a different shape. it was an improbable-looking bowl. under holmes' supervision, dozens of sacks of plaster of paris found their way into it, coating it roughly on the outside and very smoothly within. it was then lined tenderly with carefully cut sections of fluffy cloth, with bars and beams and girders placed between the layers. then reeking drums of liquid were moved to the working-site and their contents saturated the glass-wool. the smell was awful, so the workmen knocked off for a day until it diminished. but sandy and pam continued to expostulate with shippers by long-distance, type letters threatening lawsuits if orders were not filled immediately, and once found that items burke indignantly demanded had come in and holmes had carted them off and used them without notifying anybody. that was the day pam threatened to resign. "it looks like a pudding," grumbled pam, after sandy had mollified her and burke had apologized for having made her fight needlessly with two transport-lines, a shipping department, and a vice-president in charge of sales. "and they act like it was a baby!" "it'll be a ship," said sandy. "you know what kind." "i'll believe it when i see it," said pam. then she demanded indignantly, "has joe looked at you twice since this nonsense started?" "no," admitted sandy. "he works all the time. at night he has a receiver tuned to the beepings to make sure he knows if the broadcast changes again. the russians are still trying to make a two-way contact. but the broadcast just keeps on, ignoring everybody." then she said, "anyhow, joe's going to feel awful if it doesn't work. i've got to be around to pick up the pieces of his vanity and put them together again." "huh!" said pam. "catch me doing that!" at just that moment holmes came into the office with a finger dripping blood. he had been supervising and, at the same time, assisting in the building of an additional section of laths and struts and he was annoyed with himself for the small injury which interfered with his work. pam did the bandaging. she cooed over him distressedly, and had him grinning before the dressing was finished. he went back to work very much pleased with himself. "i," said sandy, "wouldn't act like you just did!" "sister, darling," said pam, "i won't cramp your act. don't you criticize mine! that large wounded character is as attractive as anything i've seen in months." "but i feel," said sandy, "as if i hadn't seen joe in years!" their viewpoint was strictly feminine and geared to female ideas and aspirations. but, in fact, they were probably as satisfied as two girls could be. they were on the side lines of interesting happenings which were being prepared by interesting men. they were useful enough to the enterprise to belong to it without doing anything outstanding enough to amount to rivalry with the men. from a girl's standpoint, it wasn't at all bad. but neither burke nor holmes even faintly guessed at the appraisal of their work by sandy and pam. to holmes, the task was fascinating because it was a ship he was building. it was not a beautiful object, to be sure. if the lath-and-plaster mould were removed, the thing inside it would look rather like an obese small whale. there were recesses in its rotund sides in which distinctly eccentric apparatus appeared. its interior was even more curious. and still it was a ship. holmes found deep satisfaction in fitting its interior parts into place. it was like, but not the same as, equipping a small vessel with fathometers, radars, direction-finders, air-conditioners, stoves, galleys, heads and refrigerators without getting it crowded. to be sure, no seagoing ship would have sections of hydroponic wall-garden installed, nor would an auxiliary schooner normally have six pairs of closed-circuit television cameras placed outside for a view in each and every direction. this ship had such apparatus. but to holmes the building of what burke had designed was an extremely attractive task. burke had less fun. he'd set up a huge metal lathe in the construction shed, and he labored at carving out of a specially built-up swedish-iron shaft a series of twenty-odd magnet-cores like the triple unit he considered successful. each of the peculiar shapes had to be carved out of the shaft, and all had to remain part of the shaft when completed. then each had to be wound with magnet-wire, coated with plastic as it was wound. then a bronze tube had to be formed over all, with no play of any sort anywhere. the task required the workmanship of a jeweller and the patience of job. and burke had had enough experience with new constructions to be acutely doubtful that this would be right when it was done. the russians sent up a third space-probe, aimed at asteroid m- . it functioned perfectly. three days later, a fourth. three days later still, a fifth. their aim with the fifth was not too good. the beeping sounds continued to come in from space. the second message remained the same but the crackling sounds changed. there was a systematic and consistent variation in what they apparently had to say. m.i.t. discovered the modification. when its report reached the newspapers, sandy invaded the construction shed to show burke the news account. oil-smeared and harassed, he stopped work to read it. "hell!" he said querulously. "i should've had somebody watching for this! i figured the second broadcast was telling us something that would change as time went on. they're telemetering something to us. i'd guess there's an emergency or an ultimatum in the works, and this is telling how fast it's coming to a crisis. but i'm already working as fast as i can!" "some cases marked 'instruments' came this morning," sandy told him. "they're the solidest shipping cases i ever saw. and the bills for them!" "wire keller," said burke. "tell him they're here and to come along." "who's keller?" asked sandy. "and what's his address?" burke blew up unreasonably, and sandy said "i quit!" in seconds, he had apologized and assured sandy that she was quite right and that he was an idiot. of course she couldn't know who keller was. keller was the man who would install the instruments in the ship outside. burke gave her his address. sandy was not appeased. burke ran a grimy hand despairingly through his hair. "sandy," he protested, "bear with me just a little while! in just a few more days this thing will be finished, and i'll know whether i'm the prize imbecile of history or whether i've actually managed to do something worth while! bear with me like you would with a half-wit or a delinquent child or something. please, sandy--" she turned her back on him and walked out of the shed. but she didn't quit. burke turned back to his work. the russians sent up another probe. it went off course. there were now six unmanned russian probes in emptiness, of which four were lined up reasonably well along the route which a manned probe, if one were sent up, should ultimately travel. the advance probes formed an ingenious approach to the problem of getting a man farther out in space than any man had been before, but it was horribly risky. but apparently the russians could afford to take such risks. the americans couldn't. they had a settled policy of spending a dollar instead of a man. it was humanitarian, but it had one drawback. there was a tendency to keep on spending dollars and not ever let a man take a chance. the russians had four fuel-carrying drones in line out in space. if a ship could grapple them in turn and refuel, it might make the journey to m- in eight or ten weeks instead of as many months. but it was not easy to imagine such a success. and as for getting back.... the beeping sounds continued to be received by earth. a short man with thin hair arrived at burke development, inc. his name was keller, and his expression was pleasant enough, but he was so sparing of words as to seem almost speechless. sandy watched as he unpacked the instruments in the massive shipping cases. the instruments themselves were meaningless to her. they had dials, and some had gongs, and one or two had unintelligible things printed on paper strips. at least one in the last category was a computer. keller unpacked them reverently and made sure that not a speck of dust contaminated any one. when he carried them out to the hull, still concealed by the lath-and-plaster exterior mould, he walked with the solemn care of a man bearing treasure. that day sandy saw him talking to burke. burke spoke, and keller smiled and nodded. only once did he open his mouth to say something. then he could not have said more than four words. he went happily back to his instruments. the next day, burke made what was intended to be a low-power test of the long iron bar he'd machined so painstakingly and wound so carefully before enclosing it in the bronze outer case. he'd worked on it for more than two weeks. he prepared the test very carefully. the six-inch test model had lain on a workbench and had been energized through a momentary-contact switch. the full-scale specimen was clamped in a great metal lathe, which in turn was shackled with half-inch steel cable to the foundations of the construction shed. if the pseudo-magnet flew anywhere this time it would have to break through a tremendous restraining force. the switch was discarded. a condenser would discharge through the windings via a rectifier. there would be a single damped surge of current of infinitesimal duration. holmes passed on the news. he got along very well with pam these days. at first he'd been completely careless of his appearance. then pam took measures to distract him from total absorption in the construction job, and he responded. nowadays, he tended to work in coveralls and change into more formal attire before approaching the office. sandy came upon him polishing his shoes, once, and she told pam. pam beamed. now he came lounging into the office and said amiably, "the moment of truth has arrived, or will in minutes." sandy looked anxious. pam said, "is that an invitation to look on at the kill?" "burke's going to turn juice into the thing he's been winding by hand and jittering over. he's worried. he can think of seven thousand reasons why it shouldn't work. but if it doesn't, he'll be a pretty sick man." he glanced at sandy. "i think he could do with somebody to hold his hand at the critical moment." "we'll go," said sandy. pam got up from her desk. "she won't hold his hand," she explained to holmes, "but she'll be there in case there are some pieces to be picked up. of him." they went across the open space to the construction shed. it was a perfectly commonplace morning. the very temporary mass of lumber and laths and plaster, forming a mould for something unseen inside, was the only unusual thing in sight. there were deep truck tracks by the shed. one of the workmen came out of the air-lock door on the bottom of the mould and lighted a cigarette. "no smoking inside," said holmes. "we're cementing things in place with plastic." sandy did not hear. she was first to enter the shed. burke was moving around the object he'd worked so long to make. it now appeared to be simply a piece of bronze pipe some fifteen feet long and eight inches in diameter, with closed ends. it lay in the bed of an oversized metal lathe, which was anchored in place by cables. burke took a painstaking reading of the resistance of a pair of red wires, then of white ones, and then of black rubber ones, which stuck out of one end of the pipe. "the audience is here," said holmes. burke nodded. he said almost apologetically, "i'm putting in a minimum of power. maybe nothing will happen. it's pretty silly." sandy's hands twisted one within the other when he turned his back to her. he made connections, took a deep breath, and said in a strained voice, "here goes." he flipped a switch. there was a cracking sound. it was horribly loud. there was a crash. bricks began to fall. the end of the metal-lathe bounced out of a corner. steel cables gave off high-pitched musical notes which went down in tone as the stress on them slackened. one end of the lathe was gone--snapped off, broken, flung away into a corner. there was a hole in the brick wall, over a foot in diameter. the fifteen-foot object was gone. but they heard a high-pitched shrilling noise, which faded away into the distance. that afternoon the russians announced that their manned space-probe had taken off for asteroid m- . naturally, they delayed the announcement until they were satisfied that the launching had gone well. when they made their announcement, the probe was fifty thousand miles out, they had received a message from its pilot, and they predicted that the probe would land on m- in a matter of seven weeks. in a remote small corner of the afternoon newspapers there was an item saying that a meteorite had fallen in a ploughed field some thirty miles from where burke's contrivance broke loose. it made a crater twenty feet across. it could not be examined because it was covered with frost. burke had the devil of a time recovering it. but he needed it badly. especially since the russian probe had gone out from earth. he explained that it was a shipment to his plant, which had fallen out of an aeroplane, but the owner of the ploughed field was dubious. burke had to pay him a thousand dollars to get him to believe. that night he had his recurrent dream again. the fluting signals were very clear. chapter the public abruptly ceased to be interested in news of the signals. rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. the public was scared. throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn't human. evil spirits, ghosts, devils, werewolves, ghouls--all have roused maddened terror wherever they were believed in. because they were intelligent but not men. now, suddenly, the world seemed to realize that there was a _something_ out on a tiny frozen rock in space. it signaled plaintively to earth. it had to be intelligent to be able to send a signal for two hundred seventy million miles. but it was not a man. therefore it was a monster. therefore it was horrible. therefore it was deadly and intolerable and scarey, and humans abruptly demanded not to hear any more about it. perhaps they thought that if they didn't think about it, it would go away. newspaper circulations dropped. news-magazine sales practically vanished. a flood of hysterical letters demanded that the broadcasting networks leave such revolting things off the air. and this reaction was not only in america. violent anti-american feeling arose in europe, which psychologists analyzed as resentment caused by the fact that the americans had answered the first broadcast. if they hadn't answered the first, there wouldn't have been a second. but also, even more violent anti-russian feeling rose up, because the russians had started a man off to meddle with the monster who piped so pleadingly. this antipathy to space caused a minor political upset in the kremlin itself, where a man with a name ending in _ov_ was degraded to much lower official rank and somebody with a name ending in _sky_ took his place. this partly calmed the russian public but had little effect anywhere else. the world was frightened. it looked for a victim, or victims, for its fear. once upon a time, witches were burned to ease the terrors of ignorance, and plague-spreaders were executed in times of pestilence to assure everybody that now the plague would cease since somebody had been killed for spreading it. organizations came into being with the official and impassioned purpose of seeing that space research ceased immediately. even more violent organizations demanded the punishment of everybody who had ever considered space travel a desirable thing. congress cut some hundreds of millions from a guided-missile-space-exploration appropriation as a starter. a poor devil of a crackpot in santa monica, california, revealed what he said was a spaceship he'd built in his back yard to answer the signals from m- . he intended to charge a quarter admission to inspect it, using the money to complete the drive apparatus. the thing was built of plywood and could not conceivably lift off the ground, but a mob wrecked his house, burned the puerile "spaceship" and would have lynched its builder if they'd thought to look in a cellar vegetable closet. other crackpots who were more sensitive to public feelings announced the picking up of messages addressed to the distant something. the messages, said this second class of crackpot, were reports from spies who had been landed on earth from flying saucers during the past few decades. they did not explain how they were able to translate them. a rush of flying-saucer sightings followed inevitably--alleged to be landing-parties from m- --and in peoria, illinois, a picnicking party sighted an unidentified flying object shaped like a soup spoon, the handle obviously being its tail. experienced newspapermen anticipated reports of the sighting of unidentified flying objects shaped like knives and forks as soon as somebody happened to think of it. sandy called a conference on the subject of security. she did not look well, nowadays. she worried. other people thought about the messages from space, but sandy had to think of something more concrete. six months earlier, the construction going on within a plaster of paris mould would have been laughed at, tolerantly, and some hopeful people might have been respectful about it. but now it was something utterly intolerable to public opinion. newspapers who'd lost circulation by talking sanely about space travel now got it back by denouncing the people who'd answered the first broadcast. and naturally, with the whole idea of outer space agitatedly disapproved, everybody connected with it was suspected of subversion. "a reporter called up today," said sandy. "he said he'd like to do a feature story on burke development's new research triumph--the new guided missile that flew thirty miles and froze everything around where it landed. i said it fell out of an aeroplane and the last completed project was for interiors, inc. then he said that he'd been talking to one of mr. holmes' men and the man said something terrific was under way." burke looked uneasy. holmes said uncomfortably, "there's no law against what we're building, but somebody may introduce a bill in congress any day." "that would be reasonable under other circumstances. there's a time for things to be discovered. they shouldn't be accomplished too soon. but the time for the ship out there is right now!" burke said. pam raised her eyebrows. "yes?" "those signals have to be checked up on," explained burke. "it's necessary now. but it could have been bad if our particular enterprise had started, say, two years ago. just think what would have happened if atomic fission had been worked out in peacetime ten years before world war two! scientific discoveries were published then as a matter of course. everybody'd have known how to make atom bombs. hitler would have had them, and so would mussolini. how many of us would be alive?" sandy interrupted, "the reporter wants to do a feature story on what burke development is making. i said you were working on a bomb shelter for quantity production. he asked if the rocket you shot off through the construction-shed wall was part of it. i said there'd been no rocket fired. he didn't believe me." "who would?" asked holmes. "hmmmmm," said burke. "tell him to come look at what we're doing. the ship can pass for a bomb shelter. the wall-garden units make sense. i'm going to dig a big hole in the morning to test the drive-shaft in. it'll look like i intend to bury everything. a bomb shelter should be buried." "you mean you'll let him inside?" demanded sandy. "sure!" said burke. "all inventors are expected to be idiots. a lot of them are. he'll think i'm making an impossibly expensive bomb shelter, much too costly for a private family to buy. it will be typical of the inventive mind as reporters think of it. anyhow, everybody's always willing to believe other people fools. that'll do the trick!" pam said blandly, "sandy and i live in a boardinghouse, joe. you don't ask about such things, but an awfully nice man moved in a couple of days ago--right after that shaft got away and went flying thirty miles all by itself. the nice man has been trying to get acquainted." holmes growled, and looked both startled and angry when he realized it. pam added cheerfully, "most evenings i've been busy, but i think i'll let him take me to the movies. just so i can make us all out to be idiots," she added. "i'll make the hole big enough to be convincing," said burke. "sandy, you make inquiries for a rigger to lift and move the bomb shelter into its hole when it's ready. if we seem about to bury it, nobody should suspect us of ambitions they won't like." "why the hole, really?" asked sandy. "to put the shaft in," said burke. "i've got to get it under control or it won't be anything more than a bomb shelter." keller, the instrument man, had listened with cheerful interest and without speaking a word. now he made an indefinite noise and looked inquiringly at burke. burke said, explanatorily, "the shaft seems to be either on or off--either a magnet that doesn't quite magnetize, or something that's hell on wheels. it flew thirty miles without enough power supplied to it to make it quiver. that power came from somewhere. i think there's a clue in the fact that it froze everything around where it landed, in spite of traveling fast enough to heat up from air-friction alone. i've got some ideas about it." keller nodded. then he said urgently, "broadcast?" burke frowned, and turned to sandy. "that's part of the broadcast from space that changes--is it still changing?" "still changing," said sandy. "i didn't think to ask you to keep a check on that. thanks for thinking of it, sandy. maybe someday i can make up to you for what you've been going through." "i doubt it very much," said sandy grimly. "i'll call the reporter back." she waited for them to leave. when they'd gone, she moved purposefully toward the telephone. pam said, "did you hear that growl when i said i'd go to the movies with somebody else? i'm having fun, sandy!" "i'm not," said sandy. "you're too efficient," the younger sister said candidly. "you're indispensable. burke couldn't begin to be able to put this thing through without you. and that's the trouble. you should be irresistible instead of essential." "not with joe," said sandy bitterly. she picked up the telephone to call the newspaper. pam looked very, very reflective. there was a large deep pit close by the plaster mould when the reporter came next afternoon. a local rigger had come a little earlier and was still there, estimating the cost for lifting up the contents of the mould and lowering it precisely in place to be buried as a bomb shelter under test should be. it was a fortunate coincidence, because the reporter brought two other men who he said were civilian defense officials. they had come to comment on the quality of the bomb shelter under development. it was not too convincing a statement. when they left, burke was not happy. they knew too much about the materials and equipment he'd ordered. one man had let slip the fact that he knew about the very expensive computer burke had bought. it could have no conceivable use in a bomb shelter. both men painstakingly left it to burke to mention the thirty-mile flight of a bronze object which arrived coated with frost of such utter frigidity that it appeared to be liquid-air snow instead of water-ice. burke did not mention it. he was excessively uneasy when the reporter's car took them away. he went into the office. pam was in the midst of a fit of the giggles. "one of them," she explained, "is the nice man who moved into the boardinghouse. he wants to take me to the movies. did you notice that they came when it ought to be my lunchtime? he asked when i went to lunch ..." holmes came in. he scowled. "one of my men says that one of those characters has been buying him drinks and asking questions about what we're doing." burke scowled too. "we can let your men go home in three days more." "i'm going to start loading up," holmes announced abruptly. "you don't know how to stow stuff. you're not a yachtsman." "i haven't got the shaft under control yet," said burke. "you'll get it," grunted holmes. he went out. pam giggled again. "he doesn't want me to go to the movies with the nice man from security," she told burke. "but i think i'd better. i'll let him ply me with popcorn and innocently let slip that sandy and i know you've been warned that bomb shelters won't find a mass market unless they sell for less than the price of an extra bathroom. but if you want to go broke we don't care." "give me three days more," said burke harassedly. "well try," said sandy suddenly. "pam can fix up a double date with one of her friend's friends and we'll both work on them." burke frowned absorbedly and went out. sandy looked indignant. he hadn't protested. burke got holmes' four workmen out of the ship and had them help him roll the bronze shaft to the pit and let it down onto a cradle of timbers. now if it moved it would have to penetrate solid earth. the most trivial of computations showed that when the bronze shaft had flown thirty miles, it hadn't done it on the energy of a condenser shorted through its coils. the energy had come from somewhere else. burke had an idea where it was. presently he verified it. the cores and windings he'd adapted from a transparent hand-weapon seen in an often-repeated dream--those cores and windings did not make electromagnets. they made something for which there was not yet a name. when current flows through a standard electromagnet, the poles of its atoms are more or less aligned. they tend to point in a single direction. but in this arrangement of wires and iron no magnetism resulted, yet, the random motion of the atoms in their framework of crystal structure was coördinated. in any object above absolute zero all the atoms and their constituent electrons and nuclei move constantly in all directions. in such a core as burke had formed and repeated along the shaft's length, they all tried to move in one direction at the same time. simultaneously, a terrific surge of current appeared in the coils. a high-speed poleward velocity developed in all the substance of the shaft. it was the heat-energy contained in the metal, all turned instantly into kinetic energy. and when its heat-energy was transformed to something else, the shaft got cold. once this fact was understood, control was easy. a single variable inductance in series with the windings handled everything. in a certain sense, the gadget was a magnet with negative--minus--self-inductance. when a plus inductance in series made the self-inductance zero, neither plus nor minus, the immensely powerful device became docile. a small current produced a mild thrust, affecting only part of the random heat-motion of atoms and molecules. a stronger current produced a greater one. the resemblance to an electromagnet remained. but the total inductance must stay close to zero or utterly violent and explosive forward thrust would develop, and it was calculable only in thousands of gravities. burke had worked for three weeks to make the thing, but he developed a control system for it in something under four hours. that same night they got the bronze shaft into the ship. it fitted perfectly into the place left for it. burke knew now exactly what he was doing. he set up his controls. he was able to produce so minute a thrust that the lath-and-plaster mould merely creaked and swayed. but he knew that he could make the whole mass surge unstoppably from its place. holmes sent his workmen home. sandy and pam went to the movies with two very nice men who pumped them deftly of all sorts of erroneous information about burke and holmes and keller and what they were about. the nice men did not believe that information, but they did believe that sandy and pam believed it. for themselves, the combination of an object made by burke which flew thirty miles plus the presence of holmes, who built plastic yachts, and the arrival of keller to adjust instruments of which they had a complete list--these things could not be overlooked. but they did feel sorry for two nice and not over-bright girls who might be involved in very serious trouble. holmes and burke installed directional controls, wiring, recording instruments, etc. stores and water and oxygen, for emergency use only, went into the lath-and-plaster construction. holmes took a hammer and chisel and painstakingly cracked the mould so that the top half could be lifted off, leaving the bottom half exposed to the open air and sky. then the broadcast from space cut off. it had been coming continuously for something like five weeks; one sharp, monotonous note every two seconds, with a longer, fluting broadcast every seventy-nine minutes. now a third, new message began. it was yet another grouping of the musical tones, with a much longer interval of specific crackling sounds. keller had adjusted every instrument and zestfully retested them over and over. burke asked him to see if the third space message compared in any way with the second. keller put them through a hook-up of instruments, beaming to himself, and the answer began to appear. newspapers burst into new headlines. "_ultimatum from space_" they thundered. "_threats from alien space travelers._" and as they presented the situation it seemed believable that the third message from the void was a threat. the first had been a call, requiring an answer. when the answer went out from earth, a second message replaced the call. it contained not only flute tones which might be considered to represent words, but cracklings which might be the equivalent of numbers. the continuous beepings between repetitions of the second message were plainly a directional signal to be followed to the message source. in this context, the newspapers furiously asserted that the third message was a threat. the first had been merely a summons, the second had been a command to repair to the signaling entities, and the third was a stern reiteration of the command, reinforced by threats. the human race does not take kindly to threats, especially when it feels helpless. in the united states, there was such explosive resentment as to require spread-eagle oratory by all public figures. the president declared that every space missile in store had been fitted with atomic-fusion warheads and that any alien spacecraft which appeared in american skies would be shot down immediately. congress reported out of committee a bill for rocket weapons which was stalled for six days because every senator and representative wanted to make a speech in its favor. it was the largest appropriation bill ever passed by congress, which less than five weeks before had cut two hundred millions out of a guided-missile-space-exploration budget. and in europe there was frenzy. for burke and holmes and sandy and pam and the smiling, inarticulate keller, the matter was deadly serious. fury such as the public felt constituted a witch-hunt in itself. suspicious private persons overwhelmed the fbi and the space agency with information about characters they were sure were giving military secrets to the space travelers on m- . there were reports of aliens skulking about american cities wearing luxuriant whiskers and dark glasses to conceal their non-human features. artists, hermits, and mere amateur beard-growers found it wise to shave, and spirit mediums, fortunetellers and, in the south, herb doctors reaped harvests by the sale of ominous predictions and infallible advice on how to escape annihilation from space. and burke development, inc., was building something that neither civilian defense nor the fbi believed was a bomb shelter. the three days burke had needed passed. a fourth. he and holmes practically abandoned sleep to get everything finished inside the plaster mould. keller happily completed his graphs and took them to burke. they showed that the cracklings, which presumably meant numbers, had been expanded. what they said was now told on a new scale. if the numbers had meant months or years, they now meant days and hours. if they had meant millions of miles, they now meant thousands or hundreds. burke was struggling with these implications when there was a tapping at the air-lock, through which all entry and egress from the ship took place. holmes opened the inner door. sandy and pam crawled through the lock which lay on its side instead of upright. sandy looked at burke. pam said amiably, "we figured the job was about finished and we wanted to see it. how do you fasten this door?" holmes showed her. the vessel that had been built inside the mould did not seem as large as the outside structure promised. it looked queer, too, because everything lay on its side. there were two compartments with a ladder between, but the ladder lay on the floor. the wall-gardens looked healthy under the fluorescent lamps which kept the grass and vegetation flourishing. there were instrument dials everywhere. sandy went to burke's side. "we're all but done," said burke tiredly, "and keller's just about proved what the signals are." "can we go with you?" asked sandy. "of course not," said burke. "the first message was a distress call. it had to be. only in a distress call would somebody go into details so any listener would know it was important. it called for help and said who needed it, and why, and where." pam turned to holmes. "can that air-lock be opened from outside?" it couldn't. not when it was fastened, as now. "somebody answered that call from earth," said burke heavily, "and the second message told more about what was wrong. the clickings, we think, are numbers that told how long help could be waited for, or something on that order. and then there was a beacon signal meant to lead whoever was coming to help to that place." keller smiled pleasantly at pam. he made an electrical connection and zestfully checked the result. "now there's a third message," said burke. "time's running out for whoever needs whatever help is called for. the clickings that seem to be numbers have changed. the--what you might call the scale of reportage--is new. they're telling us just how long they can wait or just how bad their situation is. they're saying that time is running out and they're saying, 'hurry!'" there was a thumping sound. only sandy and pam looked unsurprised. burke stared. sandy said firmly, "that's the police, joe. we've been going to the movies with people who want to talk about you. yesterday one of them confided to us that you were dangerous, and since he told us to get away from the office, we did. there might be shooting. he tipped us a little while ago." burke swore. there were other thumpings. louder ones. they were on the air-lock door. "if you try to put us out," said sandy calmly, "you'll have to open that door and they'll try to fight their way in--and then where'll you be?" keller turned from the checking of the last instrument he looked at the others with excited eyes. he waited. "i don't know what they can arrest you for," said sandy, "and maybe they don't either, unless it's unauthorized artillery practice. but you can't put us out! and you know darn well that unless you do something they'll chop their way in!" burke said, "dammit, they're not going to stop me from finding out if this thing works!" he squirmed in a chair which had its base firmly fastened to a wall and began to punch buttons. "hold fast!" he said angrily. "at least we'll see...." there were loud snapping sounds. there were creakings. the room stirred. it turned in a completely unbelievable fashion. violent crashings sounded outside. abruptly, a small television screen before burke acquired an image. it was of the outside world reeling wildly. holmes seized a hand-hold and grabbed pam. he kept her from falling as a side wall became the floor, and what had been the floor became a side wall, with the ceiling another. it seemed that all the cosmos changed, though only walls and floors changed places. suddenly everything seemed normal but new. the surface underfoot was covered with a rubber mat. the hydroponic wall-garden sections were now vertical. burke sat upright, and something over his head rotated a half-turn and was still. but it became coated with frost. more crashes. more small television screens acquired images. they showed the office of burke development, inc., against a tilted landscape. the landscape leveled. another showed the construction shed. one showed cloud formations, very bright and distinct. and two others showed a small, armed, formidable body of men instinctively backing away from the outside television lens. "so far," said burke, "it works. now--" there was a sensation as of a rapidly rising elevator. such a sensation usually lasts for part of a second. this kept on. one of the six television screens suddenly showed a view of burke development from straight overhead. the buildings and men and the four-acre enclosure dwindled rapidly. they were very tiny indeed and nearly all of the town was in the camera's field of vision when a vague whiteness, a cloud, moved in between. "the devil!" said burke. "now they'll alert fighter planes and rocket installations and decide that we're either traitors or aliens in disguise and better be shot down. i think we simply have to go on!" keller made gestures, his eyes bright. burke looked worried. "it shouldn't take more than ten minutes to get a nike aloft and after us. we must have been picked up by radar already.... we'll head north. we have to, anyhow." but he was wrong about the ten minutes. it was fifteen before a rocket came into view, pouring out enormous masses of drive-fumes. it flung itself toward the ship. chapter from a sufficient height and a sufficient distance, the rocket's repeated attacks must have appeared like the strikings and twistings of a gigantic snake. it left behind it a writhing trail of fumes which was convincingly serpentine. it climbed and struck, and climbed and struck, like a monstrous python flinging itself furiously at some invisible prey. six, seven, eight times it plunged frenziedly at the minute egg-shaped ship which scuttled for the heavens. each time it missed and writhed about to dart again. then its fuel gave out and for all intents and purposes it ceased to exist. the thick, opaque trail it left behind began to dissipate. the path of vapor scattered. it spread to rags and tatters of unsubstantiality through which the rocket plummeted downward in the long fall which is a spent rocket's ending. burke cautiously cut down the drive and awkwardly turned the ship on its side, heading it toward the north. the state of things inside the ship was one of intolerable tenseness. "i'm a new driver," said burke, "and that was a tough bit of driving to do." he glanced at the exterior-pressure meter. "there's no air outside to register. we must be fifty or sixty miles high and maybe still rising. but we're not leaking air." actually the plastic ship was eighty miles up. the sunlit world beneath it showed white patches of cloud in patterns a meteorologist would have found interesting. burke could see the valley of the st. lawrence river between the white areas. but the earth's surface was curiously foreshortened. what was beneath seemed utterly flat, and at the edge of the world all appeared distorted and unreal. holmes, still pale, asked, "how'd we get away from that rocket?" "we accelerated," said burke. "it was a defensive rocket. it was designed to knock down jet bomb carriers or ballistic missiles which travel at a constant speed. target-seeking missiles can lock onto the radar echo from a coasting ship, or one going at its highest speed because their computers predict where their target, traveling at constant speed, can be intercepted. we were never there. we were accelerating. missile-guidance systems can't measure acceleration and allow for it. they shouldn't have to." four of the six television screens showed dark sky with twinkling lights in it. on one there was the dim outline of the sun, reversed to blackness because its light was too great to be registered in a normal fashion. the other screen showed earth. there was a buzzing, and keller looked at burke. "rocket?" asked burke. keller shook his head. "radar?" keller nodded. "the dew line, most likely," said burke in a worried tone. "i don't know whether they've got rockets that can reach us. but i know fighter planes can't get this high. maybe they can throw a spread of air-to-air rockets, though.... i don't know their range." sandy said unsteadily, "they shouldn't do this to us! we're not criminals! at least they should ask us who we are and what we're doing!" "they probably did," said burke, "and we didn't answer. see if you can pick up some voices, keller." keller twirled dials and set indicators. voices burst into speech. "_reporting ufo sighted extreme altitude coördinates--first rocket exhausted fuel in multiple attacks and fell, sir._" another voice, very brisk, "_thirty-second squadron, scramble! keep top altitude and get under it. if it descends within range, blast it!_" another voice said crisply, "_coördinates three-seven jacob, one-nine alfred...._" keller turned the voices down to mutters because they were useless. burke said, "hell! we ought to land somewhere and check over the ship. keller, can you give me a microphone and a wavelength somebody will be likely to pick up?" keller shrugged and picked up masses of wire. he began to work on an as yet unfinished wiring job. evidently, the ship was not near enough to completion to be capable of a call to ground. it had taken off with many things not finished. burke, at the controls, found it possible to think of a number of items that should have been examined exhaustively before the ship left the mould in which it had been made. he worried. pam said in a strange voice, "i thought i might rate as a heroine for stowing away on this voyage, but i didn't think we'd have to dodge rockets and fighter planes to get away!" there was no comment. "i'm a beginner at navigation," said burke a little later, more worried than before. "i know we have to go out over the north magnetic pole, but how the hell do i find that?" keller beamed. he dropped his wiring job and went to the imposing bank of electronic instruments. he set one, and then another, and then a third. the action, of course, was similar to that of an airline pilot when he tunes in broadcasting stations in different cities. from each, a directional reading can be taken. where the lines of direction cross, there the transport plane must be. but keller turned to shortwave transmitters whose transmissions could be picked up in space. presently, eighty miles high, he wrote a latitude and longitude neatly on a slip of paper, wrote "north magnetic pole °w, °n, nearly," and after that a course. "hm," said burke. "thanks." then there was a relative silence inside the ship. only a faint mutter of voices came from assorted speakers that keller had first turned on and then turned down, and a small humming sound from a gyro. when they listened, they could also hear a high sweet musical tone. burke shifted this control here, and that control there, and lifted his hands. the ship moved on steadily. he checked this and that and the other thing. he was pleased. but there were innumerable things to be checked. holmes went down the ladder to the other compartment below. there were details to be looked into there, too. one of the screens portrayed earth from a height of seventy miles instead of eighty, now. others pictured the heavens, with very many stars shining unwinkingly out of blackness. keller got at his wires again and resumed the work of installing a ship-to-ground transmitter and its connection to an exterior-reflecting antenna. sandy watched burke as he moved about, testing one thing after another. from time to time he glanced at the screens which had to serve in the place of windows. once he went back to the control-board and changed an adjustment. "we dropped down ten miles," he explained to sandy. "and i suspect we're being trailed by jets down below." holmes meticulously inspected all storage places. he'd packed them when the ship lay on her side. burke read an instrument and said with satisfaction, "we're running on sunshine!" he meant that in empty space certain aluminum plates on the outside of the hull were picking up heat from the naked sun. the use of the drive-shaft lowered its temperature. metallic connection with the outside plates conducted heat inward from those plates. the drive-shaft was cold to the touch, but it could drop four hundred degrees fahrenheit before it ceased to operate as a drive. it was gratifying that it had cooled so little up to this moment. later keller tapped burke on the shoulder and jerked his thumb upward. "we go up now?" asked burke. keller nodded. burke carefully swung the ship to aim vertically. the views of solid earth slid from previous screens to new ones. the stars and the dark object which was the sun also moved across their screens to vanish and reappear on others. then burke touched the drive-control. once more they had the sensation of being in a rising elevator. and at just that moment spots appeared on the barren, icy, totally flattened terrain below. they were rocket-trails from target-seeking missiles which had reached the area of the north magnetic pole by herculean effort and were aimed at the radar-detected little ship by the heavy planes that carried them. from the surface of the earth, it would have seemed that monstrous columns of foaming white appeared and rose with incredible swiftness toward the heavens. they reached on, up and up and up, seeming to draw closer together as they became smaller in the distance, until all eight of them seemed to merge into a single point of infinite whiteness in the sunshine above the world's blanket of air. but nothing happened. nothing. the ship did not accelerate as fast as the rockets, but it had started first and it kept up longer. it went scuttling away to emptiness and the bottoms of the towers of rocket-smoke drifted away and away over the barren landscape all covered with ice and snow. when earth looked like a huge round ball that did not even seem very near, with a night side that was like a curious black chasm among the stars, the atmosphere of tension inside the ship diminished. keller completed his wiring of a ship-to-ground transmitter. he stood up, brushed off his hands and beamed. the little ship continued on. its temperature remained constant. the air in it smelled of growing green stuff. it was moist. it was warm. keller turned a knob and a tiny, beeping noise could be heard. dials pointed, precisely. "we couldn't go on our true course earlier," burke told sandy, "because we had to get out beyond the van allen bands of cosmic particles in orbit around the world. pretty deadly stuff, that radiation! in theory, though, all we have to do now is swing onto our proper course and follow those beepings home. we ought to be in harmless emptiness here. do you want to call washington?" she stared. "we need help to navigate--or astrogate," said burke. "call them, sandy. i'll get on the wire when a general answers." sandy went jerkily to the transmitter just connected. she began to speak steadily, "calling earth! calling earth! the spaceship you just shot all those rockets at is calling! calling earth!" it grew monotonous, but eventually a suspicious voice demanded further identification. it was a peculiar conversation. the five in the small spaceship were considered traitors on earth because they had exercised the traditional right of american citizens to go about their own business unhindered. it happened that their private purposes ran counter to the emotional state of the public. hence voices berated sandy and furiously demanded that the ship return immediately. sandy insisted on higher authority and presently an official voice identified itself as general so-and-so and sternly commanded that the ship acknowledge and obey orders to return to earth. burke took the transmitter. "my name's burke," he said mildly. "if you can arrange some sort of code, i'll tell you how to find the plans, and i'll give you the instructions you'll need to build more ships like this. they can follow us out. i think they should. i believe that this is more important than anything else you can think of at the moment." silence. then more sternness. but ultimately the official voice said, "i'll get a code expert on this." burke handed the microphone to sandy. "take over. we've got to arrange a cipher so nobody who listens in can learn about official business. we may use a social security number for a key, or the name of your maiden aunt's first sweetheart, or something we know and washington can find out but that nobody else can. hm. your last year's car-license number might be a starter. they can seal up the records on that!" sandy took over the job. what was transmitted to earth, of course, could be picked up anywhere over an entire hemisphere. somebody would assuredly pass on what they overheard to, say, nations the united states would rather have behind it than ahead of it in space-travel equipment. burke's suggestion of a cipher and instructions changed his entire status with authority. they'd rather have had him come back, but this was second best, and they took it. from burke's standpoint it was the only thing to do. he had no official standing to lend weight to his claim that lunatic magnet-cores with insanely complicated windings would amount to space-drive units. if he returned, in the nature of things there would be a long delay before mere facts could overcome theoreticians' convictions. but now he was forty-five thousand miles out from earth. he had changed course to home on the beeping signals from m- , was accelerating at one full gravity and had been doing so for forty-five minutes. and the small ship already had a velocity of twenty miles per second and was still going up. all the rockets that men had made, plus the russian manned-probe drifting outward now, had become as much outdated for space travel as flint arrowheads are for war. burke returned to the microphone when sandy left it to get a pencil and paper. "by the way," he said briskly. "we can keep on accelerating indefinitely at one gravity. we've got radars. we got them from--" he named the supplier. "now we want advice on how fast we can risk traveling before we'll be going too fast to dodge meteors or whatnot that the radar may detect. get that figured out for us, will you?" he gave back the instrument to sandy and returned to his inspection of every item of functioning equipment in the ship. he found one or two trivial things to be bettered. the small craft went on in a singularly matter-of-fact fashion. if it had been a bomb shelter buried in the pit beside the mould in which it was built, there would have been very little difference in the feel of things. the constant acceleration substituted perfectly for gravity. the six television screens, to be sure, pictured incredible things outside, but television screens often picture incredible things. the wall-gardens looked green and flourishing. the pumps were noiseless. there were no moving parts in the drive. the gyro held everything steady. there was no vibration. nobody could remain upset in such an unexciting environment. presently pam explored the living quarters below. holmes took his place in the control-chair, but found no need to touch anything. some time later sandy reported, "joe, they say we must be lying, but if we can keep on accelerating, we'd better not hit over four hundred miles a second. they say we can then swing end for end and decelerate down to two hundred, and then swing once more and build up to four again. but they insist that we ought to return to earth." "they don't mention shooting rockets at us, do they?" asked burke. "i thought they wouldn't. just say thanks and go on working out a code." sandy set to work with pencil and paper. federal agents would be moving, now, to impound all official records that were in any way connected with any of the five on the ship. the key to the code would be contained in such records. it would be an agglomeration of such items as burke's grandmother's maiden name, holmes' social-security number, the name of a street burke had lived on some years before, the exact amount of his federal income taxes the previous year, the title of a book third from the end on the second shelf of a bookcase in keller's apartment, and such unconsidered items as most people can remember with a little effort, but which can only be found out by people who know where to look. these people would keep anybody else from looking in the same places. such a code would be clumsy to work with, but it would be unbreakable. it took hours to establish it without the mention of a single word included in the lengthy key. the ship reached four hundred miles a second, turned about, and began to cut down its speed again. pam spoke from beside an electric stove, "dinner's ready! come and get it!" they dined; sandy weary, burke absorbed and inevitably worried, holmes placid and amiable, and keller beaming and interested in all that went on, which was practically nothing. they did not see the stars direct, because television cameras were preferable to portholes. earth had become very small, and as it swung ever more nearly into a direct line between the ship and the sun, night filled more of its disk until only a hairline of sunshine showed at one edge. the microwave receivers ceased to mutter. the working astronomers on earth who'd sent a message to m- were suddenly relieved of their disgrace and set to work again to equip the west virginia radar telescope for continuous communication with burke's ship. other technicians began to prepare multiple receptors to pick up the ship's signals from hitherto unprecedented distances for human two-way communication. and on earth an official statement went out from high authority. it announced that a hurriedly completed american ship was on the way to m- to investigate the signals from space. it announced that measures long in preparation were now in use, and that an invincible fleet of spacecraft would be completed in months, whereas they had not been hoped for for another generation. an unexpected breakthrough had made it possible to advance the science of space travel by many decades, and a fleet to explore all the planets as well as m- was already under construction. it was almost true that they were. the blueprints of burke's ship had been flown to washington from the plant, and an enormous number of replicas of the egg-shaped vessel were ordered to be begun immediately, even before the theory of the drive was understood. there was one minor hitch. a legal-minded official protested that congressional appropriations had been for rocket-driven spaceships only, and the money appropriated could not be used for other than rockets. an executive order settled the matter. then theorists began to object to the principle of the drive. it contradicted well-established scientific beliefs. it could not work. it did, but there was violent opposition to the fact. publicly, of course, the shock of such an about-face by the national government was extreme. but newspapers flashed new headlines. "u.s. ship speeding to query aliens!" lesser heads announced, "_critical velocity exceeded! russian probe already passed!_" the last was not quite true. the russian manned probe had started out ten days before. burke hadn't overtaken it yet. broadcasters issued special bulletins, and two networks canceled top evening programs to schedule interviews with prominent scientists who'd had nothing whatever to do with what burke had managed to achieve. in europe, obviously, the political effect was stupendous. russia was reduced to impassioned claims that the ship had been built from russian plans, using russian discoveries, which had been stolen by imperialistic secret agents. and the heads of the russian spy system were disgraced for not having, in fact, stolen the plans and discoveries from the americans. all other operatives received threats of what would happen to them if they didn't repair that omission. these threats so scared half a dozen operatives that they defected and told all they knew, thereby wrecking the russian spy system for the time being. essentially, however, the recovery of confidence in america was as extravagant as the previous unhappy desire to hear no more about space. burke, holmes, keller, sandy and pam became national heroes and heroines within eighteen hours after guided missiles had failed to shoot them down. the only criticism came from a highly conservative clergyman who hoped that other young girls would not imitate sandy's and pam's disregard of convention and maintained that a married woman should have gone along to chaperon them. the atmosphere in the ship, however, was that of respectability carried to the point where things were dull. the lower compartment of the ship, being smaller, was inevitably appropriated by sandy and pam. they retired when the ship was twenty hours out from earth. each of them had prepared for stowing away by wearing extra garments in layers. "funny," said pam, yawning as they made ready to turn in, "i thought it was going to be exciting. but it's just like a rather full day at the office." "which," said sandy, "i'm quite used to." "i do think you ought to have barged in when they designed the ship, sandy. there's not one mirror in it!" in the upper compartment keller took his place in the control-chair and took a trick of duty. it consisted solely of looking at the instruments and listening to the beeping noises which came from remoteness every two seconds, and the still completely cryptic broadcasts which came every seventy-nine minutes. it wasn't exciting. there was nothing to be excited about. but somebody had to be on watch. on the second day out, washington was ready to use the new code. the west virginia radar bowl was powered to handle communications again. sandy painstakingly took down the gibberish that came in and decoded it. from then on she worked at the coding and transmission of messages and the reception and decoding of others. presently pam relieved her at the job. pam tended to be bored because holmes was as much absorbed in the business of keeping anything from happening as was burke. the messages were almost entirely requests for, and answers to requests for, details about the ship plans. the united states had not yet completed a duplicate drive-shaft. machinists labored to reproduce the cores, which would then have to be wound in the complicated fashion the plans described. but it was an unhappy experience for the scientific minds assigned to duplicate burke's ship. no woman ever followed a recipe without making some change. very few physicists can duplicate another's apparatus without itching to change it. there were six copies of the drive under construction at the same time, at the beginning. four were made by skeptics, who adhered to the original plans with strict accuracy. they were sure they'd prove burke wrong. two were "improved" in the making. the four, when finished, worked beautifully. the two doctored versions did not. but still there was fretful discussion of the theory of the drive. it seemed flatly to contradict newton's law that every action has a reaction of equal moment and opposite sign--a law at least as firmly founded as the law of the conservation of energy. but that had lately been revised into the law of the conservation of energy and matter, which now was gospel. burke's theory required the newtonian law to be restated to read "every action of a given force has a reaction of the same force, of the same moment," and so on. when the reaction of one force is converted into another force, the results can be interesting. in fact, one can have a space-drive. but there was bitter resistance to the idea. it was demanded that burke justify his views in a more reasonable way than by mere demonstration that they worked. after a time, burke gave up trying to explain things. and when one and then another duplicate drive worked, the argument ceased. but eminent physicists still had a resentful feeling that burke was cheating on them somehow. then for days nothing happened. one of the three men in the ship always stayed in the control-chair where he could check the ship's course against the homing signals from the asteroid. he might have to correct it by the fraction of a hair, or swing ship and put on more drive if the radar should show celestial debris in the spaceship's path. every so many hours the ship had to be swung about so that instead of accelerating she decelerated, or instead of decelerating gained fresh speed. but that was all. on the fifth day there was the flash of a meteor on the radar. on the seventh day an object which could have been the second or third unmanned russian probe showed briefly at the very edge of the radar screens. in essence, however, the journey was pure tedium. burke wearied of making sure that his work was good, though he congratulated himself that nothing did happen to break the monotony. holmes admitted that he was disappointed. he'd wanted to make the journey because he'd sailed in everything but a spaceship. but there was no fun in it. keller alone seemed comfortably absorbed. he prepared daily lists of instrument-readings to be sent back to earth. they would be of enormous importance to science-minded people. they were not of interest to sandy. even when she talked to burke, it was necessarily impersonal. there could be no privacy which was not ostentatious. the two girls used the lower compartment, the three men the upper and larger one. for sandy to talk privately with burke, she'd have had to go to the small bottom section of the ship. holmes and pam faced the same situation. it was uncomfortable. so they developed a perfectly pleasant habit of talking exclusively of things everybody could talk about. it did not bother keller, who would hardly average a dozen words in twenty-four hours, but sandy muttered to herself when she and pam retired for what was a ship-night's rest. when they went past the orbit of mars, agitated instructions came out from earth. the asteroid belts began beyond mars. elaborate directions came. the ship was tracked by radar telescopes all around the world, direction-finding on its transmission. croydon kept track. american radar bowls picked up the ship's voice. south american and hawaiian and japanese and siberian radar telescopes determined the ship's position every time a set of code symbols reached earth from the ship. of course, there were also the beepings and the seventy-nine-minute-spaced identical broadcasts from farther out from the sun. somebody got a brilliant idea and authority to try it. an interview for broadcast on earth was sought with somebody on the ship. it was then a hundred thirty million miles from earth, and ninety-two million more from the sun. largely out of boredom sandy agreed to answer questions. but at the speed of light it required eleven minutes to reach her from earth, and as long for her reply to be received. it did not make for liveliness, so she spoke curtly for five minutes and stopped. she talked at random about housekeeping in space. without knowing it, she was praised for her domesticity in many pulpits the following sunday, and eight hundred ninety-two proposals of marriage piled up in mail addressed to her in care of the united states government. twelve were in russian. but nothing really exciting happened aboard the spaceship. it was burke's guess that they could go directly through the asteroid belt along the plane of the ecliptic, and not get nearer than ten thousand miles to any bit of shattered stone or metal in orbit out there. he was almost right. there was only one occasion when his optimism came into doubt. it was on the ninth day out from earth. experimentally, the ship coasted on attained momentum, using no drive. there was, then, no substitute for gravity and everyone and everything in the ship was weightless. the power obtainable from the sun as heat had dwindled to one-ninth of that at the earth's distance. but what was received could be stored, and was. meanwhile the ship plunged onward at very nearly four hundred miles per second. burke, keller, and holmes together labored over a self-contained diving suit which they hoped could be used as a space suit in dire emergency and for brief periods. they wanted to get the feel of using it with internal pressure and weightlessness as conditions. sandy sat at the transmitter, working at code which by now she heartily loathed. pam sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments. there was a buzz. burke snapped his head around to see the radar screen. a line of light appeared on it. it aimed directly at the center of the screen, which meant that whatever had been picked up was on a collision course with the ship. burke plunged toward the control-chair to take over. but he'd forgotten the condition of no-gravity. he went floating off in mid-air, far wide of the chair. he barked orders to pam, who was least qualified of anybody aboard to meet an emergency of this sort. she panicked. she did nothing. holmes took precious seconds to drag himself to the controls by what hand-holds could be had. the glowing white line on the radar screen lengthened swiftly. it neared the center. it reached the center. burke and holmes froze. there was a curious flashing change in a vision-screen. an image flashed into view. it was a jagged, tortured, irregularly-shaped mass of stone or metal, distorted in its representation by the speed at which it passed the television lens. it was perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. it could never have been seen from earth. it might circle the sun in its lonely orbit for a hundred million years and never be seen again. it went away to nothing. it had missed by yards or fathoms, and burke found himself sweating profusely. holmes was deathly white. keller very carefully took a deep breath, swallowed, and went back to his work on the diving-suit-qua-space-suit. sandy hadn't noticed anything at all. but pam burst into abrupt, belated tears, and holmes comforted her clumsily. she was bitterly ashamed that she'd done nothing to meet the emergency which came while she was at the control-board, and which was the only emergency they'd encountered since the ship's departure from earth. after that, they put on the drive and used reserve fuel. it was necessary to check their speed, anyhow. they were very near the source of the beeping signal they'd steered by for so long. the directional receiver pointed to it had long since been turned down to its lowest possible volume, and still the beepings were loud. on the eleventh day after their take-off, they sighted asteroid m- . they had traveled two hundred seventy million miles at an averaged-out speed of very close to three hundred miles per second. despite muting, the beepings from the loud-speakers were monstrous noises. "try a call, holmes," said burke. "but they ought to know we're here." he felt strange. he'd brought the ship to a stop about four or five miles from m- . the asteroid was a mass of dark stuff with white outcroppings at one place and another. the ship seemed to edge itself toward it. the floating mass of stone and metal had no particular shape. it was longer than it was wide, but its form fitted no description. a mountain which had been torn from solidity with its roots of stone attached might look like schull's object as it turned slowly against a background of myriads of unblinking stars. there was no change in the beeping that came from the singular thing. it did rotate, but so slowly that one had to watch for long minutes to be sure of it. there was no outward sign of any reaction to the ship's presence. holmes took the microphone. "hello! hello!" he said absurdly. "we have come from earth to find out what you want." no answer. no change in the beeping calls. the asteroid turned with enormous deliberation. sandy said suddenly, "look there! a stick! no, it's a mast! see, where the patch of white is?" burke very, very gingerly drew closer to the monstrous thing which hung in space. it was true. there was a mast of some sort sticking up out of white stone. the direction-indicators pointed to it. the beeping stopped and a broadcast began. it was the standard broadcast earth heard every seventy-nine minutes. there was no reply to holmes' call. there was no indication that the ship's arrival had been noted. on earth the ignoring of human broadcasts to m- had seemed arrogance, indifference, a superior and menacing contempt for man and all his works; somehow, here the effect was different. this irregular mass was a fragment of something that once had been much greater. it suddenly ceased to seem menacing because it seemed oblivious. it acted blindly, by rote, like some mechanism set to operate in a certain way and unable to act in any other. it did not seem alive. it had signaled like a robot beacon. now it felt like one. it was one. "look, coming around toward us," said holmes very quietly. "there's something that looks like a tunnel. it's not a crevasse. it was cut." burke nodded. "yes," he said thoughtfully. "i think we'll explore it. but i don't really expect we'll find any life here. there's nothing outside to see but a single metal mast. we've got some signal lights on our hull. if we're careful--" no one objected. the appearance of the asteroid was utterly disappointing. its lifelessness and its obliviousness to their coming and their calls were worse than disappointing. there was nothing to be seen but a metal stick from which signals went out to nowhere. burke jockeyed the little ship to the tunnel-mouth. it was fully a hundred feet in diameter. he turned on the ship's signal lights. gently, cautiously, he worked down the very center of the very large bore. it was perfectly straight. they went in for what seemed an indefinite distance. presently the signal lights showed that the wall was smoothed. the bore grew smaller still. they went on and on. suddenly keller grunted. he pointed to one of the six television screens which aimed out the length of the tunnel and showed the stars beyond. those stars were being blotted out. something vast moved slowly and deliberately across the shaft they navigated. it closed the opening. their retreat was blocked. the ship was shut in, in the center of a mountain of stone which floated perpetually in emptiness. burke checked the ship's forward motion, judging their speed by the side walls shown by the ship's outside lights. very, very slowly, faint illumination appeared outside. in seconds they could see that the light came from long tubes of faint bluish light. the light changed. it grew stronger. it turned green and then yellowish and then became very bright, indeed. then nothing more took place. nothing whatever. the five inside the ship waited more than an hour for some other development, but absolutely nothing happened. chapter there was a tiny shock; in a minute, trivial contact of the ship with something outside it. drifting within the now brightly lighted bore, it had touched the wall. there was no force to the impact. keller made an interested noise. when eyes turned to him, he pointed to a dial. a needle on that dial pointed just past the figure " ." burke grunted. "the devil! we've been waiting for things to happen, and they already have! it's our move." "according to that needle," agreed holmes, "somebody has kindly put thirty point seven mercury inches of air-pressure around the ship outside. we can walk out and breathe, now." "if," said burke, "it's air. it could be something else. i'll have to check it." he got out the self-contained diving apparatus that had been brought along to serve as a strictly temporary space suit. "i'll try a cigarette-lighter. maybe it will burn naturally. maybe it will go out. it could make an explosion. but i doubt that very much." "we'll hope," said holmes, "that the lighter burns." burke climbed into the diving suit, which had been designed for amateurs of undersea fishing to use in chilly waters. on earth it would have been intolerably heavy, for a man moving about out of the ocean. but there was no weight here. if m- had a gravitational field at all, which in theory it had to have, it would be on the order of millionths of the pull of earth. keller sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments and the outside television screens which showed the bore now reduced to fifty feet. somehow the more distant parts of the tunnel looked hazy, as if there were a slight mist in whatever gas had been released in it. sandy watched burke pull on the helmet and close the face-plate. she grasped a hand-hold, her knuckles turning white. pam nestled comfortably in a corner of the ceiling of the control-room. holmes frowned as burke went into the air-lock and closed the inner door. his voice came immediately out of a speaker at the control-desk. "i'm breathing canned air from the suit," he said curtly. there were scrapings. the outer lock-door made noises. there was what seemed to be a horribly long wait. then they heard burke's voice again. "i've tried it," he reported. "the lighter burns when it's next to the slightly opened door. i'm opening wide now." more noises from the air-lock. "it still burns. repeat. the lighter burns all right. the tunnel is filled with air. i'm going to crack my face-plate and see how it smells." silence, while sandy went white. but a moment later burke said crisply, "it smells all right. it's lifeless and stuffy, but there's nothing in it with an odor. hold on--i hear something!" a long minute, while the little ship floated eerily almost in contact with the walls about it. it turned slowly. then there came brisk, brief fluting noises. they were familiar in kind. but this was a short message, of some fifteen or twenty seconds length, no more. it ended, was repeated, ended, was repeated, and went on with an effect of mechanical and parrot-like repetition. "it's good air," reported burke. "i'm breathing normally. but it might have been stored for ages. it's stale. do you hear what i do?" "yes," said sandy in a whisper to the control-room. "it's a call. it's telling us to do something. come back inside, joe!" they heard the outer air-lock door closing and its locking-dogs engaging. the fluting noises ceased to be audible. the inner door swung wide. burke came into the control-room, his helmet face-plate open. he wriggled out of the diving suit. "something picked up the fact that we'd entered. it closed a door behind us. then it turned on lights for us. then it let air into the entrance-lock. now it's telling us to do something." the ship surged, ever so gently. keller had turned on an infinitesimal trace of drive. the walls of the bore floated past on the television screens. there was mist in the air outside. it seemed to clear as the ship moved. keller made a gratified small sound. they could see the end of the tunnel. there was a platform there. stairs went to it from the side of the bore. there was a door with rounded corners in the end wall. that wall was metal. keller carefully turned the ship until the stairway was in proper position for a landing, if there had been gravitation to make the stairs usable. very, very gently, he lowered the ship upon the platform. there was a singular tugging sensation which ceased, came again, ceased, and gradually built up to a perfectly normal feeling of weight. they stood upon the floor of the control-room with every physical sensation they'd felt during one-gravity acceleration on the way out here, and which they'd have felt if the ship were aground on earth. "artificial gravity! whoever made this knew something!" burke said. pam swallowed and spoke with an apparent attempt at nonchalance. "now what do we do?" "we--look for the people," said sandy in a queer tone. "there's nobody here, sandy!" burke said irritably. "can't you see? there can't be anybody here! they'd have signaled us what to do if there had been! this is machinery working. we do something and it operates. but then it waits for us to do something else. it's like--like a self-service elevator!" "we didn't come here for an elevator ride," said sandy. "i came to find out what's here," said burke, "and why it's signaling to earth. holmes, you stay here with the girls and i'll take a look outside." "i'd like to mention," said holmes drily, "that we haven't a weapon on this ship. when they shot rockets at us back on earth, we didn't have even a pea-shooter to shoot back with. we haven't now. i think the girls are as safe exploring as they are here. and besides, we'll all feel better if we're together." "i'm going!" said sandy defiantly. burke hesitated, then shrugged. he unlatched the devices which kept both doors to the air-lock from being open at the same time. it was not a completely cautious thing to do, but caution was impractical. the ship was imprisoned. it was incapable of defense. there was simply nothing sensible about precautions that couldn't prevent anything. burke threw open the outer lock door. one by one, the five of them climbed down to the platform so plainly designed for a ship of space--a small one--to land upon. nothing happened. their surroundings were completely uninformative. this landing-platform might have been built by any race on earth or anywhere else, provided only that it used stairs. "here goes," said burke. he went to the door with rounded corners. there was something like a handle at one side, about waist-high. he put his hand to it, tugged and twisted, and the door gave. it was not rusty, but it badly needed lubrication. burke pulled it wide and stared unbelievingly beyond. before him there stretched a corridor which was not less than twenty feet high and just as wide. the long, glowing tubes of light that illuminated the ship-tunnel were here, too, fixed in the ceiling. the corridor reached away, straight and unbroken, until its end seemed a mere point in the distance. it looked about a full mile long. there were doorways in both its side walls, and they dwindled in the distance with a monotonous regularity until they, too, were mere vertical specks. one could not speak of the length of this corridor in feet or yards. it was a mile. it was incredible. it was overwhelming. and it was empty. it shone in the glare of the light tubes which made a river of brilliance overhead. it seemed preposterous that so vast a construction should have no living thing in it. but it was absolutely vacant. they stared down its length for long seconds. then burke seemed to shake himself. "here's the parlor. let's walk in, even if there's no welcoming committee." his voice echoed. it rolled and reverberated and then diminished very slowly to nothing. burke strode forward with sandy close to him. pam stared blankly, and instinctively moved up to holmes. once they were through the door, the sensation was not that of adventure in a remote part of space, but of being in some strange and impossible monument on earth. the feeling of weight, if not completely normal, was so near it as not to be noticed. they could have been in some previously unknown structure made by men, at home. this corridor, though, was not built. it was excavated. some process had been used which did not fracture the stone to be removed. the surface of the rock about them was smooth. in places it glittered. the doorways had been cut out, not constructed. they were of a size which made them seem designed for the use of men. the compartments to which they gave admission were similarly matter-of-fact. they were windowless, of course, but their strangeness lay in the fact that they were empty, as if to insist that all this ingenuity and labor had been abandoned thousands of years before. yet from somewhere in the asteroid a call still went out urgently, filling the solar system with plaintive fluting sounds, begging whoever heard to come and do something which was direly necessary. a long, long way down the gallery there were two specks. a quarter-mile from the entrance, they saw that one of the rooms contained a pile of metal ingots, neatly stacked and bound in place by still-glistening wire. at half a mile they came upon the things in the gallery itself. one was plainly a table with a single leg, made of metal. it was unrusted, but showed signs of use. the other was an object with a hollow top. in the hollow there were twisted, shriveled shreds of something unguessable. "if men had built this," said burke, and again his voice echoed and rolled, "that hollow thing would be a stool with a vanished cushion, and the table would be a desk." sandy said thoughtfully, "if men had built this, there'd be signs somewhere marking things. at least there'd be some sort of numbers on these doorways!" burke said nothing. they went on. the gallery branched. a metal door closed off the divergent branch. burke tugged at an apparent handle. it did not yield. they continued along the straight, open way. they came to a larger-than-usual opening in the side wall. inside it there were rows and rows and rows of metal spheres some ten feet in diameter. there must have been hundreds of them. beside the door there was a tiny shelf, with a tinier box fastened to it. a long way farther, they came to what had appeared to be the end of this corridor. but it did not end. it slanted upward and turned and they found themselves in the same corridor on a different level, headed back in the direction from which they had come. their footsteps echoed hollowly in the still-enormous emptiness. there were other closed doors. burke tried some. holmes tried others. they did not open. keller moved raptly, gazing at this and that. everything was strange, but not strange enough to be frightening. one could have believed this place the work of men, except that this was beyond the ability of men to make. there must be miles of vacant rooms carved out of solid rock. they came upon some hundreds of yards of doorways, and in every room on which they opened, there were metal frames about the walls. holmes said suddenly, "if men had built this place, those could be bunks." they came to another place where there was dust, and a group of six huge rooms communicating not only with the corridor but with each other. they found hollow metal things like cook pans. they found a hollow small object which could have been a drinking vessel. it was broken. it was of a size suitable for men. "if men built this," said holmes again, "these could be mess-halls. but i agree with sandy that there should be signs." yet another closed door. it resisted their efforts to open it, just like the others. keller put out his hand and thoughtfully touched the stone beside it. he looked astonished. "what?" asked burke. he touched the stone as keller had. it was bitterly, bitterly cold. "the air's warm and the stone's cold! what's this?" keller wetted the tip of his finger and rubbed it on the rocky side wall. instantly, frost appeared. but the air remained warm. the gallery turned again, and again rose. the third-level passageway was shorter; barely half a mile in length. here they passed door after door, all open, with each compartment containing a huge and somehow malevolent shape of metal. and beside each doorway there was a little shelf with a small box fastened to it. "these," said holmes, "could be guns, if there were any way for them to shoot anything. just by the look of them i'd say they were weapons." burke said abruptly, "keller, the stone being freezing cold while the air's warm means that this place has been heated up lately. heat's been poured into it. within hours!" keller considered. then he shook his head. "not heat. warmed air." burke went scowling onward. he followed, actually, the only route that was open. other ways were cut off by doors which refused to open. sandy, beside him, noted the floor. it was stone like the walls and ceiling. but it was worn. there were slight inequalities in it, beginning a foot or so from the walls. sandy envisioned thousands of feet moving about these resonant corridors for hundreds or thousands of years in order to wear away the solid stone in this fashion. she felt age about her--incredible age reaching back to time past imagining, while the occupants of this hollow world swarmed about its interior. doing what? burke considered other things. there were the ten-foot metal spheres, ranged by hundreds in what might be a magazine below. there were the squat and ugly metal monsters which seemed definitely menacing to somebody or something. there were the metal frameworks like bunks. there was no rust, here, which could be accounted for if keller happened to be right and warmed air had been released lately in corridors which before--for ten thousand years or more--had contained only the vacuum of space. and there were those rooms which could be mess-halls. these items were subject matter for thought. but if what they hinted at was true, there must be other specialized compartments elsewhere. there must be storerooms for food for those who managed the guns--if they were guns--and the spheres, and lived in the bunk-rooms and ate in the mess-halls. there'd be storerooms for equipment and supplies of all sorts. and again, if keller were right about the air, there must be enormous pressure-tanks which had held the asteroid's atmosphere under high pressure for millennia, only to warm it and release it within the hour so that those who came by ship could use it. an old phrase occurred to burke. "a mystery wrapped in an enigma." it applied to these discoveries. plainly the release of air had been done without the command of any living creature. there could be none here! as plainly, the signals from space had been begun without the interposition of life. the transmitter which still senselessly flung its message to earth was a robot. the operation of the ship-lock, the warming of air, the lighting of the ship-lock and the corridors--all had been accomplished by machinery, obeying orders given to the transmitter first by some unguessable stimulus. but why? other mysteries aside, there had plainly been meticulous preparation for the welcoming of a ship from space. no, not welcoming. acceptance of a ship from space. somebody had been expected to respond to those plaintive fluting noises which went wailing through the solar system. who were those waited-for visitors expected to be? what were they expected to do? for that matter, what was the purpose of the asteroid itself? what had it been built for? at some time or another it must have contained thousands of inhabitants. what were they here for? what became of them? and when the asteroid was left--abandoned--what conceivable situation was to trigger the transmitter to send out urgent calls, and then a directional guiding-signal the instant the call was answered? when burke's ship came, the asteroid accepted it without question and carried out mechanical operations to make it possible for that ship's crew to roam at will through it. what activated this mechanism of so many eons ago? the five newly-arrived humans, three men and two girls, trudged along the echoing gallery cut out of the asteroid's heart. murmurous sounds accompanied them. once they came to a place where a whispering-gallery effect existed. they heard their footsteps repeated loudly as if the asteroid inhabitants were approaching invisibly, but no one came. "i don't like this!" pam said uneasily. then her own voice mocked her, and she realized what it was, and giggled nervously. that also was repeated, and sounded like something which seemed to sneer at them. it was unpleasant. they came to the end of the gallery. there was a stair leading upward. there was nowhere else to go, so burke started up, sandy close behind him, and holmes and pam behind them. keller brought up the rear. they climbed, and small noises began to be audible. they were fluting sounds. they grew louder as the party from earth went up and up. they reached a landing, and here also there was a metal door with rounded corners. through it and from beyond it came the piping notes that burke had heard in his dream some hundreds of times and that lately had come to earth from emptiness. the sounds seemed to pause and to begin again, and once more to pause. it was not possible to tell whether they came from one source, speaking pathetically, or from two sources in conversation. sandy went utterly white and her eyes fixed upon burke. he was nearly as pale, himself. he stopped. here and now there was no trace of ribbony-leaved trees or the smell of green things, but only air which was stuffy and lifeless as if it had been confined for centuries. and there was no sunset sky with two moons in it, but only carved and seamless stone. yet there were the familiar fluting sounds.... burke put his hand to the curiously-shaped handle of the door. it yielded. the door opened inward. burke went in, his throat absurdly dry. sandy followed him. and again there was disappointment. because there was no living creature here. the room was perhaps thirty feet long and as wide. there were many vision-screens in it, and some of them showed the stars outside with a precision of detail no earthly television could provide. the sun glowed as a small disk a third of its proper diameter. it was dimmer, too. the milky way showed clearly. and there were very many screens which showed utterly clear views of the surface of the asteroid, all broken, chaotic, riven rock and massy, unoxydized metal. but there was no life. there were not even symbols of life. there were only machines. they noticed a large transparent disk some ten feet across. specks of light glowed within its substance. off at one side an angular metal arm held a small object very close to the disk's surface, a third of the way from its edge. it did not touch the disk, but under it and in the disk there was a little group of bright-red specks which quivered and wavered. they were placed in a strict mathematical arrangement which very, very slowly changed so that it would be hours before it had completed a rotation and had exactly the same appearance again. the flutings came from a tall metal cone on the floor. another machine nearby held a round plate out toward the cone. "there's nobody here," said sandy in a strange voice. "what'll we do now, joe?" "this must be the transmitter," he murmured. "the sound-record for the broadcasts must be in here, somehow. it's possible that this plate is a sort of microphone--" keller, beaming, pointed to a round spot which quivered with an eerie luminescence. it glowed more brightly and dimmed according to the flutings. burke said "the devil!" and the round spot flickered up very brightly for an instant. "yes," said burke. "it's a mike. it's quite likely--" the round spot flared up and dimmed with the modulations of his voice--"it's quite likely that what i say goes into the broadcast to earth." the cone ceased to emit fluting noises. burke said very steadily--and the spot flickered violently with the sounds--"i think i am transmitting to earth. if so, this is joe burke. i announce the arrival of my ship at asteroid m- . the asteroid has been hollowed out and fitted with an air-lock which admitted our ship. it is a--a--" he hesitated, and holmes said curtly, "it's a fortress." "yes," said burke heavily. "it's a fortress. there are weapons we haven't had time to examine. there are barracks for a garrison of thousands. but there is no one here. it has been deserted, but not abandoned, because the transmitter was set up to send out a call when some occasion arose. it seems to have arisen. there is a big plate here which may be a star map, with a scale on which light-years may be represented by inches. i don't know. there are certain bright-red specks on it. they are moving. there is a machine to watch those specks. apparently it actuated the transmitter to make it call to all the solar system." keller suddenly put his finger to his lips. burke nodded and said curtly, "i'll report further." keller flipped over an odd switch with something of a flourish--after which he looked embarrassed. the transmitter went dead. "he's right," said holmes. "back home they know we're here, i suspect, and you've told enough to give them fits. i think we'd better be careful what we say in the clear." burke nodded again. "there'll be calls from earth shortly and we can decide whether or not to use code then. keller, can you trace the leads to this transmitter and find the receiver that picked up that west virginia beam-signal and changed the first broadcast to the second? it should be as sensitive as this transmitter is powerful." keller nodded confidently. "it'll take thirty-some minutes for that report of mine to reach earth and an answer to get back," observed burke, "if everything works perfectly and the proper side of earth is turned this way. i think we can be sure there's nobody but us in the fortress." his sensations were peculiar. it was exciting to have found a fortress in space, of course. it was the sort of thing that might have satisfied a really dedicated scientist completely. burke realized the importance of the discovery, but it was an impersonal accomplishment. it did not mean, to burke, that he'd carried out the purpose behind his coming here. this fortress was linked to a dream about a world with two moons in its sky and someone or something running breathlessly behind unearthly swaying foliage. but this place was not the place of that dream, nor did it fulfill it. mystery remained, and frustration, and burke was left in the state of mind of a savage who has found a treasure which means much to civilized men, but doesn't make him any happier because he doesn't want what civilized men can give him. he grimaced and spoke without elation. "let's go back to the ship and get a code message ready for earth." he led the way out of this room of many motionless but operating machines. the incredibly perfect vision-screen images still portrayed the cosmos outside with all the stars and the sun itself moving slowly across their plates. they saw sunshine and starlight shining on the broken, chaotic outer surface of the asteroid. wavering, curiously writhing red specks on the ten-foot disk continued their crawling motion. keller fairly glowed with enthusiasm as he began to investigate this apparatus. they all went back to the ship, except for keller. they retraced their way along the long and brilliantly lighted galleries. they descended ramps and went along more brilliantly lighted corridors. then they came to the branch which had been blocked off by a door that would not open. it was open now. they could see along the new section for a long, long way. they passed places where other doors had been closed, but now were open. what they could see inside them was almost exclusively a repetition of what they saw outside of them. they passed the place where hundreds of ten-foot metal spheres waited for an unknown use. they passed the table with a single leg, and the compartment with many metal ingots stored in it. finally, they came to the door with rounded corners, went through it, and there was their ship with its air-lock doors open, waiting in the brightly lighted tunnel. they went in, and the feeling was of complete anticlimax. they knew, of course, that they had made a discovery beside which all archæological discoveries on earth were trivial. they had come upon operating machines which must be old beyond imagining, unrusted because preserved in emptiness, and infinitely superior to anything that men had ever made. they had come upon a mystery to tantalize every brain on earth. the consequences of their coming to this place would re-make all of earth's future. but they were singularly unelated. "i'll make up a sort of report," said burke heavily, "of what we saw as we arrived, and our landing, and that sort of thing. we'll get it in code and ready for transmission. we can use the asteroid's transmitter." holmes scowled at the floor of the little ship. "you'll make a report, too," said burke. "you realized that this is a fortress. there can't be any doubt. it was built and put here to fight something. it wasn't built for fun. but i wonder who it was meant to do battle with, and why it was left by its garrison, and why they set up a transmitter to broadcast when something happened! maybe it was to call the garrison back if they were ever needed. but thousands of years--you make a report on that!" holmes nodded. "you might add," said pam, shivering a little, "that it's a terribly creepy place." "what i don't understand," said sandy, "is why nothing's labelled. nothing's marked. whoever built it must have known how to write, in some fashion. a civilized race has to have written records to stay civilized! but i haven't seen a symbol or a pointer or even a color used to give information." she got out the papers on which she would code the reports as burke and holmes turned them over for transmission. she began to write out, carefully, the elaborate key to the coding. almost reluctantly, pam prepared to do the same with holmes' narrative of what he'd seen. but if enthusiasm was tempered in the ship, there was no such reserve in the united states. burke's voice had cut into one of the space broadcasts which arrived every seventy-nine minutes. there had been the usual cryptic, plaintive piping noises, repeating for the thousandth time their meaningless message. then a human voice said almost inaudibly, "_... 'll we do now, joe?_" it was heard over an entire hemisphere, where satellite-tracking stations and radar telescopes listened to and recorded every broadcast from space. it was a stupendous happening. then burke's voice came through the flutings. "_this must be the transmitter. the sound-record for the broadcasts must be in here, somehow. it's quite possible that this plate is a sort of microphone...._" a few seconds later he was heard to say, "_the devil!_" and later still he addressed himself directly to his listeners on earth. he'd spoken the words eighteen and a fraction minutes before they arrived, though they traveled at the speed of light. broadcast and ecstatically reported in the united states, they touched off a popular reaction as widespread as that triggered by the beginning of the signals themselves. broadcasters abandoned all other subject matter. announcers with lovely diction stated the facts and then expanded them into gibbering nonsense. man had reached m- . man had spoken to earth across two hundred seventy million miles of emptiness. man had taken possession of a fortress in space. man now had an outpost, a stepping-stone toward the stars. man had achieved.... man had risen.... man now took the first step toward his manifest destiny, which was to occupy and possess all the thousands of thousands of planets all the way to the galaxy's rim. but this was in the united states. elsewhere, rejoicing was much less, especially after a prominent american politician was reported to have said that america's leadership of earth was not likely ever to be challenged again. a number of the smaller nations immediately protested in the united nations. that august body was forced to put upon its agenda a full-scale discussion of u.s. space developments. middle european nations charged that the purpose of america was to monopolize not only the practical means of traveling to other members of the solar system, but all natural and technical resources obtained by such journeyings. with a singular unanimity, the nations at the edge of the russian bloc demanded that there should be equality of information on earth. no nation should hold back scientific information. in fact, there was bitter denunciation of the use of code by the humans now on m- . it was demanded that they answer in the clear all scientific inquiries made by any government--in the clear so everybody could eavesdrop. in effect, the united states rejoiced in and boasted of the achievements of some of its citizens who, after escaping attack by american guided missiles, had found a stepping-stone toward the stars. but the rest of the world jealously demanded that the united states reap no benefit from the fact. international tension, in fact, rose to a new high. and burke and the others laboriously gathered this bit of information and discovered the lack of that. they found incredible devices whose purpose or workings they could not understand. they found every possible evidence of a civilization beside which that of earth was intolerably backward. but the civilization had abandoned the asteroid. by the second day the mass of indigestible information had become alarming. they could marvel, but they could not understand. and not to understand was intolerable. they could comprehend that there was a device with red sparks in it which had made another device send a fluting, plaintive call to all the solar system. nothing else was understandable. the purpose of the call remained a mystery. but the communicators hummed with messages from earth. it seemed that every radar telescope upon the planet had been furnished with a transmitter and that every one bombarded the asteroid with a tight beam carrying arguments, offers, expostulations and threats. "this ought to be funny," said burke dourly. "but it isn't. all we know is that we've found a fortress which was built to defend a civilization about which we know nothing except that it isn't in the solar system. we know an alarm went off, to call the fortress' garrison back to duty, but the garrison didn't come. we did. we've some evidence that a fighting fleet or something similar is headed this way and that it intends to smash this fortress and may include earth. you'd think that that sort of news would calm them down, on earth!" the microwave receiver was so jammed with messages that there was no communication at all. none could be understood when all arrived at once. burke had to send a message to earth in code, specifying a new and secret wavelength, before it became possible to have a two-way contact with earth. but the messages continued to come out, every one clamoring for something else of benefit to itself alone. chapter in the beginning there was nothing at all, and then things were created, and the wonder of created things was very great. when men became, they marveled at the richness and the beauty about them, and their lives were filled with astonishment at the myriads of things in the air and on the earth and in the sea. for many centuries they were busy taking note of all the created things that were. they forgot that there was such a condition as emptiness. but there were six people in a certain solar system who really knew what emptiness amounted to. five of them were in a fortress which was an asteroid and a mystery. one was in a small, crude object which floated steadily out from earth. this one's name was nikolai. the rest of it does not matter. he had been born in a small village in the urals, and as a little boy he played games with mud and reeds and sticks and dogs and other little boys. as a growing youth he dutifully stuffed his head with things out of books, and some seemed to him rational and marvelous, and some did not make much sense but were believed by everybody. and who was he to go against the wise comrades who ran the government and protected the people from wars and famines and the schemes of villainous capitalists? as a young man he was considered promising. if he had been interested in such matters, he might have had a moderately successful career in politics, as politics was practised in his nation. but he liked things. real things. when he was a student in the university he kept a canary in his lodgings. he loved it very much. there was a girl, too, about whom he dreamed splendidly. but there was a need for school teachers in bessarabia, and she went there to teach. she wept when she left him. after that nikolai studied with something of desperation, trying to forget her because he could not have her. he thought of such past events as he drifted outward from earth. he was the passenger, he was the crew of the manned space-probe his government had prepared to go out and investigate strange signals coming from emptiness. he was a volunteer, of course. it was a great honor to be accepted, and for a while he'd almost forgotten the girl who was teaching school in bessarabia. but that was a long time ago, now. at first he'd liked to remember the take-off, when brisk, matter-of-fact men tucked him in his acceleration-chair and left him, and he lay staring upward in dead silence--save for the ticking of an insanely emotionless clock--until there was a roar to end all roars and a shock to crush anything made of flesh and bones, and then a terrible, horrible feeling of weight that kept on and on until he lost consciousness. he could remember all this, if he chose. he had a distinct recollection of coming back to life, and of struggling to send off the signal which would say that he had survived the take-off. there were telemetering devices which reported what information was desired about the bands and belts of deadly radiation which surrounded the planet earth. but nikolai reported by voice, because that was evidence that he had passed through those murderous places unharmed. and his probe went on and on outward, away from the earth and the sun. he received messages from earth. tinny voices assured him that his launching had gone well. his nation was proud of him. enormous rewards awaited him on his return. meanwhile--the tinny voices instructed him in what he was to say for them to record and broadcast to all the world in his honor. he said it, with the earth a small crescent-shaped bit of brightness behind him. he drifted on. the crescent which was earth grew smaller and smaller as days went by. he took due care of the instruments of his space-vehicle. he made sure that the air apparatus behaved properly. he disposed of wastes. from time to time he reported, by voice, information which automatic devices had long since given in greater detail and with superior accuracy. and he thought more and more about the girl--teaching school in bessarabia--and his canary, which had died. days went by. he was informed that it was time for him to make contact with a drone fuel-rocket sent on before him. he watched the instruments which would point out where it was. he found it, and with small auxiliary rockets he made careful tiny blastings which guided his vehicle to contact with it. the complex machinery for refueling took effect. presently he cast off the emptied drone, aimed very, very carefully and blasted outward once more. the shock was worse than that on earth, and he knew nothing for a long, long time. he was horribly weak when he regained consciousness. he mentioned it in his reports. there was no comment on the fact in the replies he received from earth. he continued to float away from the sun. it became impossible to pick out earth among the stars. the sun was smaller than he remembered. there was nothing to be seen anywhere but stars and more stars and the dwindling disk of the sun that used to rise and set but now remained stationary, shrinking. so nikolai came to know emptiness. there were points of light which were stars. they were illimitable distances away. in between was emptiness. he had no sensation of movement. save that as days went by the sun grew smaller, there was no change in anything. all was emptiness. if his vehicle floated like this for ten thousand times ten thousand years, the stars would appear no nearer. if he got out and ran upon nothingness to get back to where he could see earth again, he would have to run for centuries, and generations would die and nations fall before he caught the least glimmer of that thin crescent which was his home. if he shouted, no man would ever hear, because emptiness does not carry sound. if he died, there was no earth into which his body could be lowered. if he lived, there was nowhere he could stand upright and breathe clean air and feel solidity beneath his feet. he had a destination, to be sure, but he did not really believe that he would ever reach it, nor did he imagine he would ever return. now he dismissed it from his thoughts. he found that he was feverish, and he mentioned it when the tinny voices talked urgently to him. he guessed, without emotion, that he had not passed through the deadly radiation-belts around earth unburned. he had been assured that he would pass through them so swiftly that they would be quite harmless. now he knew that this was a mistake. his body obeyed him only sluggishly. he was dying of deep-seated radiation burns. but he felt nothing. voices waked him to insist that he make contact with another fuel-drone. he exhausted himself as he dutifully obeyed commands. he was clumsy. he was feeble. but he managed a second refueling. and even as he performed the highly technical operation with seemingly detached and reluctant hands, he thought of a schoolteacher in bessarabia. before he fired the new fuel which would send him onward at what would be more than escape velocity, he almost humorously--yet quite humorlessly--reviewed his life. he considered that he might have no later opportunity to do so. there were three things he had done which no man had done before him. he had loved a certain small canary, and he remembered it distinctly. he had loved a certain girl, and in his weakened and dying state he could see her much more clearly than the grubby interior of the space-probe. and the third thing-- he had to cast about in his mind to remember what it was. his hand poised upon the rocket-firing key, he debated. ah, yes! the third thing was that he had learned what emptiness was. he pressed the firing-key. and the space-probe spouted flames and went on. before the fuel was exhausted it had reached a velocity so great that it would go on forever through interstellar space. it would never fall back toward the sun, not even after thousands of years. * * * * * the knowledge of emptiness possessed by the five in the asteroid was different. a totally empty room is intimidating. a vacant house is depressing. the two-mile-long asteroid, honeycombed with tunnels and corridors and galleries and rooms, was like a deserted city. those who had left it had carefully stripped it of personal possessions, but they'd left weapons behind, ready to be manned and used. they'd left a warning device to call them. the recall device was proof that the danger had not been destroyed and might return. and the plaintive call through all the solar system proved that it was returning. there was irony in the fact that earth had panicked when it seemed that intelligent non-human beings signaled from space, and that shrill disputes for advantage began instantly burke reported no living monsters at the signals' source. the fortress and its call meant more than the mere existence of aliens. it was proof that there were entities of space who needed to be fought. it proved the existence of fighting ships of space; of deadly war in emptiness; of creatures who crossed the void between star systems to conquer and to murder and destroy. and such creatures were coming. burke ground his teeth. earth had fusion bombs and rockets which could carry them for pitifully short distances on the cosmic scale. this fortress was incomparably more powerful than all of earth's armament put together. a fleet which dared to attack it must feel itself stronger still. what could earth do against a fleet which dared attack this asteroid? and what could he and holmes and keller do against such a fleet, even with the fortress, when they did not yet understand a single one of its weapons? burke worked himself to exhaustion, trying to unravel even the simplest principles of the fortress' armament. there were globes which were, obviously, the long-range weapons of the garrison. they were stored in a launching-tube at the far back of the compartment. but keller could not unravel the method of their control. there was no written matter in the fortress. none. a totally unknown language and an unfamiliar alphabet would prevent written matter from being useful, ordinarily, but in technical descriptions there are bound to be diagrams. burke felt desperately that in even the most meaningless of scripts there would be diagrams which could be puzzled out. but there was nothing. the builders of the fortress could have been illiterate, for all the signs of writing that they'd left. keller continued to labor valiantly. but there was no clue to the operation of anything but the transmitter. that was understandable because one knew where the message went in, and where it came out for broadcast. with the apparatus before one, one could deduce how it operated. but no one could guess how weapons were controlled when he hadn't the least idea of what they did. on the third night in the asteroid--the third night by ship-time, since there was neither day nor night in the great empty corridors of the fortress--burke dreamed his dream again. it was perfectly familiar, from the trees with their trailing leaves, to the markings on the larger moon. he felt the anguished anxiety he'd so often known before. he grasped the hand-weapon and knew that he was ready to fight anything imaginable for the person he feared for. he heard small fluting sounds behind him, and then he knew that someone ran breathlessly behind the swaying foliage just ahead. he felt such relief and exultation that his heart seemed about to burst. he gave a great shout and bounded to meet her-- he waked in the small ship in the entrance tunnel. all was silent. all was still. the lights in the control-compartment of the ship were turned to dim. there was no sound anywhere. the opened air-lock doors, both inner and outer, let in a fan-shaped streak of brightness which lay on the floor. burke lay quiet, still wrought up by the vivid emotions of the dream. he heard a stirring in the compartment below, occupied by sandy and pam. someone came very quietly up the ladder-like stairway. burke blinked in the semi-darkness. he saw that it was sandy. she crossed the compartment to the air-lock. very quietly, she closed the outer door and then the inner. she fastened them. burke said, sitting up, "why'd you do that, sandy?" she started violently, and turned. "pam can't sleep," she said in a low tone. "she says the fortress is creepy. she feels that there's something hiding in it, something deadly and frightening. when you leave the air-lock open, she's afraid. so i closed it." "holmes and keller are out," said burke. "keller's trying to trace down power-leads from the instrument-room to whatever power-source warms and lights everything. we can't lock him out." sandy obediently opened the air-lock doors again. she turned toward the ladder leading downward. "sandy," said burke unhappily, "i know i'm acting like a fool." "you're doing all right," said sandy. she paused at the top of the ladder. "finding this--" she waved her hand about her--"ought to put your name in the history books. of course you'll be much disliked by people who intended to invent space travel themselves. but you're doing all right." "i'm not thinking of that," said burke. "i'm thinking of you. i was going to ask you to marry me. i didn't. if we live through this, will you?" sandy regarded him carefully in the dim light of the ship's interior, most of which came through the air-lock doors. "there are some conditions," she said evenly. "i won't play second fiddle to an imaginary somebody behind a veil of dreamed-of leaves. i don't want to make conditions, joe. but i couldn't stand your feeling that maybe in marrying me you'd give up your chance of finding her--whatever or whoever she is." "but i wouldn't feel that way!" protested burke. "i'd believe you did," said sandy. "and it would amount to the same thing. i think i made a mistake in coming along in the ship, joe. if i weren't along you might have missed me. you might even--" she grimaced--"you might even have dreamed about me. but here i am. and i can't compete with somebody in a dream. i won't even try. i--i can't imagine marrying anybody else, but if i do get married i want to be the only girl my guy dreams about!" she turned again to the ladder. then said abruptly, "you didn't ask why pam feels creepy, or where. there's a place up on the second gallery where there's a door that's still locked. pam gets the shivers when she goes by it. i don't. the whole place is creepy, to me." she went down the ladder. minutes later holmes and keller arrived. holmes said curtly, "the machinery in the transmitter-room reached a change-point just now. those red dots in that plastic plate apparently started the transmitter in the first place. when its calls were answered it changed the broadcast, adding a directional signal. just before we started out from earth the red sparks passed another place and changed the broadcast again. now they've passed a third place. we were there when the machinery shifted all around on a signal from that thing which hovers close to the red sparks and watches them. the transmitter probably blasted out at four or five times its original volume. there must have been a hundred thousand kilowatts in it, at least. it looks serious. whatever those red sparks represent must be close." keller nodded in agreement, frowning, then he and holmes wearily prepared to turn in. but burke was upset. he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep. "pam gets the creeps when she passes a certain locked door up on the second gallery. i never noticed it, but i'm going to get that door open. we got to look into every compartment of this thing! there's bound to be something informative somewhere! close the air-lock behind me so pam can sleep." he went out. behind him, holmes looked at keller. "funny!" he said drily. "we're all scared. i feel uneasy all the time, without knowing why. but if he's as scared as i am, why doesn't he worry about going places alone?" the same question occurred to burke. the atmosphere of the brightly lighted halls was ominous and secretive. a man alone in a vast empty building would feel queer even in broad daylight with sunshine and other humans to be seen out of any window. but in this monstrous complex of tunnels and rooms carved out of solid stone, with uncountable millions of miles of pure emptiness without, the feeling of loneliness was incredible. he reflected wryly that a dog would be a comforting companion to have on such a journey as his. he went down the long gallery with doors on either side. past the room with the piled metal ingots. past the door through which one saw hundreds of ten-foot metal globes. up a ramp. past the rooms where something like bunks must once have stood against the walls. a long way along this corridor. emptiness, emptiness, emptiness. innumerable echoings of his footsteps on the stone. three times he stopped at doors that had swung shut, but none was fully closed. all yielded readily. then he came to the door sandy had spoken about. he worked the handle repeatedly. it was firmly shut. he kicked the door and with a loud click it swung open. there were lights inside this room, as everywhere else they had explored. but it was nearly impossible to see any distance. this was an extremely long room, and it contained racks of metal which reached from floor to ceiling. each rack was a series of shallow metal troughs, and in each trough there was a row of crumbly black metal cubes, very systematically arranged. each side was about three inches square, and they were dull black, not glistening at all. they filled the racks completely. there were narrow aisles between the rows of racks, through which burke could make his way easily enough, but which a more portly man might have found inconvenient. he stared at a trough, and was stunned. he picked up one of the cubes, and immediately recognized the object in his hand. it was a dull-black, smudgy cube exactly like the one his uncle had brought back from the cro-magnon cave in france. he knew that if he dropped this object--found two hundred seventy million miles from the other one--it would split into thousands of tissue-thin, shiny pieces. he did drop it. deliberately. and it shattered into layers which lay like films of mica on the floor. for no clearly understandable reason, burke found that his flesh crawled. he had to force himself to stay in this room with so many thousands of the enigmatic cubes. there had been a cube of this kind on earth. the one he'd known as a child had belonged to a cro-magnon tribesman ten thousand, twenty thousand, how many years ago? and it could only have come from this asteroid. which meant-- presently he made his way back to the spaceship. he carried one of the cubes, rather gingerly. he meant to show it to sandy. but the implications were startling. members of the garrison of this fortress, thousands of years gone by, had visited earth. one of them, doubtless, had carried that other cube. why? when the garrison abandoned the asteroid they left these cubes behind. they left behind intricate machinery to call them back. they left squat machines and ten-foot globes which must be weapons. they left nothing that would be useful in the place to which they had removed. but they'd left these cubes, hundreds of thousands of them. the cube, then, could be anything. it could be impersonal, like equipment for the fortress that would be useless elsewhere. the fortress' equipment was designed to deal out death. were the cubes? no. burke had owned one without damage. when that cube split into glistening, tissue-thin plates, no one was injured. to be sure, there was his dream. but the cube wasn't a weapon. whatever else it might be, it was not dangerous. he went into the spaceship and for no reason whatever firmly locked both air-lock doors. holmes and keller were asleep. there was no sound from the lower compartment occupied by sandy and pam. burke put the black object on the control-desk. the single cube on earth had been meaningless. the museum which joyfully accepted cro-magnon artifacts from his uncle had dismissed it as of no importance. it was fit only to be given to an eleven-year-old boy. but a roomful of such cubes couldn't be without meaning! he dismissed this newest mystery with an almost violent effort of his will. it was a mystery. yet there was no intention to have the fortress seem a mystery to whoever answered its call to space. he could guess that the signals were notification of some emergency which needed to be met. the automatic apparatus of the ship-lock was set to aid those who came in response to the call. but everything presupposed that those who came would know why they came. burke didn't. the thing must be simple, an explanation not yet thought of. but there was nowhere to start to think about it! his recurrent dream? no. that was as mysterious as the rest. burke was very, very lonely and depressed. he could look for no help in solving the mystery. earth was now past the point of conjunction with m- , and moved nearly a million miles a day along its orbit, with nearly half of them away from the fortress. at the most hopeful estimate, it would be three months or later before an emergency space fleet of replicas of his own ship could lift off from earth for here. and burke was reasonably sure that the red sparks would have reached the center of the disk in much less time than that. if it were in some fashion like a radar, making a map of the surroundings of the asteroid, the observer's place would be in the middle. in that event, whatever the red sparks represented would reach the fortress before more ships came out from earth. he sat with his chin on his chest, wearily debating the impossibility of meeting a situation in which all humanity might well be involved. his achievement of space travel provided no sense of triumph, and the discovery of the abandoned fortress produced no elation. not when a desperate emergency requiring a non-existent garrison to report for duty was so probable. burke sat in the control-chair and could find no encouragement in any of his thoughts.... * * * * * _he heard a trumpet-call and was on his feet, buckling familiar equipment about him. there were other figures all around in this bunkroom, similarly equipping themselves. some grumbled. there was a rush for the doorway and he found himself one of a line of trotting figures which swung sharply out the door and went swiftly down one of the high-ceilinged corridors. the faces he saw were hardbitten and resentful. they moved, but out of habit, not choice. there were other lines of men in motion. some rushed in the same direction. others ran stolidly into branching corridors and were lost to sight. up a ramp, with the pounding of innumerable feet filling his ears with echoed sound. suddenly there were fewer men before him. some had darted through a doorway to the right. more vanished. he was at the head of his line. he turned into the doorway next beyond, and saw a squat and menacing object there. he swung up its side and seated himself. he dropped a helmet over his head and saw empty space with millions of unwinking stars beyond it. he waited. he was not burke. he was someone else who happened to be the pointer, the aimer, of the weapon he sat astride. this might be a drill, but it could be action._ _a voice spoke inside his helmet. the words were utterly strange, but he understood them. he tested the give of this lever and the response of that. he spoke crisply, militarily, in words that somehow meant this--a word missing--was ready for action at its highest rate of fire._ _again he waited, his eyes examining the emptiness he saw from within his helmet. a star winked. he snatched at a lever and centered it, snapping sharp, bitten-off words. the voice in his helmet said, "flam!" he jerked the firing-lever and all space was blotted out for seconds by flaming light. then the light faded and far, far away among the stars something burned horribly, spouting fire. it blew up._ _yet again he waited. he doggedly watched the stars, because the enemy had some way to prevent detection by regular instruments, and only the barest flicker of one among myriad light-specks could reveal the presence of an enemy craft._ _a long time later the voice in his helmet spoke again, and he relaxed, and lifted the helmet. he nodded to the others of the crew of this weapon. then a trumpet blew again, and he dismounted leisurely from the saddle of the ungainly thing he'd fired, and he and his companions waited while long lines of men filed stolidly past the doorway. they were on the way back to the bunk-rooms. they did not look well-fed. his turn came. his crew filed out into the corridor, now filled with men moving in a bored but disciplined fashion. he heard somebody say that it was an enemy scout, trying some new device to get close to the fortress. eight weapons had fired on it at the same instant, his among them. whatever the new device was, the enemy had found it didn't work. but he knew that it needn't have been a real enemy, but just a drill. nobody knew when supposed action was real. there was much suspicion that there was no real action. there was always the possibility of real action, though. of course. the enemy had been the enemy for thousands of years. a century or ten or a hundred of quietude would not mean the enemy had given up...._ * * * * * then burke found himself staring at the quietly glowing monitor-lights of his own ship's control-board. he was himself again. he remembered opening his eyes. he'd dozed, and he'd dreamed, and now he was awake. and he knew with absolute certainty that what he'd dreamed came from the black cube he'd brought back from the previously locked-up room. but there was a difference between this dream and the one he'd had for so many years. he could not name the difference, but he knew it. this was not an emotion-packed, illusory experience which would haunt him forever. this was an experience like the most vivid of books. it was something he would remember, but he would need to think about it if he were to remember it fully. he sat stiffly still, going over and over this new memory, until he heard someone moving about in the compartment below. "sandy?" "yes," said sandy downstairs. "what is it?" "i opened the door that bothered pam," said burke. suddenly the implications of what had just occurred began to hit him. this was the clue he'd needed. now he knew--many things. "i found out what the fortress is for. i suspect i know what the signals were intended to do." silence for a moment. then sandy's voice. "i'm coming right up." in minutes she ascended the stairs. "what is it, joe?" he waved his hand, with some grimness, at the small black object on the control-desk. "i found this and some thousands of others behind that creepy door. i suspect that it accounts for the absence of signs and symbols. it contains information. i got it. you get it by dozing near one of these things. i did. i dreamed." sandy looked at him anxiously. "no," he told her. "no twin moons or waving foliage. i dreamed i was a member of the garrison. i went through a training drill. i know how to operate those big machines on the second level of the corridor, now. they're weapons. i know how to use them." sandy's uneasiness visibly increased. "these black cubes are--lesson-givers. they're subliminal instructors. pam is more sensitive to such stuff than the rest of us. it didn't affect me until i dozed. then i found myself instructed by going through an experience in the form of a dream. these cubes contain records of experiences. you have those experiences. you dream them. you learn." then he said abruptly, "i understand my recurrent dream now, i think. when i was eleven years old i had a cube like this. don't ask me how it got into a cro-magnon cave! but i had it. one day it dropped and split into a million leaves of shiny stuff. one got away under my bed, close up under my pillow. when i slept i dreamed about a place with two moons and strange trees and--all the rest." sandy said, groping, "do you mean it was magnetized in some fashion, and when you slept you were affected by it so you dreamed something--predetermined?" "exactly," said burke grimly. "the predetermined thing in this particular cube is the way to operate those machines holmes said were weapons." then he said more grimly, "i think we're going to have to accept the idea that this cube is an instruction device to teach the garrison without their having to learn to read or write or think. they'd have only to dream." sandy looked from him to the small black cube. "then we can find out--" "i've found it out," said burke. "i guessed before, but now i know. there is an enemy this fortress was built to fight. there is a war that's lasted for thousands of years. the enemy has spaceships and strange weapons and is absolutely implacable. it has to be found. and the signals from space were calls to the garrison of this fortress to come back and fight it. but there isn't any garrison any more. we answered instead. the enemy comes from hundreds or thousands of light-years away, and he tries desperately to smash the defenses of this fortress and others, and when he succeeds there will be massacre and atrocity and death to celebrate his victory. he's on the way now. and when he comes--" burke's voice grew harsh. "when he comes he won't stop with trying to smash this place. the people of earth are the enemy's enemies, too. because the garrison was a garrison of men!" chapter "i don't believe it," said holmes flatly. burke shrugged. he found that he was tense all over, so he took some pains to appear wholly calm. "it isn't reasonable!" insisted holmes. "it doesn't make sense!" "the question," observed burke, "isn't whether it makes sense, but whether it's fact. according to the last word from earth, they're still insisting that the ship's drive is against all reason. but we're here. and speaking of reason, would the average person look at this place and say blandly, 'ah, yes! a fortress in space. to be sure!' would they? is this place reasonable?" holmes grinned. "i'll go along with you there," he agreed. "it isn't. but you say its garrison was men. look here! have you seen a place before where men lived without writings in its public places? they tell me the ancient egyptians wrote their names on the sphinx and the pyramids. nowadays they're scrawled in phone booths and on benches. it's the instinct of men to autograph their surroundings. but there's not a line of written matter in this place! that's not like men!" "again," said burke, "the question isn't of normality, but of fact." "then i'll try it," said holmes skeptically. "how does it work?" "i don't know. but put a cube about a yard from your head, and doze off. i think you'll have an odd dream. i did. i think the information you'll get in your dream will check with what you find around you. some of it you won't have known before, but you'll find it's true." "this," said holmes, "i will have to see. which cube do i try it with, or do i use all of them?" "there's apparently no way to tell what any of them contains," said burke. "i went back to the storeroom and brought a dozen of them. take any one and put the others some distance away--maybe outside the ship. i'm going to talk to keller. he'll make a lot of use of this discovery." holmes picked up a cube. "i'll try it," he said cheerfully. "i go to sleep, perchance to dream. right! see you later." burke moved toward the ship's air-lock. "pam and i have some housekeeping to do," sandy said. burke nodded abstractedly. he left the ship and headed along the mile-long corridor with the turn at the end, a second level and another turn, and then the flight of steps to the instrument-room. as he walked, the sound of his footsteps echoed and reëchoed. behind him, holmes set a cube in a suitable position and curled up on one of the side-wall bunks in the upper compartment of the spaceship. "we'll go downstairs," said sandy. pam parted her lips to speak, and did not. they disappeared down the stair to the lower room. then sandy came back and picked up the extra cubes. "joe said to move them," she explained. she disappeared again. holmes settled himself comfortably. he was one of those fortunate people who are able to relax at will. actually, in his work he normally did his thinking while on his feet, moving about his yacht-building plant or else sailing one of his own boats. he simply was not a sit-down thinker. sitting, he could doze at almost any time he pleased, and for a yachtsman it was a useful ability. he could go for days on snatched catnaps when necessary. conversely he could catnap practically at will. he yawned once or twice and settled down confidently. in five minutes or less ... * * * * * _he wriggled down into an opening barely large enough to admit his body. the top clamped and sealed overhead. he fitted his feet into their proper stirrup-like holders and fixed his hands on the controls. there was violent acceleration and he shot away and ahead. behind him the jagged shape of the fortress loomed. he swung his tiny ship. he drove fiercely for the tiny rings of red glow which centered themselves in the sighting-screen before him. he drove and drove, while the fortress dwindled to a dot and then vanished._ _on either side of his ship a ten-foot steel globe clung. he checked them over, tense with the realization that he must very soon be within the practical timing-range of the new enemy solid missiles. he made minute adjustments in the settings of the globes._ _he released them together. they went swinging madly away at the end of a hair-thin wire which would sustain the tons of stress that centrifugal force gave the spheres. they spiraled toward darkness with its background of innumerable stars. the enemy would be puzzled, this time! they'd developed missile-weapons with computing sights. in their last attack, five hundred years before, the enemy had been defeated by the self-driving globes that had an utterly incredible acceleration. it was reported from the cathor sector that in this current attack they had missile-weapons with a muzzle-velocity of hundreds of miles per second, which could actually anticipate a globe with a hundred-sixty-gravity drive. they could fire a solid shot to meet it and knock it down, because of some incredible computer-system which was able to calculate a globe's trajectory and meet it in space. they were smart, the enemy!_ _the two globes went spinning toward the enemy. linked together, they spun round and round and no conceivable computer could calculate the path of either one so a projectile could hit. they did not travel in a straight line, as a trajectory in space should be. whirling as they did around a common center of gravity, with the plane of their circling at a sharp angle to their line of flight, it was not possible to range them for gunfire. their progress was in a series of curves, each at a different distance, which no mere calculator could solve without direction. a radar could not pick up the data a computer would need. one or the other globe might be hit, but it was far from likely._ _the pilot of the one-man ship saw the blue-white flame of a hit. he flung his ship about and sped back toward the fortress. the enemy would beat this trick, in time. four thousand years before they'd almost won, when they invaded the old nation. they were getting bolder now. there was a time when a sound beating sent them back beyond the coal-sack to lick their wounds for two thousand years or better. lately they came more often. there'd been a raid in force only five hundred years back, and only fifteen before that ..._ * * * * * holmes, obviously, had the odd dream burke had prophesied. but burke was up in the instrument-room by then. keller gazed absorbedly at a vision-plate. it showed a section of the exterior surface of the asteroid--harsh, naked rock, with pitiless sunlight showing the grain and structure of the rock-crystals. where there was shadow, the blackness was absolute. as burke entered, keller turned a knob. the image changed to a picture of a compartment inside the fortress. it was a part of the maze of rooms and galleries that none of the newcomers had visited. panels and bus-bars and things which were plainly switches covered its walls. it was a power-distribution center. keller turned the knob back, and the view of the outside of the asteroid returned. keller turned and blinked at burke, and then said happily, "look!" he went to another vision-screen with an image of another part of the outer surface. he turned that knob, and the image dissolved into another. this was a gigantic room, lighted like more familiar places. in its center there was an enormous, gigantic machine. there were domes of metal, with great rods of silvery stuff reaching across emptiness between them. there were stairs by which one could climb to this part and that. judging by the steps and the size of the light-tubes, the machine was the size of a four-storey house. and on the floor there were smaller machines, all motionless and all cryptic. keller said with conviction, "power!" burke stared. keller recovered the original view and went to still other plates. in succession, as he turned the knobs, burke saw compartment after compartment. there was one quite as huge as the one containing the power-generating machine. it contained hemispheres bolted ten feet above the floor on many columns. there was a network of bus-bars, it seemed, overlying everything, and there were smaller devices on the floor below it. "gravity!" said keller with conviction. "good enough," said burke. "we've found something too, which may be useful with those machines. if we can--" keller held up his hand and went to one special screen. when he changed the image, the new one was totally unlike any of the others. this was a close-up. it showed a clumsy, strictly improvised and definitely cobbled metal case against a wall. it had been made by inept hands. it was remarkable to see such indifferent workmanship here. but the really remarkable thing was that the face of the box contained an inscription, burned into the metal as if by a torch. the symbols had no meaning to burke, of course. but this was an inscription in a written language. keller rubbed his hands, beaming. "it could be a message for somebody who'd come later," said burke. "it's hard to think of it being anything else. but it wasn't placed for us to find. it should have been set up beside the ship-lock we were expected to come in by and did come in by." "we'll see," said keller zestfully. "come on!" burke followed him. keller seemed somehow to know the way. they went all the way back to the ship-lock, passed it, and then keller dived off to the right, down an unsuspected ramp. there were galleries running in every direction here, crossing each other and opening upon an indefinite number of what must have been storerooms. presently keller pointed. there was the case against the wall. it faced a wide corridor. it did not belong here. it was totally unlike any other artifact they had seen, because it seemed to have been made totally without skill. yet there was an inscription--and the making of written records had appeared to be a skill the former occupants of the asteroid had not possessed. keller very zestfully essayed to open it. he failed. burke said, "we'll have to use tools to get it open." "somebody made it," said keller, "just before the garrison went away. they made it here!" "quite likely," agreed burke. "we'll get at it presently. now listen, keller! i came along because a message might be useful. i think holmes has found out something, though what it may be i can't guess. come along with me. there've been developments and i want to hold a council of war. and i think i do mean war!" he led the way back toward the ship. when they arrived, holmes was awake and growling because of burke's absence. "you win," he told burke. "i had a dream, and it wasn't a dream. i know something about those metal globes. they've got drives in them, and they can accelerate to a hundred and sixty gees, and i don't think i'll ride one." wryly, he told burke what he'd experienced. "i'm not too much surprised," said burke. "i've managed two cube-experiences myself. i figure that these cubes trained men to operate things, without training their brains in anything else. they'd make illiterates into skilled men in a particular line, so anybody could do the work a highly trained man would otherwise be needed for. in one of my two cube-dreams i was a gun-pointer on one of those machines up on the third level. in the second cube-dream i was a rocket-pilot." "no rockets in my cube," protested holmes. "different period," said burke. "maybe, anyhow. in my dream we were using rockets to fight with, and the war was close. the enemy had taken some planets off kandu--wherever that is!--and the situation was bad. we went out of here in rockets and fought all over the sky. but then there were supplies coming from home, and fresh fighting men turning up." he stopped abruptly. "how'd they come? i don't know. but i know they didn't come in spaceships. they just came, and they were new men and we veterans patronized them. the devil! holmes, you say the globes have a hundred-sixty-gee drive! nobody'd use rockets if drives like that were known!" "to stay in the party," sandy said suddenly, with something like defiance, "i tried a cube, too. and i was a sort of supply-officer. i had the experience of being responsible for supply and being short of everything and improvising this and that and the other to keep things up to fighting standard. it wasn't easy. the men grumbled, and we lacked everything. there was no fighting in my time, and there hadn't been for centuries. but we knew the enemy hadn't given up and we had to be ready, generation after generation, even when nothing happened. and we knew that any minute the enemy might throw something unexpected, some new weapon, at us." "history-cubes," said keller interestedly. "different periods. right?" "dammit, yes!" said burke. "we've got accounts of past times and finished battles, but we need to know who's coming and what to do about it! maybe the rocket-dream was earliest in time. but how could a race with nothing better than rockets ever get here? and how could they supply the building of a place like this?" there was no answer. facts ought to fit together. when they don't, they are useless. "we've got snatches of information," said burke. "but we don't know who built this fort, or why, except that there was a war that lasted thousands of years, with pauses for centuries between battles." he waved a hand irritably. "the enemy tries to think up new weapons. they do. they try them. so far, they've been countered. but we're not prepared to fight a new weapon. maybe the fort is set to battle old ones, but we don't know how to use it even for that! we've got to--" "i think--" began keller. "i'd give plenty for a service manual on the probably useless weapons we do have," said burke angrily. "incidentally, keller just found what may be an explanation of how and why this place was abandoned." keller said suddenly, "where would service manuals be?" he moved, almost running, toward the air-lock. burke started to swear, and stopped. "a service-and-repair manual," he snapped, "would be near the equipment it described. how many little shelves with boxes on them have we seen? they're just the right size to hold cubes! and where are they? next to those fighting machines next to the door of the room where the ten-foot globes are! there's a shelf of them in the instrument-room! let's find out how to fight with this misbegotten shell of a space-fort! there'll be no help coming to us, but if the enemy's held off for thousands of years while this civilization fell apart, we might as well try to hold it together for a few minutes or seconds longer! let's go get some real instruction-cubes!" keller was already gone. the others followed. once they saw keller in the far, far distance, hastening toward the instrument-room. behind him, after almost running down the long corridor, burke swung into the room where hundreds of ten-foot metal globes waited for the fortress to be remanned and to go into action again. inside the door he found the remembered shelf, with two small boxes fastened to it. he pulled down one box and opened it. there was a black cube inside it. he thrust it upon holmes. "here!" he said feverishly. "find out how those globes work! find out what's in them, how they drive!" he ran. to the end of the corridor and up the ramp and past the supposed bunk-rooms and mess-halls. up to the level where the ugly metal machines stood, each in its separate cubicle. there were little shelves inside each door. each shelf contained a single box. burke took one, two, and then stopped short. "they'll be practically alike," he muttered. "no need." he put one back. and then he felt almost insanely angry. one would need at least to be able to doze, to make use of the detailed, vivid, and utterly convincing material contained in the black cubes. and how could any man doze or sleep for the purpose of learning such desperately needed data? he'd need almost not to want the information to be able to sleep to get it! sandy and pam overtook him as he stood in harried frustration with a black cube in his hands. "listen to me, joe," said sandy. "we've all taken chances, but if you get recurrent dreams from every cube you doze near--" "when that happened to me," snapped burke, "i was eleven years old and had one moment only. and that dream wasn't affected by the others in the cubes that came after it. and anyhow, no matter what happens to holmes and me, we have to get these things ready for use! i don't know what we'll use them against. i don't know whether they'll be any use at all. but i've got to try to use them, so i've got to try to find out how!" sandy opened her mouth to speak again. "i'm going off to fret myself to sleep," added burke. "holmes will be trying it too. and keller." "i don't think it's necessary," said sandy. "why?" "you found a sort of library of cubes. how useful would they be if one had to doze off to read them? how handy would a manual about repairing a weapon be, if somebody had to take a nap to get instructions? it wouldn't make sense!" "go on!" said burke impatiently. "why not look in the library?" asked sandy. "as a quartermaster officer, i _think_ i knew that there was a reading-device for the cubes, like a projector for microfilm. it might have been taken away, but also--" "come along!" snapped burke. "if that's so, it's everything! and it ought to be so!" they hastened to the vast, low-ceilinged room which was filled with racks of black cubes. they were stacked in their places. at the far corner they found a desk and a cabinet. in the cabinet they found two objects like metal skull-caps, with clamps atop them. a cube would fit between the clamps. burke feverishly sat a cube in position and put the skull-cap on his head. his expression was strange. after an instant he took it off and reversed the cube. he put it on. his face cleared. he lifted it off. "i had it on backwards the first time," he said curtly. "this is better than dreaming the stuff. this lets you examine things in detail. you know you're receiving something. you don't think you're actually experiencing. we'll get this other reading-machine to keller, so he can understand the equipment in the instrument-room. holmes will have to wait." sandy said, "i can use him. doesn't it occur to you, joe, that we've only partly explored the top half of the fortress? we've only looked at what's between us and the instrument-room. there are all the stores--there were stores! and the generators down below. i can lead the way there now!" "what do you know about the weapons?" demanded burke. "nothing," said sandy. "but i know something about the morale of the garrison. when grumbling began, discipline tightened up. and that worked for the men, but the women--" "women!" said pam incredulously. "they were an experiment," sandy told her, "to see if they would content men on duty in an outpost. it'd been going on for only a few hundred years. it didn't seem to work too well. they wanted supplies that weren't exactly military, and at the time the cube i used was made, there was trouble getting even military things!" burke said impatiently, "i'll get one of these things to keller. that's the most important thing. tell holmes not to try to sleep. take him down to look over the supplies, if there are any. i'd guess that the garrison took most of them along. i doubt there's much left that we could use." he made his way out of the cube-library and vanished. pam said uncomfortably, "joe dreamed about a woman and is no good to you, in consequence. if there were women in this garrison, using the cubes might make anybody--" sandy tensed her lips. "i don't think joe is thinking about his old dream. something deadly's on the way here. his mind's on that. i suspect all three of the men are concentrating on it. they're in no mood for romance." "don't you think i've noticed?" pam said gloomily. "but i'm coming with you when you show him the storerooms!" the "him" was obviously holmes, whose attention had been so much taken up by the problems the fortress presented that pam felt pushed much farther on the side lines than she liked. it was one thing to be present to watch and help and cheer on a man who planned to do something remarkable. but it was less satisfying when he became so absorbed that he didn't notice being watched, and couldn't be helped, and didn't need to be cheered on. pam was disgruntled. then, for a considerable number of hours, absurdly trivial activities seemed to occupy all the people in the asteroid. burke and keller sat in the thirty by thirty-foot instrument-room, each wearing a small metal half-cap with a black cube held atop it between a pair of clamps. their expressions were absorbed and intent, while they seemed attired for a children's halloween party. now and again one of them exchanged one cube for another. about them there was a multiplicity of television screens, each screen presenting a picture of infinitely perfect quality. every square foot of the outside of the asteroid could be seen on one or another of the screens. then, besides, there were banks of screens which showed every square degree of the sky, with every star of every magnitude represented so that one could use a magnifying glass upon the screen to discover finer detail. once, during the hours when burke and keller were sitting quite still, keller reached over and threw a switch. nothing happened. everything went on exactly as it had done before. he shook his head. and much later he went to one of the star-image screens. he moved an inconspicuous knob in a special fashion, and the star-image expanded and expanded until what had been a second of arc or less filled all the screen's surface. the effect of an incredibly powerful telescope was obtained by the movement of one control. keller restored the knob to its original place and the image returned to its former scale. these were the only actions which took place in the instrument-room. in the lower part of the asteroid, not much more occurred. the entrance to the power and storage areas was not hidden. it simply had not been entered. sandy and holmes and pam went gingerly down a corridor with doors on either side, and then down a ramp, and then into huge caverns filled with monstrous metal things. there was no sign of any motion anywhere, but gigantic power-leads led from the machines to massive switchboards, whose switches were thrown by relays operated from somewhere else. then there were other caverns which must have contained many varieties of stores. there were great cases, broken open and emptied. there were bins with only dust at their bottoms. there were shelves containing things which might have been textiles, but which crumbled at a touch. some thousands of years in an absolute vacuum would have evaporated any substance giving any degree of flexibility. these objects were useless. there was a great room with a singular hundred-foot-high machine in it, but there was no vibration or sound to indicate that it was in operation. this, sandy said decisively, was the artificial-gravity generator. she did not know how it worked. it would have been indiscreet to experiment. she led the way through relatively small corridors to areas in which there were very many small compartments. these had been for foodstuffs. but they were empty. they had been emptied when the asteroid was abandoned. then they came to the crudely fashioned case with the cryptic symbols on its front. "this is the thing joe mentioned," said sandy. "they had writing. they'd have to, to be civilized. but this is the only writing we've seen. why'd they write it?" "to tell somebody something they'd miss, otherwise," pam said. "who'd come down here? why not put it at the ship-lock where people could be expected to come?" holmes grunted. "asking questions like that gets nowhere. it's like asking how the garrison was supplied. there's no answer. or how it left." sandy said in a surprised voice, as if saying something she hadn't realized she knew. "there were service ships. they serviced the television eyes on the outside, and they drilled at launching missiles, and so on. they were modified fighting ships, made over after ships didn't fight any more." she hesitated, then went on. "it's odd that i didn't think of telling joe this! some of the food supply came from earth at the time my cube was made. as a quartermaster officer, i was authorized to allow hunting on earth in case of need. so the serviceships went to earth and came back with mammoths tied to the outside of their hulls. they had to be re-hydrated, though. frozen though they were, they dried out in the long trip through vacuum from earth." then she shivered a little. pam looked at her strangely. holmes raised his eyebrows. he'd had one experience of training-cubes. sandy'd had quite another. holmes felt that instinctive slight resentment a man feels when he lacks a position of authority in the presence of a woman. "in my time--in the cube's time--there was even a hunting camp on earth. otherwise there simply wouldn't be enough to eat! women were clamoring to be sent to earth to help with the food supply. to be sent to hunt for food was a reward for exemplary service." "which is interesting," observed holmes, "but irrelevant. how was the asteroid normally supplied? how did the garrison leave? where did it come from? where did it go? maybe the answer's in this box. if it is," he added, "it'll be in the same language as the inscription, and we can't read it." archaeologists on earth would have been enraptured by any part of the fortress, but anything which promised to explain as much as holmes had guessed the case could, would be a treasure past any price. but the five people in the asteroid had much more immediate and much more urgent problems to think of. they went on a little farther and came to a storeroom which had been filled with something, but now held only the remains of packing-cases. they looked ready to crumble if touched. "there used to be weapons stored here," sandy said. "hand-weapons. not for the defense of the fortress, but for the--discipline police. for the men who kept the others obedient to orders." "i'd be glad to have one operating pea-shooter," said holmes. pam wrinkled her nose suddenly. she'd noticed something. "i think--" she began, "i think--" holmes kicked at a shape which once was probably a case of wood or something similar. it collapsed into impalpable dust. it had dried out to absolute desiccation. it was stripped of every molecule which could be extracted by a total vacuum in thousands of years. it was brittle past imagining. the collapse did not end with the object kicked. it spread. one case bulged as the support of another failed. the bulged case disintegrated. its particles pressed on another. the dissolution spread fanwise until nothing remained but a carpeting of infinitely fine brown stuff. in one place, however, solid objects remained under the covering. holmes waded through the powder to the solid things. he brought them up. a case of hand-weapons had collapsed, but the weapons themselves kept their shape. they had transparent plastic barrels with curiously formed metal parts inside them. "these might be looked into," said holmes. he stuffed his pockets. the hand-weapons had barrels and handgrips and triggers. they were made to shoot, somehow. "i think--" began pam again. "don't," growled holmes. "maybe sandy remembers when this place was different, but i've had enough of it as it is. let's go back to the ship and some fresh air." "but that's what--" holmes turned away. like the rest, he'd accepted great age, mentally, as a part of the nature of the fortress. but the collapse of emptied shipping-cases because they were touched was a shock. where such decay existed, one could not hope to find anything useful for a modern emergency. he vanished. pam was indignant. she turned to sandy. "i wanted to say that i smelled fresh air," she protested. "and he acts like that!" sandy was not listening. she frowned. "he could lose his way down here," she said shortly. "we'd better keep him in sight. i remember the way from my dream." they followed holmes, who did make his way back to the upper levels and ultimately to the ship without guidance. but pam was intensely indignant. "we could have gotten lost down there!" she said angrily when they were back in familiar territory. "and he wouldn't have cared! and i did smell fresh air! not very fresh, but fresher than the aged and dried-out stuff we're breathing now!" "you couldn't," said sandy practically. "there simply couldn't be any, except in the ship where the hydroponic wall-gardens keep it fresh." "but i did!" insisted pam. sandy shrugged. they went into the ship, which holmes had already reached and where he sat gloomily beside a black cube. he would have to sleep to get anything from it. there were only two of the freakish-seeming metal caps which made the cubes intelligible to a man awake, and burke and keller were using them. holmes felt offended. sandy looked at a clock and began to prepare a meal. pam, brooding, helped her. burke and keller came back to the ship together. keller looked pale. burke seemed utterly grim. "there's some stuff to be coded and sent back to earth," he told sandy. "keller's got it written out. we know how to work the instruments up above, now. my brain's reeling a little, but i think i'll stay sane. keller takes it in stride. and we know the trick the enemy has." sandy put out plates for five. "what is it?" "gravity," said burke, evenly. "artificial gravity. we don't know how to make it, but the people who built this fortress did, and the enemy does. so they've made artificial-gravity fields to give their ships the seeming mass of suns, and they've set them in close orbits around each other. they'll come spinning into this solar system. what will happen when objects with the mass of suns--artificial or otherwise--come riding through between our sun and its planets? there'll be tidal stresses to crack the planets and let out their internal fires. there'll be no stability left in the sun. maybe it'll be a low-grade nova when they've gone, surrounded by trash that once was worlds. anyhow there'll be no humans left! and then the enemy will go driving on toward the other solar systems that the builders of this fortress own. they can't conquer anything with a weapon like that, but they can surely destroy!" keller nodded distressedly. he gave pam a number of sheets of paper, filled with his neat handwriting. he said sorrowfully, "for earth. in code." sandy served the meal she had prepared. "it's a matter of days," said burke curtly. "not weeks. just days." he picked up a fork and began his meal. "so," he said after a moment, with a sort of unnatural calm, "we've got to get the thing licked fast. up in the instrument-room there are some theory-cubes--lectures on theories with which the operators of the room were probably required to be familiar. they were intended to figure out what the enemy might come up with, so it could at least be reported before the fortress was destroyed. the trick of sun-gravity fields was suggested as possible, but it seemed preposterously difficult. apparently, it was. it took the enemy some thousands of years to get it. but they've got it, all right!" "how do you know?" demanded holmes. "the disk with the red sparks in it," said burke, "is a detector of gravity-fields. it sees by gravity, which is not radiation. keller's sending instructions back to earth telling how to make such detectors." he busied himself with his food once more. after a moment he spoke again. "we're going to try to get some help," he observed. "at least we'll try to find out if there's any help to be had. i think there's a chance. there was a civilization which built this fortress. something happened to it. perhaps it simply collapsed, like rome and greece and egypt and babylonia back on earth. but on earth when an old civilization died a new, young one rose in its place. if the one that built this fort collapsed, maybe a new one has risen in its stead. if so, it will need to defend itself against the enemy just like the old culture did. it might prefer to do its fighting here, instead of in its own land. i think we may be able to contact it." "how'll you look for them?" burke shrugged. "i've some faint hope of a few directions in that sealed-up metal case with the inscription on it. i'm going to take some tools and break into it. it's a gamble, but there's nothing to lose." he ate briskly, with a good appetite. sandy was very silent. pam said abruptly, "we saw that case. and i smelled fresh air there. not pure air like here in the ship, but not dead air like the air everywhere else." "near a power generator, pam, there'd be some ozone," holmes said patiently. "it makes a lot of difference." "it wasn't ozone," said pam firmly. "it was fresh air. not canned air. fresh!" holmes looked at burke. "did you or keller find out how the air's refreshed here? did anybody throw a switch for air apparatus?" keller said mildly, "apparatus, no. air exchange, yes. i threw switches also for communication with base. also emergency communication. also dire emergency. nothing happened." "you see, pam?" said holmes. "it was ozone that made the air smell fresh." sandy was wholly silent until the meal was over. then holmes went moodily off with keller, to use the cube-reading devices in the instrument-room and try to find, against all apparent probability, some clue or some communication which would enable something useful to be done. holmes was trying hard to believe that things were not as bad as burke announced, and not nearly so desperate that they had to try to find the descendants of a long-vanished civilization for a chance to offer resistance to the enemy. keller said confidentially, just before they reached the instrument-room, "burke's an optimist." and at that moment, back in the little plastic spaceship, burke was saying to sandy, "you can come along if you like. there are a couple of things to be looked into. and if you want to come, pam--" but pam touched the papers keller had given her and said reservedly, "i'll code and send this stuff. go ahead, sandy." sandy rose. she followed burke out of the ship. she was acutely aware that this was the first time since they had entered the ship that she and burke could speak to each other when nobody could overhear. they'd spoken twice when the others were presumably asleep. but this was the first time they'd been alone. when they'd passed through the door with the rounded corners, they were completely isolated. overhead, brilliant light-tubes reached a full mile down the gallery in one direction, and half as far in the other. the vast corridor contained nothing to make a sound but themselves. "it's this way," said burke. sandy knew the way as well as he did, or better, but she accepted his direction. their footsteps echoed and reëchoed, so that they were accompanied by countless reflections of heel-clicks along with the normal rustling and whispering sounds of walking. they went a full quarter-mile from the ship-lock door, and came to a very large arched opening which gave entrance to a corridor slanting downward. "supplies came up this ramp," said sandy. it was a statement which should have been startling, but burke nodded. sandy went on, carefully, "that cube about a supply-officer's duties was pretty explicit. things were getting difficult." burke did not seem to hear. they went on and on. they came to the place where keller had turned aside. burke silently indicated the turning. they moved along this other gallery. "joe," said sandy pleadingly. "is it really so bad?" "strictly speaking, i don't see a chance. but that's just the way it looks now. there must be something that can be done. the trick is to find it. meantime, why panic?" "you--act queer," protested sandy. "i feel queer," he said. "i know various ways to approach problems. none of them apply to this one. you see, it isn't really our problem. we're innocent bystanders, without information about the situation that apparently will kill us and everybody back on earth. if we knew more about the situation, we might find some part of it that could be tackled, changed. there may be something in this case--perhaps a message left by the garrison for the people who sent them here. i can't see why it'd be placed here, though." he slowed, looking down one cross-gallery after another. "here it is." they'd come to the clumsily-made case with the inscription on it. it was placed against the wall of a corridor, facing the length of another gallery which came from the side at this point. a little distance down the other passage, the line of doors was broken by an archway which gave upon a hewed-out compartment. the opening was wide enough to show a fragment of a metal floor. there was no sign of any contents. other compartments nearby were empty. the placing of the inscribed box was inexplicable. but the inscription was sharply clear. "maybe," suggested sandy forlornly, "it says something like 'explosives! danger!'" "not likely," said burke. he'd examined the box before. he'd brought along a tool suited to the job of opening it. he set to work, then stopped. "sandy," he said abruptly, "i think the gravity-generator's a couple of corridors in that direction. will you look and see if there are any tools there that might be better than this? just look for a place where tools might be stored. if you find something, call me." she went obediently down the lighted, excavated corridor. she reached the vast cavern. here there were myriad tube-lights glowing in the ceiling--and the gravity machine. it was gigantic. it was six storeys high and completely mysterious. she looked with careful intentness for a place where tools might have been kept by the machine's attendants. she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned there was nothing. there could be no movement in the fortress unless by machinery or one of the five humans who'd come so recently. the asteroid had been airless for ten thousand years. it was unthinkable that anything alive, even a microbe, could have survived. so sandy did not think of a living thing as having made the movement. but movement there had been. she stared. there were totally motionless machines all about. none of them showed any sign of stirring. sandy swallowed the ache in her throat and it returned instantly. she moved, to look where the movement had been. she glanced at each machine in turn. one might have made some automatic adjustment. she'd tell burke. she passed a fifteen-foot-high assembly of insulators and bright metal, connected overhead to other cryptic things by heavy silvery bars. she passed a cylinder with dials in its sides. she saw movement again. in a different place. she spun around to look. something half the height of a man, with bird-legs and feet and swollen plumage and a head with an oversized beak which was pure caricature--something alive and frightened fled from her. it waddled in ridiculous, panicky haste. it flapped useless stumps of wings. it fled in terrified silence. it vanished. the first thing that occurred to sandy was that burke wouldn't believe her if she told him. chapter burke found her, rooted to the spot. he had a small metal box in his hand. he didn't notice her pallor nor that she trembled. "i may have something," he said with careful calm. "the case had this in it. there's a black cube in the box. the case seems to have been made to hold and call attention to this cube. i'll take it up to the instrument-room and use a reader on it." he led the way. sandy followed, her throat dry. she knew, of course, that he was under almost intolerable emotional strain. he'd brought her along to be with her for a few moments, but he was so tense that he could think of nothing personal to say. now it was not possible for him to talk of anything at all. yet sandy realized that even under the stress that pressed upon him, he'd asked her to go look for tools in the gravity-machine room because she'd spoken of possible danger in the opening of the case. he'd gotten her away while he opened it. when they reached the ship-lock he said briefly, "i want to hurry, sandy. wait for me in the ship?" she nodded, and went to the small spacecraft which had brought them all from earth. when she saw pam, inside, she said shakily, "is--anybody else here?" "no," said pam. "why?" sandy sat down and shivered. "i think," she said through chattering teeth, "i think i'm going to have hysterics. l-listen, pam! i--i saw something alive! it was like a bird this high and big as a--there aren't any birds like that! there can't be anything alive here but us! but i saw it! and it saw me and ran away!" pam stared and asked questions, at first soothing ones. but presently she was saying indignantly, "i do believe it! that's near the place where i smelled fresh air!" of course, fresh air in the asteroid, two hundred and seventy million miles from earth, was as impossible as what sandy had seen. holmes came in presently, depressed and tired. he'd been filling his mind with the contents of black cubes. he knew how cooking was done in the kitchens of the fortress, some eons since. he knew how to prepare for inspection of the asteroid by a high-ranking officer. he was fully conversant with the bugle-calls once used in the fortress in the place of a public-address loud-speaker system. but he'd found no hint of how the fortress received its supplies, nor how the air was freshened, nor how reinforcements of men used to reach the asteroid. he was discouraged and vexed and weary. "sandy," said pam challengingly, "saw a live bird, bigger than a goose, in the gravity-machine room." holmes shrugged. "keller's fidgeting," he observed, "because he thinks he's seen movements in the vision-plates that show different inside views of this thing. but he isn't sure that he's seen anything move. maybe we're all going out of our minds." "then joe's closest," said pam darkly. "he worries about sandy!" "and very reasonably," said holmes tiredly. "pam, this business of figuring that there's something deadly on the way and nothing to do about it--it's got me down!" he slumped in a chair. pam frowned at him. sandy sat perfectly still, her hands clenched. burke came back twenty minutes later. his expression was studiedly calm. "i've found out where the garrison went," he said matter-of-factly. "i'm afraid we can't get any help from them. or anybody else." sandy looked at him mutely. he was completely self-controlled, and he did not look like a man resolutely refusing to despair, but sandy knew him. to her it seemed that his eyes had sunk a little in his head. "apparently there's nobody left on the world the garrison came from," said burke in the tone of someone saying perfectly commonplace things, "so they didn't go back there and there's no use in our trying to make a contact with that world. this was an outpost fortress, you know. it was reached from somewhere far away, and carved out and armed to fight an enemy that didn't attack it for itself, but to get at the world or worlds that made it." he continued with immoderate calm, "i believe the home world of that civilization has two moons in its sky and something off at the horizon that looks like a hill, but isn't." "but--" "the garrison left," explained burke, "because it was abandoned. it was left behind to stand off the enemy, and the civilization it belonged to moved away. it was left without supplies, without equipment, without hope. it was left behind even without training to face abandonment, because its members had been trained by black cubes and only knew how to do their own highly special jobs by rote. they were just ordinary soldiers, like the roman detachments left behind when the legions marched south from hadrian's wall and sailed for gaul. so when there was nothing left for them to do but leave their post or starve--because they couldn't follow the civilization that had abandoned them--they left. the cube in the box was a message they set up for their former rulers and fellow-citizens if they ever returned. it's not a pretty message!" sandy swallowed. "where'd they go? what happened to them?" "they went to earth," said burke tonelessly. "by twos and fives and dozens, in the service ships that came out with meat, and took back passengers. the service ships had been assigned to bring out what meat the hunting-parties could kill. they took back men who were fighters and ready to face mammoths or sabre tooth tigers or anything else. just the same, they left a transmitter to call them back if the enemy ever came again. but it didn't come in their lifetimes, and their descendants forgot. but the transmitter remembered. it called to them. and--we were the ones to answer!" sandy hesitated a moment. "but if the garrison went to earth," she said dubiously, "what became of them? there aren't any traces--" "we're traces," said burke. "they were our ancestors of ten or twenty thousand years ago. they couldn't build a civilization. they were fighting men! could the romans left behind at hadrian's wall keep up the culture of rome? of course not! the garrison went to earth and turned savage, and their children's children's children built up a new civilization. and for here and for now, we're it. we've got to face the enemy and drive him back." he stopped, and said in a tone that was almost completely steady and held no hint of despair, "it's going to be quite a job. but it's an emergency. we've got to manage it somehow." there was also an emergency on earth, not simplified as in space by having somebody like burke accept the burden of meeting it. the emergency stemmed from the fact that despite the best efforts of the air arm of the united states, burke and the others had gotten out to space. they'd reached the asteroid m- . naturally. the united states thereupon took credit for this most creditable achievement. inevitably. and it was instantly and frantically denounced for suspected space-imperialism, space-monopoly, and intended space-exploitation. but when keller's painstaking instructions for the building of gravity-field detectors reached earth, these suspicions seemed less plausible. the united states passed on the instructions. the basic principle was so new that nobody could claim it, but it was so simple that many men felt a wholesome shame that they had not thought of it before. nobody could question a natural law which was so obvious once it was stated. and the building of the device required next to no time at all. within days then, where the asteroid had a single ten-foot instrument, the united states had a ten-foot, a thirty-foot and a sixty-foot gravity-field detector available to qualified researchers. the new instruments gave data such as no astronomer had ever hoped for before. the thirty-foot disk, tuned for short range, pictured every gravitational field in the solar system. a previously unguessed-at saturnian moon, hidden in the outer ring, turned up. all the asteroids could be located at one instant. the mystery of the inadequate mass of pluto was solved within hours of turning on the thirty-foot device. when the sixty-foot instrument went on, scaled to take in half a hundred light-years of space, the solar system was a dot on it. but four dark stars, one with planets, and twenty-odd planetary systems were mapped within a day. on that same day, though, a query went back to keller. what, said the query, was the meaning of certain crawling, bright-red specks in mathematically exact relationship to each other, which were visibly in motion and much closer to earth than alpha centaurus? alpha centaurus had always been considered the closest of all stars to earth. under magnification the bright-red sparks wove and interwove their paths as if about a common center of gravity. if such a thing were not impossible, it would be guessed that they were suns so close together as to revolve about one another within hours. even more preposterously, they moved through space at a rate which was a multiple of the speed of light. thirty light-speeds, of course, could not be. and the direction of their motion seemed to be directly toward the glowings which represented the solar system containing earth. all this was plainly absurd. but what was the cause of this erroneous report from the new device? keller wrote out very neatly, "_the instrument here shows the same phenomenon. its appearance much farther away triggered the transmitter here to send the first signals to earth. data suggests red dots represent artificial gravity-fields strong enough to warp space and produce new spatial constants including higher speed for light, hence possible higher speed for spacecraft carrying artificial gravity generators. request evaluation this possibility._" pam coded it and sent it to earth. and presently, on earth, astronomers looked at each other helplessly. because keller had stated the only possible explanation. objects like real suns, if so close together, would tear each other to bits and fuse in flaming novas. moreover, the pattern of motion of the red-spark-producing objects could not have come into being of itself. it was artificial. there was a group of things in motion toward earth's solar system. they would arrive within so many days. they were millions of miles apart, but their gravity-fields were so strong that they orbited each other within hours. if they had gravity-fields, they had mass, which could be as artificial as their gravity. and, whirling about each other in the maddest of dances, ten suns passing through the human solar system could leave nothing but debris behind them. oddly enough, the ships that made those gravity-fields might be so small as to be beyond the power of a telescope to detect at a few thousand miles. the destruction of all the solar planets and the sun itself might be accomplished by motes. they would not need to use power for destruction. gravitation is not expended any more than magnetism, when something is attracted by it. the artificial gravity-fields would only need to be built up. they had been. once created, they could exist forever without need for added power, just as the sun and planets do not expend power for their mutual attraction, and as the earth parts with no energy to keep its moon a captive. the newspapers did not publish this news. but, very quietly, every civilized government on earth got instructions for the making of a gravity-field detector. most had them built. and then for the first time in human history there was an actual and desperately honest attempt to poll all human knowledge and all human resources for a common human end. for once, no eminent figure assumed the undignified pose involved in standing on one's dignity. for once, the public remained unworried and undisturbed while the heads of states aged visibly. naturally some of the people in the secret frantically demanded that the five in the fortress solve the problem all the science of earth could not even attack. incredible lists of required information items went out to burke and keller and holmes. keller read the lists calmly and tried to answer the questions that seemed to make sense. holmes doggedly spent all his time experiencing cubes in the hope that by sheer accident he might come upon something useful. pam, scowling, coded and decoded without pause. and sandy looked anxiously at burke. "i'm going to ask you to do something for me," she said. "when we went down to the lower levels, i thought i saw something moving. something alive." "nerves," said burke. "there couldn't be anything alive in this place. not after so many years without air." "i know," acknowledged sandy. "i know it's ridiculous. but pam's felt creepy, too, as if there were something deadly somewhere in the rooms we've never been in." burke moved his head impatiently. "well?" "holmes found some hand-weapons," said sandy. "they don't work, of course. will you fix one for pam and one for me so that they do?" she paused and added, "of course it doesn't matter whether we're frightened or not, considering. it doesn't even matter whether there is something alive. it doesn't matter if we're killed. but it would be pleasant not to feel defenseless." burke shrugged. "i'll fix them." she put three of the transparent-barreled weapons before him and said, "i'm going up to the instrument-room and help pam with her coding." she went out. burke took the three hand-weapons and looked at them without interest. but in a technician of any sort there is always some response to a technical problem. a trivial thing like a hand-weapon out of order could hold burke's attention simply because it did not refer to the coming disaster. he loosened the hand-grip plates and looked at the completely simple devices inside the weapons. there was a tiny battery, of course. in thousands of years its electrolyte had evaporated. burke replaced it from the water stores of the ship. he did the same to the other two weapons. then, curious, he stepped out of the ship's air-lock and aimed at the ship-lock wall. he pressed the trigger. there was a snapping sound and a fragment of rock fell. he tried the others. they fired something. it was not a bullet. the barrels of the weapons, on inspection, were not hollow. they were solid. the weapons fired a thrust, a push, an immaterial blow which was concentrated on a tiny spot. they punched, with nothing solid to do the punching. "probably punch a hole right through a man," said burke, reflectively. he took the three weapons and went toward the instrument-room. on the way, his mind went automatically back to the coming destruction. it was completely arbitrary. the enemy had no reason to destroy the human race in this solar system. men, here, had lost all recollection of their origin and assuredly all memory of enmities known before memory began. if any tradition remained of the fortress, even, it would be hidden in tales of a golden age before pandora was, or of an age of innocence when all things came without effort. those stories were changed out of all semblance to their foundations, of course, as ever-more-ignorant and ever-more-unsophisticated generations retold them. perhaps the golden age was a garbled memory of a time when machines performed tasks for men--before the machines wore out and could not be replaced without other machines to make them. perhaps the slow development of tools, with which men did things that machines formerly did for them, blurred the accounts of times when men did not need to use tools. even the everywhere-present traditions of a long, long journey in a boat--the flood legends--might be the last trace of grand-sires' yarns about a journey to earth. it would have been modified by successive generations who could not imagine a journey through emptiness, and therefore devised a flood as a more scientific and reasonable explanation for myths plainly overlaid with fantasy and superstition. burke went into the instrument-room as sandy was asking, "but how did they? we haven't found any ship-lock except the one we came in by! and if a ship can't travel faster than light without wrapping artificial mass about itself ..." holmes had taken off his helmet he said doggedly, "there's nothing about ships in the cubes. anyhow, the nearest other sun is four light-years away. nobody'd try to carry all the food a whole colony would need from as far away as that! if they'd used ships for supply, there'd have been hydroponic gardens all over the place to ease the load the ships had to carry! there was some other way to get stuff here!" "whatever it was, it didn't bring meat from earth. that was hauled out, fastened to the outside of service-boats." "another thing," holmes said. "there were thousands of people in the garrison, here. how did the air get renewed? nobody's found any mention of air-purifying apparatus in the cubes. there's been no sign of any! an emergency air-supply, yes. it was let loose when we came into the ship-lock. but there's no regular provision for purifying the air and putting oxygen into it and breaking down the co_{ }!" "won't anyone believe i smelled fresh air yesterday?" pam asked plaintively. no one commented. it could not be believed. burke handed sandy one of the weapons. he gave pam a second. "they work very much like the ship-drive, which was developed from them. a battery in the handle energizes them so they use the heat they contain to make a lethal punch without a kick-back. they'll get pretty cold after a dozen or so shots." he sat down and holmes went on almost angrily, "the garrison had to get food here. it didn't come in ships. they had to purify the air. they've nothing to do it with! how did they manage?" keller smiled faintly. he pointed to a control on the wall. "if that worked, we could ask. it is supposed to be communication with base. it is turned on. nothing happens." "do you know what i'm thinking?" demanded holmes. "i'm thinking of a matter-transmitter! it's been pointed out before that we'll never reach the stars in spaceships limited to one light-speed. what good would be voyages that lasted ten, twenty, or fifty years each way? but if there could be matter-transmitters--" keller said gently, "transmitters, no. transposers, yes." it was a familiar enough distinction. to break down an object into electric charges and reconstitute it at some distant place would be a self-defeating operation. it could have no actual value. to transmit a hundred and fifty pounds of electric energy--the weight of a man converted into current--would require the mightiest of bus-bars for a conductor, and months of time if it was not to burn out from overload. the actual transmission of mass as electric energy would be absurd. but if an object could simply be transposed from one place to another; if it could be translated from place to place; if it could undergo substitution of surroundings.... that would be a different matter! transposition would be instantaneous. translation would require no time. substitution of position--a man who was here this instant would be there the next--would have no temporal aspect. such a development would make anything possible. a ship might undertake a voyage to last a century. if a matter-transposer were a part of it, it could be supplied with fuel and air and foodstuffs on its voyage. its crew could be relieved and exchanged whenever it was desired. and when it made a planet-fall a hundred years and more from home, why, home would still be just around the transposer. with matter-transposition an interstellar civilization could arise and thrive, even though limited to the speed of light for its ships. but a culture spread over hundreds of light-years would be unthinkable without something permitting instant communication between its parts. "all right!" said holmes doggedly. "call them transposers! this fortress had to be supplied. we've found no sign that ships were used to supply it. it needed to have its air renewed and refreshed. we've found no sign of anything but emergency stores of air in case some unknown air-supply system failed. what's the matter with looking for a matter-transposer?" burke said, "in a way, a telephone system transposes sound-waves from one place to another. sound-waves aren't carried along wires. they're here, and then suddenly they're there. but there has to be a sending and receiving station at each end. when the fortress here was 'cut off' from home it could be that its supply-system broke down." "its air-system didn't," said holmes. "it hadn't used up its emergency air-supply. we're breathing it!" "anyhow we could try to find even a broken-down transposer," said sandy. "you try," said burke. "keller's been looking for something for me in the cubes. i'll stay here and help him look." sandy examined the weapon he'd given her. "pam says she's smelled fresh air, down below where there can't be any. mr. keller thought he saw movements in the inside vision-plates, where there can't be any. i still believe i saw something alive in the gravity-machine room, where such a thing is impossible. we're going to look, pam and i." holmes lumbered to his feet. "i'll come, too. and i'll guarantee to defend you against anything that has survived the ten thousand years or so that this place was without air. my head's tired, after all those cubes." he led the way. burke watched as the two girls followed him and closed the door behind them. "what have you found, keller?" "a cube about globes," said keller. "very interesting." "nothing on communication with base?" keller shook his head. burke said evenly, "i figured out three chances for us--all slim ones. the first was to find the garrison when the radio summons didn't and get it or its descendants to help. i found the garrison--on earth. no help there. the second chance was finding the civilization that had built this fortress. it looks like it's collapsed. there's been time for a new civilization to get started, but it's run away. the third chance is the slimmest of all. it's hooking together something to fight with." keller reached out over the array of cubes that had been experienced by holmes and himself while using the helmets from the cube-library. one cube had been set aside. keller put it in place on the extra helmet and handed it to burke. "try it," said keller. burke put the helmet on his head. * * * * * _he was in this same instrument-room, but he wore a uniform and he sat at an instrument-board. he knew that there were drone service-boats perhaps ten thousand miles out, perhaps a hundred. they'd been fitted out to make a mock attack on the fortress. counter-tactics men devised them. there was reason for worry. three times, now, drones pretending to be enemy ships had dodged past the screen of globes set out to prevent just such an evasion. once, one of the drones had gloatingly touched the stone of the fortress' outer surface. this was triumph for the counter-tactics crew, but it was proof that an enemy ship could have wiped out the fortress and all its garrison a hundred times over._ _burke sweated. there was a speck with a yellow ring about it. it was a globe, poised and ready to dart in any conceivable direction if an enemy detection-device ranged it. the globes did not go seeking an enemy. they placed themselves where they would be sought. they set themselves up as targets. but when a radar-pulse touched them, they flung themselves at its source, their reflex chooser-circuits pouring incredible power into a beam of the same characteristics as the radar-touch. that beam, of course, paralyzed or burned out the enemy device necessarily tuned to it. and the globes plunged at the thing which had found them. they accelerated at a hundred and sixty gravities and mere high explosive would be wasted if they carried it. nothing could stand their impact. nothing!_ _but in drills three drones had dodged them. the counter-tactics men understood the drones, of course, as it was hoped the enemy did not. but it should not be possible to get to the fortress! if the fortress was vulnerable, so was the empire. if the empire was vulnerable, the enemy would wreck its worlds, blast its cities, exterminate its population and only foulness would remain in the galaxy._ _on the monitor-board a light flashed. a line of green light darted across the screen. it was the path of a globe hurtling toward something that had touched it with a radar-frequency signal. the acceleration of the globe was breathtaking. it seemed to explode toward its target._ _but this globe hit nothing. it went on and on.... a second globe sprang. it also struck nothing. it went away to illimitable emptiness. its path exactly crossed that of the first. a third and fourth and fifth.... each one flung itself ferociously at the source of some trickle of radiation. their trails crossed at exactly the same spot. but there was nothing there...._ _burke suddenly flung up a row of switches, inactivating the remaining globes under his control. five had flung themselves away, darting at something which radiated but did not exist. something which was not solid. which was not a drone ship impersonating an enemy. they'd attacked an illusion...._ _at the control-board. burke clenched his fist and struck angrily at the flat surface before him. an illusion! of course!_ _cunningly, he made adjustments. he had five globes left. he chose one and changed the setting of its reflex chooser-circuit. it would ignore radar frequencies now. it would pick up only stray radiation--induction frequencies from a drone ship with its drive on._ _the globe's light flashed. a train of green fire appeared. a burst of flame. a hit! the drone was destroyed. he swiftly changed the setting of the reflex circuits of the rest. two! three! three drones blasted in twice as many seconds._ _he mopped his forehead. this was only a drill, but when the enemy came it would be the solution of such problems that would determine the survival of the fortress and the destruction of the enemy._ _he reported his success crisply._ * * * * * burke took off the helmet. keller said mildly, "what did he do?" burke considered. "the drone, faking to be an enemy, had dumped something out into space. metal powder, perhaps. it made a cloud in emptiness. then the drone drew off and threw a radar-beam on the cloud of metal particles. the beam bounced in all directions. when a globe picked it up, it shot for the phony metal-powder target. it went right through and off into space. other globes fell for the same trick. when they were all gone, the drones could have come right up to the fort." he was almost interested. he'd felt, at least, the sweating earnestness of an unknown member of this garrison, dead some thousands of years, as he tried to make a good showing in a battle drill. "so he changed the reflex circuits," burke added. "he stopped his globes from homing on radar frequencies. he made them home on frequencies that wouldn't bounce." then he said in surprise, "but they didn't hit, at that! the drones blew up before the globes got to them! they were exploding from the burning-out of all their equipment before the globes got there!" keller nodded. he said sorrowfully, "so clever, our ancestors. but not clever enough!" "of our chances," said burke, "or what i think are chances, the least promising seems to be the idea of trying to hook something together to fight with." he considered, and then smiled very faintly. "you saw movements you couldn't identify in the vision-plates? sandy says she saw something alive. i wonder if something besides us answered the space-call and got into the fortress by a different way, and has been hiding out, afraid of us." keller shook his head. "i don't believe it either," admitted burke. "it seems crazy. but it might be true. it might. i'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for solutions to our problem." keller shook his head again. burke shrugged and went out of the instrument-room. he went down the stairs and the first long corridor, and past the long rows of emplacements in which were set the hunkering metal monsters he'd cube-dreamed of using, but which would be of no conceivable use against speeding, whirling, artificial-gravity fields with the pull and the mass of suns. he reached the last long gallery on which the ship-lock opened. he saw the broad white ribbon of many strands of light, reaching away seemingly without limit. and he saw a tiny figure running toward him. it was sandy. she staggered as she ran. she had already run past endurance, but she kept desperately on. burke broke into a run himself. when he met her, she gasped, "pam! she--vanished--down below! we were--looking, and pam cried out. we ran to her. gone! and we--heard noises! noises! holmes is searching now. she--screamed, joe!" burke swung her behind him. "tell keller," he commanded harshly. "you've got that hand-weapon? hold on to it! bring keller! we'll all search! hurry!" he broke into a dead run. it might have seemed ironic that he should rush to help sandy's sister in whatever disaster had befallen her when they were facing the end of the whole solar system. in cold blood, it couldn't be considered to matter. but burke ran. he panted when he plunged down the ramp to the lower portions of the asteroid. he reached the huge cavern in which the motionless power-generator towered storeys high toward a light-laced ceiling. "holmes!" he shouted, and ran on. "holmes!" he'd been no farther than this, before, but he went on into tunnels with only double lines of light-tubes overhead, and he shouted and heard his own voice reverberating in a manner which seemed pure mockery. but as he ran he continued to shout. and presently holmes shouted in return. there was a process of untangling innumerable echoes, and ultimately they met. holmes was deathly white. he carried something unbelievable in his hands. "here!" he growled. "i found this. i cornered it. i killed it! what is it? did things like this catch pam?" only a man beside himself could have asked such a question. holmes carried the corpse of a bird with mottled curly feathers. he'd wrung its neck. he suddenly flung it aside. "where's pam?" he demanded fiercely. "what the hell's happened to her? i'll kill anything in creation that's tried to hurt her!" burke snapped questions. inane ones. where had pam been last? where were holmes and sandy when they missed her? when she cried out? holmes tried to show him. but this part of the asteroid was a maze of corridors with uncountable doorways opening into innumerable compartments. some of these compartments were not wholly empty, but neither burke nor holmes bothered to examine machine-parts or stacks of cases that would crumble to dust at a touch. they searched like crazy men, calling to pam. keller and sandy arrived. they'd passed the corpse of the bird holmes had killed, and keller was strangely white-faced. sandy panted, "did you find her? have you found any sign?" but she knew the answer. they hadn't found pam. holmes was haggard, desperate, filled with a murderous fury against whatever unnameable thing had taken pam away. "here!" snapped burke. "let's get some system into this! here's the case with the message-cube. it's our marker. we start from here! i'll follow this cross corridor and the next one. you three take the next three corridors going parallel. one each! look in every doorway. when we reach the next cross-corridor we'll compare notes and make another marker." he went along the way he'd chosen, looking in every door. cryptic masses of metal in one compartment. a heap of dust in another. empty. empty. a pile of metal furniture. another empty. still another. holmes appeared, his hands clenching and unclenching. sandy turned up, struggling for self-control. "where's keller?" "i heard him call out," said sandy breathlessly. "i thought he'd found something and i hurried--" he did not come. they shouted. they searched. keller had disappeared. they found the mark they'd started from and retraced their steps. burke heard holmes swear startledly, but there were so many echoes he could not catch words. sandy met burke. holmes did not. he did not answer shouts. he was gone. "we stay together," said burke in an icy voice. "we've both got hand-weapons. keep yours ready to fire. i've got mine. whatever out of hell is loose in this place, we'll kill it or it will kill us, and then--" he did not finish. they stayed close together, with burke in the lead. "we'll look in each doorway," he insisted. "keep that pistol ready. don't shoot the others if you see them, but shoot anything else!" "y-yes," said sandy. she swallowed. it was nerve-racking. burke regarded each doorway as a possible ambush. he investigated each one first, making sure that the compartment inside it was wholly empty. there was one extra-large archway to an extra-large compartment, halfway between their starting point and the next cross-corridor. it was obviously empty, though there was a large metal plate on the floor. but it was lighted. nothing could lurk in there. burke inspected the compartment beyond, and the one beyond that. he thought he heard sandy gasp. he whirled, gun ready. sandy was gone. chapter the star sol was as bright as sirius, but no brighter because it was nearly half a light-year away and of course could not compare in intrinsic brightness with that farther giant sun. the milky way glowed coldly. all the stars shone without any wavering in their light, from the brightest to the faintest tinted dot. the universe was round. there were stars above and below and before and behind and to the right and left. there was nothing which was solid, and nothing which was opaque. there were only infinitely remote, unwinking motes of light, but there were thousands of millions of them. everywhere there were infinitesimal shinings of red and blue and yellow and green; of all the colors that could be imagined. yet all the starlight from all the cosmos added up to no more than darkness. the whitest of objects would not shine except faintly, dimly, feebly. there was no warmth. this was deep space, frigid beyond imagining; desolate beyond thinking; empty. it was nothingness spread out in the light of many stars. in such cold and darkness it would seem that nothing could be, and there was nothing to be seen. but now and again a pattern of stars quivered a little. it contracted a trace and then returned to its original appearance. the disturbance of the star-patterns moved, as a disturbance, in vast curved courses. they were like isolated ripplings in space. there seemed no cause for these ripplings. but there were powerful gravitational fields in the void, so powerful as to warp space and bend the starlight passing through them. these gravity-fields moved with an incredible speed. there were ten of them, circling in a complex pattern which was spread out as an invisible unit which moved faster than the light their space-twisting violence distorted. they seemed absolutely undetectable, because even such minute light-ripplings as they made were left behind them. the ten ships which created these monstrous force-fields were unbelievably small. they were no larger than cargo ships on the oceans of one planet in the solar system toward which they sped. they were less than dust particles in infinity. they would travel for only a few more days, now, and then would flash through the solar system which was their target. they should reach its outermost planet--four light-hours away--and within eight minutes more swing mockingly past and through the inner worlds and the sun. they would cross the plane of the ecliptic at nearly a right angle, and they should leave the planets and the yellow star sol in flaming self-destruction behind them. then they would flee onward, faster than the chaos they created could follow. the living creatures on the world to be destroyed would have no warning. one instant everything would be as it had always been. the next, the ground would rise and froth out flames, and more than two thousand million human beings would hardly know that anything had occurred before they were destroyed. there was no purpose to be served by notifying the world that it was to die. the rulers of the nations had decided that it was kinder to let men and women look at each other and rejoice, thinking they had all their lives before them. it was kinder that children should be let play valorously, and babies wail and instantly be tended. it was better for humanity to move unknowing under blue and sunshine-filled skies than that they should gaze despairingly up at white clouds, or in still deeper horror at the shining night stars from which devastation would presently come. in the one place where there was foreknowledge, no attention at all was paid to the coming doom. burke went raging about brightly lighted corridors, shouting horrible things. he cried out to sandy to answer him, and defied whatever might have seized her to dare to face him. he challenged the cold stone walls. he raged up and down the gallery in which she had vanished, and feverishly explored beyond it, and returned to the place where she had disappeared, and pounded on solid rock to see if there could be some secret doorway through which she had been abducted. it seemed that his heart must stop for pure anguish. he knew such an agony of frustration as he had never known before. presently method developed in his searching. whatever had happened, it must have been close to the tall archway with the large metal plate in its floor and the brilliant lights overhead. sandy could not have been more than twenty feet from him when she was seized. when he heard her gasp, he was at this spot. exactly this spot. he'd whirled, and she was gone. she could not have been farther than the door beyond the archway, or else the one facing it. he went into the most probable one. it was a perfectly commonplace storage-room. he'd seen hundreds of them. it was empty. he examined it with a desperate intentness. his hands shook. his whole body was taut. he moved jerkily. nothing. he crossed the corridor and examined the room opposite. there was a bit of dust in one corner. he bent stiffly and fingered it. nothing. he came out, and there was the tall archway, brightly lighted. the other compartments had no light-tubes. being for storage only, they would not need to be lighted except to be filled and emptied of whatever they should contain. but the archway was very brilliantly lighted. he went into it, his hand-weapon shaking with the tension in him. there was the metal plate on the floor. it was large--yards in extent. he began a circuit of the walls. halfway around, he realized that the walls were masonry. not native rock, like every other place in the fortress. this wall had been made! he stared about. on the opposite wall there was a small thing with a handle on it, to be moved up or down. it was a round metal disk with a handle, set in the masonry. he flung himself across the room to examine it. he was filled with terror for sandy, which would turn into more-than-murderous fury if he found her harmed. the metal floor-plate lay between. he stepped obliviously on the plate.... the universe dissolved around him. the brightly lit masonry wall became vague and misty. simultaneously quite other things appeared mistily, then solidified. he was abruptly in the open air, with a collapsed and ruined structure about and behind him. this was not emptiness, but the surface of a world. over his head there was a sunset sky. before him there was grass, and beyond that a horizon, and to his left there was collapsed stonework and far off ahead there was a hill which he knew was not a natural hill at all. there was a moon in the sky, a half-moon with markings that he remembered. there were trees, too, and they were trees with long, ribbony leaves such as never grew on earth. he stood frozen for long instants, and a second, smaller moon came up rapidly over the horizon and traveled swiftly across the sky. it was jagged and irregular in shape. then flutings came from somewhere to his rear. they were utterly familiar sounds. they had distinctive pitch, which varied from one to another, and they were of different durations like half-notes and quarter-notes in music. and they had a plaintive quality which could have been termed elfin. all this was so completely known to him that it should have been shocking, but he was in such an agony of fear for sandy that he could not react to it. his terror for her was breath-stopping. he held his weapon ready in his hand. he tried to call her name, but he could not speak. the long, ribbony leaves of the trees waved to and fro in a gentle breeze. and then burke saw a figure running behind the swaying foliage. he knew who it was. the relief was almost greater pain than his terror had been. it was such an emotion as burke had experienced only feebly, even in his recurrent dream. he gave a great shout and bounded forward to meet sandy, crying out again as he ran. then he had his arms about her, and she clung to him with that remarkable ability women have to adapt themselves to circumstances they've been hoping for, even when they come unexpectedly. he kissed her feverishly, panting incoherent things about the fear he'd felt, holding her fast. presently somebody tugged at his elbow. it was holmes. he said drily, "i know how you feel, burke. i acted the same way just now. but there are things to be looked into. it'll be dark soon and we don't know how long night lasts here. have you a match?" pam regarded the two of them with a peculiar glint of humor in her eyes. keller was there too, still shaken by an experience which for him had no emotional catharsis attached. burke partly released sandy and fumbled for his cigarette lighter. he felt singularly foolish, but sandy showed no trace of embarrassment. "there was a matter-transposer," she said, "and we found it, and we all came through it." keller said awkwardly, "i turned on the communicator to base. it must have been a matter-transposer. i thought, in the instrument-room, that it was only a communicator." holmes moved away. he came back bearing broken sticks, which were limbs fallen from untended trees. he piled them and went back for more. in minutes he had a tiny fire and a big pile of branches to keep it up, but he went back for still more. "it works both ways," observed sandy. "or something does! there must be another metal plate here to go to the fortress. that huge, crazy bird i saw in the gravity-generator room must have come from here. he probably stepped on the plate because it was brightly lighted and--" "you've got your pistol?" demanded burke. the sunset sky was darkening. the larger, seemingly stationary moon floated ever-so-slightly nearer to the zenith. the small and jagged moon had gone on out of sight. "i have," said sandy. "pam gave hers to holmes. but that's all right. there won't be savages. over there, beyond the trees, there's a metal railing, impossibly old and corroded. but no savage would leave metal alone. i don't think there's anybody here but us." burke stared at something far away that looked like a hill. "there's a building, or the ruins of one. no lights. no smoke. savages would occupy it. we're alone, all right! i wonder where? we could be anywhere within a hundred or five hundred light-years from earth." "then," said sandy comfortably, "we should be safe from the enemy." "no," said burke. "if the enemy has an unbeatable weapon, destroying one solar system won't be enough. they'll smash every one that humanity ever used. which includes this one. they'll be here eventually. not at once, but later. they'll come!" he looked at the small fire. there were curious, familiar fragrances in the air. over to the west the sun sank in a completely orthodox glory of red and gold. the larger moon swam serenely in the sky. "i'm afraid," said pam, "that we won't eat tonight unless we can get back to the fortress and the ship. i guess we're farther from our dinners than most people ever get. did you say five hundred light-years?" "ask keller," grunted burke. "i've got to think." far off in the new night there was something like a birdsong, though it might come from anything at all. much nearer there were peculiarly maternal clucking noises. they sounded as if they might come from a bird with a caricature of a bill and stumpy, useless wings. there was a baying noise, very far away indeed, and burke remembered that the ancestry of dogs on earth was as much a mystery as the first appearance of mankind. there were no wild ancestors of either race. perhaps there had been dogs with the garrison of the fortress, which might be five hundred light-years away, in one sense, but could not be more than a few yards, in another. holmes squatted by the fire and built it up to brightness. keller came back to the circle of flickering light. his forehead was creased. "the constellations," he said unhappily. "they're gone!" "which would mean," burke told him absently, "that we're more than forty light-years from home. they'd all be changed at that distance." holmes seated himself beside pam. they had reached an obvious understanding. burke's eyes wandered in their direction. holmes began to speak in a low tone, and pam smiled at him. burke jerked his head to stare at sandy. "i think i forgot something. should i ask you again to marry me? or do i take it for granted that you will?--if we live through this?" he didn't wait for her answer. "things have changed, sandy," he said gruffly. "mostly me. i've gotten rid of an obsession and acquired a fixation--on you." "there," said sandy warmly, "there speaks my joseph! yes, i'll marry you. and we will live through this! you'll figure something out, joe. i don't know how, but you will!" "yes-s-s," said burke slowly. "somehow i feel that i've got something tucked away in my head that should apply. i need to get it out and look it over. i don't know what it is or where it came from, but i've got something...." he stared into the fire, sandy nestled confidently against him. she put her hand in his. the wind blew warm and softly through the trees. presently holmes replenished the fire. burke looked up with a start as sandy said, "i've thought of something, joe! do you remember that dream of yours? i know what it was!" "what?" "it came from a black cube," said sandy, "which was a cube that somebody from the garrison took to earth. and what kind of cube would they take? they wouldn't take drill-instruction cubes! they wouldn't take cubes telling them how to service the weapons or operate the globes or whatever else the fortress has! do you know what they'd take?" he shook his head. "novels," said sandy. "fiction stories. adventure tales. to--experience on long winter evenings or even asleep by a campfire. they were fighting men, joe, those ancestors of ours. they wouldn't care about science, but they'd like a good, lusty love story or a mystery or whatever was the equivalent of a western twenty thousand years ago. you got hold of a page in a love story, joe!" "probably," he growled. "but if i ever dream it again i'll know who's behind those waving branches. you." then, surprised, he said, "there were flutings when i came through the matter-transposer. they've stopped." "they sounded when i came through, too. and when pam and holmes and keller came. do you know what i think they are?" sandy smiled up at him. "'_you have arrived on the planet sanda. surface-travel facilities to the left, banking service and baggage to the right, tourist accommodations and information straight ahead._' we may never know, joe, but it could be that!" he made an inarticulate sound and stared at the fire again. she fell silent. soon keller was dozing. holmes strode away and came back dragging leafy branches. he made a crude lean-to for pam, to reflect back the warmth of the fire upon her. she curled up, smiled at him, and went confidently to sleep. a long time later sandy found herself yawning. she slipped her fingers from burke's hand and settled down beside pam. burke seemed not to notice. he was busy. he thought very carefully, running through the information he'd received from the black cubes. he carefully refrained from thinking of the desperate necessity for a solution to the problem of the enemy. if it was to be solved, it would be by a mind working without strain, just as a word that eludes the memory is best recalled when one no longer struggles to remember it. twice during the darkness holmes regarded the blackness about them with suspicion, his hand on the small weapon pam had passed to him. but nothing happened. there were sounds like bird calls, and songs like those of insects, and wind in the trees. but there was nothing else. when gray first showed in the east, burke shook himself. the jagged small moon rose hurriedly and floated across the sky. "holmes," said burke reflectively. "i think i've got what we want. you know how artificial gravity's made, what the circuit is like." to anybody but holmes and keller, the comment would have seemed idiotic. it would have seemed insane even to them, not too long before. but holmes nodded. "yes. of course. why?" "there's a chooser-circuit in the globes," said burke carefully, "that picks up radiation from an enemy ship, and multiplies it enormously and beams it back. the circuit that made the radiation to begin with has to be resonant to it, as the globe burns it out while dashing down its own beam." "naturally," said holmes. "what about it?" "the point is," said burke, "that one _could_ treat a suddenly increasing gravity-field as radiation. not a stationary one, of course. but one that increased, fast. like the gravity-fields of the enemy ships, moving faster than light toward our sun." "hmmmm," said holmes. "yes. that could be done. but hitting something that's traveling faster than light--" "they're traveling in a straight line," said burke, "except for orbiting around each other every few hours. there's no faster-than-light angular velocity; just straight-line velocity. and with the artificial mass they've got, they couldn't conceivably dodge. if we got some globes tricked up to throw a beam of gravity-field back at the enemy ships, there might be resonance, and there's a chance that one might hit, too." holmes considered. "it might take half an hour to change the circuit," he observed. "maybe less. there'd be no way in the world to test them. but they might work. we'd want a lot of them on the job, though, to give the idea a fair chance." burke stood up, creaking a little from long immobility. "let's hunt for the way back to the fortress," he said. "there is a way. at least two crazy birds were marching around in the fortress' corridors." holmes nodded again. they began a search. matter transposed from the fortress--specifically, the five of them--came out in a nearly three-walled alcove in the side of what had once been a magnificent building. now it was filled with the trunks and stalks of trees and vines which grew out of every window-opening. there were other, similar alcoves, as if other matter-transposers to other outposts or other worlds had been centered here. they were looking for one that a plump, ridiculous bird might blunder into among the broken stones. they found a metal plate partly arched-over by fallen stones in the very next alcove. they hauled at the tumbled rock. presently the way was clear. "come along!" called burke. "we've got a job to do! you girls want to fix breakfast and we want to get to work. we've a few hundred light-years to cross before we can have our coffee." somehow he felt no doubt whatever. the five of them walked onto the corroded metal plate together, and the sky faded and ghosts of tube-lights appeared and became brilliant, and they stepped off the plate into a corridor one section removed from the sending-transposer which had translated them all, successively, to wherever they had been. and everything proceeded matter-of-factly. the three men went to the room where metal globes by hundreds waited for the defenders of the fortress to make use of them. they were completely practical, those globes. there were even small footholds sunk into their curving sides so a man could climb to their tops and inspect or change the apparatus within. on the way, burke explained to keller. the globes were designed to be targets, and targets they would remain. they'd be set out in the path of the coming enemy ships, which could not vary their courses. their circuits would be changed to treat the suddenly increasing gravitational fields as radiation, so that they would first project back a monstrous field of the same energy, and then dive down it to presumed collision with the ships. there was a distinct possibility that if enough globes could be gotten out in space, that at the least they might hit one enemy ship and so wreck the closely orbited grouping. from that reasonable first possibility, the chances grew slimmer, but the results to be hoped for increased. keller nodded, brightly. he'd used the reading helmets more than anybody else. he understood. moreover, his mind was trained to work in just this field. when they reached the room of the many spheres he gestured for burke and holmes to wait. he climbed the footholds of one globe, deftly removed its top, and looked inside. the conductors were three-inch bars of pure silver. he reached in and did this and that. he climbed down and motioned for burke and holmes to look. it took them long seconds to realize what he'd done. but with his knowledge of what could be done, once he was told what was needed, he'd made exactly three new contacts and the globe was transformed to burke's new specifications. instead of days required to modify the circuits, the three of them had a hundred of the huge round weapons changed over within an hour. then keller went up to the instrument-room and painstakingly studied the launching system. he began the launchings while holmes and burke completed the change-over task. they joined him in the instrument-room when the last of the metal spheres rose a foot from the stony floor of the magazine and went lurching unsteadily over to the breech of the launching-tube they hadn't noticed before. "three hundred," said keller in a pleased tone, later. "all going out at full acceleration to meet the enemy. and there are six observer-globes in the lot." "observers," said burke grimly. "that's right. we can't observe anything because the information would come back at the speed of light. but if we lose, the enemy will arrive before we can know we've lost." keller shook his head reproachfully. "oh, no! oh, no! i just understood. there are transposers of electric energy, too. very tiny. in the observers." burke stared. but it was only logical. if matter could be transposed instead of transmitted between distant places, assuredly miniature energy-transposers were not impossible. the energy would no more travel than transposed matter would move. it would be transposed. the fortress would see what the observer-globes saw, at the instant they saw it, no matter what the distance! keller glanced at the ten-foot disk with its many small lights and the writhing bright-red sparks which were the enemy gravity-ships. there was something like a scale of distances understood, now. the red sparks had been not far from the disk's edge when the first space call went out to earth. they were nearer the center when the spaceship arrived here. they were very, very near the center now. "five days," said burke in a hard voice. "where will the globes meet them?" "they're using full acceleration," keller reminded him gently. "one hundred sixty gravities." "a mile a second acceleration," said burke. somehow he was not astonished. "in an hour, thirty-six hundred miles per second. in ten hours, thirty-six thousand miles per second. if they hit at that speed, they'd smash a moon! they'll cover half a billion miles in ten hours--but that's not enough! it's only a fifth of the way to pluto! they won't be halfway to uranus!" "they'll have fifty-six hours," said keller. the need to communicate clearly made him almost articulate. "not on the plane of the ecliptic. their course is along the line of the sun's axis. meeting, seven times pluto's distance. twenty billion miles. two days and a half. if they miss we'll know." holmes growled, "if they miss, what then?" "i stay here," said keller, mildly. "i won't outlive everybody. i'd be lonely." then he gave a quick, embarrassed smile. "breakfast must be ready. we can do nothing but wait." but waiting was not easy. on the first day there came a flood of messages from earth. why had they cut off communication? answer! answer! answer! what could be done about the enemy ships? what could be done to save lives? if a few spaceships could be completed and take off before the solar system shattered, would the asteroid be shattered too? could a few dozen survivors of earth hope to make their way to the asteroid and survive there? should the coming doom be revealed to the world? the last question showed that the authorities of earth were rattled. it was not a matter for burke or keller or holmes to decide. they transmitted, in careful code, an exact description of the sending of the globes to try to intercept the enemy gravity-ships. but it was not possible for people with no experiential knowledge of artificial gravity to believe that anything so massive as a sun could be destroyed by hurling a mere ten-foot missile at it! then there came a sudden revulsion of feeling on earth. the truth was too horrible to believe, so it was resolved not to believe it. and therefore prominent persons broke into public print, denouncing burke for having predicted the end of the world from his safe refuge in asteroid m- . they explained elaborately how he must be not only wrong but maliciously wrong. but these denunciations were the first knowledge the public had possessed of the thing denounced. some people instantly panicked because some people infallibly believe the worst, at all times. some shared the indignation of the eminent characters who denounced burke. some were bewildered and many unstable persons vehemently urged everybody to do this or that in order to be saved. get-rich-artists sold tickets in non-existent spacecraft they claimed had secretly been built in anticipation of the disaster. they would accept only paper currency in small bills. what value paper money would have after the destruction of earth was not explained, but people paid it. astronomers swore quite truthfully that no telescope gave any sign of the alleged sun-sized masses en route to destroy earth. government officials heroically lied in their throats to reassure the populace because, after all, one didn't want the half-civilized part of educated nations to run mad during earth's probable last few days. and burke and the others looked at the images sent back by the observer-globes traveling with the rest. the cosmos looked to the observer-globes just about the way it did from the fortress. there were innumerable specks of light of innumerable tints and colors. there was darkness. there was cold. and there was emptiness. the globe-fleet drove on away from the sun and from that flat plane near which all the planets revolve. every second the spheres' pace increased by one mile per second. ten hours after keller released them, they had covered five hundred eighty-eight thousand thousand miles and the sun still showed as a perceptible disk. twenty hours out, the globes had traveled two billion six hundred million miles and the sun was the brightest star the observers could note. thirty hours out, and the squadron of ten-foot globes had traveled five billion eight hundred thirty-odd million miles and the sun was no longer an outstanding figure in the universe. houses looked fine-drawn, now, and pam was fidgety. keller appeared to be wholly normal. and sandy was conspicuously calm. "i'll be glad when this is over," she said at dinner in the ship in the lock-tunnel. "i don't think any of you realize what this fortress and the matter-transposer and the planet it took us to--i don't believe any of you realize what such things can mean to people." burke waited. she smiled at him and said briskly, "there's a vacant planet for people to move to. people occupied it once. they can do it again. once it had a terrific civilization. this fortress was just one of its outposts. there were plenty of other forts and other planets, and the people had sciences away ahead of ours. and all those worlds, tamed and ready, are waiting right now for us to come and use them." holmes said, "yes? what happened to the people who lived on them?" "if you ask me," said sandy confidentially, "i think they went the way of greece and rome. i think they got so civilized that they got soft. they built forts instead of fighting fleets. they stopped thinking of conquests and begrudged even thinking of defenses, though they had to, after a fashion. but they thought of things like the rhine forts of the romans, and hadrian's wall. like the great wall of china, and the maginot line in france. when men build forts and don't build fighting fleets, they're on the way down." burke said nothing. holmes waited for more. "it's my belief," said sandy, "that many, many centuries ago the people who built this fort sent a spaceship off somewhere with a matter-transposer on board. they replaced its crew while it traveled on and on, and they gave it supplies, and refreshed its air, and finally it arrived somewhere at the other side of the galaxy. and then the people here set up a matter-transposer and they all moved through it to the new, peaceful, lovely world they'd found. all except the garrison that was left behind. the enemy would never find them there! and i think they smashed the matter-transposer that might have let the enemy follow them--or the garrison of this fort, for that matter! and i think that away beyond the milky way there are the descendents of those people. they're soft, and pretty, and useless, and they've likely let their knowledge die, and there probably aren't very many of them left. and i think it's good riddance!" pam said, "if we beat the enemy there'll be no excuse for wars on earth. there'll be worlds enough to take all the surplus population anybody can imagine. there'll be riches for everybody. joe, what do you think the human race will do for you if, on top of finding new worlds for everybody, you cap it by defeating the enemy with the globes?" "i think," said burke, "that most people will dislike me very much. i'll be in the history books, but i'll be in small print. people who can realize they're obligated will resent it, and those who can't will think i got famous in a disreputable fashion. in fact, if we go back to earth, i'll probably have to fight to keep from going bankrupt. if i manage to get enough money for a living, it'll be by having somebody ghost-write a book for me about our journey here." keller interrupted mildly, "it's nearly time. we should watch." holmes stood up jerkily. pam and sandy rose almost reluctantly. they went out of the ship and through the metal door with rounded corners. they went along the long corridor with the seeming river of light-tubes in its ceiling. they passed the doorway of the great room which had held the globes. it looked singularly empty, now. on the next level they passed the mess-halls and bunk-rooms, and on the third the batteries of grisly weapons which could hurl enormous charges of electricity at a chosen target, if the target could be ranged. they went on up into the instrument-room by the final flight of stairs. they settled down there. that is, they did not leave. but far too much depended on the next hour or less for anybody to be truly still in either mind or body. holmes paced jerkily back and forth, his eyes on the vision-screens that now relayed what the observer-globes with the globe-fleet saw. for a long time they gazed at the emptiness of deepest space. the picture was of an all-encompassing wall of tiny flecks of light. they did not move. they did not change. they did not waver. the observer-globes reported from nothingness, and they reported nothing. except one item. there were fewer red specks of light and more blue ones. there were some which were distinctly violet. the globes had attained a velocity so close to the speed of light that no available added power could have pushed them the last fraction of one per cent faster. but they had no monstrous mass-fields to change the constants of space and let them travel more swiftly. the enemy ships did. but there was no sign of them. there could be none except on such a detector as the instrument-room had in its ten-foot transparent disk. time passed, and passed. and passed. finally, burke broke the silence. "of course the globes don't have to make direct hits. we hope! if they multiply the gravity-field that hits them and shoot it back hard enough, it ought to burn out the gravity-generators in the ships." there was no answer. pam watched the screens and bit nervously at her nails. seconds went by. minutes. tens of minutes.... "i fear," said keller with some difficulty, "that something is wrong. perhaps i erred in adjusting the globes--" if he had made a mistake, of course, the globe-fleet would be useless. it wouldn't stop the enemy. it wouldn't do anything, and in a very short time the sun and all its planets would erupt with insensate violence, and all the solar system would shatter itself to burning bits--and the enemy fleet would be speeding away faster than exploding matter could possibly follow it. then, without warning, a tiny bluish line streaked across one of the screens. a second. a third-fourth-fifth-twentieth-fiftieth--the screens came alive with flashing streaks of blue-green light. then something blew. a sphere of violet light appeared on one of the screens. instantly, it was followed by others with such rapidity that it was impossible to tell which followed which. but there were ten of them. the silence in the instrument-room was absolute. burke tried vainly to imagine what had actually happened. the enemy fleet had been traveling at thirty times the speed of light, which was only possible because of its artificial mass which changed the properties of space to permit it. and then the generators and maintainers of that artificial mass blew out. the ships stopped--so suddenly, so instantly, so absolutely that a millionth part of a second would have been a thousand times longer than the needed interval. the energy of that enormous speed had to be dissipated. the ships exploded as nothing had ever exploded before. even a super-nova would not detonate with such violence. the substance of the enemy ships destroyed itself not merely by degenerating to raw atoms, but by the atoms destroying themselves. and not merely did the atoms fly apart, but the neutrons and protons and electrons of which they were composed ceased to exist. nothing was left but pure energy--violet light. and it vanished. then there was nothing at all. what was left of the globe-fleet went hurtling uselessly onward through space. it would go on and on and on. it would reach the edge of the galaxy and go on, and perhaps in thousands of millions of years some one or two or a dozen of the surviving spheres might penetrate some star-cloud millions of millions of light-years away. in a pleased voice, keller said, "i think everything is all right now." and sandy went all to pieces. she clung to burke, weeping uncontrollably, holding herself close to him while she sobbed. on earth, of course, there was no such eccentric jubilation. it was observed that crawling red sparks in the gravity-field detectors winked out. as hours and days went by, it was noticed that the solar system continued to exist, and that people stayed alive. it became evident that some part of the terror some people had felt was baseless. and naturally there was much resentment against burke because he had caused so many people so much agitation. within two weeks a fleet of small plastic ships hurtled upward from the vicinity of earth's north magnetic pole and presently steadied on course toward the fortress asteroid. burke was informed severely that he should prepare to receive the scientists they carried. he would be expected to coöperate fully in their investigations. he grinned when pam handed him the written sheet. "it's outrageous!" snapped sandy. "it's ridiculous! they ought to get down on their knees to you, joe, to thank you for what you've done!" burke shook his head. "i don't think i'd like that. neither would you. we'll make out, sandy. there'll be a colony started on that world the matter-transposer links us to. it might be fun living there. what say?" sandy grumbled. but she looked at him with soft eyes. "i'd rather be mixed up with--what you might call pioneers," said burke, "than people with reputations to defend and announced theories that are going to turn out to be all wrong. the research in this fortress and on that planet will make some red faces, on earth. and there's another thing." "what?" asked sandy. "this war we've inherited without doing anything to deserve it," said burke. "in fact, the enemy. we haven't the least idea what they're like or anything at all about them except that they go off somewhere and spend a few thousand years cooking up something lethal to throw at us. they tired out our ancestors. if they'd only known it, they won the war by default. our ancestors moved away to let the enemy have its own way about this part of the galaxy, anyhow. and judging by past performances, the enemy will just stew somewhere until they think of something more dangerous than artificial sun-masses riding through our solar systems." "well?" she demanded. "what's to be done about that?" "with the right sort of people around," said burke meditatively, "we could do a little contriving of our own. and we could get a ship ready and think about looking them up and pinning their ears back in their own bailiwick, instead of waiting for them to take pot-shots at us." sandy nodded gravely. she was a woman. she hadn't the faintest idea of ever letting burke take off into space again if she could help it--unless, perhaps, for one occasion when she would show herself off in a veil and a train, gloating. but it had taken the enemy a very long time to concoct this last method of attack. when the time came to take the offensive against them, at least a few centuries would have passed. five or six, anyhow. so sandy did not protest against an idea that wouldn't result in action for some hundreds of years. argument about burke's share in such an enterprise could wait. so sandy kissed him. * * * * * ...if you enjoyed the wailing asteroid be sure not to miss twists in time _by murray leinster t ¢_ here are six strange and startling stories, calculated to entrance science-fiction lovers. in these fantastic and brilliantly imaginative plots murray leinster has bent, turned inside-out and upside-down, accelerated, decelerated, and obliterated time in a weird, uncanny manner. from the hilarious chaos of a man's telephone feud with himself to the tender pathos of lovers reaching across the chasm of death ... from the hair-raising discovery of a buried city to the chill horror of the end of time ... these tales will thrill and delight imaginative people. * * * * * beyond _by theodore sturgeon t ¢_ pass through the strange, shining curtain of the mind that conceals the eeriest of all telepathies. with this series of stories, master science-fiction writer sturgeon takes the reader into dark worlds where man is merely another molecule, where centuries whirl by and civilizations shudder to a stop, where intelligent worms rule. thrilling, extraordinary, and totally engrossing, these stories are tops in science-fiction. * * * * * both of these fine avon science-fiction books are available at your local newsdealer. if he cannot supply you, order direct from avon book division--the hearst corporation, west th street, new york , n. y. enclose price listed, plus ¢ extra per copy to cover cost of wrapping and mailing. * * * * * the first sounds came at midnight a plaintive keening from an unknown voice in the vastness of uncharted space. within hours the whole world had heard the strange, unearthly music--and the panic had begun. were the sounds a plea for help? from whom? from where? or were they a command too terrible to think about? no one knew. and in billions of earth-bound minds the horror grew.... for how could man, who had not yet claimed the moon, defy a challenge from the stars? and hours later, to the ears of a helpless world, the second message came.... and earth's days were numbered! a terrifying tale of tomorrow--or maybe tonight--by the undisputed master, mr. science-fiction himself! * * * * * other avon books by: murray leinster: the planet explorer monsters and such twists in time grifters' asteroid by h. l. gold harvey and joe were the slickest con-men ever to gyp a space-lane sucker. or so they thought! angus johnson knew differently. he charged them five buckos for a glass of water--and got it! [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories may . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] characteristically, harvey ellsworth tried to maintain his dignity, though his parched tongue was almost hanging out. but joe mallon, with no dignity to maintain, lurched across the rubbish-strewn patch of land that had been termed a spaceport. when harvey staggered pontifically into the battered metalloy saloon--the only one on planetoid --his tall, gangling partner was already stumbling out, mouthing something incoherent. they met in the doorway, violently. "we're delirious!" joe cried. "it's a mirage!" "what is?" asked harvey through a mouthful of cotton. joe reeled aside, and harvey saw what had upset his partner. he stared, speechless for once. in their hectic voyages from planet to planet, the pair of panacea purveyors had encountered the usual strange life-forms. but never had they seen anything like the amazing creature in that colonial saloon. paying no attention to them, it was carrying a case of liquor in two hands, six siphons in two others, and a broom and dustpan in the remaining pair. the bartender, a big man resembling the plumpish harvey in build, was leaning negligently on the counter, ordering this impossible being to fill the partly-emptied bottles, squeeze fruit juice and sweep the floor, all of which the native did simultaneously. "nonsense," harvey croaked uncertainly. "we have seen enough queer things to know there are always more." he led the way inside. through thirst-cracked lips he rasped: "water--quick!" without a word, the bartender reached under the counter, brought out two glasses of water. the interplanetary con-men drank noisily, asked for more, until they had drunk eight glasses. meanwhile, the bartender had taken out eight jiggers and filled them with whiskey. harvey and joe were breathing hard from having gulped the water so fast, but they were beginning to revive. they noticed the bartender's impersonal eyes studying them shrewdly. "strangers, eh?" he asked at last. "solar salesmen, my colonial friend," harvey answered in his usual lush manner. "we purvey that renowned martian remedy, _la-anago yergis_, the formula for which was recently discovered by ourselves in the ancient ruined city of la-anago. medical science is unanimous in proclaiming this magic medicine the sole panacea in the entire history of therapeutics." "yeah?" said the bartender disinterestedly, polishing the chaser glasses without washing them. "where you heading?" "out of mars for ganymede. our condenser broke down, and we've gone without water for five ghastly days." "got a mechanic around this dumping ground you call a port?" joe asked. "we did. he came near starving and moved on to titan. ships don't land here unless they're in trouble." "then where's the water lead-in? we'll fill up and push off." "mayor takes care of that," replied the saloon owner. "if you gents're finished at the bar, your drinks'll be forty buckos." harvey grinned puzzledly. "we didn't take any whiskey." "might as well. water's five buckos a glass. liquor's free with every chaser." harvey's eyes bulged. joe gulped. "that--that's robbery!" the lanky man managed to get out in a thin quaver. the barkeeper shrugged. "when there ain't many customers, you gotta make more on each one. besides--" "besides nothing!" joe roared, finding his voice again. "you dirty crook--robbing poor spacemen! you--" [illustration: _"you dirty crook!" joe roared. "robbing honest spacemen!"_] harvey nudged him warningly. "easy, my boy, easy." he turned to the bartender apologetically. "don't mind my friend. his adrenal glands are sometimes overactive. you were going to say--?" * * * * * the round face of the barkeeper had assumed an aggrieved expression. "folks are always thinkin' the other feller's out to do 'em," he said, shaking his head. "lemme explain about the water here. it's bitter as some kinds of sin before it's purified. have to bring it in with buckets and make it sweet. that takes time and labor. waddya think--i was chargin' feller critters for water just out of devilment? i charge because i gotta." "friend," said harvey, taking out a wallet and counting off eight five-bucko bills, "here is your money. what's fair is fair, and you have put a different complexion on what seemed at first to be an unconscionable interjection of a middleman between nature and man's thirst." the saloon man removed his dirty apron and came around the bar. "if that's an apology, i accept it. now the mayor'll discuss filling your tanks. that's me. i'm also justice of the peace, official recorder, fire chief...." "and chief of police, no doubt," said harvey jocosely. "nope. that's my son, jed. angus johnson's my name. folks here just call me chief. i run this town, and run it right. how much water will you need?" joe estimated quickly. "about seventy-five liters, if we go on half rations," he answered. he waited apprehensively. "let's say ten buckos a liter," the mayor said. "on account of the quantity, i'm able to quote a bargain price. shucks, boys, it hurts me more to charge for water than it does for you to pay. i just got to, that's all." the mayor gestured to the native, who shuffled out to the tanks with them. the planetoid man worked the pump while the mayor intently watched the crude level-gauge, crying "stop!" when it registered the proper amount. then johnson rubbed his thumb on his index finger and wetted his lips expectantly. harvey bravely counted off the bills. he asked: "but what are we to do about replenishing our battery fluid? ten buckos a liter would be preposterous. we simply can't afford it." johnson's response almost floored them. "who said anything about charging you for battery water? you can have all you want for nothing. it's just the purified stuff that comes so high." after giving them directions that would take them to the free-water pool, the ponderous factotum of planetoid shook hands and headed back to the saloon. his six-armed assistant followed him inside. "now do you see, my hot-tempered colleague?" said harvey as he and joe picked up buckets that hung on the tank. "johnson, as i saw instantly, is the victim of a difficult environment, and must charge accordingly." "just the same," joe griped, "paying for water isn't something you can get used to in ten minutes." in the fragile forest, they soon came across a stream that sprang from the igneous soil and splashed into the small pond whose contents, according to the mayor, was theirs for the asking. they filled their buckets and hauled them to the ship, then returned for more. * * * * * it was on the sixth trip that joe caught a glimpse of jupiter-shine on a bright surface off to the left. the figure, , with the bucko sign in front of it, was still doing acrobatics inside his skull and keeping a faint suspicion alive in him. so he called harvey and they went to investigate. among the skimpy ground-crawling vines, they saw a long slender mound that was unmistakably a buried pipe. "what's this doing here?" harvey asked, puzzled. "i thought johnson had to transport water in pails." "wonder where it leads to," joe said uneasily. "it leads _to_ the saloon," said harvey, his eyes rapidly tracing the pipe back toward the spaceport. "what i am concerned with is where it leads _from_." five minutes later, panting heavily from the unaccustomed exertion of scrambling through the tangle of planetorial undergrowth, they burst into the open--before a clear, sparkling pool. mutely, harvey pointed out a pipe-end jutting under the water. "i am growing suspicious," he said in a rigidly controlled voice. but joe was already on his knees, scooping up a handful of water and tasting it. "sweet!" he snarled. they rushed back to the first pool, where joe again tasted a sample. his mouth went wry. "bitter! he uses only one pool, the sweet one! the only thing that needs purifying around here is that blasted mayor's conscience." "the asteroidal poobah has tricked us with a slick come-on," said harvey slowly. his eyes grew cold. "joseph, the good-natured artist in me has become a hard and merciless avenger. i shall not rest until we have had the best of this colonial con-man! watch your cues from this point hence." fists clenched, the two returned to the saloon. but at the door they stopped and their fists unclenched. "thought you gents were leaving," the mayor called out, seeing them frozen in the doorway. "glad you didn't. now you can meet my son, jed. him and me are the whole earthman population of johnson city." "you don't need any more," said harvey, dismayed. johnson's eight-foot son, topped by a massive roof of sun-bleached hair and held up by a foundation that seemed immovable, had obviously been born and raised in low gravity. for any decent-sized world would have kept him down near the general dimensions of a man. he held out an acre of palm. harvey studied it worriedly, put his own hand somewhere on it, swallowed as it closed, then breathed again when his fingers were released in five units instead of a single compressed one. "pleased to meet you," piped a voice that had never known a dense atmosphere. the pursuit of vengeance, harvey realized, had taken a quick and unpleasant turn. something shrewd was called for.... "joseph!" he exclaimed, looking at his partner in alarm. "don't you feel well?" even before the others could turn to him, joe's practiced eyes were gently crossing. he sagged against the door frame, all his features drooping like a bloodhound's. "bring him in here!" johnson cried. "i mean, get him away! he's coming down with asteroid fever!" "of course," replied harvey calmly. "any fool knows the first symptoms of the disease that once scourged the universe." "what do you mean, _once_?" demanded johnson. "i come down with it every year, and i ain't hankering to have it in an off-season. get him out of here!" "in good time. he can't be moved immediately." "then he'll be here for months!" harvey helped joe to the counter and lifted him up on it. the mayor and his gigantic offspring were cowering across the room, trying to breathe in tiny, uncontaminating gasps. "you'll find everything you want in the back room," johnson said frantically, "sulfopyridine, mustard plasters, rubs, inhalers, suction cups--" "relics of the past," harvey stated. "one medication is all modern man requires to combat the dread menace, asteroid fever." "what's that?" asked the mayor without conviction. instead of replying, harvey hurried outside to the ungainly second-hand rocket ship in the center of the shabby spaceport. he returned within a few minutes, carrying a bottle. * * * * * joe was still stretched out on the bar, panting, his eyes slowly crossing and uncrossing. harvey lifted the patient's head tenderly, put the bottle to his lips and tilted it until he was forced to drink. when joe tried to pull away, harvey was inexorable. he made his partner drink until most of the liquid was gone. then he stepped back and waited for the inevitable result. joe's performance was better than ever. he lay supine for several moments, his face twisted into an expression that seemed doomed to perpetual wryness. slowly, however, he sat up and his features straightened out. "are--are you all right?" asked the mayor anxiously. "much better," said joe in a weak voice. "maybe you need another dose," harvey suggested. joe recoiled. "i'm fine now!" he cried, and sprang off the bar to prove it. astonished, johnson and his son drew closer. they searched joe's face, and then the mayor timidly felt his pulse. "well, i'll be hanged!" johnson ejaculated. "_la-anago yergis_ never fails, my friend," harvey explained. "by actual test, it conquers asteroid fever in from four to twenty-three minutes, depending on the severity of the attack. luckily, we caught this one before it grew formidable." the mayor's eyes became clouded mirrors of an inward conflict. "if you don't charge too much," he said warily, "i might think of buying some." "we do not sell this unbelievable remedy," harvey replied with dignity. "it sells itself." "'course, i'd expect a considerable reduction if i bought a whole case," said johnson. "that would be the smallest investment you could make, compared with the vast loss of time and strength the fever involves." "how much?" asked the mayor unhappily. "for you, since you have taken us in so hospitably, a mere five hundred buckos." johnson did not actually stagger back, but he gave the impression of doing so. "f-four hundred," he offered. "not a red cent less than four seventy-five," harvey said flatly. "make it four fifty," quavered johnson. "i dislike haggling," said harvey. the final price, however, was four hundred and sixty-nine buckos and fifty redsents. magnanimously, harvey added: "and we will include, _gratis_, an elegant bottle-opener, a superb product of mercurian handicraftsmanship." johnson stabbed out a warning finger. "no tricks now. i want a taste of that stuff. you're not switching some worthless junk on me." harvey took a glass from the bar and poured him a generous sample. the mayor sniffed it, grimaced, then threw it down his gullet. the ensuing minute saw a grim battle between a man and his stomach, a battle which the man gradually won. "there ain't no words for that taste," he gulped when it was safe to talk again. "medicine," harvey propounded, "should taste like medicine." to joe he said: "come, my esteemed colleague. we must perform the sacred task to which we have dedicated ourselves." with joe stumbling along behind, he left the saloon, crossed the clearing and entered the ship. as soon as they were inside, joe dropped his murderous silence and cried: "what kind of a dirty trick was that, giving me poison instead of that snake oil?" "that was not poison," harvey contradicted quietly. "it was _la-anago yergis_ extract, plus." "plus what--arsenic?" "now, joseph! consider my quandary when i came back here to manufacture our specific for all known ailments, with the intention of selling yonder asteroidal tin-horn a bill of medical goods--an entire case, mind you. was i to mix the extract with the water for which we had been swindled to the tune of ten buckos a liter? where would our profit have been, then? no; i had to use the bitter free water, of course." "but why use it on me?" joe demanded furiously. harvey looked reprovingly at his gangling partner. "did johnson ask to taste it, or did he not? one must look ahead, joseph. i had to produce the same _medicine_ that we will now manufacture. thus, you were a guinea pig for a splendid cause." "okay, okay," joe said. "but you shoulda charged him more." "joseph, i promise you that we shall get back every redsent of which that swindler cheated us, besides whatever other funds or valuables he possesses. we could not be content with less." "well, we're starting all right," admitted joe. "how about that thing with six arms? he looks like a valuable. can't we grab him off?" harvey stopped filling bottles and looked up pensively. "i have every hope of luring away the profitable monstrosity. apparently you have also surmised the fortune we could make with him. at first i purpose to exhibit him on our interplanetary tours with our streamlined panacea; he would be a spectacular attraction for bucolic suckers. later, a brief period of demonstrating his abilities on the audio-visiphone. then our triumph--we shall sell him at a stupendous figure to the zoo!" * * * * * joe was still dazed by that monetary vista when he and harvey carried the case of medicine to the saloon. the mayor had already cleared a place of honor in the cluttered back room, where he told them to put it down carefully. then he took the elaborate bottle-opener harvey gave him, reverently uncorked a bottle and sampled it. it must have been at least as good as the first; he gagged. "that's the stuff, all right," he said, swallowing hard. he counted out the money into harvey's hand, at a moderate rate that precariously balanced between his pleasure at getting the fever remedy and his pain at paying for it. then he glanced out to see the position of jupiter, and asked: "you gents eaten yet? the restaurant's open now." harvey and joe looked at each other. they hadn't been thinking about food at all, but suddenly they realized that they were hungry. "it's only water we were short of," harvey said apprehensively. "we've got rations back at the ship." "_h-mph!_" the mayor grunted. "powdered concentrates. compressed pap. suit yourselves. we treat our stomachs better here. and you're welcome to our hospitality." "your hospitality," said harvey, "depends on the prices you charge." "well, if that's what's worrying you, you can stop worrying," answered the mayor promptly. "what's more, the kind of dinner i serve here you can't get anywhere else for any price." swiftly, harvey conned the possibilities of being bilked again. he saw none. "let's take a look at the menu, anyhow, joe," he said guardedly. johnson immediately fell into the role of "mine host." "come right in, gents," he invited. "right into the dining room." he seated them at a table, which a rope tied between posts made more or less private, though nobody else was in the saloon and there was little chance of company. genius, the six-armed native, appeared from the dingy kitchen with two menus in one hand, two glasses of water in another, plus napkins, silverware, a pitcher, plates, saucers, cups, and their cocktails, which were on the house. then he stood by for orders. harvey and joe studied the menu critically. the prices were phenomenally low. when they glanced up at johnson in perplexity, he grinned, bowed and asked: "everything satisfactory, gents?" "quite," said harvey. "we shall order." for an hour they were served amazing dishes, both fresh and canned, the culinary wealth of this planetoid and all the system. and the service was as extraordinary as the meal itself. with four hands, genius played deftly upon a pair of mellow venusian _viotars_, using his other two hands for waiting on the table. "we absolutely must purchase this incredible specimen," harvey whispered excitedly when johnson and the native were both in the kitchen, attending to the next course. "he would make any society hostess's season a riotous success, which should be worth a great sum to women like mrs. van schuyler-morgan, merely for his hire." "think of a fast one fast," joe agreed. "you're right." "but i dislike having to revise my opinion of a man so often," complained harvey. "i wish johnson would stay either swindler or honest merchant. this dinner is worth as least twenty buckos, yet i estimate our check at a mere bucko twenty redsents." the mayor's appearance prevented them from continuing the discussion. "it's been a great honor, gents," he said. "ain't often i have visitors, and i like the best, like you two gents." as if on cue, genius came out and put the check down between joe and harvey. harvey picked it up negligently, but his casual air vanished in a yelp of horror. "what the devil is this?" he shouted.--"how do you arrive at this fantastic, idiotic figure--_three hundred and twenty-eight buckos_!" * * * * * johnson didn't answer. neither did genius; he simply put on the table, not a fingerbowl, but a magnifying glass. with one of his thirty fingers he pointed politely to the bottom of the menu. harvey focused on the microscopic print, and his face went pasty with rage. the minute note read: "services and entertainment, buckos redsents." "you can go to hell!" joe growled. "we won't pay it!" johnson sighed ponderously. "i was afraid you'd act like that," he said with regret. he pulled a tin badge out of his rear pocket, pinned it on his vest, and twisted his holstered gun into view. "afraid i'll have to ask the sheriff to take over." johnson, the "sheriff," collected the money, and johnson, the "restaurateur," pocketed it. meanwhile, harvey tipped joe the sign to remain calm. "my friend," he said to the mayor, and his tones took on a schoolmasterish severity, "your long absence from earth has perhaps made you forget those elements of human wisdom that have entered the folk-lore of your native planet. such as, for example: 'it is folly to kill a goose that lays golden eggs,' and 'penny wise is pound foolish.'" "i don't get the connection," objected johnson. "well, by obliging us to pay such a high price for your dinner, you put out of your reach the chance of profiting from a really substantial deal. my partner and i were prepared to make you a sizable offer for the peculiar creature you call genius. but by reducing our funds the way you have--" "who said i wanted to sell him?" the mayor interrupted. he rubbed his fingers together and asked disinterestedly: "what were you going to offer, anyhow?" "it doesn't matter any longer," harvey said with elaborate carelessness. "perhaps you wouldn't have accepted it, anyway." "that's right," johnson came back emphatically. "but what would your offer have been which i would have turned down?" "which one? the one we were going to make, or the one we can make now?" "either one. it don't make no difference. genius is too valuable to sell." "oh, come now, mr. johnson. don't tell me no amount of money would tempt you!" "nope. but how much did you say?" "ah, then you will consider releasing genius!" "well, i'll tell you something," said the mayor confidentially. "when you've got one thing, you've got one thing. but when you've got money, it's the same as having a lot of things. because, if you've got money, you can buy this and that and this and that and--" "this and that," concluded joe. "we'll give you five hundred buckos." "now, gents!" johnson remonstrated. "why, six hundred would hardly--" "you haven't left us much money," harvey put in. the mayor frowned. "all right, we'll split the difference. make it five-fifty." harvey was quick to pay out, for this was a genuine windfall. then he stood up and admired the astonishing possession he had so inexpensively acquired. "i really hate to deprive you of this unique creature," he said to johnson. "i should imagine you will be rather lonely, with only your filial mammoth to keep you company." "i sure will," johnson confessed glumly. "i got pretty attached to genius, and i'm going to miss him something awful." harvey forcibly removed his eyes from the native, who was clearing off the table almost all at once. "my friend," he said, "we take your only solace, it is true, but in his place we can offer something no less amazing and instructive." the mayor's hand went protectively to his pocket. "what is it?" he asked with the suspicion of a man who has seen human nature at its worst and expects nothing better. "joseph, get our most prized belonging from the communications room of the ship," harvey instructed. to johnson he explained: "you must see the wondrous instrument before its value can be appreciated. my partner will soon have it here for your astonishment." joe's face grew as glum as johnson's had been. "aw, harv," he protested, "do we have to sell it? and right when i thought we were getting the key!" "we must not be selfish, my boy," harvey said nobly. "we have had our chance; now we must relinquish fate to the hands of a man who might have more success than we. go, joseph. bring it here." unwillingly, joe turned and shuffled out. * * * * * on a larger and heavier world than planetoid , johnson's curiosity would probably have had weight and mass. he was bursting with questions, but he was obviously afraid they would cost him money. for his part, harvey allowed that curiosity to grow like a venusian amoeba until joe came in, lugging a radio. "is that what you were talking about?" the mayor snorted. "what makes you think i want a radio? i came here to get away from singers and political speech-makers." "do not jump to hasty conclusions," harvey cautioned. "another word, and i shall refuse you the greatest opportunity any man has ever had, with the sole exceptions of joseph, myself and the unfortunate inventor of this absolutely awe-inspiring device." "i ain't in the market for a radio," johnson said stubbornly. harvey nodded in relief. "we have attempted to repay our host, joseph. he has spurned our generosity. we have now the chance to continue our study, which i am positive will soon reward us with the key to an enormous fortune." "well, that's no plating off our bow," joe grunted. "i'm glad he did turn it down. i hated to give it up after working on it for three whole years." he picked up the radio and began walking toward the door. "now, hold on!" the mayor cried. "i ain't _saying_ i'll buy, but what is it i'm turning down?" joe returned and set the instrument down on the bar. his face sorrowful, harvey fondly stroked the scarred plasticoid cabinet. "to make a long story, mr. johnson," he said, "joseph and i were among the chosen few who knew the famous doctor dean intimately. just before his tragic death, you will recall, dean allegedly went insane." he banged his fist on the bar. "i have said it before, and i repeat again, that was a malicious lie, spread by the doctor's enemies to discredit his greatest invention--this fourth dimensional radio!" "this what?" johnson blurted out. "in simple terms," clarified harvey, "the ingenious doctor discovered that the yawning chasm between the dimensions could be bridged by energy of all quanta. there has never been any question that the inhabitants of the super-dimension would be far more civilized than ourselves. consequently, the man who could tap their knowledge would find himself in possession of a powerful, undreamt-of science!" the mayor looked respectfully at the silent box on the bar. "and this thing gets broadcasts from the fourth dimension?" "it does, mr. johnson! only charlatans like those who envied doctor dean's magnificent accomplishments could deny that fact." the mayor put his hands in his pockets, unswiveled one hip and stared thoughtfully at the battered cabinet. "well, let's say it picks up fourth dimensional broadcasts," he conceded. "but how could you understand what they're saying? folks up there wouldn't talk our language." again harvey smashed his fist down. "do you dare to repeat the scurvy lie that broke dean's spirit and drove him to suicide?" johnson recoiled. "no--no, _of course not_. i mean, being up here, i naturally couldn't get all the details." "naturally," harvey agreed, mollified. "i'm sorry i lost my temper. but it is a matter of record that the doctor proved the broadcasts emanating from the super-dimension were in english! why should that be so difficult to believe? is it impossible that at one time there was communication between the dimensions, that the super-beings admired our language and adopted it in all its beauty, adding to it their own hyper-scientific trimmings?" "why, i don't know," johnson said in confusion. "for three years, joseph and i lost sleep and hair, trying to detect the simple key that would translate the somewhat metamorphosed broadcasts into our primitive english. it eluded us. even the doctor failed. but that was understandable; a sensitive soul like his could stand only so much. and the combination of ridicule and failure to solve the mystery caused him to take his own life." johnson winced. "is that what you want to unload on me?" "for a very good reason, sir. patience is the virtue that will be rewarded with the key to these fourth dimensional broadcasts. a man who could devote his life to improving this lonely worldlet is obviously a person with unusual patience." "yeah," the mayor said grudgingly, "i ain't exactly flighty." "therefore, you are the man who could unravel the problem!" johnson asked skeptically: "how about a sample first?" * * * * * harvey turned a knob on the face of the scarred radio. after several squeals of spatial figures, a smooth voice began: "there are omnious pleajes of moby-hailegs in sonmirand which, howgraismon, are notch to be donfured miss ellasellabell in either or both hagasanipaj, by all means. this does not refly, on the brother man, nat or mizzafil saces are denuded by this ossifaligo...." harvey switched off the set determinedly. "wait a minute!" johnson begged. "i almost got it then!" "i dislike being commercial," said harvey, "but this astounding device still belongs to us. would we not be foolish to let you discover the clue before purchasing the right to do so?" the mayor nodded indecisively, looking at the radio with agonized longing. "how much do you want?" he asked unhappily. "one thousand buckos, and no haggling. i am not in the mood." johnson opened his mouth to argue; then, seeing harvey's set features, paid with the worst possible grace. "don't you think we ought to tell him about the batteries, harv?" joe asked. "what about the batteries?" demanded johnson with deadly calm. "a very small matter," harvey said airily. "you see, we have been analyzing these broadcasts for three years. in that time, of course, the batteries are bound to weaken. i estimate these should last not less than one terrestrial month, at the very least." "what do i do then?" harvey shrugged. "special batteries are required, which i see joseph has by chance brought along. for the batteries, the only ones of their kind left in the system, i ask only what they cost--one hundred and ninety-nine buckos, no more and, on the other hand, no less." johnson was breathing hard, and his hand hovered dangerously near his gun. but he paid the amount harvey wanted. moreover, he actually shook hands when the two panacea purveyors collected their six-armed prize and said goodbye. before they were outside, however, he had turned on the radio and was listening tensely to a woman's highly cultured, though rather angry voice, saying: "oh, you hannaforge are all beasa-taga-sanimort. if you rue amount it, how do you respench a pure woman to ansver go-samak--" "i'll get it!" they heard johnson mutter. then the sound of giant feet crossing the barroom floor reached their ears, and a shrill question: "what's that, papa?" "a fortune, jed! those fakers are damned fools, selling us a thing like--" joe gazed at harvey admiringly. "another one sold? harv, that spiel pulls them in like an ether storm!" together with the remarkable planetoid man, they reached the ship. above them, dark, tumbling shapes blotted out the stars and silently moved on. joe opened the gangway door. "come on in, pal," he said to genius. "we're shoving off." the planetoid man grinned foolishly. "can't go arong with you," he said with an apologetic manner. "i rike to, but pressure fratten me out if i go." "what in solar blazes are you talking about?" harvey asked. "i grow up on pranetoid," genius explained. "on big pranet, too much pressure for me." the two salesmen looked narrowly at each other. "did johnson know that when he sold you?" joe snarled. "oh, sure." the silly grin became wider than ever. "peopre from earth buy me rots of times. i never reave pranetoid, though." "joseph," harvey said ominously, "that slick colonist has put one over upon us. what is our customary procedure in that event?" "we tear him apart," joe replied between his teeth. "not mister johnson," advised genius. "have gun and badge. he shoot you first and then rock you up in prison." harvey paused, his ominous air vanishing. "true. there is also the fact, joseph, that when he discovers the scrambled rectifier in the radio we sold him, he will have been paid back in full for his regrettable dishonesty." * * * * * unwillingly, joe agreed. while genius retreated to a safe distance, they entered the ship and blasted off. within a few minutes the automatic steering pilot had maneuvered them above the plane of the asteroid belt. "i got kind of dizzy," joe said, "there were so many deals back and forth. how much did we make on the sucker?" "a goodly amount, i wager," harvey responded. he took out a pencil and paper. "medicine, . ; radio, , ; batteries, . total--let's see-- buckos and redsents. a goodly sum, as i told you." he emptied his pockets of money, spread it out on the astrogation table and began counting. finished, he looked up, troubled. "how much did we have when we landed, joseph?" "exactly buckos," joe answered promptly. "i can't understand it," said harvey. "instead of double our capital, we now have only buckos and redsents!" feverishly, he returned to his pencil and paper. "drinking water, ; battery water, free; meal, ; planetoid man, . total: buckos!" he stared at the figures. "we paid out almost as much as we took in," he said bitterly. "despite our intensive efforts, we made the absurd sum of fifty redsents." "why, the dirty crook!" joe growled. but after a few moments of sad reflection, harvey became philosophical. "perhaps, joseph, we are more fortunate than we realize. we were, after all, completely in johnson's power. the more i ponder, the more i believe we were lucky to escape. and, anyhow, we did make fifty redsents on the swindler. a moral victory, my boy." joe, who had been sunk desparingly into a chair, now stood up slowly and asked: "remember that bottle-opener we gave him?" "certainly," harvey explained. "what about it?" "how much did it cost us?" harvey's eyebrows puckered. suddenly he started laughing. "you're right, joseph. we paid forty-six redsents for it on venus. so, after all that transacting of business, we made four redsents!" "four redsents, hell!" joe snapped. "that was the sales tax!" he glared; then a smile lifted his mouth. "you remember those yokels on mars' flatlands, and the way they worshipped gold?" "_goldbricks!_" harvey said succinctly. grinning, joe set the robot-controls for mars. mr. meek plays polo by clifford d. simak mr. meek was having his troubles. first, the _educated_ bugs worried him; then the welfare worker tried to stop the ring rats' feud by enlisting his aid. and now, he was a drafted space-polo player--a fortune bet on his ability at a game he had never played in his cloistered life. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] the sign read: _atomic motors repaired. busted plates patched up. rocket tubes relined. wheeze in, whiz out!_ it added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering: _we fix anything._ mr. oliver meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. a second sign was wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was faint, almost illegible. meek blinked at it through thick-lensed spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl: ask about educated bugs a bit bewildered, but determined not to show it, meek swung away from the sign-post and gravely regarded the settlement. on the chart it was indicated by a fairly sizeable dot, but that was merely a matter of comparison. out saturn-way even the tiniest outpost assumes importance far beyond its size. the slab of rock was no more than five miles across, perhaps even less. here in its approximate center, were two buildings, both of almost identical construction, semi-spherical and metal. out here, meek realized, shelter was the thing. architecture merely for architecture's sake was still a long way off. one of the buildings was the repair shop which the sign advertised. the other, according to the crudely painted legend smeared above its entrance lock, was the _saturn inn_. the rest of the rock was landing field, pure and simple. blasters had leveled off the humps and irregularities so spaceships could sit down. two ships now were on the field, pulled up close against the repair shop. one, meek noticed, belonged to the solar health and welfare department, the other to the galactic pharmaceutical corporation. the galactic ship was a freighter, ponderous and slow. it was here, meek knew, to take on a cargo of radiation moss. but the other was a puzzler. meek wrinkled his brow and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what a welfare ship would be doing in this remote corner of the solar system. slowly and carefully, meek clumped toward the squat repair shop. once or twice he stumbled, hoping fervently he wouldn't get the feet of his cumbersome spacesuit all tangled up. the gravity was slight, next to non-existent, and one who wasn't used to it had to take things easy and remember where he was. behind him saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched with angry, bright green patches. to right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that made up the inner ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings. "like dewdrops in the black of space," meek mumbled to himself. but he immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. this sector of space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. it was hard and savage and as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out with a firmer tread that almost upset him. after that, he tried to think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him. reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. swiftly the lock spun outward and a moment later meek had passed through the entrance vault and stepped into the office. a dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head. meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling earth gravity under him again. he lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his shoulders. "you are the gentleman who can fix things?" he asked the mechanic. * * * * * the mechanic stared. here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. meek's hair was white and stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. his skin was pale. his blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose. even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and slight frame. the mechanic said nothing. meek tried again. "i saw the sign. it said you could fix anything. so i...." the mechanic shook himself. "sure," he agreed, still slightly dazed. "sure i can fix you up. what you got?" he swung his feet off the desk. "i ran into a swarm of pebbles," meek confessed. "not much more than dust, really, but the screen couldn't stop it all." he fumbled his hands self-consciously. "awkward of me," he said. "it happens to the best of them," the mechanic consoled. "saturn sweeps in clouds of the stuff. thicker than hell when you reach the rings. lots of ships pull in with punctures. won't take no time." meek cleared his throat uneasily. "i'm afraid it's more than a puncture. a pebble got into the instruments. washed out some of them." the mechanic clucked sympathetically. "you're lucky. tough job to bring in a ship without all the instruments. must have a honey of a navigator." "i haven't got a navigator," meek said, quietly. the mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. "you mean you brought it in alone? no one with you?" meek gulped and nodded. "dead reckoning," he said. the mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. "i don't know who you are, mister," he declared, "but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot that ever took to space." "really i'm not," said meek. "i haven't done much piloting, you see. up until just a while ago, i never had left earth. bookkeeper for lunar exports." "bookkeeper!" yelped the mechanic. "how come a bookkeeper can handle a ship like that?" "i learned it," said meek. "you learned it?" "sure, from a book. i saved my money and i studied. i always wanted to see the solar system and here i am." dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook. "afraid this job might take a while," he said. "especially if we have to wait for parts. have to get them in from titan city. why don't you go over to the _inn_. tell moe i sent you. they'll treat you right." "thank you," said meek, "but there's something else i'm wondering about. there was another sign out there. something about educated bugs." "oh, them," said the mechanic. "they belong to gus hamilton. maybe belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before gus took over. anyhow, gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they sure run him ragged. first year they almost drove him loopy trying to figure out what kind of game they were playing." "game?" asked meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed. "sure, game. like checkers. only it ain't. not chess, neither. even worse than that. bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up sides and play for hours. about the time gus would think he had it figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again." "that doesn't make sense," protested meek. "stranger," declared the mechanic, solemnly, "there ain't nothing about them bugs that make sense. gus' rock is the only one they're on. gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the solar system. thinks maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. figures maybe it crossed space somehow and was captured by saturn, sucked into the ring. that would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. they come along with it, see." "this gus hamilton," said meek. "i'd like to see him. where could i find him?" "go over to the _inn_ and wait around," advised the mechanic. "he'll come in sooner or later. drops around regular, except when his rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. subscribes to a daily paper, he does. only man out here that does any reading. but all he reads is the sports section. nuts about sports, gus is." ii moe, bartender at saturn inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced his chin in an outspread palm. his face wore a melancholy, hang-dog look. moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming in big batches. "lady," he declared mournfully, "you sure picked yourself a job. the boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. they ain't worth it, either. just ring-rats, that's all they are." henrietta perkins, representative for the public health and welfare department of the solar government, shuddered at his suggestion of anything so low it didn't yearn for betterment. "but those terrible feuds," she protested. "fighting just because they live in different parts of the ring. it's natural they might feel some rivalry, but all this killing! surely they don't enjoy getting killed." "sure they enjoy it," declared moe. "not being killed, maybe ... although they're willing to take a chance on that. not many of them get killed, in fact. just a few that get sort of careless. but even if some of them are killed, you can't go messing around with that feud of theirs. if them boys out in sectors twenty-three and thirty-seven didn't have their feud they'd plain die of boredom. they just got to have somebody to fight with. they been fighting, off and on, for years." "but they could fight with something besides guns," said the welfare lady, a-smirk with righteousness. "that's why i'm here. to try to get them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and disturbing channels. direct their energies into other activities." "like what?" asked moe, fearing the worst. "athletic events," said miss perkins. "tin shinny, maybe," suggested moe, trying to be sarcastic. she missed the sarcasm. "or spelling contests," she said. "them fellow can't spell," insisted moe. "games of some sort, then. competitive games." "now you're talking," moe enthused. "they take to games. seven-toed pete with the deuces wild." the inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited figure limped into the room. the spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush of grey whiskers spouted into view. it was gus hamilton. he glared at moe. "what in tarnation is all this foolishness?" he demanded. "got your message, i did, and here i am. but it better be important." he hobbled to the bar. moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward him, keeping out of reach. "have some trouble?" he asked, trying to be casual. "trouble! hell, yes!" blustered gus. "but i ain't the only one that's going to have trouble. somebody sneaked over and stole the injector out of my space crate. had to borrow hank's to get over here. but i know who it was. there ain't but one other ring-rat got a rocket my injector will fit." "bud craney," said moe. it was no secret. every man in the two sectors of the ring knew just exactly what kind of spacecraft the other had. "that's right," said gus, "and i'm fixing to go over into thirty-seven and yank bud up by the roots." he took a jolt of liquor. "yes, sir, i sure aim to crucify him." his eyes lighted on miss henrietta perkins. "visitor?" he asked. "she's from the government," said moe. "revenuer?" "nope. from the welfare outfit. aims to help you fellows out. says there ain't no sense in you boys in twenty-three all the time fighting with the gang from thirty-seven." gus stared in disbelief. moe tried to be helpful. "she wants you to play games." gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes. "so that's why you asked me over here. another of your danged peace parleys. come and talk things over, you said. so i came." "there's something in what she says," defended moe. "you ring-rats been ripping up space for a long time now. time you growed up and settled down. you're aiming on going over right now and pulverizing bud. it won't do you any good." "i'll get a heap of satisfaction out of it," insisted gus. "and, besides, i'll get my injector back. might even take a few things off bud's ship. some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin." gus took another drink, glowering at miss perkins. "so the government sent you out to make us respectable," he said. "merely to help you, mr. hamilton," she declared. "to turn your hatreds into healthy competition." "games, eh?" said gus. "maybe you got something, after all. maybe we could fix up some kind of game...." "forget it, gus," warned moe. "if you're thinking of energy guns at fifty paces, it's out. miss perkins won't stand for anything like that." * * * * * gus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. "nothing of the sort," he denied. "dang it, you must think i ain't got no sportsmanship at all. i was thinking of a real sport. a game they play back on earth and mars. read about it in my papers. follow the teams, i do. always wanted to see a game, but never did." miss perkins beamed. "what game is it, mr. hamilton?" "space polo," said gus. "why, how wonderful," simpered miss perkins. "and you boys have the spaceships to play it with." moe looked alarmed. "miss perkins," he warned, "don't let him talk you into it." "you shut your trap," snapped gus. "she wants us to play games, don't she. well, polo is a game. a nice, respectable game. played in the best society." "it wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would play it," predicted moe. "it would turn into mass murder. wouldn't be one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else, once you got him in the open." miss perkins gasped. "why, i'm sure they wouldn't!" "of course we wouldn't," declared gus, solemn as an owl. "and that ain't all," said moe, warming to the subject. "those crates you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. most of them would just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. you can't play polo in ships tied up with haywire. those broomsticks you ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them." the inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room. "you're prejudiced," gus told moe. "you just don't like space polo, that is all. you ain't got no blueblood in you. we'll leave it up to this man here. we'll ask his opinion of it." the man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles. "my opinion, sir," said oliver meek, "seldom amounts to much." "all we want to know," gus told him, "is what you think of space polo." "space polo," declared meek, "is a noble game. it requires expert piloting, a fine sense of timing and...." "there, you see!" whooped gus, triumphantly. "i saw a game once," meek volunteered. "swell," bellowed gus. "we'll have you coach our team." "but," protested meek, "but ... but." "oh, mr. hamilton," exulted miss perkins, "you are so wonderful. you think of everything." "hamilton!" squeaked meek. "sure," said gus. "old gus hamilton. grow the finest dog-gone radiation moss you ever clapped your eyes on." "then you're the gentleman who has bugs," said meek. "now, look here," warned gus, "you watch what you say or i'll hang one on you." "he means your rock bugs," moe explained, hastily. "oh, them," said gus. "yes," said meek, "i'm interested in them. i'd like to see them." "see them," said gus. "mister, you can have them if you want them. drove me out of house and home, they did. they're dippy over metal. any kind of metal, but alloys especially. eat the stuff. they'll tromp you to death heading for a spaceship. got so i had to move over to another rock to live. tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure and simple. moved out and let them have the place after they started to eat my shack right out from underneath my feet." meek looked crestfallen. "can't get near them, then," he said. "sure you can," said gus. "why not?" "well, a spacesuit's metal and...." "got that all fixed up," said gus. "you come back with me and i'll let you have a pair of stilts." "stilts?" "yeah. wooden stilts. them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is. seem to be scared of it, sort of. you can walk right among them if you want to, long as you're walking on the stilts." meek gulped. he could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper. iii the bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a chinese checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places preparatory to the start of another game. for a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was gus hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game. oliver meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of stone that jutted from the surface. even in his youth, meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes on stilts. here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. meek knew now he was no expert. a half-dozen dents in his space armor was ample proof of that. comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, meek dug into the pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. flipping the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them. none of the diagrams made sense. they showed the patterns of three other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing out the game. apparently, in each case, the game had been finished. which, meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been reached, some point won, some advantage gained. but so far as meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point. the whole thing was squirrely. but, meek told himself, it fitted in. the whole saturnian system was wacky. the rings, for example. debris of a moon smashed up by saturn's pull? sweepings of space? no one knew. saturn itself, for that matter. a planet that kept man at bay with deadly radiations. but radiations that, while they kept man at a distance, at the same time served man. for here, on the inner ring, where they had become so diluted that ordinary space armor filtered them out, they made possible the medical magic of the famous radiation moss. one of the few forms of plant life found in the cold of space, the moss was nurtured by those mysterious radiations. planted elsewhere, on kindlier worlds, it wilted and refused to grow. the radiations had been analyzed, meek knew, and reproduced under laboratory conditions, but there still was something missing, some vital, elusive factor that could not be analyzed. under the artificial radiation, the moss still wilted and died. and because earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because it would grow nowhere else but here on the inner ring, men squatted on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. men like hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. men who endured loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the mockery of space before them. meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself. * * * * * the bugs had started the game and meek craned forward cautiously, watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook. crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly popping in and out of holes. if there were opposing sides ... and if it were a game, there'd have to be ... they didn't seem to alternate the moves. although, meek admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each side. suddenly there was confusion on the board. for a moment a half-dozen of the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy. then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. and in another moment, they were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements, going back several plays beyond the point of confusion. just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical problem ... going back to the point of error and going on again from there. "well, i'll be...." mr. meek said. meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly on the rock below. a mathematical problem! his breath gurgled in his throat. he knew it now! he should have known it all the time. but the mechanic had talked about the bugs playing games and so had hamilton. that had thrown him off. games! those bugs weren't playing any game. they were solving mathematical equations! meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. one of the stilts slipped out of position and meek felt himself start to fall. he dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space. the other stilt went, then, and meek found himself floating slowly downward, gravity weak but inexorable. his struggle to retain his balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed. he pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged. he struck and bounced, struck and bounced again. on the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny projection of the surface. fighting desperately, he regained his feet. something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand before him. it was covered with the bugs. fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock. oliver meek shut his eyes and groaned. "gus will give me hell for this," he told himself. * * * * * gus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic scurrying within it. "by rights," he declared, judiciously, "i should take this over and dump it in bud's ship. get even with him for swiping my injector." "but you got the injector back," meek pointed out. "oh, sure, i got it back," admitted gus. "but it wasn't orthodox, it wasn't. just getting your property back ain't getting even. i never did have a chance to smack bud in the snoot the way i should of smacked him. moe talked me into it. he was the one that had the idea the welfare lady should go over and talk to bud. she must of laid it on thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and all that. otherwise bud never would have given her that injector." he shook his head dolefully. "this here ring ain't ever going to be the same again. if we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being polite to one another." "that would be awful," agreed meek. "wouldn't it, though," declared gus. meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight. "got him," yelped meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand. gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. meek rose and popped the bug inside. "that makes twenty-eight of them," said meek. "i told you," gus accused him, "that we hadn't got them all. you better take another good look at your suit. the danged things burrow right into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. sneakiest cusses in the whole dang system. just like chiggers back on earth." "chiggers," meek told him, "burrow into a person to lay eggs." "maybe these things do, too," gus contended. the radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning in on one of the regular newscasts from titan city out on saturn's biggest moon. the syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with excitement and pride. "next week," he said, "the annual martian-earth football game will be played at greater new york on earth. but in the earth's newspapers tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the sporting world down into secondary place." he paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with delight. "the sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and down the streets of earth tonight, is one that will be played here in our own saturnian system. a space polo game. to be played by two unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the inner ring. most of the men have never played polo before. few if any of them have even seen a game. there may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what it was. "but they're going to play it. the men who ride those bucking rocks that make up the inner ring will go out into space in their rickety ships and fight it out. and ladies and gentlemen, when i say fight it out, i really mean fight it out. for the game, it seems, will be a sort of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in the ring for years. no one knows what started the feud. it has gotten so it really doesn't matter. the only thing that matters is that when men from sector twenty-three meet those from sector thirty-seven, the feud is taken up again. but that is at an end now. in a few days the feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the inner ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space polo. for the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy of one of the two sectors." * * * * * meek rose from his chair, opened his mouth as if to speak, but sank back again when gus hissed at him and held a finger to his lips for silence. "the teams are now in training," went on the newscaster, the happy lilt in his voice still undimmed, "and it is understood that sector twenty-three has the advantage, at the start at least, of having a polo expert as its coach. just who this expert is no one can say. several names have been mentioned, but...." "no, no," yelped meek, struggling to his feet, but gus shushed him, poking a finger toward him and grinning like a bearded imp. "... bets are mounting high throughout the entire saturnian system," the announcer was saying, "but since little is known about the teams, the odds still are even. it is likely, however, that odds will be demanded on the sector of thirty-seven team on the basis of the story about the expert coach. "the very audacity of such a game has attracted solar-wide attention and special fleets of ships will leave both earth and mars within the next few days to bring spectators to the game. newsmen from the inner worlds, among them some of the system's most famous sports writers, are already on their way. "originally intended to be no more than a recreation project under the supervision of the department of health and welfare, the game has suddenly become a solar attraction. the _daily rocket_ back on earth is offering a gigantic loving cup for the winning team, while the _morning spaceways_ has provided another loving cup, only slightly smaller, to be presented the player adjudged the most valuable to his team. we may have more to tell you about the game before the newscast is over, but in the meantime we shall go on to other news of solar int...." meek leaped up. "he meant me," he whooped. "that was me he meant when he was talking about a famous coach!" "sure," said gus. "he couldn't have meant anyone else but you." "but i'm not a famous coach," protested meek. "i'm not even a coach at all. i never saw but one space polo game in all my life. i hardly know how it's played. i just know you go up there in space and bat a ball around. i'm going to...." "you ain't going to do a blessed thing," said gus. "you ain't skipping out on us. you're staying right here and give us all the fine pointers of the game. maybe you ain't as hot as the newscaster made out, but you're a dang sight better than anyone else around here. at least you seen a game once and that's more than any of the rest of us have." "but i...." "i don't know what's the matter with you," declared gus. "you're just pretending you don't know anything about polo, that's all. maybe you're a fugitive from justice. maybe that's why you're so anxious to make a getaway. only reason you stopped at all was because your ship got stoved up." "i'm no fugitive," declared meek, drawing himself up. "i'm just a bookkeeper out to see the system." "forget it," said gus. "forget it. nobody around here's going to give you away. if they even so much as peep, i'll plain paralyze them. so you're a bookkeeper. that's good enough for me. just let anyone say you ain't a bookkeeper and see what happens to him." meek opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. what was the use? here he was, stuck again. just like back on juno when that preacher had thought he was a gunman and talked him into taking over the job of cleaning up the town. only this time it was a space polo game and he knew even less about space polo than he did about being a lawman. gus rose and limped slowly across the room. ponderously, he hauled a red bandanna out of his back pocket and carefully dusted off the one uncrowded space on the mantel shelf, between the alarm clock and the tarnished silver model of a rocket ship. "yes, sir," he said, "she'll look right pretty there." he backed away and stared at the place on the shelf. "i can almost see her now," he said. "glinting in the lamplight. something to keep me company. something to look at when i get lonesome." "what are you talking about?" demanded meek. "that there cup the radio was talking about," said gus. "the one for the most valuable team member." meek stammered. "but ... but...." "i'm going to win her," gus declared. iv saturn inn bulged. every room was crowded, with half a dozen to the cubicle, sleeping in relays. those who couldn't find anywhere else to sleep spread blankets in the narrow corridors or dozed off in chairs or slept on the barroom floor. a few of them got stepped on. titan city's junior chamber of commerce had done what it could to help the situation out, but the notice had been short. a half-dozen nearby rocks which had been hastily leveled off for parking space, now were jammed with hundreds of space vehicles, ranging from the nifty two man job owned by billy jones, sports editor of the _daily rocket_, to the huge excursion liners sent out by the three big transport companies. a few hastily-erected shelters helped out to some extent, but none of these shelters had a bar and were mostly untenanted. moe, the bartender at the inn, harried with too many customers, droopy with lack of sleep, saw oliver meek bobbing around in the crowd that surged against the bar, much after the manner of a cork caught in a raging whirlpool. he reached out a hand and dragged meek against the bar. "can't you do something to stop it?" meek blinked at him. "stop what?" "this game," said moe. "it's awful, mr. meek. honestly. the crowd has got the fellers so worked up, it's apt to be mass murder." "i know it," meek agreed, "but you can't stop it now. the junior chamber of commerce would take the hide off anyone who even said he would like to see it stopped. it's more publicity than saturn has gotten since the first expeditions were lost here." "i don't like it," declared moe, stolidly. "i don't like it either," meek confessed. "gus and those other fellows on his team think i'm an expert. i told them what i knew about space polo, but it wasn't much. trouble is they think it's everything there is to know. they figure they're a cinch to win and they got their shirts bet on the game. if they lose, they'll more than likely space-walk me." fingers tapped meek's shoulders and he twisted around. a red face loomed above him, a cigarette drooping from the corner of its lips. "hear you say you was coaching the twenty-three bunch?" meek gulped. "billy jones, that's me," said the lips with the cigarette. "best damn sports writer ever pounded keys. been trying to find out who you was. nobody else knows. treat you right." "you must be wrong," said meek. "never wrong," insisted jones. "nose for news. smell it out. like this. _sniff. sniff._" his nose crinkled in imitation of a bloodhound, but his face didn't change otherwise. the cigarette still dangled, pouring smoke into a watery left eye. "heard the guy call you meek," said jones. "name sounds familiar. something about juno, wasn't it? rounded up a bunch of crooks. found a space monster of some sort." another hand gripped meek by the shoulder and literally jerked him around. "so you're the guy!" yelped the owner of the hand. "i been looking for you. i've a good notion to smack you in the puss." "now, bud," yelled moe, in mounting fear, "you leave him alone. he ain't done a thing." meek gaped at the angry face of the hulking man, who still had his shoulder in the grip of a monstrous paw. bud craney! the ring-rat that had stolen gus' injector! the captain of the thirty-seven team. "if there was room," craney grated, "i'd wipe up the floor with you. but since there ain't, i'm just plain going to hammer you down about halfway into it." "but he ain't done nothing!" shrilled moe. "he's an outsider, ain't he?" demanded craney. "what business he got coming in here and messing around with things?" "i'm not messing around with things, mr. craney," meek declared, trying to be dignified about it. but it was hard to be dignified with someone lifting one by the shoulder so one's toes just barely touched the floor. [illustration: _"ulp!" ulped mr. meek shakily._] "all that's the matter with you," insisted the dangling meek, "is that you know gus and his men will give you a whipping. they'd done it, anyhow. i haven't helped them much. i haven't helped them hardly at all." craney howled in rage. "why ... you ... you...." and then oliver meek did one of those things no one ever expected him to do, least of all himself. "i'll bet you my spaceship," he said, "against anything you got." astonished, craney opened his hand and let him down on the floor. "you'll what?" he roared. "i'll bet you my spaceship," said meek, the madness still upon him, "that twenty-three will beat you." he rubbed it in. "i'll even give you odds." craney gasped and sputtered. "i don't want any odds," he yelped. "i'll take it even. my moss patch against your ship." someone was calling meek's name in the crowd. "mr. meek! mr. meek!" "here," said meek. "what about that story?" demanded billy jones, but meek didn't hear him. a man was tearing his way through the crowd. it was one of the men from twenty-three. "mr. meek," he panted, "you got to come right away. it's gus. he's all tangled up with rheumatiz!" * * * * * gus stared up with anguished eyes at meek. "it sneaked up on me while i slept," he squeaked. "laid off of me for years until just now. limped once in a while, of course, and got a few twinges now and then, but that was all. never had me tied up like this since i left earth. one of the reasons i never did go back to earth. space is good climate for rheumatiz. cold but dry. no moisture to get into your bones." meek looked around at the huddled men, saw the worry that was etched upon their faces. "get a hot water bottle," he told one of them. "hell," said russ jensen, a hulking framed spaceman, "there ain't no such a thing as a hot water bottle nearer than titan city." "an electric pad, then." jensen shook his head. "no pads, neither. only thing we can do is pour whiskey down him and if we pour enough down him to cure the rheumatiz, we'll get him drunk and he won't be no more able to play in that game than he is right now." meek's weak eyes blinked behind his glasses, staring at gus. "we'll lose sure if gus can't play," said jensen, "and me with everything i got bet on our team." another man spoke up. "meek could play in gus' place." "nope, he couldn't," declared jensen. "the rats from thirty-seven wouldn't stand for it." "they couldn't do a thing about it," declared the other man. "meek's been here six weeks today. that makes him a resident. six earth weeks, the law says. and all that time he's been in sector twenty-three. they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. they might squawk but they couldn't make it stick." "you're certain of that?" demanded jensen. "dead certain," said the other. meek saw them looking at him, felt a queasy feeling steal into his stomach. "i couldn't," he told them. "i couldn't do it. i ... i...." "you go right ahead, oliver," said gus. "i wanted to play, of course. sort of set my heart on that cup. had the mantel piece all dusted off for it. but if i can't play, there ain't another soul i'd rather have play in my place than you." "but i don't know a thing about polo," protested meek. "you taught it to us, didn't you?" bellowed jensen. "you pretended like you knew everything there was to know." "but i don't," insisted meek. "you wouldn't let me explain. you kept telling me all the time what a swell coach i was and when i tried to argue with you and tell you that i wasn't you yelled me down. i never saw more than one game in all my life and the only reason i saw it then was because i found the ticket. it was on the sidewalk and i picked it up. somebody had dropped it." "so you been stringing us along," yelped jensen. "you been making fools of us! how do we know but you showed us wrong. you been giving us the wrong dope." he advanced on meek and meek backed against the wall. jensen lifted his fist, held it in front of him as if he were weighing it. "i ought to bop you one," he decided. "all of us had ought to bop you one. every danged man in this here room has got his shirt bet on the game because we figured we couldn't lose with a coach like you." "so have i," said meek. but it wasn't until he said it that he really realized he did have his shirt bet on twenty-three. his spaceship. it wasn't all he had, of course, but it was the thing that was nearest to his heart ... the thing he had slaved for thirty years to buy. he suddenly remembered those years now. years of bending over account books in the dingy office back on earth, watching other men go out in space, longing to go himself. counting pennies so that he could go. spending only a dime for lunch and eating crackers and cheese instead of going out for dinner in the evening. piling up the dollars, slowly through the years ... dollars to buy the ship that now stood out on the field, all damage repaired. sitting, poised for space. but if thirty-seven won it wouldn't be his any longer. it would be craney's. he'd just made a bet with craney and there were plenty of witnesses to back it up. "well?" demanded jensen. "i will play," said meek. "and you really know about the game? you wasn't kidding us?" meek looked at the men before him and the expression on their faces shaped his answer. he gulped ... gulped again. then slowly nodded. "sure, i know about it," he lied. they didn't look quite satisfied. he glanced around, but there was no way of escape. he faced them again, back pressed against the wall. he tried to make his voice light and breezy, but he couldn't quite keep out the croak. "haven't played it much in the last few years," he said, "but back when i was a kid i was a ten-goal man." they were satisfied at that. v hunched behind the controls, meek slowly circled gus' crate, waiting for the signal, half fearful of what would happen when it came. glancing to left and right, he could see the other ships of sector twenty-three, slowly circling too, red identification lights strung along their hulls. ten miles away a gigantic glowing ball danced in the middle of the space-field, bobbing around like a jigging lantern. and beyond it were the circling blue lights of the thirty-seven team. and beyond them the glowing green space-buoys that marked the thirty-seven goal line. meek bent an attentive ear to the ticking of the motor, listening intently for the alien click he had detected a moment before. gus' ship, to tell the truth, was none too good. it might have been a good ship once, but now it was worn out. it was sluggish and slow to respond to the controls, it had a dozen little tricks that kept one on the jump. it had followed space trails too long, had plumped down to too many bumpy landings in the maelstrom of the belt. meek sighed gustily. it would have been different if they had let him take his own ship, but it was only on the condition that he use gus' ship that thirty-seven had agreed to let him play at all. they had raised a fuss about it, but twenty-three had the law squarely on its side. he stole a glance toward the sidelines and saw hundreds of slowly cruising ships. ships crammed with spectators out to watch the game. radio ships that would beam a play by play description to be channeled to every radio station throughout the solar system. newsreel ships that would film the clash of opposing craft. ships filled with newsmen who would transmit reams of copy back to earth and mars. looking at them, meek shuddered. how in the world had he ever let himself get into a thing like this? he was out to see the solar system, not to play a polo game ... especially a polo game he didn't want to play. it had been the bugs, of course. if it hadn't been for the bugs, gus never would have had the chance to talk him into that coaching business. he should have spoken out, of course. told them, flat out, that he didn't know a thing about polo. made them understand he wasn't going to have a thing to do with this silly scheme. but they had shouted at him and laughed at him and bullied him. been nice to him, too. that was the biggest trouble. he was a sucker, he knew, for anyone who was nice to him. not many people had been. maybe he should have gone to miss henrietta perkins and explained. she might have listened and understood. although he wasn't any too sure about that. she probably had plenty to do with starting the publicity rolling. after all, it was her job to make a showing on the jobs she did. if it hadn't been for gus dusting off the place on the mantelpiece. if it hadn't been for the titan city junior chamber of commerce. if it hadn't been for all the ballyhoo about the mystery coach. but more especially, if he'd kept his fool mouth shut and not made that bet with craney. * * * * * meek groaned and tried to remember the few things he did know about polo. and he couldn't think of a single thing, not even some of the things he had made up and told the boys. suddenly a rocket flared from the referee's ship and with a jerk meek hauled back the throttle. the ship gurgled and stuttered and for a moment, heart in his throat, meek thought it was going to blow up right then and there. but it didn't. it gathered itself together and leaped, forcing meek hard against the chair, snapping back his head. dazed, he reached out for the repulsor trigger. ahead the glowing ball bounced and quivered, jumped this way and that as the ships spun in a mad melee with repulsor beams whipping out like stabbing knives. two of the ships crashed and fell apart like matchboxes. a third, trying a sharp turn above the field of play, came unstuck and strewed itself across fifty miles of space. substitute ships dashed in from the sidelines, signalled by the referee's blinking light. rescue ships streaked out to pick up the players, salvage ships to clear away the pieces. for a fleeting moment, meek got the bobbing sphere in the cross-hairs and squeezed the trigger. the ball jumped as if someone had smacked it with his fist, sailed across the field. fighting to bring the ship around, meek yelled in fury at its slowness. desperately pouring on the juice, he watched with agony as a blue-lighted ship streamed down across the void, heading for the ball. the ship groaned in every joint, protesting and twisting as if in agony, as meek forced it around. suddenly there was a snap and the sudden swoosh of escaping air. startled, meek looked up. bare ribs stood out against star-spangled space. a plate had been ripped off! face strained behind the visor of his spacesuit, hunched over the controls, he waited for the rest of the plates to go. by some miracle they hung on. one worked loose and flapped weirdly as the ship shivered in the turn. but the turn had taken too long and meek was too late. the blue-lamped ship already had the ball, was streaking for the goal line. jensen somehow had had sense enough to refuse to be sucked out of goalie position, and now he charged in to intercept. but he muffed his chance. he dived in too fast and missed with his repulsor beam by a mile at least. the ball sailed over the lighted buoys and the first chukker was over with thirty-seven leading by one score. the ships lined up again. the rocket flared from the starter's ship and the ships plunged out. one of thirty-seven's ships began to lose things. plates broke loose and fell away, a rocket snapped its moorings and sailed off at a tangent, spouting gouts of flame, the structural ribs came off and strewed themselves along like spilling toothpicks. battered by repulsor beams, the ball suddenly bounced upward and meek, trailing the field, waiting for just such a chance, played a savage tune on the tube controls. the ship responded with a snap, executing a half roll and a hairpin turn that shook the breath from meek. two more plates tore off in the turn, but the ship plowed on. now the ball was dead ahead and meek gave it the works. the beam hit squarely and meek followed through. the second chukker was over and the score was tied. not until he was curving back above the thirty-seven goal line, did meek have time to wonder what had happened to the ship. it was sluggish no longer. it was full of zip. almost like driving his own sleek craft. almost as if, the ship knew where he wanted it to go and went there. a hint of motion on the instrument panel caught his eye and he bent close to see what it was. he stiffened. the panel seemed to be alive. seemed to be crawling. he bent closer and froze. it was crawling. there was no doubt of that. crawling with rock-bugs. * * * * * breath whistling between his teeth, meek ducked his head under the panel. every wire, every control was oozing bugs! for a moment he sat paralyzed by the thoughts that flickered through his brain. gus, he knew, would have his scalp for this. because he was the one that had brought the bugs over to the rock where gus lived and kept the ship. they thought, of course, they had caught all of them that were on his suit, but now it was clear they hadn't. some of them must have gotten away and found the ship. they would have made straight for it, of course, because of the alloys that were in it. why bother with a spacesuit or anything else when there was a ship around. only there were too many of them. there were thousands in the instrument panel and other thousands in the controls and he couldn't have brought back that many. not if he'd hauled them back in pails. what was it gus had said about them burrowing into metal just like chiggers burrow into human flesh? chiggers attacked humans to lay their eggs. maybe ... maybe.... a battalion of the bugs trooped across the face of an indicator and meek saw they were smaller than the ones he had seen back on gus' rock. there was no doubt about it. they were young bugs. bugs that has just hatched out. thousands of them ... millions of them, maybe! and they wouldn't be in the instruments and controls alone, but all through the ship. they'd be in the motors and the firing mechanisms ... all the places where the best alloys were used. meek wrung his hands, watching them play tag across the panel. if they'd had to hatch, why couldn't they have waited. just until the game was over, anyhow. that would have been all he'd asked. but they hadn't and here he was, with a couple of million bugs or so right smack in his lap. the rocket flared again and the ships shot out. bitterness chewing at him, meek flung the ship out savagely. what did it matter what happened now. gus would take the hide off him, rheumatism or no rheumatism, as soon as he found out about the bugs. for a wild moment, he hoped he would crack up. maybe the ship would fall apart like some of the others had. like the old one hoss shay the poet had written about centuries ago. the ship had lost so many plates that even now it was like flying a space-going box-kite. suddenly a ship loomed directly ahead, diving from the zenith. meek, forgetting his half-formed hope of a crackup a second before, froze in terror, but his fingers acted by pure instinct, stabbing at keys. although in the petrified second that seemed half an eternity, meek knew the ships would crash before he even touched the keys. and even as he thought it, the ship ducked in a nerve-rending jerk and they were skinning past, hulls almost touching. another jerk and more plates gone and there was the ball, directly ahead, with the repulsor beam already licking out. meek's jaw fell and a chill ran through his body and he couldn't move a muscle. for he hadn't even touched the trigger and yet the repulsor beam was flaring out, driving the ball ahead of it while the ship twisted and squirmed its way through a mass of fighting craft. hands dangling limply at his side, meek gaped in terror and disbelief. he wasn't touching the controls, and yet the ship was like a thing bewitched. a split second later the ball was over the goal and the ship was curving back, repulsor beam snapped off. "it's the bugs!" meek whispered to himself, lips scarcely moving. "the bugs have taken over!" the craft he was riding, he knew, was no longer just a ship, but a collection of rock-bugs. bugs that could work out mathematical equations. and now were playing polo! for what was polo, anyhow, except a mathematical equation, a problem of using certain points of force at certain points in space to arrive at a predetermined end? back on gus' rock the bugs had worked as a unit to solve equations ... and the new hatch in the ship was working as a unit, too, to solve another kind of problem ... the problem of taking a certain ball to a certain point despite certain variable and random factors in the form of opposing spaceships. tentatively, half fearfully, meek stabbed cautiously at a key which should have turned the ship. the ship didn't turn. meek snatched his hand away as if the key had burned his finger. * * * * * back on the line the ship wheeled into position of its own accord and a moment later was off again. meek clung to his chair with shaking hands. there was, he knew, no use of even pretending he was trying to operate the ship. there was just one thing that he was glad of. no one could see him sitting there, doing nothing. but the time would come ... and soon ... when he would have to do something. for he couldn't let the ship return to the ring. to do that would be to infest the other ships parked there, spread the bugs throughout the solar system. and those bugs definitely were something the solar system cold get along without. the ship shuddered and twisted, weaving its way through the pack of players. more plates ripped loose. glancing up, meek could see the glory of saturn through the gleaming ribs. then the ball was over the line and meek's team mates were shrieking at him over the radio in his spacesuit ... happy, glee-filled yells of triumph. he didn't answer. he was too busy ripping out the control wires. but it didn't help. even while he was doing it the ship went on unhampered and piled up another score. apparently the bugs didn't need the controls to make the ship do what they wanted. more than likely they were in control of the firing mechanism at its very source. maybe, and the thought curled the hair on meek's neck, they were the firing mechanism. maybe they had integrated themselves with the very structure of the entire mechanism of the ship. that would make the ship alive. a living chunk of machinery that paid no attention to the man who sat at the controls. meanwhile, the ship made another goal.... there was a way to stop the bugs ... only one way ... but it was dangerous. but probably not half as dangerous, meek told himself, as gus or the junior chamber or the thirty-seven team ... especially the thirty-seven team ... if any of them found out what was going on. he found a wrench and crawled back along the shivering ship. working in a frenzy of fear and need for haste, meek took off the plate that sealed the housing of the rear rocket assembly. breath hissing in his throat, he fought the burrs that anchored the tubes. there were a lot of them and they didn't come off easily. rockets had to be anchored securely ... securely enough so the blast of atomic fire within their chambers wouldn't rip them free. meanwhile, the ship piled up the score. loose burrs rolled and danced along the floor and meek knew the ship was in the thick of play again. then they were curving back. another goal! suddenly the rocket assembly shook a little, began to vibrate. wielding the wrench like a madman, knowing he had seconds at the most, meek spun two or three more bolts, then dropped the wrench and ran. leaping for a hole from which a plate had been torn, he caught a rib, swung with every ounce of power he had, launching himself into space. his right hand fumbled for the switch of the suit's rocket motor, found it, snapped it on to full acceleration. something seemed to hit him on the head and he sailed into the depths of blackness. vi billy jones sat in the office of the repair shop, cigarette dangling from his lip, pouring smoke into his watery eye. "never saw anything like it in my life," he declared. "how he made that ship go at all with half the plates ripped off is way beyond me." the dungareed mechanic sighted along the toes of his shoes, planted comfortably on the desk. "let me tell you, mister," he declared, "the solar system never has known a pilot like him ... never will again. he brought his ship down here with the instruments knocked out. dead reckoning." "wrote a great piece about him," billy said. "how he died in the best tradition of space. stuff like that. the readers will eat it up. the way that ship let go he didn't have a chance. seemed to go out of control all at once and went weaving and bucking almost into saturn. then blooey ... that's the end of it. one big splash of flame." the mechanic squinted carefully at his toes. "they're still out there, messing around," he said, "but they'll never find him. when that ship blew up he was scattered halfway out to pluto." the inner lock swung open ponderously and a spacesuited figure stepped in. they waited while he snapped back his helmet. "good evening, gentlemen," said oliver meek. they stared, slack-jawed. jones was the first to recover. "but it can't be you! your ship ... it exploded!" "i know," said meek. "i got out just before it went. turned on my suit rocket full blast. knocked me out. by the time i come to i was halfway out to the second ring. took me awhile to get back." he turned to the mechanic. "maybe you have a second hand suit you would sell me. i have to get rid of this one. has some bugs in it." "bugs? oh, yes, i see. you mean something's wrong with it." "that's it," said meek. "something's wrong with it." "i got one i'll let you have, free for nothing," said the mechanic. "boy, that was a swell game you played!" "could i have the suit now?" asked meek. "i'm in a hurry to get away." jones bounced to his feet. "but you can't leave. why, they think you're dead. they're out looking for you. and you won the cup ... the cup as the most valuable team member." "i just can't stay," said meek. he shuffled his feet uneasily. "got places to go. things to see. stayed too long already." "but the cup...." "tell gus i won the cup for him. tell him to put it on that mantelpiece. in the place he dusted off for it." meek's blue eyes shone queerly behind his glasses. "tell him maybe he'll think of me sometimes when he looks at it." the mechanic brought the suit. meek bundled it under his arm, started for the lock. then turned back. "maybe you gentlemen...." "yes," said jones. "maybe you can tell me how many goals i made. i lost count, you see." "you made nine," said jones. meek shook his head. "must be getting old," he said. "when i was a kid i was a _ten goal_ man." then he was gone, the lock swinging shut behind him. out of the iron womb! by poul anderson _behind a pale venusian mask lay hidden the arch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of those who needlessly had strewn malone blood across the heavens from saturn to the sun. now--on distant trojan asteroids--the rendezvous for death was plainly marked._ [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories summer . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] the most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds. darkness and the chill glitter of stars. bo jonsson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him. there was no horizon. the flying mountain on which he stood was too small. at his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the milky way. before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque bowsprit. there was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit. otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond mars. stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic of his helmet to the ground. its cold bit at him even through the insulating material. he might be able to hear the footsteps of his murderer conducted through the ground. stillness answered him. he gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air and rose. the other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close, catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. a man could do that when gravity was feeble enough. the stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. he had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends. sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to vega or spica or dear old beetle juice, murmuring what was in him as if the remote sun could understand. but they didn't care, he saw that now. to them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he was gone into night. he had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid with him, hunting him down. bo jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. it was long and massive, it would have been heavy on earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. he smiled stiffly at the thought. he wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for fear he wouldn't be able to stop. _let's face it_, he told himself. _you're scared. you're scared sweatless._ he wondered if he had spoken it aloud. there was plenty of room on the asteroid. at least two hundred square miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. he could skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. he had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died. and if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway. he looked about him. nothing. no sound, no movement, nothing but the streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. nothing had ever moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into death. not till men came and hunted each other. slowly he forced himself to move. the thrust of his foot sent him up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in earth's october. suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only a couple of pounds here. it was ghostly, this soundless progress over fields which had never known life. it was like being dead already. bo jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. he wanted to find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would command. but he couldn't do that. even if the other man let him do it, which was doubtful, he couldn't. johnny malone was dead. maybe that was what had started it all--the death of johnny malone. * * * * * there are numerous reasons for basing on the trojan asteroids, but the main one can be given in a single word: stability. they stay put in jupiter's orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed to be. the trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-jovian planets, the leading group for the inner worlds--that way, their own revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost, while minimizing the effects of jupiter's drag. moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners, so that achilles among the leaders and patroclus in the trailers have a permanent boom town atmosphere. even though a spaceship and equipment represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to start out on his own--a race of individualists, rough and noisy and jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue. the last chance on achilles has another name, which simply sticks an "r" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar where guardsmen come in trios. but johnny malone liked it, and talked bo jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and departure. "nothing to compare," he insisted. "every place else is getting too fantangling civilized, except venus, and i don't enjoy venus." johnny was from luna city himself: a small, dark man with the quick nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial metropolis. he affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. but somehow he didn't grate on bo, they had been partners for several years now. they pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched one of achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some miracle found an empty booth. bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the cubicle while johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed drinks. bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen--he'd never have gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in--and was usually content to let others talk while he listened. a placid blond giant, with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider himself bright, and always wanted to learn. johnny gulped his drink and winced. "whiskey, they call it yet! water, synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label whiskey and charge for!" "everything's expensive here," said bo mildly. "that's why so few rockhounds get rich. they make a lot of money, but they have to spend it just as fast to stay alive." "yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us." johnny grinned and fed the dispenser another coin. it muttered to itself and slid forth a tray with a glass. "c'mon, drink up, man. it's a long way home, and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. a bottle, a battle, and a wench is what i need. most especially the wench, because i don't think the eminent dr. mckittrick is gonna be interested in sociability, and it's close quarters aboard the _dog_." bo kept on sipping slowly. "johnny," he said, raising his voice to cut through the din, "you're an educated man. i never could figure out why you want to talk like a jumper." "because i am one at heart. look, bo, why don't you get over that inferiority complex of yours? a man can't run a spaceship without knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on earth. so you had to work your way through the academy and never had a chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled mozart through a horn. so what?" johnny's head darted around, birdlike. "if we want some women we'd better make our reservations now." "i don't, johnny," said bo. "i'll just nurse a beer." it wasn't morals so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit luna. "suit yourself. if you don't want to uphold the honor of the sirius transportation company--" bo chuckled. the company consisted of (a) the _sirius_; (b) her crew, himself and johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners back in luna city. not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved. her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they'd be able to buy another ship or two, and eventually fireball and triplanetary would be getting some competition. even the public lines might have to worry a little. johnny put away another couple of shots and rose. alcohol cost plenty, but it was also more effective in low-gee. "'scuse me," he said. "i see a target. sure you don't want me to ask if she has a friend?" bo shook his head and watched his partner move off, swift in the puny gravity--the last chance didn't centrifuge like some of the tommicker places downtown. it was hard to push through the crowd without weight to help, but johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his highest-powered smile. there were several other men standing around her, but johnny had the touch. he'd be bringing her back here in a few minutes. bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. if he wasn't going to make a night of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. he had to make the final inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover tablets. besides what he was putting back into the business, he was trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married and build a house. he already had the site picked out, on kullen overlooking the sound, back on earth. man, but it was a long time since he'd been on earth! a sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music bo looked up. there was a tall black haired man, venusian to judge by his kilts, arguing with johnny. his face was ugly with anger. johnny made some reply. bo heaved up his form and strode toward the discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him aside. johnny liked a fight, but this venusian was big. as he neared, he caught words: "--my girl, dammit." "like hell i am!" said the girl. "i never saw you before--" "run along and play, son," said johnny. "or do you want me to change that diaper of yours?" that was when it happened. bo saw the little needler spit from the venusian's fingers. johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at the dart in his stomach. then his knees buckled and he fell with a nightmare slowness. the venusian was already on the move. he sprang straight up, slammed a kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond. _a spaceman, that. knows how to handle himself in low-gee._ it was the only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of bo's head. the girl screamed. a man cursed and tried to follow the venusian. he tangled with another. "get outta my way!" a roar lifted, someone slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and lifted the jagged end. there was the noise of a fist meeting flesh. bo had seen death before. that needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison. he knelt in the riot with johnny's body in his arms. ii suddenly the world came to an end. there was a sheer drop-off onto the next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. bo lay on his belly and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it were the deeps of space and the cold stars. he could dimly see the tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. no place to hide; his enemy was not there. he turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. by crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one of its edges. on the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked from a ravine as he jumped over. and this route was the fastest for completing his search scheme. the great bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. he had often stood on winter nights, back in sweden, and seen its immense sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. well, now he had his wish, and much good it had done him. he went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. then his helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next million years. the vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him. now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot, reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge. he moved with flat low-gee bounds. besides the danger of springing off the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to fall back. it was utterly silent around him. he had never thought there could be so much stillness. he was halfway across when the bullet came. he saw no flash, heard no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a soundless shower of chips. the bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off for outer space. no meteor gravel, that! bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. he was a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. sweat was cold on his body. he squinted, trying to see where the shot had come from. suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest edge. another bullet pocked the ground near him. the sun rose, a tiny heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes. fire crashed at his back. thunder and darkness exploded before him. he lurched forward, driven by the impact. something was roaring, echoes clamorous in his helmet. he grew dimly aware that it was himself. then he was falling, whirling down into the black between the stars. there was a knife in his back, it was white-hot and twisting between the ribs. he stumbled over the edge of the plain and fell, waking when his armor bounced a little against stone. breath rattled in his throat as he turned his head. there was a white plume standing over his shoulder, air streaming out through the hole and freezing its moisture. the knife in him was not hot, it was cold with an ultimate cold. around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through fever. he hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos shouted beneath. * * * * * theoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two or three are required for non-military craft. this is not only an emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone might get too tired at the critical moments. bo knew he wouldn't be allowed to leave achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a venusian snowfall. bo didn't care the first day. he had taken johnny out to helmet hill and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till judgement day. he felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike, his main thought a dull dread of having to tell johnny's father when he reached luna. he was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting hand would only break the old man's back. old malone had given six sons to space, johnny was the last; from saturn to the sun, his blood was strewn for nothing. it hardly seemed to matter that the guards office reported itself unable to find the murderer. a single venusian should have been easy to trace on achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely. bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed valeria mckittrick. she looked impatiently at him out of the screen. "well," she said, "what's the matter? i thought we were blasting today." "hadn't you heard?" asked bo. he found it hard to believe she could be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else. "johnny's dead. we can't leave." "oh ... i'm sorry. he was such a nice little man--i've been in the lab all the time, packing my things, and didn't know." a frown crossed her clear brow. "but you've got to get me back. i've engaged passage to luna with you." "your ticket will be refunded, of course," said bo heavily. "but you aren't certified, and the _sirius_ is licensed for no less than two operators." "well ... damn! there won't be another berth for weeks, and i've _got_ to get home. can't you find somebody?" bo shrugged, not caring much. "i'll circulate an ad if you want, but--" "do so, please. let me know." she switched off. bo sat for a moment thinking about her. valeria mckittrick was worth considering. she wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. and brains, too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the union's radiation labs for nothing. he knew she was still young, and that she had been on achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now ready to go home. she was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. out here a woman was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to herself, dr. mckittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were ever likely to reach. since coming here, on commission from the lunar lab, to bring her home, bo jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. he liked intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. but of course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. he had sweated out a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through another. he placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get drunk. it was all he could do for johnny now, drink him a final wassail. already his friend was cold under the stars. in the course of the evening he found himself weeping. he woke up many hours later. achilles ran on earth time but did not rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken sun was high over the domes. the man in the upper bunk said there was a message for him; he was to call one einar lundgard at the comet hotel soonest. the comet! anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. bo swallowed a tablet and made his way to the visi and dialed. the robo-clerk summoned lundgard down to the desk. it was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which appeared in the screen. lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow neat even without clothes. "jonsson," said bo. "sorry to get you up, but i understood--" "oh, yes. are you looking for a spaceman? i heard your ad and i'm available." bo felt his mouth gape open. "huh? i never thought--" "we're both lucky, i guess." lundgard chuckled. his english had only the slightest trace of accent, less than bo's. "i thought i was stashed here too for the next several months." "how does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?" "i'm with fireball, was on the _drake_--heard of what happened to her?" bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is doing at any given time. the _drake_ had come to achilles to pick up a cargo of refined thorium for earth; while she lay in orbit, she had somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked gasket. why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have for sabotage? the event had taken place about a month ago, when the _sirius_ was already enroute here; bo had heard of it in the course of shop talk. "i thought she went back anyway," he said. lundgard nodded. "she did. it was the usual question of economics. you know what refined fuel water costs in the belt; also, the delay while we got it would have carried earth and achilles past optimum position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. since we had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. i volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me i couldn't help feeling guilty." bo understood that kind of loyalty. you couldn't travel space without men who had it. "the company beamed a message: i'd stay here till their schedule permitted an undermanned ship to come by, but that wouldn't be for maybe months," went on lundgard. "i can't see sitting on this lump that long without so much as a chance at planetfall bonus. if you'll take me on, i'm sure the company will agree; i'll get a message to them on the beam right away." "take us a while to get back," warned bo. "we're going to stop off at another asteroid to pick up some automatic equipment, and won't go into hyperbolic orbit till after that. about six weeks from here to earth, all told." "against six months here?" lundgard laughed; it emphasized the bright charm of his manner. "sunblaze. i'll work for free." "no need to. bring your papers over tomorrow, huh?" the certificate and record were perfectly in order, showing einar lundgard to be a spacetech /cl with eight years' experience, qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand professions which have run into one. they registered articles and shook hands on it. "call me bo. it really is my name ... swedish." "another squarehead, eh?" grinned lundgard. "i'm from south america myself." "notice a year's gap here," said bo, pointing to the service record. "on venus." "oh, yes. i had some fool idea about settling but soon learned better. i tried to farm, but when you have to carve your own land out of howling desert--well, let's start some math, shall we?" they were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer; no other ship was leaving immediately. they fed it the data and requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements, acceleration times, orbital elements. the figures always had to be modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator. bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking before giving the problem to the machine; lundgard breezed through it and spent his time while waiting for bo in swapping dirty limericks with the tech. he had some good ones. the _sirius_ was loaded, inspected, and cleared. a "scooter" brought her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and waited. at the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder of rockets. bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of achilles falling away behind them. "so long," he whispered. "so long, johnny." iii in another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends, and a couple of minutes later he would be dead. bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in his jaws. his hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as he fumbled for the supply pouch. it seemed to recede from him, down a hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not know. "damn," he gasped. "damn, damn, damn, damn, damn." he got the pouch open somehow. the stars wheeled around him. there were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. pain jagged through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped. the plastic patch stuck to his metal gauntlet. he peeled it off, trying not to howl with the fury ripping in his nerves. his body was slow, inert, a thing to fight. there was no more feeling in his back, was he dead already? redness flamed before his eyes, red like valeria's hair blowing across the stars. it was sheer reflex which brought his arm around to slap the patch over the hole in his suit. the adhesive gripped, drying fast in the sucking vacuum. the patch bellied out from internal air pressure, straining to break loose and kill him. bo's mind wavered back toward life. he opened the valves wide on his tanks, and his thermostatic capacitors pumped heat back into him. for a long time he lay there, only lungs and heart had motion. his throat felt withered and flayed, but the rasp of air through it was like being born again. born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold, to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. bo shuddered and wanted to scream again. slowly he groped back toward awareness. his frostbitten back tingled as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. he could feel a hot trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. the bullet must have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. next time he probably wouldn't be so lucky. a magnetic-driven . slug would go through a helmet, splashing brains as it passed. he turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the gauges. this had cost him a lot of air. there was only about three hours worth left. lundgard could kill him simply by waiting. it would be easy to die. he lay on his back, staring up at the stars and the spilling cloudy glory of the milky way. a warmth was creeping back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and sleepy. his eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on an asteroid. he wanted terribly to sleep. * * * * * there wasn't much room in the _sirius_, the only privacy was gained by drawing curtains across your bunk. men without psych training could get to hate each other on a voyage. bo wondered if he would reach luna hating einar lundgard. the man was competent, a willing worker, tempering his cheerfulness with tact, always immaculate in the neat blue and white of the fireball line which made bo feel doubly sloppy in his own old gray coverall. he was a fine conversationalist with an enormous stock of reminiscence and ideas, witty above a certain passion of belief. it seemed as if he and valeria were always talking, animated voices like a sound of life over the mechanical ship-murmurs, while bo sat dumbly in a corner wishing he could think of something to say. the trouble was, in spite of all his efforts, he was doing a cometary dive into another bad case of one-sided love. when she spoke in that husky voice of hers, gray gleam of eyes under hair that floated flaming in null-gee, the beauty he saw in her was like pain. and she was always around. it couldn't be helped. once they had gone into free fall he could only polish so much metal and tinker with so many appliances; after that they were crowded together in a long waiting. --"and why were you all alone in the belt?" asked lundgard. "in spite of all the romantic stories about the wild free life of the rockhound, it's the dullest place in the system." "not to me," she smiled. "i was working. there were experiments to be done, factors to be measured, away from solar radiation. there are always ions around inside the orbit of mars to jamble up a delicate apparatus." bo sat quiet, trying to keep his eyes off her. she looked good in shorts and half-cape. too good. "it's something to do with power beaming, isn't it?" lundgard's handsome face creased in a frown. "afraid i don't quite understand. they've been beaming power on the planets for a long time now." "so they have," she nodded. "what we're after is an interplanetary power beam. and we've got it." she gestured to the baggage rack and a thick trunk full of papers she had put there. "that's it. the basic circuits, factors, and constants. any competent engineer could draw up a design from them." "hmmm ... precision work, eh?" "obviously! it was hard enough to do on, say, earth--you need a _really_ tight beam in just the right frequencies, a feedback signal to direct each beam at the desired outlet, relay stations--oh, yes, it was a ten-year research project before they could even think about building. an interplanetary beam has all those problems plus a number of its own. you have to get the dispersion down to a figure so low it hardly seems possible. you can't use feedback because of the time lag, so the beams have to be aimed _exactly_ right--and the planets are always moving, at miles per second. an error of one degree would throw your beam almost two million miles off in crossing one a.u. and besides being so precise, the beam has to carry a begawatt at least to be worth the trouble. the problem looked insoluble till someone in the order of planetary engineers came up with an idea for a trick control circuit hooked into a special computer. my lab's been working together with the order on it, and i was making certain final determinations for them. it's finished now ... twelve years of work and we're done." she laughed. "except for building the stations and getting the bugs out!" * * * * * lundgard cocked an oddly sardonic brow. "and what do you hope for from it?" he asked. "what have the psychotechs decided to do with this thing?" "isn't it obvious?" she cried. "power! nuclear fuel is getting scarcer every day, and civilization is finished if we can't find another energy source. the sun is pouring out more than we'll ever need, but sheer distance dilutes it below a useful level by the time it gets to venus. "we'll build stations on the hot side of mercury. orbital stations can relay. we can get the beams as far out as mars without too much dispersion. it'll bring down the rising price of atomic energy, which is making all other prices rise, and stretch our supply of fissionables for centuries more. no more fuel worries, no more martians freezing to death because a converter fails, no more clan feuds on venus starting over uranium beds--" the excited flush on her cheeks was lovely to look at. lundgard shook his head. there was a sadness in his smile. "you're a true child of the new enlightenment," he said. "reason will solve everything. science will find a cure for all our ills. give man a cheap energy source and leave him forever happy. it won't work, you know." something like anger crossed her eyes. "what are you?" she asked. "a humanist?" "yes," said lundgard quietly. bo started. he'd known about the anti-psychotechnic movement which was growing on earth, seen a few of its adherents, but-- "i never thought a spaceman would be a humanist," he stammered. lundgard shrugged wryly. "don't be afraid. i don't eat babies. i don't even get hysterics in an argument. all i've done is use the scientific method, observing the world without preconceptions, and learned by it that the scientific method doesn't have all the answers." "instead," said valeria, scornfully, "we should all go back to church and pray for what we want rather than working for it." "not at all," said lundgard mildly. "the new enlightenment is--or was, because it's dying--a very natural state of mind. here earth had come out of the world wars, racked and ruined, starving and chaotic, and all because of unbridled ideology. so the physical scientists produced goods and machines and conquered the planets; the biologists found new food sources and new cures for disease; the psychotechs built up their knowledge to a point where the socio-economic unity could really be planned and the plan worked. man was unified, war had sunken to an occasional small 'police action,' people were eating and had comfort and security--all through applied, working science. naturally they came to believe reason would solve their remaining problems. but this faith in reason was itself an emotional reaction from the preceding age of unreason. "well, we've had a century of enlightenment now, and it has created its own troubles which it cannot solve. no age can handle the difficulties it raises for itself; that's left to the next era. there are practical problems arising, and no matter how desperately the psychotechs work they aren't succeeding with them." "what problems?" asked bo, feeling a little bewildered. "man, don't you ever see a newscast?" challenged lundgard. "the second industrial revolution, millions of people thrown out of work by the new automata. they aren't going hungry, but they are displaced and bitter. the economic center of earth is shifting to asia, the political power with it, and hundreds of millions of asians are skeptical aboard this antiseptic new order the west has been bringing them: cultural resistance, and not all the psychotechnic propaganda in the system can shake it off. the men of mars, venus, the belt, the jovian moons are developing their own civilizations--inevitably, in alien environments; their own ways of living and thinking, which just don't fit into the neat scheme of an earth-dominated solar union. the psychotechs themselves are being driven to oligarchic, unconstitutional acts; they have no choice, but it's making them enemies. "and then there's the normal human energy and drive. man can only be safe and sane and secure for so long, then he reacts. this new enlightenment is really a decadent age, a period where an exhausted civilization has been resting under a holy status quo. it can't last. man always wants something new." "you humanists talk a lot about 'man's right to variability,'" said valeria. "if you really carry off that revolution your writings advocate you'll just trade one power group for another--and more fanatic, less lawful, than the present one." "not necessarily," said lundgard. "after all, the union will probably break up. it can't last forever. all we want to do is hasten the day because we feel that it's outlived its usefulness." bo shook his head. "i can't see it," he said heavily. "i just can't see it. all those people--the lunarites, the violent clansmen on venus, the stiff correct martians, the asteroid rockhounds, even those mysterious jovians--they all came from earth. it was earth's help that made their planets habitable. we're all men, all one race." "a fiction," said lundgard. "the human race is a fiction. there are only small groups with their own conflicting interests." "and if those conflicts are allowed to break into war--" said valeria. "do you know what a lithium bomb can do?" there was a reckless gleam in lundgard's eyes. "if a period of interplanetary wars is necessary, let's get it over with," he answered. "enough men will survive to build something better. this age has gotten stale. it's petrifying. there have been plenty of shake-ups in history--the fall of rome, the reformation, the napoleonic wars, the world wars. it's been man's way of progressing." "i don't know about all those," said bo slowly. "i just know i wouldn't want to live through such a time." "you're soft," said lundgard. "down underneath you're soft." he laughed disarmingly. "pardon me. i didn't mean anything personal. i'll never convince you and you'll never convince me, so let's keep it friendly. i hope you'll have some free time on luna, valeria. i know a little grill where they serve the best synthosteaks in the system." "all right," she smiled. "it's a date." bo mumbled some excuse and went aft. he was still calling her dr. mckittrick. iv you can't just lie here and let him come kill you. there was a picture behind his eyes; he didn't know if it was a dream or a long buried memory. he stood under an aspen which quivered and rustled as if it laughed to itself softly, softly, when the wind embraced it. and the wind was blowing up a red granite slope, wild and salt from the sound, and there were towering clouds lifting over denmark to the west. the sunlight rained and streamed through aspen leaves, broken, shaken, falling in spatters against the earth, and he, bo jonsson, laughed with the wind and the tree and the far watery glitter of the sound. he opened his eyes, wearily, like an old man. orion was marching past, and there was a blaze on crags five miles off which told of the rising sun. the asteroid spun swiftly; he had been here for many of its days now, and each day burdened him like a year. got to get out of here, he knew. he sat up, pain tearing along his furrowed breast. somehow he had kept the wrench with him, he stared at it in a dull wonder. where to go, where to hide, what to do? thirst nagged him. slowly he uncoiled the tube which led from the electrically heated canteen welded to his suit, screwed its end into the helmet nipple, thumbed down the clamp which closed it, and sucked hard. it helped a little. he dragged himself to his feet and stood swaying, only the near-weightlessness kept him erect. turning his head in its transparent cage, he saw the sun rise, and bright spots danced before him when he looked away. his vision cleared, but for a moment he thought the shadow lifting over a nearby ridge was a wisp of unconsciousness. then he made out the bulky black-painted edge of it, gigantic against the milky way, and it was lundgard, moving unhurriedly up to kill him. a dark laughter was in his radio earphones. "take it easy, bo. i'll be there in a minute." he backed away, his heart a sudden thunder, looking for a place to hide. down! get down and don't stand where he can see you! he crouched as much as the armor would allow and broke into a bounding run. a slug spat broken stone near his feet. the powdery dust hung for minutes before settling. breath rattled in his throat. he saw the lip of a meteoric crater and dove. crouching there, he heard lundgard's voice again: "you're somewhere near. why not come out and finish it now?" the radio was non-directional, so he snapped back: "a gun against a monkey wrench?" lundgard's coolness broke a little; there was almost a puzzled note: "i hate to do this. why can't you be reasonable? i don't want to kill you." "the trouble," said bo harshly, "is that i want to kill you." "behold the man of the new enlightenment!" bo could imagine lundgard's grin. it would be tight, and there would be sweat on the lean face, but the amusement was genuine. "didn't you believe sweet reasonableness could solve everything? this is only the beginning, bo, just a small preliminary hint that the age of reason is dying. i've already converted you to my way of thinking, by the very fact you're fighting me. why not admit it?" bo shook his head--futile gesture, looked in darkness where he lay. there was a frosty blaze of stars when he looked up. it was more than himself and johnny malone, more even than the principle of the thing and the catastrophe to all men which lundgard's victory meant. there was something deep and primitive which would not let him surrender, even in the teeth of annihilation. valeria's image swayed before him. lundgard was moving around, peering over the shadowy tumble of blackened rock in search of any trace. there was a magnetic rifle in his hands. bo strained his helmet to the crater floor, trying to hear ground vibrations, but there was nothing. he didn't know where lundgard was, only that he was very near. blindly, he bundled his legs and sprang out of the pit. * * * * * they found the asteroid where valeria had left her recording instruments. it was a tiny drifting fragment of a world which had never been born, turning endlessly between the constellations; the _sirius_ moored fast with grapples, and valeria donned a spacesuit and went out to get her apparatus. lundgard accompanied her. as there was only work for two, bo stayed behind. he slumped for a while in the pilot chair, letting his mind pace through a circle of futility. valeria, valeria, valeria--o strong and fair and never to be forgotten, would he ever see her again after they made luna? _this won't do_, he told himself dully. _i should at least keep busy. thank god for work._ he wasn't much of a thinker, he knew that, but he had cleverness in his hands. it was satisfying to watch a machine come right under his tools. working, he could see the falseness of lundgard's philosophy. the man could quote history all he wanted; weave a glittering circle of logic around bo's awkward brain, but it didn't change facts. maybe this century was headed for trouble; maybe psychotechnic government was only another human self-limitation and should be changed for something else; nevertheless, the truth remained that most men were workers who wished no more than peace in which to create as best they could. all the high ideals in the universe weren't worth breaking the union for and smashing the work of human hands in a single burst of annihilating flame. _i can feel it, down inside me. but why can't i say it?_ he got up and went over to the baggage rack, remembering that lundgard had dozens of book-reels along and that reading would help him not to think about what he could never have. on a planet bo would not have dreamed of helping himself without asking first. but custom is different in space, where there is no privacy and men must be a unit if they are to survive. he was faintly surprised to see that lundgard's personal suitcase was locked; but it would be hours, probably, before the owner got back: dismantling a recorder setup took time. a long time, in which to talk and laugh with valeria. in the chill spatial radiance, her hair would be like frosty fire. casually, bo stooped across to lundgard's sack-hammock and took his key ring off the hook. he opened the suitcase and lifted out some of the reels in search of a promising title. underneath them were neatly folded clothes, fireball uniforms and fancy dress pajamas. a tartan edge stuck out from below, and bo lifted a coat to see what clan that was. probably a souvenir of lundgard's venusian stay-- next to the kilt was a box which he recognized. l-masks came in such boxes. how the idea came to him, he did not know. he stood there for minutes, looking at the box without seeing it. the ship was very quiet around him. he had a sudden feeling that the walls were closing in. when he opened the box, his hands shook, and there was sweat trickling along his ribs. the mask was of the latest type, meant to fit over the head, snug around the cheeks and mouth and jaws. it was like a second skin, reflecting expression, not to be told from a real face. bo saw the craggy nose and the shock of dark hair, limp now, but-- suddenly he was back on achilles, with riot roaring around him and johnny malone's body in his arms. no wonder they never found that venusian. there never was any. bo felt a dim shock when he looked at the chronometer. only five minutes had gone by while he stood there. only five minutes to turn the cosmos inside out. very slowly and carefully he repacked the suitcase and put it in the rack and sat down to think. what to do? accuse lundgard to his face--no, the man undoubtedly carried that needler. and there was valeria to think of. a ricocheting dart, a scratch on her, no! it took bo a long time to decide; his brain seemed viscous. when he looked out of a port to the indifferent stars, he shuddered. * * * * * they came back, shedding their spacesuits in the airlock; frost whitened the armor as moisture condensed on chilled surfaces. the metal seemed to breathe cold. valeria went efficiently to work, stowing the boxed instruments as carefully as if they were her children. there was a laughter on her lips which turned bo's heart around inside him. lundgard leaned over the tiny desk where he sat. "what y' doing?" he asked. "recalculating our orbit to luna," said bo. "i want to go slow for a few million miles before going up to hyperbolic speed." "why? it'll add days to the trip, and the fuel--" "i ... i'm afraid we might barge into swarm . it's supposed to be near here now and, uh, the positions of those things are never known for sure ... perturbations...." bo's mouth felt dry. "you've got a megamile of safety margin or your orbit would never have been approved," argued lundgard. "hell damn it, i'm the captain!" yelled bo. "all right, all right ... take it easy, skipper." lundgard shot a humorous glance at valeria. "i certainly don't mind a few extra days in ... the present company." she smiled at him. bo felt ill. his excuse was thin; if lundgard thought to check the ephemeris, it would fall to ruin. but he couldn't tell the real reason. an iron-drive ship does not need to drift along the economical hohmann "a" orbit of the big freighters; it can build up such furious speed that the sun will swing it along a hyperbola rather than an ellipse, and can still brake that speed near its destination. but the critical stage of acceleration has to be just right, or there will not be enough fuel to stop completely; the ship will be pulled into a cometary orbit and run helpless, the crew probably starving before a rescue vessel can locate them. bo dared not risk the trouble exploding at full drive; he would drift along, capture and bind lundgard at the first chance, and then head for earth. he could handle the _sirius_ alone even if it was illegal; he could not handle her if he had to fight simultaneously. his knuckles were white on the controls as he loosed the grapples and nudged away from the asteroid with a whisper of power. after a few minutes of low acceleration, he cut the rockets, checked position and velocity, and nodded. "on orbit," he said mechanically. "it's your turn to cook, ei ... einar." lundgard swooped easily through the air into the cubbyhole which served for a galley. cooking in free fall is an art which not all spacemen master, but he could--his meals were even good. bo felt a helpless kind of rage at his own clumsy efforts. he crouched in midair, dark of mind, a leg hooked around a stanchion to keep from drifting. when someone touched him, his heart jumped and he whirled around. "what's the matter, bo?" asked valeria. "you look like doomsday." "i ... i...." he gulped noisily and twisted his mouth into a smile. "just feeling a little off." "it's more than that, i think." her eyes were grave. "you've seemed so unhappy the whole trip. is there anything i can do to help?" "thanks ... dr. mckittrick ... but--" "don't be so formal," she said, almost wistfully. "i don't bite. too many men think i do. can't we be friends?" "with a thick-headed clinker like me?" his whisper was raw. "don't be silly. it takes brains to be a spaceman. i like a man who knows when to be quiet." she lowered her eyes, the lashes were long and sooty black. "there's something solid about you, something so few people seem to have these days. i wish you wouldn't go feeling so inferior." at any other time it would have been a sunburst in him. now he thought of death, and mumbled something and looked away. a hurt expression crossed her face. "i won't bother you," she said gently, and moved off. the thing was to fall on lundgard while he slept-- the radar alarm buzzed during a dinner in which lundgard's flow of talk had battered vainly against silence and finally given up. bo vaulted over to the control panel and checked. no red light glowed, and the auto-pilot wasn't whipping them out of danger, so they weren't on a collision course. but the object was getting close. bo calculated it was an asteroid on an orbit almost parallel to their own, relative speed only a few feet per second; it would come within ten miles or so. in the magnifying periscope, it showed as a jagged dark cube, turning around itself and flashing hard glints of sunlight off mica beds--perhaps six miles square, all crags and cracks and fracture faces, heatless and lifeless and kindless. v lundgard yawned elaborately after dinner. "excuse," he said. "unless somebody's for chess?" his hopeful glance met the grimness of bo and the odd sadness of valeria, and he shrugged. "all right, then. pleasant dreams." after ten minutes--_now!_ bo uncoiled himself. "valeria," he whispered, as if the name were holy. "yes?" she arched her brows expectantly. "i can't stop to explain now. i've got to do something dangerous. get back aft of the gyro housing." "what?" "get back!" command blazed frantically in him. "and stay there, whatever happens." something like fear flickered in her eyes. it was a very long way to human help. then she nodded, puzzled but with an obedience which held gallantry, and slipped out of sight behind the steel pillar. bo launched himself across the room in a single null-gee bound. one hand ripped aside lundgard's curtain, the other got him by the throat. "what the hell--" lundgard exploded into life. his fist crashed against bo's cheek. bo held on with one hand and slugged with the other. knuckles bounced on rubbery muscle. lundgard's arm snaked for the tunic stretched on his bunk wall; his body came lithely out of the sack. bo snatched for that wrist. lundgard's free hand came around, edged out to slam him in the larynx. pain ripped through bo. he let go and sailed across the room. lundgard was pulling out his needler. bo hit the opposite wall and rebounded--not for the armed man, but for the control panel. lundgard spat a dart at him. it burst on the viewport over his shoulder, and bo caught the acrid whiff of poison. then the converter was roaring to life and whining gyros spun the ship around. lundgard was hurled across the room. he collected himself, catlike, grabbed a stanchion, and raised the gun again. "i've got the drop," he said. "get away from there or you're a dead man." it was as if someone else had seized bo's body. decision was like lightning through him. he had tried to capture lundgard, and failed, and venom crouched at his back. but the ship was pointed for the asteroid now, where it hung gloomily a dozen miles off, and the rockets were ready to spew. "if you shoot me," said bo, "i'll live just long enough to pour on the juice. we'll hit that rock and scatter from hell to breakfast." valeria emerged. lundgard swung the needler to cover her. "stay where you are!" he rapped. "what's happening?" she said fearfully. "i don't know," said lundgard. "bo's gone crazy--attacked me--" wrath boiled black in the pilot. he snarled, "you killed my partner. you must'a been fixing to kill us too." "what do you mean?" whispered valeria. "how should i know?" said lundgard. "he's jumped his orbit, that's all. look, bo, be reasonable. get away from that panel--" "look in his suitcase, valeria." bo forced the words out of a tautened throat. "a venusian shot my partner. you'll find his face and his clothes in lundgard's things. i'd know that face in the middle of the sun." she hung for a long while, not moving. bo couldn't see her. his eyes were nailed to the asteroid, keeping the ship's nose pointed at it. "is that true, einar?" she asked finally. "no," he said. "of course not. i do have venusian clothes and a mask, but--" "then why are you keeping me covered too?" lundgard didn't answer at once. the only noise was the murmur of machinery and the dense breathing of three pairs of lungs. then his laugh jarred forth. "all right," he said. "i hadn't meant it to come yet, or to come this way, but all right." "why did you kill johnny?" tears stung bo's eyes. "he never hurt you." "it was necessary." lundgard's mouth twitched. "but you see, we knew you were going to achilles to pick up valeria and her data. we needed to get a man aboard your ship, to take over when her orbit brought her close to our asteroid base. you've forced my hand--i wasn't going to capture you for days yet. i sabotaged the _drake's_ fuel tanks to get myself stranded there, and shot your friend to get his berth. i'm sorry." "why?" horror rode valeria's voice. "i'm a humanist. i've never made a secret of that. what our secret is, is that some of us aren't content just to talk revolution. we want to give this rotten, over-mechanized society the shove that will bring on its end. we've built up a small force, not much as yet, not enough to accomplish anything lasting. but if we had a solar power beam it would make a big difference. it could be adapted to direct military uses, as well as supplying energy to our machines. a lens effect, a concentration of solar radiation strong enough to burn. well, it seems worth trying." "and what do you intend for us?" "you'll have to be kept prisoners for a while, of course," said lundgard. "it won't be onerous. we aren't beasts." "no," said bo. "just murderers." "save the dramatics," snapped lundgard. "i have the gun. get away from those controls." bo shook his head. there was a wild hammering in his breast, but his voice surprised him with steadiness: "no. i've got the upper hand. i can kill you if you move. yell if he tries anything, valeria." lundgard's eyes challenged her. "do you want to die?" he asked. her head lifted. "no," she said, "but i'm not afraid to. go ahead if you must, bo. it's all right." * * * * * bo felt cold. he knew he wouldn't. he was bluffing. in the final showdown he could not crash her. he had seen too many withered space drained mummies in his time. but maybe lundgard didn't realize that. "give up," he said. "you can't gain a damn thing. i'm not going to see a billion people burned alive just to save our necks. make a bargain for your life." "no," said lundgard with a curious gentleness. "i have my own brand of honor. i'm not going to surrender to you. you can't sit there forever." impasse. the ship floated through eternal silence while they waited. "all right," said bo. "i'll fight you for the power beam." "how's that?" "i can throw this ship into orbit around the asteroid. we can go down there and settle the thing between us. the winner can jump up here again with the help of a jet of tanked air. the lump hasn't got much gravity." lundgard hesitated. "and how do i know you'll keep your end of the bargain?" he asked. "you could let me go through the airlock, then close it and blast off." bo had had some such thought, but he might have known it wouldn't work. "what do you suggest?" he countered, never taking his eyes off the planetoid. "remember, i don't trust you either." lundgard laughed suddenly, a hard yelping bark. "i know! valeria, go aft and remove all the control-rod links and spares. bring them back here. i'll go out first, taking half of them with me, and bo can follow with the other half. he'll have to." "i--no! i won't," she whispered. "i can't let you--" "go ahead and do it," said bo. he felt a sudden vast weariness. "it's the only way we can break this deadlock." she wept as she went toward the engine room. lundgard's thought was good. without linked control-rods, the converter couldn't operate five minutes, it would flare up and melt itself and kill everyone aboard in a flood of radiation. whoever won the duel could quickly re-install the necessary parts. there was a waiting silence. at last lundgard said, almost abstractedly: "holmgang. do you know what that means, bo?" "no." "you ought to. it was a custom of our ancestors back in the early middle ages--the viking time. two men would go off to a little island, a holm, to settle their differences; one would come back. i never thought it could happen out here." he chuckled bleakly. "valkyries in spacesuits?" the girl came back with the links tied in two bundles. lundgard counted them and nodded. "all right." he seemed strangely calm, an easy assurance lay over him like armor. bo's fear was cold in his belly, and valeria wept still with a helpless horror. the pilot used a safe two minutes of low blast to edge up to the asteroid. "i'll go into the airlock and put on my spacesuit," said lundgard. "then i'll jump down and you can put the ship in orbit. don't try anything while i'm changing, because i'll keep this needler handy." "it won't work against a spacesuit," said bo. lundgard laughed. "i know," he said. he kissed his hand to valeria and backed into the lock chamber. the outer valve closed behind him. "bo!" valeria grabbed the pilot by the shoulders, and he looked around into her face. "you can't go out there, i won't let you, i--" "if i don't," he said tonelessly, "we'll orbit around here till we starve." "but you could be killed!" "i hope not. for your sake, mostly, i hope not," he said awkwardly. "but he won't have any more weapon than me, just a monkey wrench." there was a metal tube welded to the leg of each suit for holding tools; wrenches, the most commonly used, were simply left there as a rule. "i'm bigger than he is." "but--" she laid her head on his breast and shuddered with crying. he tried to comfort her. "all right," he said at last. "all right. lundgard must be through. i'd better get started." "leave him!" she blazed. "his air won't last many hours. we can wait." "and when he sees he's been tricked, you think he won't wreck those links? no. there's no way out." it was as if all his life he had walked on a road which had no turnings, which led inevitably to this moment. he made some careful calculations from the instrument readings, physical constants of the asteroid, and used another minute's maneuvering to assume orbital velocity. alarm lights blinked angry eyes at him, the converter was heating up. no more traveling till the links were restored. bo floated from his chair toward the lock. "good-bye, valeria," he said, feeling the bloodless weakness of words. "i hope it won't be for long." she threw her arms about him and kissed him. the taste of tears was still on his lips when he had dogged down his helmet. opening the outer valve he moved forth, magnetic boots clamping to the hull. a gulf of stars yawned around him, a cloudy halo about his head. the stillness was smothering. when he was "over" the asteroid he gauged his position with a practiced eye and jumped free. falling, he thought mostly of valeria. as he landed he looked around. no sign of lundgard. the man could be anywhere in these square miles of cosmic wreckage. he spoke tentatively into his radio, in case lundgard should be within the horizon: "hello, are you there?" "yes. i'm coming." there was a sharp cruel note of laughter. "sorry to play this dirty, but there are bigger issues at stake than you or me. i've kept a rifle in my tool-tube all the time ... just in case. good-bye, bo." a slug smashed into the pinnacle behind him. bo turned and ran. vi as he rose over the lip of the crater, his head swung, seeking his enemy. there! it was almost a reflex which brought his arm back and sent the wrench hurtling across the few yards between. before it had struck, bo's feet lashed against the pit edge, and the kick arced him toward lundgard. spacemen have to be good at throwing things. the wrench hit the lifted rifle in a soundless shiver of metal, tore it loose from an insecure gauntleted grasp and sent it spinning into shadow. lundgard yelled, spun on his heel, and dove after it. then the flying body of bo jonsson struck him. even in low-gee, matter has all its inertia. the impact rang and boomed within their armor, they swayed and fell to the ground, locking arms and hammering futilely at helmets. rolling over, bo got on top, his hands closed on lundgard's throat--where the throat should have been, but plastic and alloy held fast; instinct had betrayed him. lundgard snarled, doubled his legs and kicked. bo was sent staggering back. lundgard crawled erect and turned to look for the rifle. bo couldn't see it either in the near-solid blackness where no light fell, but his wrench lay as a dark gleam. he sprang for that, closed a hand on it, bounced up, and rushed at lundgard. a swing shocked his own muscles with its force, and lundgard lurched. bo moved in on him. lundgard reached into his tool-tube and drew out his own wrench. he circled, his panting hoarse in bo's earphones. "this ... is the way ... it was supposed to be," said bo. he jumped in, his weapon whirling down to shiver again on the other helmet. lundgard shook a dazed head and countered. the impact roared and echoed in bo's helmet, on into his skull. he smashed heavily. lundgard's lifted wrench parried the blow, it slid off. like a fencer, lundgard snaked his shaft in and the reverberations were deafening. bo braced himself and smote with all his power. the hit sang back through iron and alloy, into his own bones. lundgard staggered a little, hunched himself and struck in return. they stood with feet braced apart, trading fury, a metal rain on shivering plastic. the stuff was almost unbreakable, but not quite, not for long when such violence dinned on it. bo felt a lifting wild glee, something savage he had never known before leaped up in him and he bellowed. he was stronger, he could hit harder. lundgard's helmet would break first! the humanist retreated, using his wrench like a sword, stopping the force of blows without trying to deal more of his own. his left hand fumbled at his side. bo hardly noticed. he was pushing in, hewing, hewing. again the shrunken sun rose, to flash hard light off his club. lundgard grinned, his face barely visible as highlight and shadow behind the plastic. his raised tool turned one hit, it slipped along his arm to rap his flank. bo twisted his arm around, beat the other wrench aside for a moment, and landed a crack like a thunderbolt. then lundgard had his drinking hose free, pointing in his left hand. he thumbed down the clamp, exposing water at fifty degrees to naked space. it rushed forth, driven by its own vapor pressure, a stream like a lance in the wan sunshine. when it hit bo's helmet, most of it boiled off ... cooling the rest, which froze instantly. blindness clamped down on bo. he leaped away, cursing, the front of his helmet so frosted he could not see before him. lundgard bounced around, playing the hose on him. through the rime-coat, bo could make out only a grayness. he pawed at it, trying to wipe it off, knowing that lundgard was using this captured minute to look for the rifle. as he got some of the ice loose, he heard a sharp yell of victory--found! turning, he ran again. over that ridge! down on your belly! a slug pocked the stone above him. rolling over, he got to his feet and bounded off toward a steep rise, still wiping blindness off his helmet. but he could not wipe the bitter vomit taste of defeat out of his mouth. his breathing was a file that raked in his throat. heart and lungs were ready to tear loose, and there was a cold knot in his guts. fleeing up the high, ragged slope, he sobbed out his rage at himself and his own stupidity. at the top of the hill he threw himself to the ground and looked down again over a low wall of basalt. it was hard to see if anything moved down in that valley of night. then the sun threw a broken gleam off polished metal, the rifle barrel, and he saw einar lundgard walking around, looking for him. the voice came dim in his earphones. "why don't you give up, bo? i tell you, i don't want to kill you." "yeh." bo panted wearily. "i'm sure." "well, you can never tell," said lundgard mildly. "it would be rather a nuisance to have to keep not only the fair valeria, but you, tied up all the way to base. still, if you'll surrender by the time i've counted ten--" "look here," said bo desperately, "i've got half the links. if you don't give up i'll hammer 'em all flat and let you starve." "and valeria?" the voice jeered at him. he knew his secret was read. "i shouldn't have let you bluff me in the first place. it won't happen a second time. all right: one, two, three--" bo could get off this asteroid with no more than the power of his own legs; a few jets from the emergency blow valve at the bottom of an air tank would correct his flight as needed to bring him back to the _sirius_. he wanted to get up there, and inside warm walls, and take valeria in his hands and never let her go again. he wanted to live. "--six, seven, eight--" he looked at his gauges. a lot of oxy-helium mixture was gone from the tanks, but they were big and there was still several atmospheres' pressure in each. a couple of hours' life. if he didn't exert himself too much. they screwed directly into valves in the back of his armor, and-- "--ten. all right, bo." lundgard started moving up the slope, light and graceful as a bird. it was wide and open, no place to hide and sneak up behind him. * * * * * figures reeled through bo's mind, senselessly. mass of the asteroid, effective radius, escape velocity only a few feet per second, and he was already on one of the highest points. brains! he thought with a shattering sorrow. a lot of good mine have done me! he prepared to back down the other side of the hill, run as well as he could, as long as he could, until a bullet splashed his blood or suffocation thickened it. but i want to fight! he thought through a gulp of tears. i want to stand up and fight! orbital velocity equals escape velocity divided by the square root of two. for a moment he lay there, rigid, and his eyes stared at death walking up the slope but did not see it. then, in a crazy blur of motion, he brought his wrench around, closed it on a nut at one side, and turned. the right hand air tank unscrewed easily. he held it in his hands, a three foot cylinder, blind while calculation raced through his head. what would the centrifugal and coriolis forces be? it was the roughest sort of estimate. he had neither time nor data, but-- lundgard was taking it easy, stopping to examine each patch of shadow thrown by some gaunt crag, each meteor scar where a man might hide. it would take him several minutes to reach the hilltop. bo clutched the loosened tank in his arms, throwing one leg around it to make sure, and faced away from lundgard. he hefted himself, as if his body were a machine he must use. then, carefully, he jumped off the top of the hill. it was birdlike, dreamlike, thus to soar noiseless over iron desolation. the sun fell behind him. a spearhead pinnacle clawed after his feet. the southern cross flamed in his eyes. downward--get rid of that downward component of velocity. he twisted the tank, pointing it toward the surface, and cautiously opened the blow valve with his free hand. only a moment's exhaust, everything gauged by eye. did he have an orbit now? the ground dropped sharply off to infinity, and he saw stars under the keel of the world. he was still going out, away. maybe he had miscalculated his jump, exceeded escape velocity after all, and was headed for a long cold spin toward jupiter. it would take all his compressed air to correct such a mistake. sweat prickled in his armpits. he locked his teeth and refused to open the valve again. it was like endless falling, but he couldn't yet be sure if the fall was toward the asteroid or the stars. the rock spun past him. another face came into view. yes, by all idiot gods, its gravity was pulling him around! he skimmed low over the bleakness of it, seeing darkness and starlit death sliding beneath him. another crag loomed suddenly in his path, and he wondered in a harsh clutch of fear if he was going to crash. then it ghosted by, a foot from his flying body. he thought he could almost sense the chill of it. he was a moon now, a satellite skimming low above the airless surface of his own midget world. the fracture plain where lundgard had shot at him went by, and he braced himself. up around the tiny planet, and there was the hill he had left, stark against sagittarius. he saw lundgard, standing on its heights and looking the way he had gone. carefully, he aimed the tank and gave himself another small blast to correct his path. there was no noise to betray him, the asteroid was a grave where all sound was long buried and frozen. he flattened, holding his body parallel to the tank in his arms. one hand still gripped the wrench, the other reached to open the blow valve wide. the surge almost tore him loose. he had a careening lunatic moment of flight in which the roar of escaping gas boiled through his armor and he clung like a troll to a runaway witch's broom. the sun was blinding on one side of him. he struck lundgard with an impact of velocity and inertia which sent him spinning down the hill. bo hit the ground, recoiled, and sprang after his enemy. lundgard was still rolling. as bo approached, he came to a halt, lifted his rifle dazedly, and had it knocked loose with a single blow of the wrench. lundgard crawled to his feet while bo picked up the rifle and threw it off the asteroid. "why did you do that?" "i don't know," said bo. "i should just shoot you down, but i want you to surrender." lundgard drew his wrench. "no," he said. "all right," said bo. "it won't take long." * * * * * when he got up to the _sirius_, using a tank lundgard would never need, valeria had armed herself with a kitchen knife. "it wouldn't have done much good," he said when he came through the airlock. she fell into his arms, sobbing, and he tried to comfort her. "it's all over. all taken care of. we can go home now." he himself was badly in need of consolation. the inquiry on earth would clear him, of course, but he would always have to live with the memory of a man stretched dead under a wintery sky. he went aft and replaced the links. when he came back, valeria had recovered herself, but as she watched his methodical preparations and listened to what he had to tell, there was that in her eyes which he hardly dared believe. not him. not a big dumb slob like him. monster of the asteroid by ray cummings they might gamble, but win or lose the take was death for these two new slaves of the master of that pitted devil's isle of outer space. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories winter . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] the amazing thing began that summer evening of while i was sitting with dora franklin on the third ramp at the crossroads, listening to the outdoor public-music. we were on the fringe of the crowd in a secluded little place where there was a small bench under the overhanging branches of a tree. it was a romantic scene with the audience seated in crescent rows under the strings of colored tubelights. my arm went around dora, with her head against my shoulder as we listened to the soft exotic music. around us, countless other couples were also listening in silence. a pair of young lovers. i realize now that was doubtless what first attracted the furtive man to us. how long he and his weird little companion had been watching us i have no idea. i was aware of the two dark shapes in the shadow under a nearby tree--a tall blob and a short one. then the tall one came forward; the short one lurked in the deep shadows a few feet away. "the music is very pretty?" a guttural voice said. it was a man in a long, dull-black cloak. his black peaked hat had a fringe almost in woman fashion which dangled past his ears and shrouded his face so that i could hardly see it. with his mumbled greeting he sidled up and dropped to the bench beside me, peering past me at dora as though he were infinitely more interested in her rather than me which was not in itself a surprising fact. "yes," i agreed. dora and i sat up and shifted reluctantly to give him room. the little figure ten feet away, stood impassive. i recall that i stared with a sudden startled astonishment; and then with a vague shudder stabbing into me. the silent shape was no more than five feet tall, so that with a quick glance here in the dimness one might have thought it a half grown boy. a man's long black overcoat fell from the top of its head almost to the ground, as though a boy had the overcoat hung on his head, with all of him shrouded inside it. but the top of the overcoat was limp, sagging. i had the sudden crazy thought that the thing was headless--an overcoat hanging on wide square shoulders without any head above them! i shuddered involuntarily. "you and the young lady like music?" the man beside me was saying. "it is romantic. you are engaged maybe? or honeymooning?" his voice was almost too solicitous. between the shrouding fringe of his hat the colored tubelight sheen gleamed on his partly shrouded face. it was pallid, hawk-nosed, with burning dark eyes that still were staring with an almost rude intentness at dora. "no," i said. i moved with an impulse to stand up and take dora to another bench, but the man's hand reached out and touched my arm. "just a minute," he said in his limping guttural voice. "my name is bragg. what is yours?" "ralston," i said stiffly. "thomas ralston." i could see that dora now was staring at that little lurking figure. she, too, sensed that there was something gruesome about it. the man beside me was speaking more swiftly now in a low furtive flow of mumbled words. "i can interest young lovers like you. i have a place, just for honey-mooners. a little colony of lovers. a place to live, without cost, and no work. you would like it. a very beautiful place." "we're not married," i said. was this weird fellow a solicitor for some rich man's altruistic colony? i had heard of such places. in my father's day there was a big one on an island off the florida coast, and another in the south seas--colonies where newlyweds went to create an earthly paradise, which, of course, wouldn't work out. "but you will be married?" the man insisted. "it is a very beautiful place. there is no place like it. i am sure miss franklin will--" i tensed, jumped to my feet, and dora stood up beside me. miss franklin! but i hadn't named her. this fellow knew us then. at our movement, it seemed that the little figure nearby was edging closer. i am a pretty husky, six foot fellow. as i stood up, the man on the bench rose also, with his hand still on my arm. he was about my height. i flung off his light hold. "not interested," i said. "come on, dora." we started to go. was that damnable, headless little thing about to pounce on me? there were five hundred people here within sound of a shout, but despite it a thrill of fear darted through me. i'm not exactly afraid of anything human; but somehow this seemed different--as though that square, box-like, wide-shouldered little thing were something gruesome--something you couldn't fight with your fists. it was standing sidewise to us now, in a deeper shadow than before and, even more than before, i got the impression that the ominous-looking little figure was headless. "but won't you at least come and see what i have to show you?" the man at my side was insisting. "it is not very far--" "thanks, no." i turned away with an arm around dora. and suddenly the man was slinking off with the wide-shouldered little thing following after him on stiff little legs. in a moment they were gone. * * * * * that was the beginning. the details of me are not important here; i need only say that i was twenty-four that summer. dora and i were engaged to be married. both of us were orphans. she was wealthy; i was not, so that i did not want to marry until i had made a success of an invention on which i was working--a ray-weapon with which i hoped, not to make war more deadly, but to make war impossible. it was a non-killing, paralyzing vibration. in theory, if i could project it any great distance--a vibration on speeding form--then with it whole armies would be stricken down, rendered helpless. but i had not progressed that far as yet. i was living in dora's home, working in a small laboratory with which it was equipped. just this week i had completed a miniature projector. with tests upon animals it seemed to be effective at some fifty feet.... dora's home was some three miles out in the country from the crossroads municipal village where we had gone to hear the music. we took her little air-roller which was parked nearby. we did not fly it for such a short distance, merely rolled it out on the state road. dora was frightened, but i tried to shrug away the mysterious incident. "that--that little thing that stood watching us," she said. "oh tom--" "looked like a boy with an overcoat over his head," i told her. "forget it, dora." had she noticed that the man who had accosted us knew her name? she did not mention it, nor did i. we were approaching her home within five minutes. here, fifty miles north of new york city, there was one of the infrequent patches of lonely country. her small cement and metal cottage nestled against a wooded hillside. queer--as we rolled up, the house was in complete darkness. yet mrs. holten, our housekeeper, certainly would not have retired now at ten o'clock. we stopped at the main entrance and climbed out. "oh tom--" dora murmured. "something very strange about this--" she stood clinging to me, with the dark silent house beside us. overhead the moon was riding a sky of low, swift-flying clouds. the trees around the house stirred with a night breeze, but beyond that it seemed that everything was abnormally silent--a silence hanging menacingly around us. "mrs. holten must have gone to bed," i said. "come on, let's go in." but mrs. holten wasn't in the house. we called; then lighted all the lights. the place was in perfect order, but the housekeeper was gone. "strange," i said. "i suppose something called her away. she should have left us a note." but what i didn't say was that on the wall of the hall, near the door of the laboratory there were dark marks on the plaster--marks that suggested a burn, as though heat had struck the wall. "tom, come here," dora called from the living room. "what a queer smell!" i met her frightened gaze; her nostrils were dilating. i could smell it--an acrid, pungent smell. "_government food depot raided!_" the crisp low voice here with us in the living room was so unexpected that dora gave a low scream and clutched me. it was our news-radio which mrs. holten had evidently left on; and now a news announcement was being made. "_allenville, new york. mysterious raiders broke into the government surplus food depot, here tonight--probably about . p.m. large supplies of sealed cooked food stolen. four watchmen found dead--others missing._" dora and i stood stricken, listening to the newscaster's droning voice. allenville was the municipal housing village we had just left. the government food storehouses were on its other side half a mile from where we had heard the music. "... _and the bodies of the watchmen show that they were attacked by some mysterious weapon. there are no wounds. the clothing is charred a little, as though some weird form of heat were applied. two of the men have burned spots on the forehead--as though some electric charge of a lethal power_--" the signal lights on top of our instrument showed that another public-news station was signalling it had a visual broadcast of immediate interest. i reached and tuned to it. the televisor glowed. numbed with startled horror, dora and i stood staring at the moving image on the televisor grid. it was from a public observor lens mounted on a pole beside one of the roads leading out of allenville. an alarm signal had been turned in by a traffic director there on a crossing ramp. he had evidently flung on the alarm-light so that all the scene was bathed in its white actinic glare. and the road-side observing lens was bringing it now to us, broadcasting it to every receiving set in the country. what we saw was the crossing ramp with milling, frightened pedestrians and the traffic in a tangle. momentarily the people were blinded by the glare and deafened by the shrieking of the alarm-siren. in the background loomed a building which i knew was another of the government food depots. the alarm evidently had originated there. "tom--look--that doorway!" dora murmured. from one of the dark doorways of the food depot a little figure came scurrying out. and then another--and at the foot of the ramp where the crowd was milling, several others suddenly were visible. figures identical with the one which had watched us by the bench! "oh tom--dear god!" for a brief instant one of them was bathed in the alarm-light and our image of the turmoil showed it clearly. the shrouding garment was open in front as it faced us. the scurrying little thing was headless! it seemed to have square wide shoulders, straight across from tip to tip--no neck--no head! the glimpse was ended in another second as the thing darted away and was gone in the turmoil. in our living room, dora and i stood stricken. and suddenly our room tubelight was extinguished and we were plunged into darkness! there was just the moonlight glow from one of the living room's open windows--a pallid rectangle where now i saw a weird box-like thing lurching as it climbed over the sill! a little automatic bullet-projector for home emergency use was hanging on a rack beside me. i snatched it. the disintegrating air-charge hurled the bullet with an almost soundless whizz. my aim doubtless was true enough; but from the oncoming little creature a faint violet radiance was streaming out, like an enveloping aura around it, visible now in the darkness. the bullet melted with a soundless little puff of light. i was aware that dora was clutching at me, screaming. then something hit us with a numbing electric shock. i was conscious of nothing save that i was falling; galvanized so that i went down rigid, with a crash. then there was only dora's scream of terror, swiftly fading as my senses were flung away. * * * * * i came to myself with the sense that a considerable time had passed. i knew that i was thinking. for a while it seemed that there was nothing of me alive, except my mind. i was conscious now that my body was numb; lifeless. like catalepsy. it was a consciousness most horrible--dead, yet alive. i struggled to move, but there was nothing that would react. then very slowly i could feel the sensation of tingling. it seemed to define my body; make me conscious of my legs and arms that were prickling as though with a thousand needles stabbing them. i could feel now that i was lying on something soft. my eyelids fluttered up so that i had the swimming vision of narrow metal walls and a low grid ceiling. the room was faintly luminous with a weird dull radiance. then my clearing sight focused on a lens-shaped window. stars were out there--glittering points of blue-white light in a firmament solid black. the stars were in a slow circular procession of movement so that i knew the room was revolving. interplanetary space. i was in a space-vehicle. i could hear the faint, throbbing humming mechanisms now, and see the endless procession of celestial glory outside my window. numbly, for how long i do not know, i lay blankly watching it. the space-vehicle obviously had a slow horizontal axial rotation. the glittering distant worlds swung past. and then i saw the earth! the blazing, flame-enveloped ball of sun was off to one side, so that it was a great crescent earth. much time indeed had passed. hours; days--a blank to me. the earth was dull red-yellow. the sunlight gleamed on the mountains at the limb of its crescent; and i could see the mottling of clouds and the configurations of oceans and continents beneath them. "maybe you can move now. your name is tom ralston, isn't it? any chance you can speak--you're coming out all right, damned if you're not. i'd about given you up." it was a low voice beside me; and suddenly i was aware of a hunched man's form sitting here on the floor. my gaze swung to see him--a slim young fellow in ragged earth garments of tight black and white striped trousers and white blouse open at the throat. his face was good-looking; slack-jawed, weak face with pale blue eyes. his stubble of beard made his weak chin and thin cheeks bluish. he was smiling. "all right now, ralston?" "yes, i guess so." i could barely mouth it. my tongue was thick; all my body was a torture now from that prickling. but i could move, and every moment i could feel my strength coming back to me. "where am i?" i mumbled. "what happened? who are you?" and then i remembered dora. "she--dora franklin--she was with me. is she all right?" "oh sure. if you could call being on this damned ship anything to be pleased about. the woman setta is taking care of her. the damned little physical hit her and you both with its shock, but you got much the worst. dora's all right, now." i lay, with my strength coming back, listening in mute wonderment to the weird things he was telling me. his name was johnny blair. a year ago, in new york city, he had just been married. he and his young wife had been approached by that same weird man who had accosted dora and me. they had yielded to his lure of a honeymoon paradise; had gone with him. the man's name was bragg--an escaped earth criminal, member of a band of fifty who in a wholesale jailbreak five years ago had gotten loose, stolen a space-vehicle and left earth. roaming in space, they had landed on a little planetoid, a member of our solar system, which encircles the sun in an orbit outside the orbit of earth; between the earth and mars. "we're almost there now," young blair was saying. he had lowered his voice so that now he was furtive, fearing that what he was telling me might be overheard by someone outside our cubby. "pretty weird new world we're headed for, ralston," he commented grimly. he jerked his thumb toward the lens-shaped pressure window. "if you're strong enough to take a look, you'll see it right under us. we're dropping down into its stratosphere now." with his arm supporting me, weakly i staggered to the window. blair was explaining that our tiny cubby was on the outer rim of the flat, disc-shaped vehicle. its rocket-streams gave it a slow horizontal rotation, and its gravity plates, set now into repulsion, were slowly dropping it downward. through the window i stared down. the little planetoid, some six hundred miles in diameter but with an immense density since it was almost solid metal, lay spread close beneath us. a weird world indeed; a great spread of convex surface of barren, tumbled rocks and mountains in great serrated tiers. the sunlight gleamed with a dazzling sheen on the burnished heights. then we passed into the shadow of night. * * * * * i gazed, wordless. it was a fearsome, barren waste of blue-white metal rocks, fused and pitted as though the little world had been born in a fiery convulsion; a tumbled, strewn land of crags and boulders with ragged gashes of canyons in which now the shadows were black, impenetrable. and over it all there was a lurid green-red glow. it seemed inherent to the air; and it streamed up like a radioactive aura from the rocks of the ground. "the whole planetoid is like that?" i murmured. "surely that's not habitable?" johnny blair rubbed his bluish stubble of beard. "well, there's water--it rains sometimes. maybe there's soil where things would grow, but i've never seen any. there's quite a colony of us humans here now. we've been stealing our food--" so that explained the raids on the government food depots! a band of fifty escaped criminals, fugitives from earth, originally had come here. their leader was one torkine; the pallid fellow bragg was his lieutenant. and now, raiding earth of food and supplies, married couples were being brought--and young men and young girls, to be married on the planetoid. a new world. "we've brought some young people from mars also," johnny blair was explaining. "been there three times, and once to venus. quite a lot of humans here now--four hundred maybe." to colonize an uninhabitable world. i said something like that and johnny stared at me mutely. "it was inhabited," he said grimly. he seemed to shudder. "a world with just one inhabitant. it--it's a ghastly thing. it's got us all as its prisoners now. the supreme one--that's what it calls itself. god, when you see it--" what weird horrible thing was this? i could only return his stare. a barren little planetoid, with just one inhabitant. something not human. "but," i stammered, "when bragg accosted us, there was a little headless thing in an overcoat standing near him. and we saw several of them coming out of the food depots." johnny's smile was grim. "we call those the physicals. they're parts of the supreme one--like his arms and legs, only they're detached." "part of him? his arms and legs? i don't get you." "no? well, my god, you'll see." johnny's gesture seemed trying to express his hopelessness at explaining. "you'll see him--the main central part of him, i mean, that never leaves his house. he's a being, not all in one piece, like us humans. his housed main body can't move. you understand? he's rooted to the ground. the rest of him is detached and he works it by remote control. there must be thousands of those little physicals--some in one shape, some in others. but mostly they're like the ones you saw." a new form of life. a thing, an individual--the sole occupant of its world. my mind tried to encompass it. on earth, every living creature at least seems to be, as johnny expressed it, all in one piece. but why should that be exclusively necessary throughout the universe? here, on this little remote planetoid, was one of god's creations that was made wholly different. johnny's voice went lower. "he--it--the supreme one--it's got us all trapped. it's delighted--having something besides parts of itself to rule. you see? that's why it's been sending its parts--like its arms and legs--to make bragg and the others lure young men and girls. to establish a human world, and the supreme one will rule it." i understood it better now. that headless little thing in the overcoat had been watching bragg--a moving part of the supreme one, making bragg do its bidding. and now johnny was explaining that as though it were a giant electric eel, the headless physical could emit from its own body a weird electronic discharge. that was what had shocked me into catalepsy. and it had thrown a barrage about itself, so that my bullet had been futile to hit it. "these physicals," i was murmuring. "can they hear you when you speak? can they talk?" he nodded. "yes. subsidiary organs that operate for themselves when the main body is too remote." again he shrugged hopelessly. "i guess we humans aren't capable of fully understanding--" * * * * * he checked himself suddenly. he and i were still standing by the little bull's-eye window. behind us i heard a click. a doorslide to our cubby opened. i sucked in my breath with a gasp. one of the physicals stood there. a little square, box-like thing mounted on two jointed legs, with flexible hinged feet, long and pointed. the light from an outside corridor was behind it, so that i could at first only see its outline in silhouette. as it stood, it seemed to click and a third leg came sliding down to support it like a tripod. its arms, three on each side of its box-body, were waving like little tentacles. ghastly little living thing. its box-body was some two feet wide by three feet long, with perhaps a foot of thickness. the light gleamed on its top edge; the foot-thick surface there was level, smooth and shining, with rounded ends gruesomely to suggest a travesty of human shoulders. and then it spoke--a low, hollow, tonelessly mechanical voice. "you have recovered? you are the human called tom ralston?" english! queerly intoned, but correct. johnny nudged me. "yes," i said. "that's who i am." its third leg slid up again into its body; and with padding little steps it came forward. i could see it better now. was it clothed? was it living tissue, or wholly metal? for a moment there seemed no answers. then i realized that there was no detachable clothing. a body of animal tissue, or mineral? perhaps both. perhaps neither. a substance different. but i could see that parts of it were rigid, and parts of it quivering. down the front of its square little body rows of knobs protruded; and as i stared, one of them shifted aside and a little knife-like finger came out on a tentacle arm and waved at me. then i saw what might have been called its face--a mobile, flexible-looking circular area in the front center of its body. a hole there seemed to glow as though an eye were in it. a round orifice from which the voice issued was on one side of it; and on the other, a hole that could have been an ear. and over them there was a crescent-shaped little area which was greenly luminous--the little brain in there, visibly palpitating. "i told torkine," the physical said, "that he might see you when you recovered. blair will bring you now." its feet turned. with little precision steps it marched out and vanished in the dim corridor. i stared at johnny, and now suddenly he gripped me. "we'll have to go," he murmured swiftly. "listen, we'll be landing in an hour or two--this may be the last chance i have to talk to you alone. i been tryin' to get away from this accursed thing for six months now. escape--i want to get back to earth." "and you couldn't?" "good god, no. wait 'til you understand the--the monster better. it's got all us humans trapped. helpless. sometimes it treats us kindly--it's got its own ideas about building up a world of humans, for it to rule. but when you make it mad, the wrath of the monster is horrible!" his words were making me shudder. "you have a wife," i murmured. "where is she?" "she's dead," he said. his voice went drab. "eight months ago, by earth-time, i guess it was. she--she displeased the supreme one, and so it killed her. four of the physicals just--just grabbed her arms and legs and they pulled until she--she came apart!" his voice trailed away. i could only stand with my hand on his shoulder, staring mutely at him as i shuddered. then he was leading me along the corridor which ran like the spoke of a wheel toward the center of the disc-shaped vehicle. "what i was saying," he went on in his swift murmur. "torkine and those fifty men of his convict band--i wouldn't trust a damn one of them. the monster likes torkine, so he's the boss of us humans. but torkine is planning something murderous. i've been sure of that for quite a while. and this fellow bragg is married to a girl we got from mars. her name's setta. she's all right." his voice sank even lower as he stopped in the corridor and gripped me. "listen, i've seen your girl dora--setta's been taking care of her. i hope the supreme one decides to marry you to her. but i wouldn't count on it. i've seen torkine and bragg both lookin' at her pretty queer. she's a damn sweet-lookin' girl." my heart was pounding. "johnny, look here; you say you want to escape, get back to earth?" "that's what i was tellin' you. or to mars--that would be all right. setta and i are planning it. can't tell you now. she loves bragg, and wants to get him out of here. bragg has been punished by the monster." "johnny, listen. when we get to the planetoid, i want to be in with you--dora and i." "yes. that's what i guessed. suits me fine. but i'm tellin' you--don't you trust a damn soul!" * * * * * the weird passions of humans. here on this little space-vehicle we all were captives of the supreme one. and yet, wherever there are humans, smoldering strife will exist. the criminal torkine and his fifty men--what murderous action were they planning? we passed one of them in the corridor; a big, beetle-browed fellow in trousers and shirt. he stood with his hands on his hips, staring after us with a grinning leer. but he moved quickly enough when a little physical came marching up with its hurried, jerky little steps and ordered him away. at the entrance to the small control tower which projected up like the hub of a wheel from the center of the disc-vehicle, bragg was standing. "so they got you and your girl?" he murmured. "yes," i agreed. i stared at the woman who was beside him. setta, his wife, the girl from mars. she was a small, brown-skinned girl of perhaps twenty. an odd face with slanted eyes, narrow nose and queerly pointed chin. long sleek black hair framed her face, fell over her brown, sleek bare shoulders and crossed her full breasts to make a sort of bodice. from her waist a fringed brown skirt hung to her bare ankles. strange-looking young woman of another world from mine. but as she smiled at me, revealing even white teeth, i felt her charm, and almost at once my sense of her strangeness was gone. at least we were both humans, a man and a woman, with so vast a gulf between us and the gruesome little physicals. "i have tried to be good to your woman dora," setta said as i passed her. "yes, thank you," i responded. the control turret was pallid with overhead starlight. its big circular glassite windows showed me the spread of the planetoid's barren surface underneath us. we had dropped down through cloud layers now. the wild naked wastes of the little world's surface were no more than ten thousand feet down. still there seemed nothing but barren metal rocks; no sign of life human or otherwise. "so you did not die, tom ralston. welcome to our little colony!" torkine's ironic voice greeted me. he was seated at the control table where the intricate dials, levers and vacuums of the disc's mechanisms were ranged. he stood up as i entered. and beside him i saw dora. she was still clad in her earth garments, and her long pale-blonde hair was braided and coiled on her head. i have not spoken of dora's beauty. loving her, my own opinion of it possibly was exaggerated; and yet i have never known a man, or a woman either, who differed greatly from me in praising it--a delicate, ethereal beauty. she gave a little cry as she saw me, half started to her feet, and then sank back on the bench beside torkine. her face was pallid, but she was trying to smile at me. "welcome," torkine said again. "come sit here with us, ralston, and i'll show you our new world. you see he did not die, little dora?" i saw torkine now as a huge burly giant; six feet four at least. a swaggering, handsome fellow, this escaped convict. in age he could have been thirty odd. he was grinning at me ironically as he shoved a metal chair toward me. "the supreme one will be glad to have you," he added. "you and dora franklin. especially dora. we need earth beauty in our motley little colony of humans. the supreme one spoke to me of that--there will be several marriages soon after we arrive tonight. the great master is deciding now which men and which women of our humans shall be mated." omnipotence. torkine's irony was gone now; he spoke casually, as though stating a casual fact. humans here, who before the power of the supreme one were no longer individuals to have a will and emotions of their own. everything to be decided for us. but i saw the pallid hawk-nosed bragg staring at dora with a look that made my heart pound. and torkine himself dropped back on the bench and murmured: "do not be surprised little dora, if the master decides not to give you to this fellow ralston--" he leered at me, and his arms went around dora, drawing her to him. she gave a little cry of terror and repugnance. it was too much for me. i jumped up. "stop that!" i rasped. "you torkine--take your hands off her!" he turned his head, grinning at me, but he did not move. i would have been upon him in another second. behind me i heard johnny blair give a cry to try and stop me. in the shadows of one of the circular walls, half a dozen of the little box-like physicals, all identical, were ranged motionless in a line. they were muttering now--weird mutterings that popped from them like tiny explosions. and abruptly acting in unison, they came pouncing at me! * * * * * "ralston, stand still!" blair shouted. "your only chance--stand still!" i checked my advance and tried to get my wits; to master the frenzy that was upon me. it was a moment of horrible chaos; i knew that my life or death in that second hung in the balance. with hands at my sides i stood irresolute as the weird little creatures spread out and surrounded me. little creatures? still my brain would barely encompass the amazing fact that these were not individual little beings but merely the detached parts of one great individual--one almost omniscient mentality. as though they were just arms and legs with a remote giant central being to guide them in what they were doing now. as i stood panting, waiting, with my heart pounding, for an instant it seemed that i would be seized, with the tentacle arms of the box-like little things pulling at me, like poor blair's young wife, with arms and legs pulled until she came apart.... it was a breathless, horrible moment of suspense. all the humans here in the pallid turret stood breathlessly silent, tense, as helplessly we waited to see what the supreme one would decide to do. by what weird method of nature were swift communications passing between these little things and their main being so distant? our human mind doubtless will never yield an answer to that. yet perhaps it was no different in its essence from the swift orders which our own brain gives to our distant hands and feet. ours is a transmission through nerves; this other a transmission through the ether. each of these little parts had its subsidiary eye, to see these local happenings; a little subsidiary brain to record them, to amplify them with reasoning and to fling the result out to the supreme one for decision. thoughts themselves are instant things. i stood with a flood of such thoughts as the physicals surged at me. their little eyes, in the middle of each box-like body, were balefully glaring. a few of the tentacles gripped me. the touch was cold, slimy, yet from it i could feel a current tingling, like a mild electric shock. then the gripping fingers in unison relaxed. one of the little hollow voices muttered: "tom ralston, i will punish you later." as though suddenly the incident were closed, in unison all the physicals turned, and with their hurried little precision steps marched back to the wall where they lined themselves up, motionless, silent, with only their eyes alert. and from the bench where still his arm encircled the shuddering dora, the giant torkine was grinning at me with a leer of triumph. the huge disc which was the spaceship dropped lower into the dark night of the weird little planetoid. for a brief time i sat at one of the control turret windows, staring down over the rim of the disc at the barren, tumbled surface. we were slowly sailing now hardly a thousand feet above it. still there was nothing apparent down there save naked crags. but i knew we were nearing our destination. in the dim little corridors which spread out like spokes here from this hub of the disc, distant sounds of activity were audible. a dozen or more of torkine's men were on board, watched and herded by a score of the little physicals. this raid on earth had produced quantities of food which the humans needed to sustain them on the planetoid. there was alcoholite also. i could see that many of torkine's villainous-looking men were imbibing it. their faces were flushed; some of them were murmuring to each other, with leering, appraising looks at dora. and this raid had produced a few more earth captives. young men and girls who were confined in the little cubbies along one of the corridors. their frightened voices were audible now as the physicals herded them with preparations to disembark. "the planetoid world," dora abruptly whispered. "look--there is the city." torkine momentarily had moved away, and dora had shifted to sit beside me. together we gazed down. the ragged mountainous horizon of the sharply convex surface of the little world seemed only a few miles away. and as the disc, dropping still lower, sailed forward, a human settlement came suddenly into view. i had only a brief glimpse of it. at first it was a group of light-dots. then the colored glow from them disclosed little groups of dwellings. the lights came from their windows, and other glowing tubelights were set on poles in the spaces, like irregular streets between the houses. it was a weird, motley little settlement. small, crude, single story dwellings, evidently erected from materials and parts of other houses filched from earth on previous raids. a hundred little habitations, set in a group. * * * * * torkine was beside dora and me now. "very nice, isn't it?" he said with his ironic smile. "that is for our earth-people. with nothing here on this planetoid, we have had to do the best we could by bringing everything from earth. and there to the left is the martian village. and to the right, our venus people live." the two other little house-groups stood a few hundred yards further away, with the weird night-shadows enveloping them. a score perhaps of strangely-fashioned habitations in each of them. a few dozen martians, living here, captives of this monstrous thing that ruled here. the spindly, fragile-looking martian village was almost wholly dark. the venus group was blue with flickering torchlight which disclosed little mound-shaped houses of wood and stone. "the nucleus of a new civilization," torkine was saying. "the supreme one is proud of it. earth, mars and venus will be blended here in the new race we will produce. and the great master will rule and guide us. he chooses our mates. he directs our lives--he even thinks and acts for us, because, you see, we humans are very inferior." the irony of torkine's voice made me turn and stare at him. he was grinning at me. but in his dark, deep-set eyes there was something else that smoldered with the glinting reflection of his own thoughts. "i see," i murmured. "well, you don't," he retorted. "but you soon will. there, to one side--that round thing is where the supreme one houses himself. see it?" figures were visible down in the village now as men and women gathered in the doorways and in the spaces between the houses. they were all staring up at our arriving disc. and everywhere i could see the box-like little physicals. some stood like sentries at the street corners. others were marching with their little precision steps back and forth. my gaze followed torkine's gesture. to one side, partly between the earth and the martian sections of the weird village, a flat cauldron depression of the rocks seemed to have a big circular cover over it. it was a bulging dome-like roof perhaps a hundred feet in diameter. the house of the monster. the one thing which was native here. the dome-like roof, of some material which to me was nameless, indescribable, glowed with a weird violent sheen. its circular outer rim was some ten feet above the ground--ten feet of entrance space. but the violet sheen down there was like a barrage-wall, with slits in it like doorways. groups of physicals were standing there on guard. our space-disc was settling to a level, rocky, open area just beyond the glow of the village lights. the physicals here in the turret herded dora and me away. torkine, with one of the weird little shapes on each side of him, grimly, silently watching him, was at the bank of controls, landing us. dora and i had no chance to see young johnny blair again. nor the martian woman, setta. at one of the rim pressure-exits, three of the physicals stood waiting with us. then we felt the big disc settle with a bump to the ground. the exit door slid open and our captors pushed us out. the new world. its strangely heavy air choked me a little at first, and made my head reel. i could feel that the gravity was less than earth, but not much so because of the immense density of the planet. a babble of muffled sound was audible as human voices greeted us. in the weird darkness of dim tubelights, a fringe of staring captive humans showed on the rocks nearby. but physicals like little policemen paced in front of them, keeping them away. along a descending rocky path dora and i were shoved until in a moment the violet sheen of the barrage at the house of the monster loomed ahead. then we went through one of the slit openings under the dome-like roof. and presently we stopped at a luminous waist-high railing; and in a lurid violet-yellow glow, we stared down at the giant thing which was spread here before us! * * * * * the circular area inside here seemed about fifty feet in diameter and was depressed ten feet below us. a violet-yellow luminescence suffused it so that for a moment it was a blur. then gradually it clarified and we saw the supreme one! its flat, intricate body was a quivering, palpitating, luminous mass of tissue spread in a great fifty foot circle. a thing fifty feet in diameter, and perhaps three feet thick. for a moment i thought that it was lying flat on the rocks. then i saw that it was suspended a foot or two in the air with a violet curtain or radiance connecting it to the solidity of the ground. a rooted monster! incapable of locomotion it spread here, with radiance like roots, through which doubtless it was drawing from the ground its sustenance, its life. electric sustenance, of course. weird life-force, animating its nerve-ganglia, replenishing its living tissue. intricate electronic streams of nourishment which in a human body are blood-streams. a life-force of indescribable chemistry, drawn through its electronic roots from the planet itself. an amazing being. glowing, multiple brain-lobes were like a score of transparent heads with luminous threads of what could have been nerve tissue connecting them; an intricate network of ganglia in a tangle everywhere through the palpitating body-tissue. other organs, indescribable, unnamable, were crimson and violet glowing blobs. i could see the streams of nourishment swiftly circulating from one to the other--huge transparent arteries of fluorescence, threading out into veins and tiny capillaries. and in the center of the body-mass, a giant eye on a flexible stem, huge organ of sight with spectral colors darting like fire within it, was glaring at us. all that i saw with my first swift awed gaze. then other details were apparent. a dozen globes of what could have been transparent muscle were rhythmically palpitating, like huge hearts pumping the strange current through this thing to keep it alive. and then i saw that under the central giant eye there was the orifice for a voice and another for hearing. an awesome rooted monster. the only living thing on its barren little world until the humans came, a pseudo-solidity of roof and walls; a radiance which streamed from the monster itself. and now in the lurid dimness i could see faint streams like the threads of an aura emanating from the different sections of the monster. little cables of vibrations, infinitely long, perhaps as unsubstantial as a human thought. in the darkness here beside dora and me, a dozen of the little physicals were ranged. parts of the monster. i saw it now--saw those evanescent threadlike streams from the circle of quivering tissue--each thread ending in one of the physicals. the pathways of transmission for orders from the central being to its seemingly detached physical parts. thoughts are so swift! i suppose dora and i stood there gazing for no more than a minute. the monster for that minute was silent; the round central eye, as big as my head, gazed with appraisement. i heard dora suck in her breath with terror as she mutely stared. both of us, clutching at each other. and a weird feeling swept me. it was as though i was gazing at a living thing of vast immensity. the power of thought here, immense, vast and unfathomable to me who was just a human. it gave me a feeling of my own futility, so that in the presence of this being i stood cringing. unutterably helpless; small, and terrified. and then the supreme one spoke: "you have been causing me trouble, tom ralston. i should have destroyed you, there on the spaceship." it was a soft, measured, toneless voice, issuing perhaps from near the giant eye. yet it had a faraway sound as though blended and muffled by distance. and now i could see that one of the brain-lobes near us had been stimulated into action greater than the others. the luminous aura from it had intensified. beneath its membrane tissue, like a million luminous little snakes writhing one upon the other, the brain-folds were in motion. this, then, was the brain-lobe concerned with us now; the lobe from which the thing had learned english; had learned indeed, that there were other living things in the universe besides itself. "speak, human!" the monster said suddenly. "yes," i stammered. "should have--killed me--yes." "but i have not many humans here. perhaps i shall kill you. perhaps i shall marry you to this human you call dora. i have not yet decided." * * * * * i had thought that dora and i were standing by a railing. but like the rest of this dwelling it was a barrage barrier. i could see its outlines quivering in front of me; feel its repellent force so that if i had taken a step forward it would shove me back. beside dora and me now, torkine had appeared. he stood gazing down at dora. his face, with the lurid glow on it, was grinning. and suddenly the supreme one said: "you, torkine, you tell me you knew this girl many of your years ago?" "yes, master. oh, yes." torkine said ingratiatingly. knew dora years ago? that was news to me. "i shall think of it," the monster said. "there are several marriages for me to perform presently in your earth, and mars and venus fashions. i need more humans here. you, tom ralston--have they told you my purpose?" "no," i said. "we shall have a human world here for me to rule. a little world of blended mars and venus and earth. and then we will spread. the parts of me will go abroad to this great planet and that one, conquering! conquering everything, until at last i shall master the entire universe!" torkine was chuckling. i stood gripping dora and my thoughts swung to young johnny blair. he had some plan with the woman setta to escape from here. to me now it seemed a thing utterly hopeless. and suddenly i shuddered, with a new stab of terror. could this monstrous being read our human thoughts? apparently not, for its voice said sharply: "for why do you chuckle, torkine?" "i was thinking of that fellow bragg," torkine responded, "who did his work so badly on this last voyage to earth. we brought only fifteen more humans, master." "i am bringing bragg here to see me and talk to him more closely," the monster said. "you, tom ralston, and you, dora franklin--that is all i wish of you now. you will learn my decision soon." threadlike streams from one of the brain-lobes of the monster were swaying past me; and as i turned, i saw a dozen little physicals attached to the faintly luminous threads--physicals who came marching in with bragg among them--bragg, more pallid than ever with his hawk-face contorted by terror. torkine stood aside, still chuckling. then physicals were surrounding dora and me, herding us away. we stumbled back through the luminous darkness; along a little path. it was no more than a hundred feet until the outlines of a small house--loomed before us. a voice from one of the physicals said: "you go inside and wait for my decision." a miniature of the monster's central voice. i realized now that all the physicals spoke with the same voice, in miniature. "all right," i said. "you'll have no trouble with us, master." the dim room was crudely furnished with earth furniture. i sat the trembling dora on a couch; dropped beside her with my arm around her. "weird, dora." i whispered it. "but don't be too frightened. we'll find a way out of this." in the shadows two figures suddenly were moving! then i saw that they were the martian woman, setta, and young johnny blair. they came forward. "the physicals all went outside?" johnny murmured. "yes," i agreed. "good lord, that weird monster--can it hear us, if we whisper like this?" "no. safe enough, in here now." * * * * * the room had the door through which we had entered, and two windows. both were open. in the glowing dimness outside we could see other physicals ranged in a line, watching us. "the house is surrounded," johnny whispered. "no way of getting out--any break would be instant death. but a little later, when they're getting ready for the marriages there's just a desperate chance. there's generally a hundred physicals guarding the spaceship, but not so many tonight, if they are needed other places. did he take bragg in there?" "yes," i agreed. "bragg looked pretty frightened. good lord, if that damned monster ever gets really angry--" the words brought a terrified cry from setta. "if only bragg will be brought here to us," she murmured. "i think i can get us outside to watch the marriages. the master has never been angry at me. and once we are outside with a chance to run for the ship--" futile, desperate plans. but they were all we could devise. we huddled now on the sofa, waiting for bragg. all of us were unarmed. even if we had been armed, of what use would a knife or a bullet-weapon be against this multiple monster? a thing impregnable to human attack.... then i was questioning dora about that strange thing the supreme one had said--that torkine had known her many years ago. "after my father and mother died," dora was telling me now, "before i met you, tom, i lived in that home with my uncle. mrs. holten was our housekeeper." dora had always seemed reticent about her young girlhood; i had known her only about a year. when she was about twelve, her uncle had been working to give the secret of spaceflight to the world. it was he who had, in secret, constructed the space-disc. dora had known about it only vaguely; and had been warned to keep secret what little she knew. torkine had been her uncle's assistant; and him, as a little girl, she had hated and feared. "he--he tried to kiss me one day," she was telling us now. "you, tom--you understand? it terrified me so that i screamed, and then my uncle came and i told him." torkine had been discharged by her uncle; and later her uncle had heard that he was in prison. then there was the jailbreak, and shortly after that her uncle's experimental ship, and himself also, had vanished. "he stole the ship, and killed your uncle?" i murmured. "yes. he told me that, while we were coming here." * * * * * i could understand so much more of this weird thing now! it was no chance that had directed bragg to dora and me as we sat listening to the concert. torkine had sent him to lure us to some spot where we could be seized without creating an alarm. and it wasn't chance which enabled us to be attacked in dora's home. torkine knew where her home was located. "was it bragg, or torkine himself who came with the physicals and caught us?" i demanded. "torkine," she said. "he told me they killed mrs. holten just before we arrived." my mind leaped back.... my little laboratory there in which i had just completed the small ray-weapon. the paralyzing ray. in our frightened haste when we had arrived and found mrs. holten gone, i had glanced into the laboratory, but had not thought of my ray-model. had torkine forced mrs. holten to tell her what work was being done there? she knew about the weapon. had torkine taken it? the little brown-skinned, brown-clad martian girl, setta, was at one of the windows now, standing there with johnny; and they motioned us silently to come. the guarding physicals on this side of the house had drawn back a little, but still we could see them, a line of gruesome motionless shapes. their eyes glowed like points of fire in the darkness. behind them there was a dark area of open rocks between the house of the monster and the earth village. humans were moving about, always with little groups of physicals guarding them. the bustle of activity out there was growing. for half an hour past we had been aware of the sound of men's voices; the voices of girls, sometimes laughing, sometimes with little cries of terror. "look," johnny murmured. "the dais for the wedding couples. they're lighting it." earth tubelights, with batteries attached, were glowing now, mounted on the rocks. their colored radiance illumined a small ledge of rock like a little natural dais which faced the glowing house of the monster. and now we saw a group of earthmen gathered near the dais. torkine's original band of criminals. some had jugs in their hands from which occasionally they drank. alcoholite, i had no doubt. there were some twenty of them, with others occasionally joining them. their muttering laughter floated to us. johnny blair bent toward me. "something going on among those fellows--look at that." a group of earth-girls were passing the dais, herded toward its entrance steps by a line of physicals. some of the roistering men reached for the girls as they went by. the physicals with popping anger checked them. the half-drunken men desisted. some jibed at the girls with coarse comment; but others muttered to themselves--low, defiant curses. i felt myself shuddering. there was smoldering revolt out there. torkine's men, inflamed now by the alcoholite so that what for a long time they and their leader might have been planning, they now forgot to disguise. it was as though here were a little spark trembling above a pit of horrible explosive--a spark which at any moment might hurl us all to death. "they've never been like this before," johnny muttered anxiously. "by heaven, if the physicals turn on them, and on us--" "if only bragg would come," setta murmured. a scream out in the night made her words die in her throat. a man's scream of agony, blood-curdling with its ghastly shrillness. and setta, here in the dim room with us, echoed it. "bragg!" it sounded again, mingled now with the hissing, popping little voices of the physicals. gruesome, ghastly tragedy being enacted now within the house of the supreme one! bragg's screams were horrible, but brief. all in a moment they were dying into terrible agonized moans--bragg's tortured death in the grip of the angered multiple monster. and suddenly the frenzied little setta was rushing from us to the room-door. "no!" johnny shouted. "come back!" we jumped for her but she eluded us; rushed out. and then we saw her outside for just a brief, horrible glimpse. a group of physicals rushed at her; seized her, but she fought them. and then suddenly they were pulling at her. little box-like parts of the great monster with an inhuman, incredible strength ... pulling at her arms and her legs ... like johnny blair's young wife.... i seized dora, pressed her head against my side. "don't look, dora. dear god!" i could not look myself after a moment. "i am ready for you now, dora franklin." physicals were here in the room with us, advancing upon dora! the voice of one of them crisply added: "come with me, dora franklin." even with what i had seen and heard outside, i tensed to resist. but i came to my senses as johnny tremblingly seized me, and dora screamed: "no! no, tom!" then the physicals had taken her from me. three or four of them remained here in the room with johnny and me; the others herded dora away. then from the window we saw her as they led her to the dais. torkine's men called at her with coarse, drunken comment as she went past them. and now the house of the monster was opening. the radiant barrage which had formed its walls and roof slowly dissolved so that the huge, weird being was exposed. giant glowing thing spread there on the rocks. its big central eye appraisingly roved the weird night-scene. and then its hollow, toneless, central voice was intoning names. the men and girls whom now it was to marry. "... and karl torkine to dora franklin, both of earth. and sela sirran, mars, to irene jarrod, of earth." slaves, matched and mated by the decisions of the great master. then i saw the big figure of torkine. the colored tubelight gleamed on his leering face as with his arm around the trembling dora he led her up onto the marriage dais and faced the glowing spread of the supreme one. * * * * * it was a fantastic, weird ceremony. the varicolored tubelights gleamed down upon the couples who stood ranged along the front edge of the dais. men and women of three great planets, facing the gruesome multiple monster which here on its own little world was omnipotent. its toneless voice was droning now with the ritual it had devised; and at intervals, trained by the physicals, the couples on the dais bowed, gestured and then knelt with foreheads to the ground in supplication and homage to the supreme one. little grey-skinned venus girls in their gaudy robes; brown-skinned, black-haired young women of mars; the earth-girls and young men. but i had eyes only for dora, as she knelt with the big torkine beside her. the light gleamed on her long, pale-blonde hair which fell in great gleaming ripples over her shoulders. then she and torkine and the others stood up; and i saw her terrified face. at the window johnny and i stood breathless. watching us, physicals were ranged across the dim room behind us. i had no thought of them. helpless, utterly despairing now, i stood gazing out at the weird, eerie night-scene. the group of torkine's men still gathered at the back of the dais. their muttering voices mingled with the drone of the supreme one. abruptly my heart leaped. one or two of the drunken men had started to climb to the dais. and one suddenly called: "why wait, torkine? why--" like a spark in gunpowder. the supreme one's voice droned on; but one of the physicals jumped and jerked the man from the dais. it made a commotion off there. two others of torkine's men reached and plucked at the flowing robe of a venus girl. the man being married to her turned with an oath, jumped and dealt a blow with his fist. there was a scuffle, and the venus man was pulled down from the dais. suddenly there was a milling, spreading chaos. in a fringe at the edge of the light-sheen the spread of rocks was filled with a watching, motley crowd of humans from the three little villages. i saw the crowd wavering; the front ranks pressing backward and those behind shoving forward, trying to see better. like fire in prairie grass the milling movement widened. human voices shouting in terror, and in drunken anger. darting little physicals, with popping, commanding voices. then one of the physicals emitted a flash. a man screamed and dropped. "tom--oh, look at torkine!" i was aware that johnny was gripping me. up on the dais in the midst of the commotion the big figure of torkine was standing motionless. his left arm was around dora who in terror sagged against him. the light revealed clearly his pale, handsome face, and i saw again that leering, triumphant smile. and now his right hand was fumbling under his flaring, gaudy jacket. perhaps the monster itself in that instant was startled at the magnitude of this human commotion. the droning central voice abruptly ceased. in the room behind me i was aware that the physicals had darted back through the doorway and gone outside. and on the dais the leering, triumphant torkine suddenly brought his right hand from under his jacket. he was leveling a weapon! my ray-gun! my paralyzing vibration-projector! this, then, was what torkine had been planning! this was what had inspired drunken boldness among his men! torkine was leveling it now at the glowing, quivering spread of the supreme one! in that tense, breathless second i was aware that johnny and i were leaning out over the sill of the window, numbly staring. and then torkine fired my vibration-gun! its hissing, infra-red bolt spat down into the palpitating spread of the great rooted, multiple monster! there was a split-second when it seemed to me as though all the world hung breathless, pregnant with expectancy of horror. * * * * * and the horror came, with a rushing, spreading tumult. down in the glowing mass of the great circular, flat body there was a little puff of light-flash where the ray vibrations struck. a blow at one of its hearts? it seemed that one of the blobs of heart-muscle was wildly beating, expanding and lunging. and the central eye was flashing crimson and seeming to split with electric flame. and now in a flash almost simultaneous with the first shot, its wrath was transmitted to its remote, detached parts. over all the weird chaotic scene of milling humans, the little physicals sprang into action. a thousand of them as this multiple-membered monster ran amok. i felt johnny pulling at me. "got to get out of here, tom. it's our last chance!" "johnny," i gasped, gripping him. "got to keep together. try and get to dora!" "yes; keep away from the physicals. good god, tom!" up on the dais torkine had fired his last futile little bolt, and now he had flung my projector away. he was still holding dora. amazement, futility, then terror was on his face as he gazed at the writhing, bellowing monster and then at the wild scene of chaos out on the rocks--the crowd of milling, panic-stricken humans with the little physicals darting among them. popping, wrathful, miniature duplicated voices of the supreme one. violet-yellow flashes were hissing from the physicals. the running, milling, screaming humans were falling. johnny and i were running, trying to get to the dais. then we saw that torkine had lifted dora in his arms; had leaped down and was running with her over the dark spread of rocks. the lights over the dais abruptly now were extinguished. the dimness of the night sprang around us, hideous with human screams of agony and terror; ghastly with the glares of the little popping bolts and the red-yellow, wrathful glare of the monster. where had torkine gone? we could not see him. we darted sidewise as a group of running men and women with physicals chasing them swept past. and then again we saw torkine. he was still carrying dora, leaping over the rocks, zig-zagging, trying seemingly to reach the space-disc. the dark outlines of it were apparent no more than a hundred feet away. "no physicals there!" johnny gasped. we slanted our running leaps to head off torkine. and suddenly he saw us and jumped to a little rocky butte where he stood leering down at us with his arm holding dora as she sagged against him. a knife was in his hand now. the red-yellow chaos off to our left glistened on its naked blade. for a second i thought that he would plunge it into dora's breast. then suddenly behind him the little box-bodies of physicals had appeared. tentacle arms reached for him so that he dropped dora. for a second she staggered, slumped and then fell over the little brink. johnny and i scramblingly caught her; i snatched her in my arms and ran, with johnny beside me. we reached the dark, space-disc doorway, and i turned to look back. torkine was wildly slashing at a tentacle arm of a physical that gripped him. weird tissue-flesh of the damnable, gruesome thing. the steel knife-blade slid harmlessly on it; and then as he wildly stabbed at a box-like chest, the knife-blade broke. he screamed with a last agonized, throat-splitting cry as the plucking little things tumbled him from the rock and engulfed him.... "tom, there they come! hurry! get inside--" johnny gasped. we slide the doorslide as a plunging wave of physicals came and hurled themselves against it.... then in a moment the big disc was slowly rising. from a bullseye window of the central turret we could see the raging little things as they dropped from the rim of the disc. the ground slid slowly away beneath us. the sounds were shut off from us now. mute, ghastly scene. we had only a brief glimpse of the glowing, wrathful monster. it palpitated, quivered in the midst of the carnage. monster of the planet. omnipotent ruler here. there were no humans running now. no human bodies were on the rocks. nothing but crimsoned, noisome fragments with little shapes fighting over them. the terrible scene in a moment dropped away, blurred and was gone so that there was just starlight here in the turret. the myriad stars of interplanetary space. and at the dark, rocky horizon of the planetoid the earth was just rising, a great mellow crescent, beckoning us. gods of space by ray cummings planetoid- was a world of horror. a star of death, ruled by a weird and beautiful earthian goddess. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories spring . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] the weird purple glow of the planetoid was apparent now, even to the naked eye. the end of roy atwood's long, lonely journey was at hand. in the narrow control-turret of his small spaceship he sat gazing. planetoid- , in the belt out here, far beyond mars, was a great leaden disc now occupying nearly a quarter of the firmament. and the purple glow of the _xarite_ was puzzling. on earth, young atwood's father had located the treasured substance with a giant electro-spectroscope; seen it after patient search as a tiny tracery, a faint band upon the prismatic 'graph of the light from this distant world. and now atwood was here, seeking it. long since he had discarded his spectroscope, here in the spaceship turret. it had been his compass, the identification of planetoid- , enabling him to chart his course. it was unnecessary now. he stared, puzzled. surely there must be an immense amount of the electroidally active _xarite_--the name his father had given it--here on this little world. and all concentrated almost in one spot, apparently. the weird purple sheen was intense; a patch down there on the putty-colored surface of the five-hundred-mile-diameter asteroid. occasionally he could see it clearly. then at other times the leaden, sullen, low-hanging cloud masses of the unknown little world wholly obscured it. * * * * * with his journey's end so near, atwood's heart was pounding. but a grimness was on him. he was a young fellow; just twenty-four this earth-summer of , a handsome young giant whose hundred and ninety pounds were stretched over a powerful, yet almost lanky, frame. in the government college of new york, he had been a champion athlete. what would he be here? actually, atwood cared very little what strange form of life might exist here on planetoid- . his was not a trip of scientific exploration. now that the beginning of interplanetary travel was at hand, he was willing to leave all that sort of thing to the professional scientists. his was a secret adventure, and so he had of necessity come alone. his purpose was to land on this unknown little world, and get a small quantity of the treasured _xarite_. with that safely stored in the foot-long, insulated cylinder which now was ready to strap on his back, he would leave and get back to earth as speedily as possible. it had been a long journey. atwood contemplated it now as the round disc of the asteroid enlarged until it was beneath him, stretching all across the lower firmament; and he set his anti-gravity plates to resist his fall and verified that the repellent rocket-streams of electroidal gases were ready for the final atmospheric descent. by his calculation he would emerge from the clouds fairly close to the _xarite_ purple glow. it would be early evening here. he recalled the details of planetoid- which had been in the letter to him from his dead father. meager details indeed. dr. paul atwood had calculated the asteroid at between five and six hundred miles in diameter. then the clouds broke away. atwood's heart was pounding as he stared down for his first real sight of the unknown world. at first it was a blur of deep purple radiance. it seemed to blind him, this weird glow to which his eyes were unaccustomed. but presently he could see better. * * * * * ahead, the purple glow suffused the night with its faint but lurid sheen. then his eyes seemed to grow accustomed to the purple so that he had the illusion of it fading a little with the details of the scene taking form. a broken forest stretched here--a strange, spindly form of purple and red vegetation. in places it grew a hundred feet or more high in a tangled, lush, solid mass of interwoven vines. there seemed no trees. it was all slender-stalked, spindly. atwood stared, amazed, puzzled. the forest, if it could be called that, grew in dense patches, interspersed with open spaces where there was apparently a little soil. others were naked, gleaming masses of metallic rock. the forest patches swayed in a gentle night-breeze like marine vegetation in water. the stalks of the vines were thick with giant pods; balloon-like things twenty feet or more in length. it was as though gases of decomposing vegetation within them were lifting them so that their upward pull held erect the swaying, hundred-foot stalks. off in the distance, from the height at which he stared down, atwood could see a thread of river. it gleamed dull purple-green, from the _xarite_-glow, and the reflection of the cloud-light. the same glow of cloud-light shone on the forest-top. landing demanded all of atwood's attention, so that after his first quick scrutiny of what lay down there, he looked about for a place to land. he headed for a dim open space in the forest, an almost level hundred-foot area seemingly of rocky soil. then, at last, he had landed; brought the forty-foot, narrow little ship down flat upon its spreading base fins. with air helmet beside him in the event this atmosphere was not breathable, he cautiously opened a pressure-exit porte. the cylinder's air did not go out. on the contrary, the outer pressure was greater, so that the planetoid's air came hissing in--a rush at first, then a filtering drift, and then it stopped. atwood's head reeled. he gripped his air-mask; then his head steadied and he discarded the mask. breathable air. it was heavy; moist, aromatic with strange smells of the forest. but breathable. in a moment he hardly noticed its strangeness. in the silence, mingled with the thumping of his heart against his ribs, a low hum now was audible coming through the open porte. the voice of the forest. the blended hum of insect life. was it that? he listened. it was a weird hum. so faint it seemed that he heard it within his head, rather than against his ear-drums. a tiny throbbing sound. but he seemed to know that it was vast. the blend of billions of still more tiny sounds. and queerly, it seemed hideous. a thing at which he should shudder. a thing of terror. with a lugubrious grin he shoved away the thought. certainly it was no more than a hunch, a premonition. atwood was clad in short, tight trousers, grey shirt open at his muscular throat, and heavy boots. his crisp curly blond hair was matted with sweat on his forehead. the descent through the atmosphere had made his little ship insufferably hot. this moist, heavy night air was a relief, but not much. at his wide leather belt, pulled tight around his waist, he carried a small electroidal flash-gun in a holster. the insulated cylinder into which he would put the _xarite_ was slung with a leather strap over one shoulder. in a hand-case he carried his portable mining equipment and a few explosive-capsules. but he did not expect to need any of it. surely this _xarite_ was on the surface. and with a glow like this, it must exist in almost a pure state. perhaps it was not more than a mile from here in a concentrated lode somewhere here in this weird forest. all he needed was a scant pound of it. he might have it and be back here in an hour or two. fully ready now for what he hoped was a simple quest, atwood stepped through the exit porte. within the ship his interior gravity was maintained at about that of earth. but as he stepped over the threshold, the gravity of the planetoid gripped him. amazing change. he clutched at the porte-casement to steady himself. his weight--certainly most of it--had gone. swaying on his feet, the lightness made him reel. then gingerly he took a step. seemingly he weighed now no more than ten or fifteen pounds. carefully, with flexed knees, he impelled himself upward. it was the sort of leap which on earth would have taken him a foot or so off the ground. he rose now to a height higher than his head, and came down, landing in a scrambling heap. * * * * * for a while, amused in spite of his grimness, atwood experimented. by the feel of his cautious attempts, a good running leap would sail him a hundred feet or more, and probably smash him against a rock. better be careful at first. it wouldn't be hard to kill himself, making errors with a power like this. his muscles were so powerful now in comparison with his weight. then he was ready to start. that faint weird humming still was audible. but there seemed nothing living here--no insect life underfoot, no birds in the trees. and, suddenly, he stood staring, stricken. something was up on the top of the nearby patch of forest. the matted vegetation up there a hundred feet above him was so solid that he realized now he probably could manage to walk upon it. something was moving up there. a swaying little blob, vaguely white. atwood stood silent, watchful with his gun in his hand. the blob seemed about five feet tall. white limbs; a flowing drape. then, as it moved, a little more light came upon it--starlight filtering down now through a break in the overhead clouds. atwood sucked in his breath with his amazement. a girl! a human girl! apparently she had not seen him; and, suddenly, she jumped from the top of the swaying mass of vines and came fluttering down. a girl, with pale drapes held like wings in her outstretched hands, so that like a bird she fluttered down and landed lightly on her feet. she was only a few paces from atwood when she saw him. for an instant, amazed, she stood staring, like himself, stricken. an earthgirl? certainly she looked it. a slender little thing with dark flowing tresses; a draped robe to her knees--a robe with a flowing cape at her shoulders, the ends of which she had gripped to spread it like wings as she jumped down. and now he saw that the robe wasn't fabric, but seemingly made of woven, dried vegetation. "well--" atwood gasped. "what in the devil--" with a cry like a frightened animal she stooped, seized a chunk of rock; flung it. the rock came, very much as a hurled rock would, on earth. it struck atwood's shoulder. the girl turned, and with a leap made off. "i'll be damned," atwood muttered. his caution, this time, was gone. he jumped, went thirty feet, landed on his side. already the girl was gone. then he saw her as like a monkey she went up a vine-rope. he tried it; hauled himself up with amazing speed. on the vine-top he tried running. but after a leap or two, with the girl far ahead of him, he found himself entangled, floundering in the matted mass of vines. his gun had been knocked from his hand, lost as it fell down into the leafy abyss. the girl, apparently less afraid of him now, stood a hundred feet away, balanced on a swaying, rope-like vine as she peered at him. "all right," atwood muttered. "i guess i can't catch you." certainly he had no idea that she could understand him. but, suddenly, she laughed--a little rippling rill of human laughter, mingled with awe. "you speak my language?" her soft voice was amazed. english! it was quaintly, queerly intoned. but english nevertheless. and she added, in wonderment. "who are you that you speak the language of the gods?" he could only stare, wordless. and abruptly she was coming forward; slowly at first, and then, overcoming her fear, she jumped and landed beside him. he seized her. "look here, who the devil are you?" "me? i am ah-li, goddess of the marlans." "well," he said. "whatever that is. anyway, be reasonable. i'm roy atwood. i've just come from earth. you came from there, too, of course. when did you come? your people, are they around here?" she seemed only able to stare at him as though numbed. seemingly, she understood his words, but certainly not their meaning. "the earth?" she murmured at last. "what is that? my people? they are here, of course. the marlans." her slim white arm gestured out over the forest-top. "i am goddess ah-li." wonderment was in her dark eyes and in her voice. "and now you come--a god, like me." her voice faltered. she was trying to smile. "i am afraid i do not understand," she murmured. "a man-god coming here to rule with me. never did i think that could happen." * * * * * for a moment, as he sat there clutching the girl in the tangled vines of the swaying forest-top, atwood was at a loss for words. beyond doubt, english was this girl's native language. had some earth-explorers landed here, bringing her when she was an infant? earth-people who had died or been killed when the girl was too young to have learned anything? but her mature, fluent english belied that. in all those years, from infancy to maturity, alone here with what apparently were primitive natives of the planetoid, she would have forgotten her earth-language. she was staring at him blankly, her wonderment matching his own. "when did you come here?" he demanded. "can't you remember?" "oh, yes," she smiled. "i was born--i appeared here in the forest--it was, how you would say, about two thousand of our days ago." with the day here about half that of earth, she was naming something less than three earth-years. "you appeared here in the forest?" he prompted. "yes. from the sky i came. the marlans saw me coming down. in my god-chariot." she gestured. "like yours there, it must have been. only mine, they tell me, burst into flame and destroyed itself when it touched the ground." a miracle surely. but to atwood, the miracle was that from a wrecked, flaming little spaceship, somehow she must have escaped alive. had she come alone, or with others who, doubtless, in the wreck of the ship, had been cremated so that remains of them had never been found? "and you can't remember that coming?" atwood demanded. "oh, yes. when human life came to me i was among the marlans. i could not talk their language, then, but only the language of the gods. this language of yours," she added. "god-language of you and of me." weird. she was so obviously sincerely truthful; she believed it. naïve, child-like. yet there was upon her, implanted by her belief, an aspect of power. a consciousness that she was a goddess here. a radiance of her power, and a humility--a feeling of responsibility to one on high, who had sent her here as his servant. and now she was staring at atwood, another of god's servants, like herself. a man-god. she stared with a little color coming into her cheeks and her breath quickened. "i see," he murmured. then abruptly on her forehead he noticed a scar--white scar-tissue over an area of an inch or so. he reached gently and shifted a lock of her hair. it was the scar of a ragged cut. quite evidently a nasty wound. three years ago? "what is that?" he asked. "oh--that? there was my human blood running from it when they found me. my human birth--" a crash when she landed. a brain concussion. and it had stricken her with amnesia--all her memory gone so that at that instant when she regained consciousness her life in effect was beginning again. atwood understood it now. "i see," he nodded. "well, ah-li, my name is roy." "rohee," she repeated. "i came, landed just now, from earth." "the heaven of the gods?" she murmured. "oh, yes. tell me. surely i came from there, too. and you can remember it." "i sure can. ah-li, listen. what you've got to understand now--" abruptly he checked himself. it wouldn't be easy to tell her. and then he had a queer thought. was it right for him to destroy her faith in her own power to do good among the people of this world? certainly he'd better find out what was here, first. and she probably would not believe him anyway. "tell me," he amended. "the marlans--your people here." under his questions she told him with simple directness. the planetoid here was known as marla. the marlans were its only race. not many of them now of recent generations--a few thousands, he gathered, most of whom lived in a settlement here in the forest only a short distance away. "there were many, once," she was saying. "but always the rising of the terrible _genes_ killed them off. we have learned now to subdue the _genes_ with the glow of the _drall-stone_ light." the radiance of the _xarite_. her gesture indicated it. from here, on the forest top, the patch of its light-radiance showed plainly an earth-mile or so away. weird thing. so far as he could understand now, these _genes_ seemed to be microscopic things of horror. at intervals, caused by the weather, or in rhythmic cycles of some mysterious process of nature, the _genes_ abruptly grew from microscopic spores into ghastly monsters. but the radiance of the _xarite_ held them in check. so that of recent years the human marlans had learned to use the _xarite_ against these monsters of the half-world. a barrage of the _xarite_ radiance was set up here to protect the marlan settlement. "i think i understand," atwood said at last. "queerly enough, i came here to get some of that _xarite_, as we call it on earth. it is needed there." "in the god-realm they need--" "yes," he hastily agreed. "anyway--oh, well, never mind that." his thoughts went back to the letter he had received from his father who had died suddenly. young atwood had been taking a post-graduate science-medical course in the great anglo-american university in london. his father's death had brought him hastily back. and the bank had given him the letter which his father had left for him. "_my dear son:_" the letter began. "_i am preparing this data for you so that if anything should happen to me before my work is done, you will be able to carry on for me. i haven't been able to tell you--it has had to remain a secret. i have been working with a dr. georg johns, astronomer and physicist of boston. as you know, all my life, roy, has been devoted to the discovery of the cause of poliomelitus--_" the dread infantile paralysis. dr. atwood, ten years ago, had propounded the theory that it was a sub-microscopic spore so small that even the giant electro-microscopes could not detect it. so small that it was non-filterable--no filter had ever been devised that could trap it, despite the claims of having done that which other medical men had made. surely that was a negative result indeed. but, then, dr. atwood had discovered, in the ore of xarium, which existed in very small quantities on earth, a product which he had named _xarite_. he had spent a considerable fortune doing it--the resolution of many tons of xarium, refined down into an almost microscopic quantity of an electroidally active substance. and with it, for a year he worked miracles. as though by magic the emanations from his tiny _xarite_ tube, magnified and projected in the fashion of radiotherapy treatments, had cured victims of the dread disease. but the triumph was short-lived. the _xarite_ tube exhausted itself. and on earth, the scarcity of the ore of xarium was such that to secure another grain of _xarite_ seemed practically an impossibility. and then the death of dr. atwood had come, and roy had gotten the letter. his father had secretly been working with dr. johns. together, with dr. johns' huge electro-spectroscope, they had discovered the existence of _xarite_ on planetoid . and had kept it secret. with the era of interplanetary adventure now at hand, both the physicians feared that the _xarite_ treasure might fall into unscrupulous hands, be exploited for profit. they wanted to get it themselves and invent the radiotherapy projectors suitable for its use; and give it all to the suffering children of the world as their benefaction. dr. atwood's letter to his son told how, finally, dr. johns had secured a small spaceship and had gone, trying to get to planetoid- . dr. atwood, in delicate health, had not dared make the trip. he had been waiting; and had left this letter to roy, with voluminous data, as a precaution. roy had read the letter a hundred times. it was in the small spaceship which he had built with the money inherited from his father, and which had brought him here. he remembered its final, pleading words: "_you must carry on for me, roy. believe me, son, the lives of thousands of thousands of children will be in your hands. and the health of thousands upon thousands of others, who do not die, but live with twisted little bodies, tragic, pathetic, piteous monuments to the futility of man's medical skill. you have seen them. they will be counting upon you._" how could he fail them? and how could he fail his dead father? the thought of that was what had spurred him; what had brought him here with a grim determination to secure the _xarite_ and get back as soon as possible. "you are very quiet," the girl said timidly out of the silence. "i was thinking," he said. "out there in our--our god-heaven if that's what you want to call it--well, it's certainly very queer--" * * * * * queer indeed. how could he even attempt to explain it to her! these _genes_--hideous monsters here on this little world, held in check, destroyed by the _xarite_ radiance. and on earth, the dread sub-microscopic spores of poliomelitus--his father had killed them with _xarite_ radiance. as though here might be not only the original source of the terrible spores, but the cure for them as well. nature striking a balance here; and failing to do it on earth. did the spores, the _genes_ drift through the immensity of space? young atwood well remembered that even a hundred years ago, physicians had advanced some such theory. spores, landing on earth, where conditions would not allow them to grow in size, but where they could only multiply themselves in the bodies of human victims. "i was thinking," atwood began again. and then he shrugged hopelessly and gave it up. "ah-li, listen. take me to your people now. they will know i'm friendly?" "friendly? why, of course. a god--to help them--" and he would get his cylinder full of _xarite_ in its pure state, and then go back to earth. and take the girl with him? the thought occurred to him suddenly and sent a queer vague thrill through him.... she was helping him to his feet. "we will go," she said. "the god--roh-ee--oh, they will welcome you!" "we're supposed to go up here over the tree-tops?" with a faint smile she regarded him. "well, it is not very far. but you are clumsy." "i think i'd feel better on the ground," he agreed. a leap down, for him from this hundred-foot height, could have been dangerous. it was different with the girl. on earth she might have weighed not much over a hundred pounds; and with her slight weight here, the pressure of her spread grass-cloak against this heavy air was sufficient. she fluttered down; and like a clumsy monkey he half dropped, half fell, clinging to the vine-ropes. they started over the rocks. "we'll take it slow," he said. "until i get used to it." they followed the open spaces between the patches of forest. the weird scene was dim in the night-glow. occasionally now, through breaks in the patches of lush vegetation, atwood could see that the radiance of the _xarite_-glow ahead of them was growing.... strange progress, this half walking, half leaping advance. it was hard for atwood to keep his feet; almost impossible to gauge the distance a leap would carry him. many times he fell. muscles that he had seldom used before were beginning to ache. "let's rest a minute," he protested presently. they were in a rocky defile, like a little gully descending. atwood dropped to the ground and drew up the girl beside him. more than ever now, the idea of taking her to earth was in his mind. how could he ever have imagined leaving her here, an earthgirl, suffering from amnesia. and he was thinking. dr. georg johns, his father's friend, had left the earth, presumably to come here. "listen, ah-li," he said. "i don't want to confuse you too much. don't think i'm crazy or anything. in this place where i just came from there used to be someone called dr. georg johns. doesn't that mean something to you? think back." he stared at her; and on her face, at mention of the name, there came a queer, startled puzzlement. "why--why--" she could only stammer. puzzled, with some vague consciousness of memory stirring within her. and then it was gone. "why--what is that?" she murmured. "you speak so strangely. the words i understand, but the things you say--" "forget it, ah-li. i don't want to worry you. there are things you used to know, and that you'll remember sometime. they'll come back to you." "my life in the god-heaven?" "yes, sure. call it that." during all this time with the girl, atwood had been conscious of that weird, gruesome undercurrent of humming which seemed a sinister background to this little world. and now, as momentarily they were silent here in the small rocky recess, abruptly he was aware that the humming had greatly intensified. ah-li at the same instant noticed it. terror leaped to her face as her hand gripped his arm. "that humming--" he murmured. "yes. oh, evidently this is the time for the _genes_ to come out! i thought so; that is why i was out in the tree-tops tonight--to see if any were around." the _genes_. on earth they might remain always as sub-microscopic spores, multiplying in human nerve and brain tissue to cause the ghastly poliomelitus. but here they were merely lurking monsters, seasonally growing into visible things of horror. things with a voice. countless billions of them, with their blended tiny voices faintly audible. the rock recess here was dark. it was like a little cave, with an open, narrow front. atwood and the girl were seated several feet back from the entrance. and now, as the tiny humming suddenly was increasing, in the grotto entrance close before them, a little spot was visible on the rocks. a spot, like a dot of saffron glow. for that stricken second numbly atwood stared at it; an inch-long blob of glow, with a tiny solid nucleus. only a second or two atwood and ah-li sat transfixed with horror. the glow was expanding. a swift expansion--so swift that it was like a saffron balloon being blown up into size tremendous. as though hideous forces of nature, held in check, now abruptly were released. a tentacled thing, big as a football. but before atwood and the girl could more than struggle to their feet, it was a monstrous saffron thing of horror--a round, glowing, luminous pulpy mass, big as atwood now. its bulk blocked the cave-entrance. "good god--" atwood muttered. "we're penned in here!" there was no chance for them to leap away. in terror ah-li was clinging to him. the dark narrow confines of the recess were lurid now with the monster's ghastly yellow light. its hideous voice was a humming throb. for another second it stood blocking the opening, apparently its full size now, with long tentacles weaving like tongues of yellow fire; and a ring of clustered eyes in its center, balefully glowing. and then, with a rolling lunge, it hurled itself forward! * * * * * it was a blur, a chaos of utter horror to atwood. he had no time to do more than thrust ah-li behind him when the monster was upon him. weird and ghastly combat. he was conscious of being engulfed by the horrible glutinous mass as the noisome saffron pulp wrapped itself around him. wildly he fought, staggering, with kicking legs and flailing arms. the intense yellow glow, so close to his eyes now, was dazzling, blinding. its voice was chattering, like a dynamo gone awry; a throbbing voice that mingled with the girl's cry of terror. "oh, do not fall. keep standing!" "you run--" he gasped. "get past it and run." he mustn't fall. that would be the end. the sticky weight of the thing pressed him. sucking tentacles were wrapped around him. in the saffron glare he could not see if the monster still blocked the cave-opening. if only he could get it further inside, so ah-li could slip past. then he realized that as he fought to get loose, his flailing hands were pulling the oozy tissue apart. he ripped one of the tentacles loose. it fell like a segment of yellow flame, writhing on the ground. but there was no wound where it had been, for it seemed that the oozy flesh flowed around the break. then he felt ah-li tugging at him as again he staggered, almost went down. she was tugging, trying to pull him loose. and the monster now, with chattering, enraged voice rising in pitch, was trying to draw him inward. a slap of the horrible stuff struck his face; choking him. he wiped it off; tore loose a great segment of the body and cast it away. "now--you--get free--we can run--" the girl's panting voice came to him out of the chaos. behind him she was pulling at his shoulders, adding her slight strength and weight to his. and suddenly he found himself loose, staggering backward. the monster, gathered itself, with its glowing fragments on the rocks around it, rolled itself a few feet away. atwood found that he was in the mouth of the cave. ah-li shoved him, and he was outside. "you jump--now!" the huge, screaming, saffron ball lunged for them. with his hand gripping hers, they jumped, sailed together in a flat arc over the monster and landed fifty feet behind it. atwood, who had fallen, picked himself up. at the mouth of the cave the huge round ball, with new tentacles growing upon it, stood seemingly confused by the escape of its prey. then, growling with a low sullen murmur, suddenly it rolled itself back into the darkness of the recess. lurking, with only the reflected light of it at the opening to show that it was there. panting, still with horror making him shudder, atwood followed the girl. they skirted an edge of waving forest growth, descending a rocky declivity. open rocky space was to the left of them now, with a little line of hillocks. ahead, at a lower level, the glow of the purple _xarite_-radiance was a big patch in the darkness. and now in the patch, atwood could see what seemed a weird little human settlement. clusters of low, mound-shaped dwellings of rocks and mud and grass. the semblance of crooked little streets. the purple glow bathed it--a half mile, irregular patch. and beyond it and to the sides, there was only blank darkness. "that is marla," ah-li was saying. "we shall have to put the light-force up now for the season of the growing of _genes_. the time has come." with his questions, she tried to make it clear. the radiance off there which enveloped the little settlement was inherent to the ground itself. most of the marlans of this little world lived here. and those others who were nearby, now at the season of the growing of the _genes_, would come flocking into the glow. a few days, a week or two; and then the _genes_ would die away until the next cycle of their growth. but even this natural glow was not sufficient to hold them off, so that the marlans set up around their settlement what ah-li called a light-fence. a sort of barrage; a few hundred little braziers of _xarite_, set at intervals on the ground, their spreading glow mingling one with the other, encircling the village. a barrage which no _gene_ would dare pass. "i see," atwood murmured. "but ah-li, where do you get that _xarite_? near here?" "oh, yes." she gestured toward the dark little line of hills off to the left. "it is there. most of it, in grottos underground. you see, it is not far." "and what's it like? loose in the caves?" he held his breath for her answer. "yes," she said. "the _drall-stone_. it lies loose in the caves." triumph swept him. he could get his insulated cylinder packed with _xarite_, and then get back to his spaceship and away. and take ah-li with him. "listen," he began, "show me the way to one of those caves. i want to see--" "here is water, for us to swim," she interrupted. "the flesh of the _genes_ is still on us." heaven knew he had been conscious of it. a little stream of purplish phosphorescent water, impregnated no doubt with the _xarite_, came babbling down the slope here from the distant hills. he and ah-li plunged in; came out, with the purple phosphorescence of the water dripping from them. atwood breathed with relief. "that's certainly better." now, if he could get her to lead him to the _xarite_ caves. "ah-lee. ah-lee." it was the sound of a guttural voice calling from the dimness of the rocks near at hand. the startled atwood turned to see a group of small stocky figures approaching. * * * * * the marlans. with ah-li gripping him he stood as the figures came forward and ranged themselves in a jabbering group around him and the girl. they were about five feet tall. cast somewhat in earth-human mould, with crooked heavy legs, and swart, putty-colored skin. the body was wide-shouldered, thick-chested. the round, hairless head was set low in a depression of the shoulders. the face was rough-hewn of feature, with up-turned snout-like nose, and small, watery reddish eyes. they walked with a sluggishness of heavy, solid tread. quite evidently their bodies were a wholly different density from that of earthmen. atwood guessed that here they weighed what might be called three hundred pounds; compared to which his own weight was ten or fifteen, and that of ah-li not more than five or eight. beside them, with their swinging, ponderous movements, atwood suddenly felt spindly and birdlike. how obvious now, that these primitive people would have accepted the beautiful little earthgirl as a goddess! her coming from the sky in a thing which struck the ground and burst into flame. her seeming miraculous ability to leap into the air. her size, and yet her lightness. her ability to swim; to leap into the vine-tops and run upon their frail swaying surface. certainly these marlans would sink like stones in this light water; they could leap no more than a heavy man could leap on earth. their weight chained them to the ground. "ah-lee...." one of them, slightly taller, less ponderous than the others, came forward, with a flood of words to the girl. she answered him in weird, guttural, unintelligible words, with gestures toward atwood at whom now they were all staring in awe. and then abruptly she added, in english: "a man-god has come to us, bohr." "that fellow understands english?" atwood put in. "yes. a little. i have taught him, since this time when i was born from the sky." "the language of the gods." bohr said heavily. "it, i understand. i am like a god too--" whatever plans atwood vaguely had made, were swept away now. there seemed not so much awe of him upon these jabbering, crowding marlans as curiosity. they were plucking at him now, with heavy, taloned hands feeling his arms, prodding at his ribs. and abruptly he realized the tremendous strength of these creatures. a ponderous power of muscles; a different quality of strength from that of any earthman. the realization sent a thrill of fear through atwood; mentally he cursed himself that he had not seized ah-li, rushed her to one of those caves for the _xarite_, and gotten away from this accursed place. but there was nothing he could do about it now. bohr and one of the others gripped him, leading him along, with ah-li excitedly beside them, and the crowd of jabbering marlans engulfing them. the crowd augmented as they progressed down the slope. it was fifty, then a hundred. and now he saw women. they were garbed much the same as the men--shorter, more flabby-looking bodies with wispy hair on their heads. their shrill voices mingled with the deeper tones of the men, as they pressed forward, some of them carrying children, all of them trying to get a glimpse of atwood. "you are to see our ruler, the great selah," ah-li said, as she walked beside him, clinging to him. "tonight, i am sure, you will be proclaimed a god." her young voice quivered. "our man-god." "all right, but look here--" atwood muttered. "you better get us out of this now. this crowd is getting pretty heavy." they were among the little mound-shaped houses. the narrow crooked streets were jammed with pressing people. "yes," ah-li agreed. "to my home first. and then the selah will send for you." in the marlan language she gave her commands to bohr. he seemed to assent. but in the light-radiance here which suffused the turmoil of the weird little village, atwood had a better look at the leader of these marlans. bohr was close beside him; and on the marlan's grotesque, ugly face, atwood saw an expression very strange. a sort of sidelong leer at atwood; and a look at ah-li that made atwood's heart pound. it was as though this bohr were sullenly resentful. as though something which he might have been planning was going wrong. and abruptly, as though with a premonition of menace, atwood recalled the only words of english which bohr had spoken: the language of the gods, he had said. "it, i understand. i am like a god too." ahead of them a larger dwelling loomed in the radiant glow. "my home," ah-li said. "we will go there, and wait." * * * * * ah-li's dwelling was a house seemingly of three mounds interlocked. a glow of dim purple radiance showed through its small window-openings. and there were upright ovals for doors. the milling crowd stood watching as they entered. there seemed three small rooms inside. amazement swept atwood. there was crude furniture here, woven of plaited vines--a table; chairs. a low little couch with dried leaves upon it. furniture almost in earth-style. "where did you get that?" atwood murmured as he surveyed it. "that? why, i made it. i do not know why, but that seemed the right thing to do." memories of her earth-life which were stirring in her, so vague that she did not recognize them. "you go now, bohr," ah-li added. atwood swung to find the marlan behind him. "yes," bohr said, "i will tell to the great-selah that the man-god has come." bohr's wide heavy jaws were chewing; and as he stood eyeing atwood, he swayed on his feet. "you chew the intoxicating weed?" ah-li said reproachfully. "that is not good, bohr. you want to be god-like--you should not do that." "i know it," he said. his gaze fell before hers. and then as he turned to leave the room, again his strange flashing look swept atwood, and there was hatred and menace in it. "we will eat now," ah-li said. "i have food here." it was a strange meal. the food was peculiar though palatable. but atwood hardly was aware of the food as he ate it. at the windows here he could see that marlans were watching them. others undoubtedly were watching the doors. there would be no chance, certainly not now, for him to get out, even though, once outside and free, he knew that no marlan possibly could catch him. nor had he the least chance of getting ah-li out. especially since she would probably be unwilling. "you have told them of the _genes_?" he heard himself saying. her voice sounded worried. "yes. they are putting the barrage up now." on impulse atwood went to one of the windows. the marlans there drew back, but stood at a little distance, staring at him. behind them, the weird, glowing little village was in a turmoil with the excitement of the coming of a man-god, and the news of the _genes_, the dread season of monsters again at hand. doubtless the word had spread. from the nearby smaller settlements, the people were hurrying here. the streets seemed more jammed than ever now; and out beyond the edge of the village, radiant beams of the purple light were standing up at intervals into the sky; spreading beams, intermingling to form the barrage curtain. atwood came back from the window. it faced the main village street. atwood was wondering if the other side might not face some space darker, more empty. that would be this adjoining room. "when do you think selah will send for us?" he demanded. "perhaps soon. perhaps later tonight." he gestured toward the room's inner doorway. "and that room there, that is for me, the man-god?" "yes," she agreed. "then i shall go there now. you call me if the selah wants us." triumph swept him as he reached the dim other room. he had lost his flash-gun in the tree-tops when he was chasing the girl. but he still had his other equipment. he discarded it all now save the little insulated cylinder slung over his shoulder, the cylinder in which he would store the precious _xarite_. the window-ovals here were dark. cautiously he went to one of them. there was a sort of garden outside, with beds great blossoms topping spindly stalks. a little forest of them, high as a man's head. to the left, a section of the village was visible; crowded with milling excited marlans. but to the right, beyond the garden there was dimness. the barrage at the outskirts of the village there, had not yet gone up. it should be possible to get out through this window; make a run through the shrouding flowers of the garden. atwood watched his chance. then, like a shadow, he was out of the window, sliding into the tall flower-clusters. every instant he feared that there would be an alarm; but there was not. then he was through the garden, skirting a dark edge of the town. the barrage was going up to the left of him, but its light did not reach him, and in a moment he was in the open country, with great sailing leaps bounding toward the hills and the caves of the _xarite_. * * * * * the little cave was a weird, intense glare of violet light. atwood had had no difficulty finding it; the glare streamed like an aura from its entrance, out into the night. the _xarite_, almost in a pure state, lay in great powdery heaps. atwood's hands were trembling as he scooped it up, filling his insulated cylinder, clamping down its lid. more than ever, a desperate haste was upon him now. so many things might be transpiring back in the village. and he realized too that his spaceship might be discovered. within a minute or two he was into the cave and out again, with his precious little cylinder slung on his back. he was more skillful at leaping now. ahead the circular barrage was complete now, a vertical violet curtain of light enclosing the village. it made the darkness out here on the rocks seem more intense by contrast. the dim landscape swayed weirdly with his flat sailing leaps. and suddenly, off to one side, he was aware that round blobs of yellow glow were appearing. the monster _genes_. with the season of their growth upon them, they were struggling up out of their microscopic invisible world. the night out here now was hideous with the throbbing, humming voices of the monsters. atwood's heart went cold. how would he get the girl out of this damnable place? he could think only that in some way he must quickly persuade her. together, running, leaping like this--or like birds following the flimsy forest-top which the _genes_ could not reach--he would be able to get her to the spaceship. with the purple barrage curtain close before him, atwood slowed up. then he came within the direct light-radiance; crawling almost flat to pass between two of the braziers. the glare blinded him. then he was through, rising to his feet. "so? here is the god--our man-god who was gone?" it was bohr's ironic, guttural voice. atwood had no chance to jump away. bohr, with a ponderous pounce, gripped him with the power of a machine. bohr and a dozen of his roistering men were here. "our man-god is late for the ceremony," bohr was leering. they were shoving atwood forward, along a village street crowded with jabbering marlans, across an edge of the village toward an open space, like a public square. the mound-dwellings bounded it on one side, and the barrage was on the other. the square was thronged with marlans, standing in jabbering groups, gazing toward the center where three platforms were erected. two were side by side, and one faced them. the two were empty. on the other a single marlan sat in a great cradle. the ruler-selah. his ponderous fat body was round with flesh. in the cradle he squatted like a huge toad. bohr's grip never for an instant had relaxed on atwood. "i am to be made a god now?" atwood murmured. "yes. the selah has decided." surely that was leering irony in bohr's heavy voice. where was ah-li? then, as atwood's captors shoved him toward the larger and higher of the two empty platforms, atwood saw the girl. slowly she was crossing the square. ah-li, robed now in a long flowing, bluish grass garment with a garland of flowers around her head. the goddess ah-li. the marlans, awed, bowed before her as she advanced, mounted the smaller platform and stood with her arms outstretched. the reflected glow of the barrage painted her face. apprehension was there. and then she saw atwood. relief swept her; and then an exaltation. the recognition of a man-god, with her to guide these people. then atwood, tense and alert, stood on the other platform, facing the ruler. he was some twenty feet from the girl, and five feet or so above her. "the man-god is here," bohr proclaimed in english. and then he seemed to be repeating it in the marlan language. the crowd was bowing now with foreheads to the ground. the selah spoke in a piping, cracked voice; and with a gesture ordered bohr from the platform. * * * * * alone, atwood faced the ruler and the prostrate throng. out of the corner of his eyes he could see ah-li standing stiffly erect, with arms outstretched as though in benediction. and as the selah now was intoning some ritual, atwood drew himself up and lifted his arms. but tensely, alertly he was watching. where was bohr? the big marlan seemed to have vanished. a dozen of bohr's men were in a little drunken group, their boistering voices suppressed now as they stood at the edge of the platform behind the selah's cradle. the barrage was close behind them. and as atwood's apprehensive gaze stared at the purple radiance, dimly behind it he could see that the _genes_ were crowding. attracted by the scent of the human crowd here, they had gathered outside the barrage. thousands of them--ghastly, tumbling, tentacled balls of saffron, milling one upon the other as they pressed forward. thousands? there could have been millions; a saffron sea of them out there. "the man-god will speak to us now." it was ah-li's voice, prompting him. atwood gathered his wits. he began to talk. what matter the words. he hardly knew what he was saying, for abruptly behind the ruler-selah, bohr had appeared. bohr with a knife in his hand. and in that same instant, with a ponderous leap he plunged the knife into the selah's bloated back! there was a second of ghastly startled silence. then chaos. the prostrate marlans gasped; then leaped to their feet, shouting, milling with terror and confusion. bohr's men from behind the platform leaped upon it. all of them with knives, plunging the blades into the ruler's puffed, toadlike body; and then standing, shouting at the crowd. it was a startled instant while atwood stood numbed. bohr again had vanished; and then suddenly he appeared on the platform with ah-li and was standing beside her, with his heavy arm around her as she sagged against him in terror. he, too, was shouting at the crowd now; and then he shouted in english: "i am the man-god! your man-god and the new ruler." all in a few seconds, and then atwood recovered his wits. like an awkward plunging bird he leaped from one platform to the other, landing full upon ah-li and the shouting bohr. it took bohr by surprise. atwood's body struck him full so that he rocked, staggered a little, his grip releasing the girl as wildly he flailed his arms to ward off this huge attacking thing clinging to him. the impact against bohr's solidity all but knocked the breath from atwood. he found himself hanging with feet off the ground as he clung. and desperately he fought for the knife. bohr's fingers in his confusion must have gripped it loosely; and abruptly atwood had it, stabbed it into bohr's face. gruesome thrust. it went slowly into the tough, heavy flesh as with all his strength atwood shoved it to the hilt. bohr screamed. his twitching arms pushed atwood a dozen feet away. with the knife still in his face and horrible ooze bubbling around it, he staggered and fell heavily from the platform. then he was up on his feet, staggering, half blinded doubtless--staggering toward the barrage. and his scream rang out, first in the marlan language and then in english: "not to be the man-god--" on the platform atwood gripped the shaking, terrified girl. "we've got to get away from here." "why--why this is terrible." "you listen to me! don't talk! if you don't run with me, then i'm going to carry you." he shook her. "we're going, you understand?" "not to be the man-god--" bohr's scream still rang over the turmoil. he had staggered, found himself at one of the barrage-braziers. and suddenly in a frenzy he overturned the brazier. its light went out. a slit of darkness leaped into the barrage. "not to be the man-god--" a frenzy of disappointment, disillusionment was in bohr's wild voice. all his plans now gone awry as he felt himself dying from the knifeblade in his head. a slit of darkness in the barrage.... and now bohr had staggered and overturned another brazier. it was his last act. he staggered and fell as through the widened dark slit, the hideous torrent of screaming, chattering saffron monsters rolled through. in a second bohr was engulfed. the milling marlans, shouting in wild terror now, were trying to run. ponderous, sluggish steps.... the horrible yellow torrent engulfed them. "ah-li! ah-li dear--" atwood gasped. the girl, fascinated with horror had been resisting him. "we've got to try to get away." "yes. oh, yes--i see it." she guided him. hand in hand they leaped--a great sailing leap that carried them across the square into a now almost deserted section of the village. and then another--over two or three of the mound-dwellings. another, and they went through the opposite side of the barrage. open country. the monsters were all rushing toward the barrage-break. with a leap atwood and ah-li went over a milling, tumbling group of a hundred of them. it was a wild, scrambling, leaping run.... the dark little spaceship lying flat on its hull-fins at the edge of the forest was a blessed haven to the panting, bruised atwood. [illustration: together they leaped. behind them, pouring through the break in the forcescreen, poured the monstrous _genes_.] "inside! quick now--" he gasped. _genes_ were here, rolling forward; monstrous bobs of saffron as atwood shoved the girl into the porte and slid its door. through the heavy bulls-eye pane the gathering monsters were a turgid yellow blur.... then the little ship was rising, with its rocket streams flaring out like a comet tail behind it. atwood and the girl--escaping gods, from a world which had become a purgatory. * * * * * in the control turret they sat, staring ahead at the great stars that glittered in the black firmament. the earth was a tiny glowing dot. "there it is," atwood said. "your world, and mine. we've got the _xarite_, ah-li. you wanted to do good on that little planetoid. there'll be plenty of chance, on earth." "and that is earth?" she murmured. "so small." "it's very big," he said smilingly. "you'll see. if only my father and dr. johns were alive now, to greet us as we come with the _xarite_. they worked so hard for this." "dr. johns?" she was staring at him, startled. and then suddenly on her face and in her eyes there was the light of memory. "dr. johns? why--why--" "yes?" he prompted. "try and think!" "dr. johns? why--_gloria_--yes, yes there was a gloria! why--that is my other name! his daughter--gloria johns--why, of course!" gloria johns.... "then your father and mine--they were friends," atwood murmured. the familiar scenes of earth would bring everything back to her. and ah-li, goddess of the planet, would be gone. there would just be gloria johns. they sat gazing at the immensity of space--at the tiny dot of light which was their great world waiting for them. exit from asteroid by d. l. james strange things were happening on echo, weird martian satellite. but none stranger than the two earthlings who hurtled into the star-lanes from its deep, hidden core. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories winter . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] echo is naturally magnetic, probably more so than any other planetoid--and neal bormon cursed softly, just to relieve his feelings, as that magnetism gripped the small iron plates on the soles of the rough boots with which the martians had provided him. slavery--and in the twenty-ninth century! it was difficult to conceive of it, but it was all too painfully true. his hands, inside their air-tight gauntlets, wadded into fists; little knots of muscle bulged along his lean jaw, and he stared at the darkness around him as if realizing it for the first time. this gang had plenty of guts, to shanghai men from the earth-mars transport lines. they'd never get by with it. and yet, they had--until now. first, keith calbur, and then himself. of course, there had been others before calbur, but not personal friends of neal bormon. men just disappeared. and you could do that in the martian spaceport of quessel without arousing much comment--unless you were a high official. but when calbur failed to show up in time for a return voyage to earth, bormon had taken up the search. vague clews had led him into that pleasure palace in quessel--a joint frequented alike by human beings and martians--a fantasmagoria of tinkling soul-lights; gossamer arms of frozen music that set your senses reeling when they floated near you; lyric forms that lived and danced and died like thoughts. then someone had crushed a bead of reverie-gas, probably held in a martian tentacle, under bormon's nostrils, and now--here he was on echo. he gave an angry yank at the chain which was locked around his left wrist. the other end was fastened to a large metal basket partly filled with lumps of whitish-gray ore, and the basket bobbed and scraped along behind him as he advanced. of the hundred or more earthmen, prisoners here on echo, only seven or eight were within sight of bormon, visible as mere crawling spots of light; but he knew that each was provided with a basket and rock-pick similar to his own. as yet he had not identified anyone of them as keith calbur. suddenly the metallic voice of a martian guard sounded in bormon's ears. "attention. one-seven-two. your basket is not yet half filled, your oxygen tank is nearly empty. you will receive no more food or oxygen until you deliver your quota of ore. get busy." "to hell with you!" fumed bormon--quite vainly, as he well knew, for the helmet of his space suit was not provided with voice-sending equipment. nevertheless, after a swift glance at the oxygen gauge, he began to swing his rock-pick with renewed vigor, pausing now and then to toss the loosened lumps of ore into the latticed basket. on earth, that huge container, filled with ore, would have weighed over a ton; here on echo its weight was only a few pounds. neal bormon had the average spaceman's dread of oxygen shortage. and so, working steadily, he at last had the huge basket filled with ore--almost pure rhodium--judging by the color and weight of the lumps. nearby, a jagged gash of light on the almost black shoulder of echo indicated the location of that tremendous chasm which cut two-thirds of the way through the small asteroid, and in which the martians had installed their machine for consuming ore. locating this gash of light, bormon set out toward it, dragging the basket of ore behind him over the rough, rocky surface. the ultimate purpose of that gargantuan mechanism, and why this side of the planetoid apparently never turned toward the sun, were mysteries with which his mind struggled but could not fathom. * * * * * presently, having reached the rim of the abyss, with only a narrow margin of oxygen left, he commenced the downward passage, his iron-shod boots clinging to the vertical wall of metallic rock, and as he advanced this magnetic attraction became ever more intense. the blaze of lights before him grew brighter and seemed to expand. dimly, two hundred yards over his head, he could glimpse the opposite wall of the chasm like the opposing jaw of an enormous vise. he joined the slow-moving stream of workers. they were filing past a guard and out on a narrow metal catwalk that seemed to be suspended--or rather poised--by thin rods in close proximity to a spacious disk which extended from wall to wall of the chasm. they moved in absolute silence. even when tilted ore-baskets dumped a ton or more ore into the gaping orifice in the center of the disk, there was still no sound--for echo, small and barren of native life, lacked even the suggestion of a sound-carrying atmosphere. and that weird soundlessness of the action around him brought a giddy sense of unreality to neal bormon. only the harsh, mechanical voice of the martian guard, intoning orders with cold and impersonal precision, seemed actually real. "attention. one-seven-two. dump your ore...." these earthmen were apparently known by numbers only. bormon's own number-- --was on a thin metal stencil stretched across the outer surface of the glass vision plate of his helmet; he couldn't forget it. he obeyed the martian's order. then he noticed that men with empty baskets were moving along a curved ramp, like a corkscrew, which led to a different level, whether above or below he could not possibly tell without a distinct mental effort. he decided it was to a lower level as he moved onward, for the huge disk lost its circularity and became like the curving wall of a cylinder, or drum, down the outside of which the ramp twisted. fresh ore was also being brought from this direction. and seeming to extend out indefinitely into blackness was a misty shaft, like the beam of a searchlight. presently the ramp gave way to a tunnel-like passage. flexible metal-sheathed tubes dangled from the ceiling. these tubes were labeled: oxygen, water, nutrient. * * * * * bormon, patterning the actions of those he observed around him began to replenish his supply of these three essentials to life. his space suit was of conventional design, with flasks in front for water and nutrient fluid, and oxygen tank across the shoulders. by attaching the proper tubes and opening valves--except the oxygen inlet valve, which was automatic--he soon had his suit provisioned to capacity. he had just finished this operation when someone touched his arm. he glanced up at the bulky, tall figure--an unmistakable form that even a month's sojourn on echo had not been able to rob of a certain virility and youthful eclat. for a moment they stared into each other's eyes through the vision plates of their helmets and bormon was struck dumb by the change, the stark and utterly nerve-fagged hopelessness expressed on keith calbur's features. then calbur tried to grin a welcome, and the effect was ghastly! for a moment his helmet clicked into contact with bormon's. "neal," he said, his voice sounding far away, "so they got you, too! we can't talk here.... i'm pretty well shot. lived in this damn walking tent for ages. no sleep, not since they took me.... some powder, drug, they put in the nutrient fluid--it's supposed to take the place of sleep--and you can't sleep! only it doesn't.... you come along with me." the darkness swallowed them up. bormon had thrown his rock-pick into his empty basket. and now, by keeping one hand in contact with calbur's basket, as it bobbed and jerked on ahead, he was able, even in the inky blackness, to keep from straying aside. after seemingly interminable groping and stumbling, calbur's light flashed on. they had entered a pocket in the rocks, bormon realized, a small cavern whose walls would prevent the light from betraying their presence to the guard. calbur threw himself exhaustedly down, signifying that bormon should do likewise, and with their helmets touching, a strange conversation ensued. bormon explained, as well as he was able, his presence there. "when you didn't show up, keith, in time to blast for earth," he said, "all we could do was to report your absence to the space police. but they're swamped; too many disappearances lately. moreover, they're trying to relocate that stream of meteoric matter which wrecked a freighter some time back. they know something is in the wind, but they'll never guess this! for weeks they've had the patrol ship, _alert_, scouting around mars. so, after making the run to earth and back to mars--i had to do that, you know--i got back in quessel again and commenced to pry around, sort of inviting the same thing to happen to me that had happened to you--and here we are." "we're here for keeps, looks like," answered calbur grimly, his voice having lost part of that overtone of strained nerves. "a man doesn't last long, so the other prisoners say, two months at the most. these marts use earthmen because we're tougher, here at least, and last longer than marts.... hell, what wouldn't i give for a smoke!" "but the purpose, keith? what's the scheme?" "i thought you knew. just marts with fighting ideas--a crowd backed by wealthy, middle-class martians who call themselves lords of conquest. they're building ships, weapons. first, they're going to take over mars from the present government, which is friendly to earth, and then they're going to subdue earth." * * * * * calbur had switched off his light, as a matter of precaution, and his voice came to bormon from a seemingly far distant point--a voice from out of the darkness, fraught with fantastic suggestion. "ships? you say they're building ships? where?" bormon asked, his own voice reverberating harshly within the confines of his helmet. "in a cavern they've blasted out near the south magnetic pole of mars. you know that's an immense, barren region--lifeless, cold--bordered on the north by impenetrable reed thickets. they need rhodium in large quantities for hull alloys and firing chambers. that's why they're mining it, here on echo." "they'll never get it to mars," bormon declared quickly. "every freighter is checked and licensed by the joint governments of earth and mars." "they won't?" calbur laughed, distantly. "listen, neal--every crateful of ore that's dumped into their machine, here on echo, gets to mars within a few hours. and it isn't carried by ships, either!" "you mean--?" "i didn't get the answer, myself, until i'd been here for some time. you see, echo is just a gob of metal--mostly magnetite, except for these granules of rhodium--forty miles in diameter, but far from round. then there's that chasm, a mammoth crack that's gaped open, cutting the planetoid almost in half. the whole thing is magnetic--like a terrestrial lodestone--and there's a mighty potent field of force across that gap in the chasm. the walls are really poles of a bigger magnet than was ever built by martians or human being. and of what does a big magnet remind you?" after a moment of thought, bormon replied, "cyclotronic action." there was a short silence, then calbur resumed. "these marts shoot the ore across space to the south magnetic pole of mars. a ground crew gathers it up and transports it to their underground laboratories. as a prisoner explained it, it was simple; those old-time cyclotrons used to build up the velocity of particles, ions mostly, by whirling them in spiral orbits in a vacuum-enclosed magnetic field. well, there's a vacuum all around echo, and clear to mars. by giving these lumps of ore a static charge, they act just like ions. when the stream of ore comes out of the machine, it passes through a magnetic lens which focuses it like a beam of light on mars' south pole. and there you have it. maybe you saw what looked like a streak of light shooting off through the chasm. that's the ore stream. it comes out on the day side of echo, and so on to mars. they aim it by turning the whole planetoid." "hm-m-m, i understand, now, why it's always dark here--they keep this side of echo facing away from mars and the sun." "right," said calbur. "now we'll have to move. these marts are heartless. they'll let you die for lack of oxygen if you don't turn in baskets of ore regularly. but we'll meet here again." "just give me time to size things up," bormon agreed. the effects of the reverie-gas was wearing off and he was beginning to feel thoroughly alive again and aware of the serious situation which confronted them. "don't let it get you down, keith," he added. "we'll find a way out." but his words expressed a confidence that the passing of time did not justify. again and again he filled his ore-basket, dragged it to the hungry mouth of that prodigious mechanism in the abyss, and in return he received the essentials for continued life. during this time he formed a better idea of conditions around him. once he wandered far from the martian's headquarters, so far that he nearly blinded himself in the raw sunlight that bombarded the day side of the tiny planetoid. again, he was strangely comforted with the discovery of a small space ship anchored deep in the abyss although he was not permitted to go near it. * * * * * he soon found that nothing was to be expected of the horde of earthmen who slaved like automatons over the few miles of echo immediately adjacent to the chasm's rim. the accumulative effect of the drug seemed to render them almost insensible of existence. but with calbur, who had served for a shorter time, it was different. "keith, we've got to tackle one of the mart guards," bormon told him, during one of their conferences in the cave. "we'll take its ray-tubes, fight our way to that ship they've cached in the chasm below the cyclotron power plant, and blast away from here." "how?" asked calbur. "if you make a move toward one, it'll burn you down--i've seen it happen!" "listen, i've spent hours figuring this out. suppose one of us were to stay here in this cave, helmet-light on, and near enough to the opening so that his light would show dimly on the outside. wouldn't a mart guard be sure to come along to investigate?" "yes, practically sure," agreed calbur, but with no great interest. hour by hour he was sinking closer to that animate coma which gripped the other earthmen. "but what would that get you? if you lose too much time, you'll be cut off from rations." "i know, but suppose also that one of us--i, for instance--was hiding in the rocks above the cave, with a big chunk of ore, ready to heave it down on the mart?" calbur seemed to be thinking this over, and for a moment there was silence. "when shall we try it?" he demanded suddenly, and there was a note of eagerness and hope in his voice. "it's simple enough. it might actually work." "right now! if we put it off, it'll soon be too late." they discussed details, laying their plans carefully, bormon prudently refraining any suggestion that this move was one born of sheer desperation on his part. everything settled, calbur moved up near the opening, so that his helmet-light could be dimly seen from outside the cave. bormon, dragging his ore-basket, climbed up in the rocks directly over the entrance, and presently found concealment that suited him. near at hand he placed a loose chunk of rock which on earth would have weighed perhaps eighty pounds. the trap was set. he settled himself to wait. his own light was, of course, extinguished. far off he could see crawling blobs of luminance as guards and human workers moved slowly over the surface of echo. otherwise stygian darkness surrounded him. but he had chosen a position which, he hoped, would not be revealed by the light of any martian bent on investigating the cave. there were, he had learned, actually less than a score of martians here on echo; about half of them stayed around that cyclotronic ore-hurler in the chasm. they depended on secrecy, and were in constant communication, by ether-wave, with spies not only on earth and mars but among the personnel of the space police itself. these spies were in a position to warn them to shut down operations in case the ore stream through space attracted notice and was in danger of being investigated. it was all being conducted with true martian insidiousness. thus bormon's thoughts were wandering when, at last, he became aware that a martian guard was approaching. his cramped muscles suddenly grew tense. his heart began to pound; it was now or never--and he must not fail! * * * * * the martian, reeling along rapidly on the mechanical legs attached to its space armor, appeared to suspect nothing. it approached amid a rosette of light which seemed to chase back the shadows into a surrounding black wall. it had evidently seen the gleam of calbur's helmet-light, for it was heading directly toward the mouth of the cave above which bormon crouched. the moment for action arrived. tense as a tirhco spring, bormon leaped erect, hurled the jagged lump of rock down on the rounded dome of the martian's armor. then, without pausing to ascertain the result, he grasped the rim of his ore-basket and swinging it in a wide arc before him, leaped downward-- for a moment martian, basket and earthman were in a mad tangle. bormon realized that the martian had been toppled over, and that one of its ray-tubes was sending out a coruscating plume of fire as it ate into the rocks. the moment seemed propitious to bormon! hands gripping and searching desperately, he found the oddly-shaped clamp that bound the two halves of the martian's space armor together--and released it. there was a hiss of escaping gas. abruptly those metal handlers ceased to thrash about.... bormon, thrilling with success, rose to his feet, turned off the martian's ray-tube just as calbur, delayed with having to drag his ore-basket, through the rather narrow opening, dashed into view. there was no need for words. bormon handed him a ray-tube. within a matter of seconds, each had burned through a link of the chain around his wrist. they were free from those accursed baskets! calbur secreted the weapon in a pouch of his space suit, then swiftly they set to work, for their next move had been carefully planned. opening the armor fully, they began to remove the dead martian, puffed up like a kernel of pop-corn by the sudden loss of its air pressure. having cleared the armor, bormon climbed inside--space suit and all--folding up like a pocket knife so as to resemble somewhat the alien shape it was intended to hold, and tested the semi-automatic controls. everything appeared to be in working order. assuring himself of this as well as his knowledge of martian mechanics would permit, he crawled out again to help calbur. calbur was scrambling to collect ore. and under their combined efforts one of the baskets was presently filled--for the last time, bormon fervently hoped! again he entered that strange conveyance, the martian's armor, and after some experimental manipulation of the push-button controls, managed to get the thing upright on its jointed, metal legs and start it moving awkwardly in the direction of the chasm. behind him came calbur, dragging the basket of ore--for lacking a disguise such as bormon's, he must have some excuse for returning to the cabin, and he had wrapped the chain around his wrist to conceal the fact that it had been severed. bormon, in the narrow confines of his armor, disconnected the mechanical voder used by its deposed owner, for all martians are voiceless. his greatest fear was that one of the martian guards would attempt to communicate with him. this would disclose the imposture immediately, since he would be unable to reply. for all martian communication, even by ether-wave, is visual--the medium being a complicated series of symbols based on their ancient sign language, the waving of tentacles, which no human brain has ever fully understood. the means of producing these conventionalized symbols was a tiny keyboard, just below an oval, silvery screen, and as bormon sent his odd conveyance stalking down the side of the chasm, toward that sweeping disk which he now knew to be formed by the ends of two cyclotronic d-chambers facing each other, he kept one eye on this silvery screen, but it remained blank. he moved on down past the catwalk to the lower ramp. here he must pass close to a martian guard. but this martian seemed to give him no attention whatever. reaching a point opposite the ship, bormon stepped from the ramp. still that oval screen remained blank. no martian was apparently paying enough attention to him to question his movements. again he caused the armor to advance slowly, picking his way along the rock surface. he reached the ship. for a moment he was hidden behind the hull. one glance sent his hopes plunging utterly. neither of the two fuel caps were clamped down, which could mean but one thing--the ship's tanks were empty! it was a stunning blow. no wonder the martians felt safe in leaving the ship practically unguarded. after a moment, anger began to mount above bormon's disappointment. he would start to kill off martians! if he and calbur couldn't get away from echo, then he'd see that at least some of these marts didn't either. he might even wipe them all out. calbur, too, had a ray-tube. but what of calbur? quickly bormon moved from behind the ship. calbur was loitering on the ramp, ore-basket empty, evidently on the point of making a break to join him. frantically, bormon focused the ether-wave on calbur's helmet, hurling a warning. "stay where you are. it's a washout! no fuel...." he began moving across the rocks toward the power-plant. that was the most likely spot to commence--more marts close at hand. he'd take them by surprise. suddenly he was cold, calculating, purposeful. after all, there wasn't much chance of wiping them all out--and yet he might. he should strike at a vital point, cripple them, so as to give calbur and the others a chance in case he only managed to kill a few before passing out of the picture. a glittering neutrochrome helix on top of the power-plant gave him a suggestion. why not destroy their communications, fix things so they couldn't call for help from mars? * * * * * abruptly he realized something was wrong. that silver oval six inches from his face was flashing a bewildering complexity of symbols. simultaneously the martian on the ramp began to move quickly and questioningly toward him. the moment had arrived. bormon swung the metal handler bearing the ray-tube into line and pressed the firing button.... amid a splatter of coruscating sparks the martian went down. "number one!" growled bormon. everything now depended on prompt action and luck--mostly luck! as quickly as possible he heeled around, aimed at the helix on the power-plant. it swayed slowly as that pale blue shaft ate into its supports, then drifted away. he had lost sight of calbur. absolute silence still reigned, but on airless echo that silence was portentous. along the rim of the chasm he could see the glitter of martian armor against the blackness of space. the alarm had been given. but for the moment he was more concerned with the imminent danger from those who tended the intricate controls in the power-plant, and the guard at the far end of the catwalk. this guard was protected by the catwalk itself and the stream of earthmen slaves still moving uncomprehendingly along it. bormon sent his space armor reeling forward, intent on seeking shelter behind the bulk of the power-plant. he almost reached that protection. but suddenly sparks plumed around him, and his armor slumped forward--one leg missing. he fell, fortunately, just within the shelter of the power-plant. desperately he struggled to open the armor, so as to get the ray-tube in his own hand. but when he finally crawled forth it was to face three martians grouped around him, their weapons--six in number--unwaveringly centered on him. "earthman," said the mechanical speaker coldly inside his helmet, "you have killed a martian." and then, with true martian decisiveness and cruelty, they pronounced inhuman judgment on him. "we in our kindness shall not immediately demand your life as forfeit. you shall wander unhindered over echo, dying slowly, until your oxygen is gone. do not ask for more; it is sealed from you. do not again enter the chasm; it is death to you. now go." * * * * * hours later bormon was indeed wandering, hopeless as a lost soul, over nighted echo, awaiting the consummation of his sentence, which now seemed very near. already his oxygen gauge indicated zero and he was face to face with the "dying slowly" process promised by the martians--the terrible death of suffocation. now, as things began to seem vague and unreal around him, bormon was drawing near that hidden cave where he and calbur had often met for like a final flash of inspiration had come the thought that here, if anywhere, he would find calbur. it was strange, he reflected, how the life in a man forces him on and on, always hoping, to the very end. for now it seemed that the most important thing in the universe was to find calbur. he had husbanded the last of his oxygen to the utmost. but panting, now, for breath, he opened the valve a fraction of a turn and staggered on in the darkness. and suddenly, dimly as in a dream, he knew that at last he had found calbur.... and calbur was doing a queer thing. gauntleted hands moving hastily in the chalky radiance cast by his helmet-light, he was tossing chunks of rhodium from his filled ore-basket-- then their helmets clicked together, and he heard calbur's voice, faint, urgent: "climb in the basket! i'll cover you with ore so they won't see you. i'll drag you in. well get your tank filled--i swear it!" the next instant, it seemed, bormon felt himself being tumbled into the ore-basket. chunks of ore began pressing down lightly on his body. then the basket commenced to pitch and scrape over the rocks. but his lungs were bursting! could he last? he had to. he couldn't fool calbur by passing out--not now. something like destiny was working, and he'd have to see it through. something was tapping on his helmet. bormon opened his eyes, and light was trickling down between the chunks of ore. no longer was there any scraping vibrations. something, metallic, snakelike, was being pressed into his hand. and then bormon remembered. the oxygen tube! with a final rallying of forces only partly physical, he managed to stab the tube over the intake of his tank. the automatic valve clicked and a stream of pure delight swept into his lungs! for a time he lay there, his body trembling with the exquisite torture of vitality reawakening, slowly closing the helmet-valve to balance the increase of pressure in the tank. suddenly that snakelike tube was jerked away from between the chunks of ore, and again the basket began a scraping advance. bormon's new lease on life brought its problems. what was about to happen? in a moment, now, calbur would be ordered by the guard to dump his ore. they wouldn't have a chance, there on the catwalk. for bormon's abrupt reappearance would bring swift extinction, probably to both. the basket stopped. they had reached the ore-dump. calbur's head and shoulders appeared. behind the vision plate in his helmet there was a queer, set expression on his thin face. he thrust the ray-tube into bormon's hands. bormon sprang erect, leaped from the basket. for a moment he stared around, locating the guard at the end of the catwalk. as yet the guard appeared not to have noticed anything unusual. but where was calbur? "attention. one-six-nine. dump your ore," ordered the guard, coldly, mechanically. something seemed to draw bormon's eyes into focus on his own number stencil. one-six-nine, he read. calbur's number! and then, suddenly, he realized the dreadful, admirable thing keith calbur had done.... for calbur had leaped through the ore-chute, into the cyclotron's maelstromic heart! despairing, he had chosen a way out. he had forfeited his life so that bormon could take his place. "dump your ore," repeated the martian guard, coldly. "to hell with you!" snarled bormon, and blasted with the tube. he missed the martian. still weakened by the ordeal he had just passed through, and overwrought as an effect of calbur's last despairing act, his aim was not true. nevertheless, that coruscating shaft was fraught with far-reaching consequence. passing three feet to the left of the martian, it snapped two of the rods which braced the catwalk in position over the cyclotron drum. thus released at the far end, the metal ribbon--for the catwalk was little more than that--curled and twisted like a tirhco spring, pitching bormon, as from a catapult, straight along the path so recently chosen by calbur. destiny had indeed provided them both with a strange exit from echo, for in that split second bormon realized that he was being hurled squarely into the gaping orifice of the cyclotron. * * * * * far out in the vacuity between echo and mars, captain dunstan sat in his cabin aboard the patrol ship _alert_--most powerful and, therefore, speediest craft possessed by the earth-mars space police. on his desk lay two jagged pieces of ore, whitish-gray in color, which he had been examining. his speculations were interrupted by the sudden bursting open of the cabin door. an officer, spruce in gray uniform and silver braid, entered hurriedly, his face flushed with excitement. "captain dunstan, the most extraordinary thing has happened! we've just picked up two men--two men drifting with the meteoric stream, and in space suits--and they're alive!" captain dunstan rose slowly. "alive, and adrift in space? then it's the first such occurrence in the history of space travel! who are they?" "i don't know, sir. so far we've got only one out of his suit. but i have reason to believe they're the men recently reported as missing by the e.m.t. lines. he babbled something about echo--that there's hell to pay on echo. i imagine he means asteroid no. . but--" "lead the way," said the captain, stepping quickly toward the doorway. "there's something mighty queer going on." * * * * * and so, by a lucky break, neal bormon found himself snatched from death and aboard the _alert_, arriving there by a route as hazardous and strange as was ever experienced by spaceman. and no less strange and unexpected came the knowledge of keith calbur's arrival there ahead of him. bormon, who was last to be drawn in by the grapple-ray and helped out of his space suit by the willing hands of the _alert's_ crew, was still capable of giving an understandable account of things; although calbur, until the effects of the martian drug wore off, would be likely to remain in his somewhat neurotic condition of bewilderment. "these marts," said bormon, after a great deal of explaining on both sides, "don't know that you have discovered their stream of ore. they won't know it until their communications have been repaired." captain dunstan nodded. "that explains why we were able, on this occasion, to approach the meteoric stream without its immediate disappearance. but i cannot understand," he confessed, "how two men could have passed through such an apparatus as you describe, and remain alive." "perhaps i can offer a possible explanation," said an officer whose insignia was that of chief electrobiologist. "if, as we suspect, this martian invention is founded on the old and well-known cyclotronic principle, then we have nothing but reciprocal interaction of electric fields and magnetic fields. and these fields, as such, are entirely harmless to living organisms, just as harmless as gravitational fields. moreover, any static charge carried by the bodies of these men would have been slowly dissipated through the grapple-ray with which they were drawn out of the ore stream." this explanation appeared to satisfy the captain. "you say," he questioned, addressing bormon, "that there are other men on echo--earthmen being used as slaves?" "yes, more than a hundred." captain dunstan's mouth became a fighting, grim line. he gave several swift orders to his officers, who scattered immediately. somewhat later, bormon found his way into the surgery where calbur lay--not sleeping yet, but resting peacefully. assuring himself of this, bormon, too, let his long frame slump down on a near-by cot--not to sleep, either, but to contemplate pleasantly the wiping-up process soon to take place on echo, and elsewhere. the monster maker by ray bradbury "get gunther," the official orders read. it was to laugh! for click and irish were marooned on the pirate's asteroid--their only weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories spring . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] suddenly, it was there. there wasn't time to blink or speak or get scared. click hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a damned sweet picture of everything that was happening. the picture of marnagan hunched huge over the control-console, wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. and out in the dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this meteor coming like blazing fury. click hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's skin. and then the meteor hit. it made a spiked fist and knocked the rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round. there was plenty of noise. too damned much. hathaway only knew he was picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that marnagan wasn't long in following, swearing loud words. click remembered hanging on to his camera and gritting to keep holding it. what a sweet shot that had been of the meteor! a sweeter one still of marnagan beating hell out of the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now. it got quiet. it got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids rushing up, cold, blue and hard. you could hear your heart kicking a tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs. stars, asteroids revolved. click grabbed marnagan because he was the nearest thing, and held on. you came hunting for a space-raider and you ended up cradled in a slab-sized irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of metal death. what a fade-out! "irish!" he heard himself say. "is this it?" "is this _what_?" yelled marnagan inside his helmet. "is this where the big producer yells cut!?" marnagan fumed. "i'll die when i'm damned good and ready. and when i'm ready i'll inform you and you can picture me profile for cosmic films!" they both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones. the ship struck, once. bouncing, it struck again. it turned end over and stopped. hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and marnagan rattled around--human dice in a croupier's cup. the shell of the ship burst, air and energy flung out. hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking quick crazy, unimportant things. the best scenes in life never reach film, or an audience. like this one, dammit! like _this_ one! his brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his camera. * * * * * silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it. hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked to his mid-belt. there was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. he wriggled out of the wreckage into that silence. he didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. he stood there, thinking "well, i'll at least have a few good scenes on film. i'll--" a hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. marnagan elevated seven feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck. "hold it!" cracked hathaway's high voice. marnagan froze. the camera whirred. "low angle shot; interplanetary patrolman emerges unscathed from asteroid crackup. swell stuff. i'll get a raise for this!" "from the toe of me boot!" snarled marnagan brusquely. oxen shoulders flexed inside his vac-suit. "i might've died in there, and you nursin' that film-contraption!" hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "i never thought of that. marnagan die? i just took it for granted you'd come through. you always have. funny, but you don't think about dying. you try not to." hathaway stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he couldn't tell if it was shaking. muscles in his bony face went down, pale. "where are we?" "a million miles from nobody." they stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars. overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look sick. "if we walk in opposite directions, click hathaway, we'd be shaking hands the other side of this rock in two hours." marnagan shook his mop of dusty red hair. "and i promised the boys at luna base this time i'd capture that gunther lad!" his voice stopped and the silence spoke. hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "i checked my oxygen, irish. sixty minutes of breathing left." the silence punctuated that sentence, too. upon the sharp meteoric rocks hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply mashed and scattered. they were lucky to have escaped. or _was_ suffocation a better death...? _sixty minutes._ they stood and looked at one another. "damn that meteor!" said marnagan, hotly. hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. he said it out: "somebody tossed that meteor, irish. i took a picture of it, looked it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot. space-meteors are never hot and glowing. if it's proof you want, i've got it here, on film." marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "it's not proof we need now, click. oxygen. and then _food_. and then some way back to earth." hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "this is gunther's work. he's here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us. oh, god, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back to earth. i.p.'s irish marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate whose dirty face has never been seen, gunther by name, finally wins through to a triumphant finish. photographed on the spot, in color, by yours truly, click hathaway. cosmic films, please notice." * * * * * they started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a bony ridge of metal. they kept their eyes wide and awake. there wasn't much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting. marnagan said, "we're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. we got fifty minutes to prove you're right. after that--right or wrong--you'll be cosmic films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. but talk all you like, click. it's times like this when we all need words, any words, on our tongues. you got your camera and your scoop. talk about it. as for me--" he twisted his glossy red face. "keeping alive is me hobby. and this sort of two-bit death i did not order." click nodded. "gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, irish. it's irony clean through. that's probably why he planned the meteor and the crash this way." marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far down, and the green eyes blazed. they stopped, together. "oops!" click said. "hey!" marnagan blinked. "did you feel _that_?" hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and limbless, suddenly. "irish! we lost weight, coming over that ridge!" they ran back. "let's try it again." they tried it. they scowled at each other. the same thing happened. "gravity should not act this way, click." "are you telling me? it's man-made. better than that--it's gunther! no wonder we fell so fast--we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up! gunther'd do anything to--did i say _anything_?" hathaway leaped backward in reaction. his eyes widened and his hand came up, jabbing. over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable horrors. progeny from frankenstein's ark. immense crimson beasts with numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along in the air. fangs caught starlight white on them. hathaway yelled and ran, marnagan at his heels, lumbering. sweat broke cold on his body. the immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed after him. a blast of light. marnagan, firing his proton-gun. then, in click's ears, the irishman's incredulous bellow. the gun didn't hurt the creatures at all. "irish!" hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline toward the mouth a small cave. "this way, fella!" hathaway made it first, marnagan bellowing just behind him. "they're too big; they can't get us in here!" click's voice gasped it out, as marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him. instinctively, hathaway added, "asteroid monsters! my camera! what a scene!" "damn your damn camera!" yelled marnagan. "they might come in!" "use your gun." "they got impervious hides. no use. gahh! and that was a pretty chase, eh, click?" "yeah. sure. _you_ enjoyed it, every moment of it." "i did that." irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "now, what will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?" "let me think--" "lots of time, little man. forty more minutes of air, to be exact." * * * * * they sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. hathaway felt funny about something; didn't know what. something about these monsters and gunther and-- "which one will you be having?" asked irish, casually. "a red one or a blue one?" hathaway laughed nervously. "a pink one with yellow ruffles--good god, now you've got _me_ doing it. joking in the face of death." "me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have irish luck." that didn't please the photographer. "i'm an anglo-swede," he pointed out. marnagan shifted uneasily. "here, now. you're doing nothing but sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take me a profile shot of the beasties and myself." hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "what in hell's the use? all this swell film shot. nobody'll ever see it." "then," retorted marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while waitin' for the u.s. cavalry to come riding over the hill to our rescue!" hathaway snorted. "u.s. cavalry." marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "snap me this pose," he said. "i paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped, my capture of gunther, now the least you can do is record peace negotiations betwixt me and these pixies." marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. hathaway knew the superficial palaver for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running around in that red-cropped skull. hathaway played the palaver, too, but his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals. montage. marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. marnagan smiling for the camera. marnagan in profile. marnagan looking grim, without much effort, for the camera. and then, a closeup of the thrashing death wall that holed them in. click took them all, those shots, not saying anything. nobody fooled nobody with this act. death was near and they had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts. when click finished filming, irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it up arguing about gunther. click came back at him: "gunther drew us down here, sure as ceres! that gravity change we felt back on that ridge, irish; that proves it. gunther's short on men. so, what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. space war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory is lousy over long distances. so what's the best weapon, which dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men? super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. saves all around. it's a good front, this damned iron pebble. from it, gunther strikes unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. a subtle hand, with all aces." marnagan rumbled. "where is the dirty son, then!" "he didn't have to appear, irish. he sent--them." hathaway nodded at the beasts. "people crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from wounds caused at the crackup. if they survive all that--the animals tend to them. it all looks like nature was responsible. see how subtle his attack is? looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the patrol happens to land and finds us. no reason for undue investigation, then." "i don't see no base around." * * * * * click shrugged. "still doubt it? okay. look." he tapped his camera and a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. holding it up, he stripped it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it developed, smiling. it was one of his best inventions. self-developing film. the first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical, leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the impressions. quick stuff. inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base, click handed the whole thing over. "look." marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "ah, click. now, now. this is one lousy film you invented." "huh?" "it's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid monsters complete." "what!" hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again: pictures in montage; marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally with _nothing_; marnagan shooting his gun at _nothing_; marnagan pretending to be happy in front of _nothing_. then, closeup--of--nothing! the monsters had failed to image the film. marnagan was there, his hair like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it. maybe-- hathaway said it, loud: "irish! irish! i think i see a way out of this mess! here--" he elucidated it over and over again to the patrolman. about the film, the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. if the film said the monsters weren't there, they weren't there. "yeah," said marnagan. "but step outside this cave--" "if my theory is correct i'll do it, unafraid," said click. marnagan scowled. "you sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or infra-red or something that won't come out on film?" "nuts! any color _we_ see, the camera sees. we've been fooled." "hey, where _you_ going?" marnagan blocked hathaway as the smaller man tried pushing past him. "get out of the way," said hathaway. marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "if anyone is going anywhere, it'll be me does the going." "i can't let you do that, irish." "why not?" "you'd be going on my say-so." "ain't your say-so good enough for me?" "yes. sure. of course. i guess--" "if you say them animals ain't there, that's all i need. now, stand aside, you film-developing flea, and let an irishman settle their bones." he took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist except under an inch of porous metal plate. "your express purpose on this voyage, hathaway, is taking films to be used by the patrol later for teaching junior patrolmen how to act in tough spots. first-hand education. poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me profile a scan. this is lesson number seven: daniel walks into the lion's den." "irish, i--" "shut up and load up." hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it. "ready, click?" "i--i guess so," said hathaway. "and remember, think it hard, irish. think it hard. there aren't any animals--" "keep me in focus, lad." "all the way, irish." "what do they say...? oh, yeah. action. lights. camera!" marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one, two, three, four steps out into the outside world. the monsters were waiting for him at the fifth step. marnagan kept walking. right out into the middle of them.... * * * * * that was the sweetest shot hathaway ever took. marnagan and the monsters! only now it was only marnagan. no more monsters. marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "hey, click, look at me! i'm in one piece. why, hell, the damned things turned tail and ran away!" "ran, hell!" cried hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and animated. "they just plain vanished. they were only imaginative figments!" "and to think we let them hole us in that way, click hathaway, you coward!" "smile when you say that, irish." "sure, and ain't i always smilin'? ah, click boy, are them tears in your sweet grey eyes?" "damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "why don't they put window-wipers in these helmets?" "i'll take it up with the board, lad." "forget it. i was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one hunk, i couldn't help--look, now, about gunther. those animals are part of his set-up. explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back into their ships, forced to take off. tourists and the like. nothing suspicious about animals. and if the tourists don't leave, the animals kill them." "shaw, now. those animals can't kill." "think not, mr. marnagan? as long as we believed in them they could have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. if that isn't being dangerous--" the irishman whistled. "but, we've got to _move_, irish. we've got twenty minutes of oxygen. in that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source, gunther's base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." click attached his camera to his mid-belt. "gunther probably thinks we're dead by now. everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never had a chance to disbelieve them." "if it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, click--" "coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident--" click stopped and felt his insides turning to water. he shook his head and felt a film slip down over his eyes. he spread his legs out to steady himself, and swayed. "i--i don't think my oxygen is as full as yours. this excitement had me double-breathing and i feel sick." marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "hold tight, click. the guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach." "hold tight, hell, let's move. we've got to find where those animals came from! and the only way to do that is to get the animals to come back!" "come back? how?" "they're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we believe in them again, they'll return." marnagan didn't like it. "won't--won't they kill us--if they come--if we believe in 'em?" hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "not if we believe in them to a _certain point_. psychologically they can both be seen and felt. we only want to _see_ them coming at us again." "_do_ we, now?" "with twenty minutes left, maybe less--" "all right, click, let's bring 'em back. how do we do it?" hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "just think--i will see the monsters again. i will see them again and i will not feel them. think it over and over." marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "and--what if i forget to remember all that? what if i get excited...?" hathaway didn't answer. but his eyes told the story by just looking at irish. marnagan cursed. "all right, lad. let's have at it!" the monsters returned. * * * * * a soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming in malevolent anticipation about the two men. "this way, irish. they come from this way! there's a focal point, a sending station for these telepathic brutes. come on!" hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them. marnagan was making good progress ahead of hathaway. but he stopped and raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "click! this one here! it's real!" he fell back and something struck him down. his immense frame slammed against rock, noiselessly. hathaway darted forward, flung his body over marnagan's, covered the helmet glass with his hands, shouting: "marnagan! get a grip, dammit! it's not real--don't let it force into your mind! it's not real, i tell you!" "click--" marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass. "click--" he was fighting hard. "i--i--sure now. sure--" he smiled. "it--it's only a shanty fake!" "keep saying it, irish. keep it up." marnagan's thick lips opened. "it's only a fake," he said. and then, irritated, "get the hell off me, hathaway. let me up to my feet!" hathaway got up, shakily. the air in his helmet smelled stale, and little bubbles danced in his eyes. "irish, _you_ forget the monsters. let me handle them, i know how. they might fool you again, you might forget." marnagan showed his teeth. "gah! let a flea have all the fun? and besides, click, i like to look at them. they're pretty." the outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on. evidently the telepathic source lay there. they approached it warily. "we'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed irish. "i'll go ahead, draw their attention, maybe get captured. then, _you_ show up with _your_ gun...." "i haven't got one." "we'll chance it, then. you stick here until i see what's ahead. they probably got scanners out. let them see me--" and before hathaway could object, marnagan walked off. he walked about five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved up, and there was a door opening in the rock. his voice came back across the distance, into click's earphones. "a door, an air-lock, click. a tunnel leading down inside!" then, marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. click heard the thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring. click sucked in his breath, hard and fast. "all right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different radio. one of gunther's guards. three shots sizzled out, and marnagan bellowed. the strange harsh voice said, "that's better. don't try and pick that gun up now. oh, so it's you. i thought gunther had finished you off. how'd you get past the animals?" click started running. he switched off his _sending_ audio, kept his _receiving_ on. marnagan, weaponless. _one_ guard. click gasped. things were getting dark. had to have air. air. air. he ran and kept running and listening to marnagan's lying voice: "i tied them pink elephants of gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" marnagan said. "but, damn you, they killed my partner before he had a chance!" the guard laughed. * * * * * the air-lock door was still wide open when click reached it, his head swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. he let himself down in, quiet and soft. he didn't have a weapon. he didn't have a weapon. oh, damn, damn! a tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that yellow glare. marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked, air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. and the guard, a proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. the guard had his profile toward hathaway, his lips twisting: "i think i'll let you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "that what gunther wanted, anway. a nice sordid death." hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him. "don't move!" he snapped. "i've got a weapon stronger than yours. one twitch and i'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind you! freeze!" the guard whirled. he widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped his gun to the floor. "get his gun, irish." marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward. hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "thanks for posing," he said. "that shot will go down in film history for candid acting." "what!" "ah: ah! keep your place. i've got a real gun now. where's the door leading into the base?" the guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder. click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. he needed air. "okay. drag marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. double time! double!" ten minutes later, marnagan and hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on their backs, marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard, hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "where he belongs," observed irish tersely. they found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged. perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was short-handed of men. gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for cargo. the animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. small fry weren't wanted. they were scared off. the telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them into thought-emanations. a damned neat piece of genius. "so here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled irish. "we haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn up any moment. you think we could refocus this doohingey, project the monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?" "what good would that do?" hathaway gnawed his lip. "they wouldn't fool the engineers who created them, you nut." marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "ah, if only the u.s. cavalry would come riding over the hill--" * * * * * "irish!" hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "irish. the u.s. cavalry it is!" his eyes darted over the machines. "here. help me. we'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century." marnagan winced. "you breathing oxygen or whiskey?" "there's only one stipulation i make, irish. i want a complete picture of marnagan capturing raider's base. i want a picture of gunther's face when you do it. snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. how good an actor are you?" "that's a silly question." "you only have to do three things. walk with your gun out in front of you, firing. that's number one. number two is to clutch at your heart and fall down dead. number three is to clutch at your side, fall down and twitch on the ground. is that clear?" "clear as the coal sack nebula...." an hour later hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a sort of city street inside the asteroid. there were about six streets, lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near hathaway in a wide, green-lawned plaza. hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked across the plaza as if he owned it. he was heading for a building that was pretentious enough to be gunther's quarters. he got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back. he didn't resist. they took him straight ahead to his destination and pushed him into a room where gunther sat. hathaway looked at him. "so you're gunther?" he said, calmly. the pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken, questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of metal-link cloth. he glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. before he could speak, hathaway said: "everything's over with, mr. gunther. the patrol is in the city now and we're capturing your base. don't try to fight. we've a thousand men against your eighty-five." gunther sat there, blinking at hathaway, not moving. his thin hands twitched in his lap. "you are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm directness. "a ship hasn't landed here for an hour. your ship was the last. two people were on it. the last i saw of them they were being pursued to the death by the beasts. one of you escaped, it seemed." "both. the other guy went after the patrol." "impossible!" "i can't respect your opinion, mr. gunther." a shouting rose from the plaza. about fifty of gunther's men, lounging on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and started yelling. gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side of his office. he stared, hard. the patrol was coming! across the plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the patrol. five hundred patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis guns with them in their tight hands. gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air. "get out there, you men! throw them back! we're outnumbered!" guns flared. but the patrol came on. gunther's men didn't run, hathaway had to credit them on that. they took it, standing. hathaway chuckled inside, deep. what a sweet, sweet shot this was. his camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. nobody stopped him from filming it. everything was too wild, hot and angry. gunther was throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state. some of the patrol were killed. hathaway chuckled again as he saw three of the patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and twitch. god, what photography! gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. he fired wildly until hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight. then hathaway took a picture of gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos taking place immediately outside his window. the pirates broke and fled, those that were left. a mere handful. and out of the chaos came marnagan's voice, "here!" * * * * * one of the patrolmen stopped firing, and ran toward click and the building. he got inside. "did you see them run, click boy? what an idea. how did we do?" "fine, irish. fine!" "so here's gunther, the spalpeen! gunther, the little dried up pirate, eh?" marnagan whacked hathaway on the back. "i'll have to hand it to you, this is the best plan o' battle ever laid out. and proud i was to fight with such splendid men as these--" he gestured toward the plaza. click laughed with him. "you should be proud. five hundred patrolmen with hair like red banners flying, with thick irish brogues and broad shoulders and freckles and blue eyes and a body as tall as your stories!" marnagan roared. "i always said, i said--if ever there could be an army of marnagans, we could lick the whole damn uneeverse! did you photograph it, click?" "i did." hathaway tapped his camera happily. "ah, then, won't that be a scoop for you, boy? money from the patrol so they can use the film as instruction in classes and money from cosmic films for the news-reel headlines! and what a scene, and what acting! five hundred duplicates of steve marnagan, broadcast telepathically into the minds of the pirates, walking across a plaza, capturing the whole she-bang! how did you like my death-scenes?" "you're a ham. and anyway--five hundred duplicates, nothing!" said click. he ripped the film-spool from the camera, spread it in the air to develop, inserted it in the micro-viewer. "have a look--" marnagan looked. "ah, now. ah, now," he said over and over. "there's the plaza, and there's gunther's men fighting and then they're turning and running. and what are they running from? one man! me. irish marnagan! walking all by myself across the lawn, paralyzing them. one against a hundred, and the cowards running from me! "sure, click, this is better than i thought. i forgot that the film wouldn't register telepathic emanations, them other marnagans. it makes it look like i'm a mighty brave man, does it not? it does. ah, look--look at me, hathaway, i'm enjoying every minute of it, i am." * * * * * hathaway swatted him on his back-side. "look here, you egocentric son of erin, there's more work to be done. more pirates to be captured. the patrol is still marching around and someone might be suspicious if they looked too close and saw all that red hair." "all right, click, we'll clean up the rest of them now. we're a combination, we two, we are. i take it all back about your pictures, click, if you hadn't thought of taking pictures of me and inserting it into those telepath machines we'd be dead ducks now. well--here i go...." hathaway stopped him. "hold it. until i load my camera again." irish grinned. "hurry it up. here come three guards. they're unarmed. i think i'll handle them with me fists for a change. the gentle art of uppercuts. are you ready, hathaway?" "ready." marnagan lifted his big ham-fists. the camera whirred. hathaway chuckled, to himself. what a sweet fade-out this was! the happy castaway by robert e. mcdowell being space-wrecked and marooned is tough enough. but to face the horrors of such a planet as this was too much. imagine fawkes' terrible predicament; plenty of food--and twenty seven beautiful girls for companions. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories spring . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] jonathan fawkes opened his eyes. he was flat on his back, and a girl was bending over him. he detected a frightened expression on the girl's face. his pale blue eyes traveled upward beyond the girl. the sky was his roof, yet he distinctly remembered going to sleep on his bunk aboard the space ship. "you're not dead?" "i've some doubt about that," he replied dryly. he levered himself to his elbows. the girl, he saw, had bright yellow hair. her nose was pert, tip-tilted. she had on a ragged blue frock and sandals. "is--is anything broken?" she asked. "don't know. help me up." between them he managed to struggle to his feet. he winced. he said, "my name's jonathan fawkes. i'm a space pilot with universal. what happened? i feel like i'd been poured out of a concrete mixer." she pointed to the wreck of a small space freighter a dozen feet away. its nose was buried in the turf, folded back like an accordion. it had burst open like a ripe watermelon. he was surprised that he had survived at all. he scratched his head. "i was running from mars to jupiter with a load of seed for the colonists." "oh!" said the girl, biting her lips. "your co-pilot must be in the wreckage." he shook his head. "no," he reassured her. "i left him on mars. he had an attack of space sickness. i was all by myself; that was the trouble. i'd stay at the controls as long as i could, then lock her on her course and snatch a couple of hours' sleep. i can remember crawling into my bunk. the next thing i knew you were bending over me." he paused. "i guess the automatic deflectors slowed me up or i would have been a cinder by this time," he said. the girl didn't reply. she continued to watch him, a faint enigmatic smile on her lips. jonathan glanced away in embarrassment. he wished that pretty women didn't upset him so. he said nervously, "where am i? i couldn't have slept all the way to jupiter." the girl shrugged her shoulders. "i don't know." "you don't know!" he almost forgot his self-consciousness in his surprise. his pale blue eyes returned to the landscape. a mile across the plain began a range of jagged foothills, which tossed upward higher and higher until they merged with the blue saw-edge of a chain of mountains. as he looked a puff of smoke belched from a truncated cone-shaped peak. a volcano. otherwise there was no sign of life: just he and the strange yellow-headed girl alone in the center of that vast rolling prairie. "i was going to explain," he heard her say. "we think that we are on an asteroid." "we?" he looked back at her. "yes. there are twenty-seven of us. we were on our way to jupiter, too, only we were going to be wives for the colonists." "i remember," he exclaimed. "didn't the jupiter food-growers association enlist you girls to go to the colonies?" she nodded her head. "only twenty-seven of us came through the crash." "everybody thought your space ship hit a meteor," he said. "we hit this asteroid." "but that was three years ago." "has it been that long? we lost track of time." she didn't take her eyes off him, not for a second. such attention made him acutely self conscious. she said, "i'm ann. ann clotilde. i was hunting when i saw your space ship. you had been thrown clear. you were lying all in a heap. i thought you were dead." she stooped, picked up a spear. "do you feel strong enough to hike back to our camp? it's only about four miles," she said. "i think so," he said. * * * * * jonathan fawkes fidgeted uncomfortably. he would rather pilot a space ship through a meteor field than face twenty-seven young women. they were the only thing in the spaceways of which he was in awe. then he realized that the girl's dark blue eyes had strayed beyond him. a frown of concentration marred her regular features. he turned around. on the rim of the prairie he saw a dozen black specks moving toward them. she said: "get down!" her voice was agitated. she flung herself on her stomach and began to crawl away from the wreck. jonathan fawkes stared after her stupidly. "get down!" she reiterated in a furious voice. he let himself to his hands and knees. "ouch!" he said. he felt like he was being jabbed with pins. he must be one big bruise. he scuttled after the girl. "what's wrong?" the girl looked back at him over her shoulder. "centaurs!" she said. "i didn't know they had returned. there is a small ravine just ahead which leads into the hills. i don't think they've seen us. if we can reach the hills we'll be safe." "centaurs! isn't there anything new under the sun?" "well, personally," she replied, "i never saw a centaur until i was wrecked on this asteroid." she reached the ravine, crawled head foremost over the edge. jonathan tumbled after her. he hit the bottom, winced, scrambled to his feet. the girl started at a trot for the hills. jonathan, groaning at each step, hobbled beside her. "why won't the centaurs follow us into the hills?" he panted. "too rough. they're like horses," she said. "nothing but a goat could get around in the hills." the gulley, he saw, was deepening into a respectable canyon, then a gorge. in half a mile, the walls towered above them. a narrow ribbon of sky was visible overhead. yellow fern-like plants sprouted from the crevices and floor of the canyon. they flushed a small furry creature from behind a bush. as it sped away, it resembled a cottontail of earth. the girl whipped back her arm, flung the spear. it transfixed the rodent. she picked it up, tied it to her waist. jonathan gaped. such strength and accuracy astounded him. he thought, amazons and centaurs. he thought, but this is the year ; not the time of ancient greece. the canyon bore to the left. it grew rougher, the walls more precipitate. jonathan limped to a halt. high boots and breeches, the uniform of universal's space pilots, hadn't been designed for walking. "hold on," he said. he felt in his pockets, withdrew an empty cigarette package, crumpled it and hurled it to the ground. "you got a cigarette?" he asked without much hope. the girl shook her head. "we ran out of tobacco the first few months we were here." jonathan turned around, started back for the space ship. "where are you going?" cried ann in alarm. he said, "i've got a couple of cartons of cigarettes back at the freighter. centaurs or no centaurs, i'm going to get a smoke." "no!" she clutched his arm. he was surprised at the strength of her grip. "they'd kill you," she said. "i can sneak back," he insisted stubbornly. "they might loot the ship. i don't want to lose those cigarettes. i was hauling some good burley tobacco seed too. the colonists were going to experiment with it on ganymede." "no!" he lifted his eyebrows. he thought, she is an amazon! he firmly detached her hand. the girl flicked up her spear, nicked his neck with the point of it. "we are going to the camp," she said. jonathan threw himself down backwards, kicked the girl's feet out from under her. like a cat he scrambled up and wrenched the spear away. a voice shouted: "what's going on there?" * * * * * he paused shamefacedly. a second girl, he saw, was running toward them from up the canyon. her bare legs flashed like ivory. she was barefooted, and she had black hair. a green cloth was wrapped around her sarong fashion. she bounced to a stop in front of jonathan, her brown eyes wide in surprise. he thought her sarong had been a table cloth at one time in its history. "a man!" she breathed. "by jupiter and all its little moons, it's a man!" "don't let him get away!" cried ann. "hilda!" the brunette shrieked. "a man! it's a man!" a third girl skidded around the bend in the canyon. jonathan backed off warily. ann clotilde cried in anguish: "don't let him get away!" jonathan chose the centaurs. he wheeled around, dashed back the way he had come. someone tackled him. he rolled on the rocky floor of the canyon. he struggled to his feet. he saw six more girls race around the bend in the canyon. with shouts of joy they flung themselves on him. jonathan was game, but the nine husky amazons pinned him down by sheer weight. they bound him hand and foot. then four of them picked him up bodily, started up the canyon chanting: "_he was a rocket riding daddy from mars._" he recognized it as a popular song of three years ago. jonathan had never been so humiliated in his life. he was known in the spaceways from mercury to jupiter as a man to leave alone. his nose had been broken three times. a thin white scar crawled down the bronze of his left cheek, relic of a barroom brawl on venus. he was big, rangy, tough. and these girls had trounced him. girls! he almost wept from mortification. he said, "put me down. i'll walk." "you won't try to get away?" said ann. "no," he replied with as much dignity as he could summon while being held aloft by four barbarous young women. "let him down," said ann. "we can catch him, anyway, if he makes a break." jonathan fawkes' humiliation was complete. he meekly trudged between two husky females, who ogled him shamelessly. he was amazed at the ease with which they had carried him. he was six feet three and no light weight. he thought enviously of the centaurs, free to gallop across the plains. he wished he was a centaur. the trail left the canyon, struggled up the precipitate walls. jonathan picked his way gingerly, hugged the rock. "don't be afraid," advised one of his captors. "just don't look down." "i'm not afraid," said jonathan hotly. to prove it he trod the narrow ledge with scorn. his foot struck a pebble. both feet went out from under him. he slithered halfway over the edge. for one sickening moment he thought he was gone, then ann grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, hauled him back to safety. he lay gasping on his stomach. they tied a rope around his waist then, and led him the rest of the way to the top like a baby on a leash. he was too crestfallen to resent it. the trail came out on a high ridge. they paused on a bluff overlooking the prairie. "look!" cried ann pointing over the edge. a half dozen beasts were trotting beneath on the plain. at first, jonathan mistook them for horses. then he saw that from the withers up they resembled men. waists, shoulders, arms and heads were identical to his own, but their bodies were the bodies of horses. "centaurs!" jonathan fawkes said, not believing his eyes. * * * * * the girls set up a shout and threw stones down at the centaurs, who reared, pawed the air, and galloped to a safe distance, from which they hurled back insults in a strange tongue. their voices sounded faintly like the neighing of horses. amazons and centaurs, he thought again. he couldn't get the problem of the girls' phenomenal strength out of his mind. then it occurred to him that the asteroid, most likely, was smaller even than earth's moon. he must weigh about a thirtieth of what he usually did, due to the lessened gravity. it also occurred to him that they would be thirty times as strong. he was staggered. he wished he had a smoke. at length, the amazons and the centaurs tired of bandying insults back and forth. the centaurs galloped off into the prairie, the girls resumed their march. jonathan scrambled up hills, skidded down slopes. the brunette was beside him helping him over the rough spots. "i'm olga," she confided. "has anybody ever told you what a handsome fellow you are?" she pinched his cheek. jonathan blushed. they climbed a ridge, paused at the crest. below them, he saw a deep valley. a stream tumbled through the center of it. there were trees along its banks, the first he had seen on the asteroid. at the head of the valley, he made out the massive pile of a space liner. they started down a winding path. the space liner disappeared behind a promontory of the mountain. jonathan steeled himself for the coming ordeal. he would have sat down and refused to budge except that he knew the girls would hoist him on their shoulders and bear him into the camp like a bag of meal. the trail debouched into the valley. just ahead the space liner reappeared. he imagined that it had crashed into the mountain, skidded and rolled down its side until it lodged beside the stream. it reminded him of a wounded dinosaur. three girls were bathing in the stream. he looked away hastily. someone hailed them from the space ship. "we've caught a man," shrieked one of his captors. a flock of girls streamed out of the wrecked space ship. "a man!" screamed a husky blonde. she was wearing a grass skirt. she had green eyes. "we're rescued!" "no. no," ann clotilde hastened to explain. "he was wrecked like us." "oh," came a disappointed chorus. "he's a man," said the green-eyed blonde. "that's the next best thing." "oh, olga," said a strapping brunette. "who'd ever thought a man could look so good?" "i did," said olga. she chucked jonathan under the chin. he shivered like an unbroken colt when the bit first goes in its mouth. he felt like a mouse hemmed in by a ring of cats. a big rawboned brute of a girl strolled into the circle. she said, "dinner's ready." her voice was loud, strident. it reminded him of the voices of girls in the honky tonks on venus. she looked at him appraisingly as if he were a horse she was about to bid on. "bring him into the ship," she said. "the man must be starved." he was propelled jubilantly into the palatial dining salon of the wrecked liner. a long polished meturilium table occupied the center of the floor. automatic weight distributing chairs stood around it. his feet sank into a green fiberon carpet. he had stepped back into the thirty-fourth century from the fabulous barbarian past. with a sigh of relief, he started to sit down. a lithe red-head sprang forward and held his chair. they all waited politely for him to be seated before they took their places. he felt silly. he felt like a captive princess. all the confidence engendered by the familiar settings of the space ship went out of him like wind. he, jonathan fawkes, was a castaway on an asteroid inhabited by twenty-seven wild women. * * * * * as the meal boisterously progressed, he regained sufficient courage to glance timidly around. directly across the table sat a striking, grey-eyed girl whose brown hair was coiled severely about her head. she looked to him like a stenographer. he watched horrified as she seized a whole roast fowl, tore it apart with her fingers, gnawed a leg. she caught him staring at her and rolled her eyes at him. he returned his gaze to his plate. olga said: "hey, sultan." he shuddered, but looked up questioningly. she said, "how's the fish?" "good," he mumbled between a mouthful. "where did you get it?" "caught it," said olga. "the stream's full of 'em. i'll take you fishing tomorrow." she winked at him so brazenly that he choked on a bone. "heaven forbid," he said. "how about coming with me to gather fruit?" cried the green-eyed blonde; "you great big handsome man." "or me?" cried another. and the table was in an uproar. the rawboned woman who had summoned them to dinner, pounded the table until the cups and plates danced. jonathan had gathered that she was called billy. "quiet!" she shrieked in her loud strident voice. "let him be. he can't go anywhere for a few days. he's just been through a wreck. he needs rest." she turned to jonathan who had shrunk down in his chair. "how about some roast?" she said. "no." he pushed back his plate with a sigh. "if i only had a smoke." olga gave her unruly black hair a flirt. "isn't that just like a man?" "i wouldn't know," said the green-eyed blonde. "i've forgotten what they're like." billy said, "how badly wrecked is your ship?" "it's strewn all over the landscape," he replied sleepily. "is there any chance of patching it up?" he considered the question. more than anything else, he decided, he wanted to sleep. "what?" he said. "is there any possibility of repairing your ship?" repeated billy. "not outside the space docks." they expelled their breath, but not for an instant did they relax the barrage of their eyes. he shifted position in embarrassment. the movement pulled his muscles like a rack. furthermore, an overpowering lassitude was threatening to pop him off to sleep before their eyes. "you look exhausted," said ann. jonathan dragged himself back from the edge of sleep. "just tired," he mumbled. "haven't had a good night's rest since i left mars." indeed it was only by the most painful effort that he kept awake at all. his eyelids drooped lower and lower. "first it's tobacco," said olga; "now he wants to sleep. twenty-seven girls and he wants to sleep." "he is asleep," said the green-eyed blonde. * * * * * jonathan was slumped forward across the table, his head buried in his arms. "catch a hold," said billy, pushing back from the table. a dozen girls volunteered with a rush. "hoist!" said billy. they lifted him like a sleepy child, bore him tenderly up an incline and into a stateroom, where they deposited him on the bed. ann said to olga; "help me with these boots." but they resisted every tug. "it's no use," groaned ann, straightening up and wiping her bright yellow hair back from her eyes. "his feet have swollen. we'll have to cut them off." at these words, jonathan raised upright as if someone had pulled a rope. "_cut off whose feet?_" he cried in alarm. "not your feet, silly," said ann. "your boots." "lay a hand on those boots," he scowled; "and i'll make me another pair out of your hides. they set me back a week's salary." having delivered himself of this ultimatum, he went back to sleep. olga clapped her hand to her forehead. "and this," she cried "is what we've been praying for during the last three years." the next day found jonathan fawkes hobbling around by the aid of a cane. at the portal of the space ship, he stuck out his head, glanced all around warily. none of the girls were in sight. they had, he presumed, gone about their chores: hunting, fishing, gathering fruits and berries. he emerged all the way and set out for the creek. he walked with an exaggerated limp just in case any of them should be hanging around. as long as he was an invalid he was safe, he hoped. he sighed. not every man could be waited on so solicitously by twenty-seven handsome strapping amazons. he wished he could carry it off in cavalier fashion. he hobbled to the creek, sat down beneath the shade of a tree. he just wasn't the type, he supposed. and it might be years before they were rescued. as a last resort, he supposed, he could hide out in the hills or join the centaurs. he rather fancied himself galloping across the plains on the back of a centaur. he looked up with a start. ann clotilde was ambling toward him. "how's the invalid?" she said, seating herself beside him. "hot, isn't it?" he said. he started to rise. ann clotilde placed the flat of her hand on his chest and shoved. "_ooof!_" he grunted. he sat down rather more forcibly than he had risen. "don't get up because of me," she informed him. "it's my turn to cook, but i saw you out here beneath the trees. dinner can wait. jonathan do you know that you are irresistible?" she seized his shoulders, stared into his eyes. he couldn't have felt any more uncomfortable had a hungry boa constrictor draped itself in his arms. he mopped his brow with his sleeve. "suppose the rest should come," he said in an embarrassed voice. "they're busy. they won't be here until i call them to lunch. your eyes," she said, "are like deep mysterious pools." "sure enough?" said jonathan with involuntary interest. he began to recover his nerve. she said, "you're the best looking thing." she rumpled his hair. "i can't keep my eyes off you." jonathan put his arm around her gingerly. "ouch!" he winced. he had forgotten his sore muscles. "i forgot," said ann clotilde in a contrite voice. she tried to rise. "you're hurt." he pulled her back down. "not so you could notice it," he grinned. "well!" came the strident voice of billy from behind them. "we're _all_ glad to hear that!" * * * * * jonathan leaped to his feet, dumping ann to the ground. he jerked around. all twenty-six of the girls were lined up on the path. their features were grim. he said: "i don't feel so well after all." "it don't wash," said billy. "it's time for a showdown." jonathan's hair stood on end. he felt rather than saw ann clotilde take her stand beside him. he noticed that she was holding her spear at a menacing angle. she said in an angry voice: "he's mine. i found him. leave him alone." "where do you get that stuff?" cried olga. "share and share alike, say i." "we could draw straws for him," suggested the green-eyed blonde. "look here," jonathan broke in. "i've got some say in the matter." "you have not," snapped billy. "you'll do just as we say." she took a step toward him. jonathan edged away in consternation. "he's going to run!" olga shouted. jonathan never stopped until he was back in the canyon leading to the plain. his nerves were jumping like fleas. he craved the soothing relaxation of a smoke. there was, he remembered, a carton of cigarettes at the wreck. he resumed his flight, but at a more sober pace. at the spot where he and ann had first crawled away from the centaurs, he scrambled out of the gulley, glanced in the direction of his space ship. he blinked his eyes, stared. then he waved his arms, shouted and tore across the prairie. a trim space cruiser was resting beside the wreck of his own. across its gleaming monaloid hull ran an inscription in silver letters: "interstellar cosmography society." two men crawled out of jonathan's wrecked freighter, glanced in surprise at jonathan. a third man ran from the cruiser, a dixon ray rifle in his hand. "i'm jonathan fawkes," said the castaway as he panted up, "pilot for universal. i was wrecked." a tall elderly man held out his hand. he had a small black waxed mustache and van dyke. he was smoking a venusian cigarette in a yellow composition holder. he said, "i'm doctor boynton." he had a rich cultivated voice, and a nose like a hawk. "we are members of the interstellar cosmography society. we've been commissioned to make a cursory examination of this asteroid. you had a nasty crack up, mr. fawkes. but you are in luck, sir. we were on the point of returning when we sighted the wreck." "i say," said the man who had run out of the cruiser. he was a prim, energetic young man. jonathan noted that he carried the ray gun gingerly, respectfully. "we're a week overdue now," he said. "if you have any personal belongings that you'd like to take with you, you'd best be getting them aboard." * * * * * jonathan's face broke into a grin. he said, "do any of you know how to grow tobacco?" they glanced at each other in perplexity. "i like it here," continued jonathan. "i'm not going back." "what?" cried the three explorers in one breath. "i'm going to stay," he repeated. "i only came back here after the cigarettes." "but it will be three years before the asteroid's orbit brings it back in the space lanes," said doctor boynton. "you don't possibly expect to be picked up before then!" jonathan shook his head, began to load himself with tools, tobacco seed, and cigarettes. "odd." doctor boynton shook his head, turned to the others. "though if i remember correctly, there was quite an epidemic of hermits during the medieval period. it was an esthetic movement. they fled to the wilderness to escape the temptation of _women_." jonathan laughed outright. "you are sure you won't return, young man?" he shook his head. they argued, they cajoled, but jonathan was adamant. he said, "you might report my accident to universal. tell them to stop one of their jupiter-bound freighters here when the asteroid swings back in the space ways. i'll have a load for them." inside the ship, doctor boynton moved over to a round transparent port hole. "what a strange fellow," he murmured. he was just in time to see the castaway, loaded like a pack mule, disappear in the direction from which he had come. robinson crusoe was going back to his man (?) friday--all twenty-seven of them. cosmic yo-yo by ross rocklynne "want an asteroid in your backyard? we supply 'em cheap. trouble also handled without charge." interplanetary hauling company. (advt.) [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories summer . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] bob parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "cut the drive!" he yelled at queazy. "i've got it, right on the nose. queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? we're in the dough. not only that, we're rich! come here!" queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below-- . miles per second. he came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. he gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "she checks down to the last dimension," bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! but there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the belt, so this has to be it!" he jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "whee! mr. andrew s. burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" queazy straightened. a slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "better take it easy," he advised, "until i land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "have it your way," bob parker sang, happily. he threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. while queazy--so called because his full name was quentin zuyler--dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. in the ship, the ethergram from andrew s. burnside, of philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. it was addressed to: mr. robert parker, president interplanetary hauling & moving co., main street, satterfield city, fontanaland, mars. the ethergram read: _received your advertising literature a week ago. would like to state that yes i would like an asteroid in my back yard. must meet following specifications: feet length, long enough for wedding procession; feet at base, tapering to feet at apex; - feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. must be in my back yard before : a.m. my time, for important wedding june , else order is void. will pay $ . per ton._ * * * * * bob parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. and if the interplanetary hauling & moving co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of saylor & saylor, a rival firm) neither bob nor queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to burnside stating that they would fill the order. it was, plainly, a hair-brained request. and yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. that they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. for there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. the "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been bob parker's originally. now it was a fad that was sweeping earth, and burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the saylor brothers--which persons bob parker intended to punch in the nose some day. and would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. now that he and queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of saylor & saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. they came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. here they squatted, and bob parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. by the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. he satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. the beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. the radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up--past tungsten, past iridium, past gold-- bob parker said, in astonishment, "hell! there's something screwy about this business. look at that point--" neither he nor queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. a cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "may i ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"--the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "ma'am," said bob, blinking, "did you say something?" queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. he automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "i said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. and quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. i've already taken a reading. cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. goodbye." * * * * * bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. he couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. he knew that he was slowly working up a blush. mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible--cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin--bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "now you two boys go and play somewhere else! else i'll let the interplanetary commission know you've infringed the law. g'bye!" she turned and disappeared. bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "hey! wait! _you!_" he and queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. it was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications burnside had set down. "wait a minute," bob parker begged nervously. "i want to make some conversation, lady. i'm sure you don't understand the conditions--" the girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. it was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "i understand conditions better than you do," she said. "you want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to earth. unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. come back in a month. i don't expect to be here then." "a month!" parker burst the word out. he started to sweat, then his face became grim. he took two slow steps toward the girl. she blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. about twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. a rich girl's ship, bob parker thought angrily. a month would be too late! he said grimly, "don't worry. i don't intend to pull any rough stuff. i just want you to listen to reason. you've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. but to us--to me and queazy here--it means our business. we got an order for this asteroid. some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? we get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! if we don't take this asteroid to earth before june , we go back to satterfield city and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. don't we, queazy?" queazy said simply, "that's right, miss. we're in a spot. i assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." the girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. she put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "okay," she said. "now i understand the conditions. now we both understand each other. g'bye again. i'm staying here and--" she smiled sweetly "--it may interest you to know that if i let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but i'll meet a fate worse than death! so that's that." bob recognized finality when he saw it. "come on, queazy," he said fuming. "let this brat have her way. but if i ever run across her without a space-suit on i'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" he turned angrily, but queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. he pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "what's that?" he whispered. "what's wha--_oh!_" bob parker's stomach caved in. a few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship--a ship a trifle bigger than their own. the girl turned, too. they heard her gasp. in another second, bob was standing next to her. he turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "don't talk by radio. that ship belongs to the saylor brothers! oh, lord, that this should happen! somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. we're in this together, understand? we got to back each other up." the girl nodded dumbly. suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "it's--it's very important that this--this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "what--what will they do?" * * * * * bob parker didn't answer. the big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. a few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. the two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "a pleasure," drawled wally saylor, looking at the girl. "what do you think of this situation billy?" "it's obvious," drawled billy saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that bob parker and company have double-crossed us. we'll have to take steps." the three men behind the saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. bob parker's gorge rose. "scram," he said coldly. "we've got an ethergram direct from andrew s. burnside ordering this asteroid." "so have we," wally saylor smiled--and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. he started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. bob parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "we got here first," he snapped harshly. "try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the interplanetary commission!" it was bob parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. but he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer--a paralyzing weapon. he took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at queazy. queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. he hurled straight at billy saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. he yelled with triumph. at the same time, the spasticizer bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by wally saylor. bob roared, started toward wally saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. he doubled up, gurgling with agony. he fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage--then a scream of pain. what had happened to queazy he didn't know. he felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. then--lights out. * * * * * bob parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. he opened his eyes. he was slowly revolving on an axis. sometimes the sun swept across his line of vision. a cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. there was no asteroid, no girl, no queazy. he was alone in the vastness of space. alone in a space-suit. "queazy!" he whispered. "queazy! i'm running out of air!" there was no answer from queazy. with sick eyes, bob studied the oxygen indicator. there was only five pounds pressure. five pounds! that meant he had been floating around out here--how long? days at least--maybe weeks! it was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. he closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. he was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. he was probably scrawny. and he was hungry! "i'll starve," he thought. "or suffocate to death first!" he couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. minutes, then hours passed. he was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. he pleaded continually for queazy, hoping that somehow queazy could help, when probably queazy was in the same condition. he ripped out wild curses directed at the saylor brothers. murderers, both of them! up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. if he ever got out of this-- he groaned. he never would get out of it! after another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. he called queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. and this time the headset spoke back! bob parker made a gurgling sound. a voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. bob made a rattling sound in his throat. then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the milky way. he relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. he did not lose consciousness. he heard voices, queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. somebody grabbed hold of his foot. his "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. the sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive--and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "thanks, queazy," he said huskily. queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "don't thank me," he whispered. "we'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. the saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. she unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. she got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. the saylors scattered us far and wide." queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "the so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. her space-suit was off. she was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. something in bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. the girl said glumly, "i guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who i am and what i've done. i'm starre lowenthal--andrew s. burnside's granddaughter!" * * * * * bob came slowly to his feet, and matched queazy's slowly growing anger. "say that again?" he snapped. "this is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "no!" she exclaimed. "no. my grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. but i did, long before he ordered it from you--or from the saylor brothers. you see--well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! he's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. he's been badgering me for years to marry mac, and so has mac--" "who's mac?" queazy demanded. "my fiancé, i guess," she said helplessly. "he's one of my granddad's protégés. granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. mac has become pretty famous for his mercurian water-colors--he's an artist. well, i couldn't hold out any longer. if you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely _impossible_ it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! i was just a mass of nerves. so i decided to trick him and i came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. i took the measurements and the composition, then i told my grandfather i'd marry mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. he agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody _did_ find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to earth, i came out here and decided to live here. asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... so i had everything figured out--except," she added bitterly, "the saylor brothers! i guess granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." bob swore under his breath. he went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. he swung around, looked at queazy. "how long were we floating around out there?" "three weeks, according to the chronometer. the saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." "_ouch!_" bob groaned. then he looked at starre lowenthal with determination. "miss, pardon me if i say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! with us on the butt end. but i'm going to put this to you plainly. we can catch up with the saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. the saylor ship and ours both travel on the hh drive--inertia-less. but the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to earth by a long, spiraling orbit. we can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of earth. and we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" her eyes sparkled. "you mean--" she cried. then her attractive face fell. "oh," she said. "_oh!_ and when you get it back, you'll land it." "that's right," bob said grimly. "we're in business. for us, it's a matter of survival. if the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage--sorry! but until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. we'll fight the other problem out later. okay?" she smiled tremulously. "okay, i guess." queazy looked from one to another of them. he waved his hand scornfully at bob. "you're plain nuts," he complained. "how do you propose to go about convincing the saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. and we couldn't ram the saylor brothers' ship--not without damaging our own ship just as much. go ahead and answer that." bob looked at queazy dismally. "the old balance-wheel," he groaned at starre. "he's always pulling me up short when i go off half-cocked. all i know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. in the meantime, starre--ahem--none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" starre got the idea. she smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. * * * * * bob parker was in love with starre lowenthal. he knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "even _i_ know that isn't the control to the holloway vacuum-feeder, bob. that switch is for the--ah--the anathern tube, you told me. right?" "right," he said unsteadily. "anyway, starre, as i was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse fitzgerald contraction formula. all moving bodies contract in the line of motion. what holloway and hammond did was to reverse that universal law. they caused the contraction first--motion had to follow! the gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. we could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" he snapped his fingers. "no acceleration effects. this type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at--oh, hell!" bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. he took her hand. "starre," he said desperately, "i've got to tell you something--" she jerked her hand away. "no," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "you can't tell me. there's--there's mac," she finished, faltering. "the asteroid--" "you _have_ to marry him?" her eyes filled with tears. "i have to live up to the bargain." "and ruin your whole life," he ground out. suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. he pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "there's your ship, starre." he jabbed his finger at it. "i've got a feeling--and i can't put the thought into concrete words--that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. but how? _how?_" starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. she shook her head helplessly. "it just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "a yo-yo?" "yes, a yo-yo. that's all." she was belligerent. "a _yo-yo_!" bob parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "can you imagine it! a yo-yo!" he disappeared from the room. "queazy!" he shouted. "_queazy, i've got it!_" * * * * * it was queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. the nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. bob parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while starre and queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. queazy snapped his fingers. "it'll work!" his gray eyes showed satisfaction. "now, if only the saylor brothers are where we calculated!" they weren't where bob and queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. they had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the moon's orbit. but now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid--inside the moon's orbit! a mere two hundred thousand miles from earth! "we have to work fast," bob stammered, sweating. he got within naked-eye distance of the saylor brothers' ship. below, earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. the enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. it was moving along a down-spiraling path toward earth. queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "go to it, bob!" bob nodded grimly. he backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. and resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." there was little doubt the saylors' saw their approach. but, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. there was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. or at least that was what they thought, for bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero--and starre lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! it spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "it's going to hit!" the excited cry came from starre. but bob swore. the dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. it didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. * * * * * bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. it was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove--namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. and now bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. all this had happened in such a short space of time that the saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. but by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. but it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. and as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. and this time--collision! bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. the dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. it had received a mere dent in its starboard half. starre was chortling with glee. queazy whispered, "attaboy, bob! this time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" the "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. bob knew what that meant. the saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. queazy was across the room in two running strides. he threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, wally saylor's big body built up in the plate. wally saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "what do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "you've crushed in our stern section. you've sliced away half of our stern jets. air is rushing out! you'll kill us!" "now," bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "i'll inform the interplanetary commission!" screamed saylor. "_if_ you're alive," bob snarled wrathfully. "and you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "i'll see you in hades first!" "hades," remarked bob coldly, "here you come!" he snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. and the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. for a fraction of a second wally saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. in the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. the "yo-yo" struck again, but bob parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. and even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the saylor brothers had given up. like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. the battle was won! * * * * * as soon as the hauler had grappled itself onto the prized asteroid, bob parker jumped to his feet with a grin on his face as wide as the void. queazy grabbed his arm and pounded his shoulder. bob shook him off, losing his elation. "cut it," he snapped. "it's too early for the glad-hand business. we've solved one problem, but we've run into another, as we knew we would." he crossed determinedly to starre, tipped up her downcast face. "starre," he said, "i guess you know i love you. if i asked you to marry me--" she quivered. "_are_ you asking me, bob?" she breathed. "no! couldn't ask you to marry me unless i had money. starre, if it was up to me i'd drop the asteroid on the moon, and you wouldn't have to take a chance on marrying a man you don't love. but i'm in partnership with queazy and queazy has his due--" queazy intervened, his grey eyes troubled. "no," he said quietly. "hold on. i'll willingly forego any interest in the asteroid, bob." bob laughed. "nuts to you, queazy! don't get gallant. we'll be so deep in debt we'll never be independent again the rest of our lives if we don't land the asteroid. thanks, anyway." he took a deep breath. "starre, you'll have to trust me. today's the last of may. we've got two more days before we have to fill the order. in those two days, i think i can evolve a procedure to put all of us in the clear--with the exception of your fiancé and your grandfather. which, i think, is as it should be, because these days people pick out their own husbands and wives. in other words, a few minutes before your wedding, the asteroid will be delivered--on schedule!" "i'll trust you, bob," starre said huskily, after a moment of quiet. "but whatever you've got in mind, to put one over on my grandfather, it better be good...." * * * * * for a day and a half, ship and attached asteroid pursued a slow, unpowered orbit around earth. for a day and a half, bob parker hardly slept. he gave queazy charge of the ship entirely, had him send an ethergram to andrew s. burnside announcing that his asteroid would show up in time for the wedding, and that the bride would be there too. most of bob's time was spent on the surface of the asteroid. he took spectroscopic readings from every possible angle, made endless notations on a pad. sometimes, he worked in his cabin, and queazy, ambling puzzledly into bob's presence, could make nothing of the countless pages of calculation strewn about the room--figures which dealt with melting points, refractive indices, atmospheric velocities. and finally, when bob tore the ship and prisoned asteroid from their orbit, sent them into earth's atmosphere, queazy could make nothing of that either. for bob parker apparently had a rigid schedule to follow in reference to the hour set for starre's wedding. he hit the atmosphere at a certain second, at a certain speed. he followed a definite route through the atmosphere, slowly moving downward as he crossed the great asiatic continents. he passed as slowly over the atlantic, passed above new york city scarcely a dozen miles, and hovered over philadelphia at last, a mile up. then he called starre into the control room. she looked distracted, pale. she was wearing slacks and was as completely unprepared for her marriage as she could manage. bob grinned, took her cold hand affectionately. "we're over philadelphia, starre. you can point out the general section of the city of your granddad's home and estate for me. we'll be landing at : a.m. that's in about a half-hour. whatever you do, make certain you aren't--ah--married before o'clock. okay?" she extracted her hand from his, nodding dumbly. she sat down at the photo-amplifiers, and for the next fifteen minutes studied the streets below and guided him south. then bob dropped the ship until it was only a few hundred feet from the ground. around them pleasure craft circled, and on the streets and fields below people ran excitedly, pointing upward at the largest asteroid ever to be brought to the planet. the ship labored over the fields with its tremendous burden, finally hovered over a clearing bordered by leafy oak and sycamore trees, part of burnside's tremendous "back yard." there was a man with a red flag down there. bob followed his directions, slowly brought the asteroid, rough side down, onto the carefully tended lawn. then he lifted the hauler, placed it firmly on the opposite side of the clearing. bob relaxed, wiped his sweating face, and felt a cool breeze as queazy opened the airlock. minutes later, starre lowenthal was the center of an excited, mystified group of wedding guests. among them was her grandfather, a wrinkled, well-preserved old gentleman who alternately kissed her and flew into rages. another man, handsome, blond, came rushing up, sweeping everybody out of his way. he took starre in his arms, fervently. bob parker hated him at sight. * * * * * burnside cornered starre and some sort of an argument ensued. starre was insisting that she dress for the wedding, and finally her grandfather gave in. starre flung a final, pleading look at bob, and then disappeared toward the great white house with the georgian pillars. most of the guests trailed after her, and burnside came stomping up to bob. he thrust a slip of green paper into his hands. "there's your check, young man!" he puffed. "now you can get your greasy ship out of here. what do you mean by waiting until the last minute to bring the asteroid?" bob didn't answer. he said politely, "i'd like very much to stay for the wedding, sir." the old man looked distastefully at his dirty coveralls. "you may," he said testily. "but please view it from a distance." he started away, then suddenly turned back. "would you mind telling me, young man, how it is that my granddaughter was in your ship?" "i'll be glad to, sir," bob said politely, "after the wedding. it's a long story." "i've no doubt, i've no doubt," burnside said, glaring. "but if it's anything scandalous, i don't want to hear it. this is an important wedding." he stomped away, limping. bob whirled toward queazy, tensely, thrust the check into his hands. he jerked it back, hastily endorsed it and thrust it at queazy again. "cash it! quick! i'll meet you in the somers hotel." queazy asked no questions, but lifted the ship, and left. at twenty minutes of twelve, somebody having rushed starre into a hurried preparation for the wedding, the minister climbed a ladder to the apex of the asteroid, and the wedding march sounded out. bob saw starre, walking slowly on her grandfather's arm, her eyes looking straight ahead. "now!" bob prayed. "_now!_" he groaned inwardly. it wasn't going to happen! he'd been a fool to think-- then a yell, completely uninhibited, escaped his lips. the asteroid was quivering, precisely like gelatine dessert. pieces of iron ore, tungsten, quartz and cinnabar began to fall from its sides. little rivulets of a silvery-white liquid gushed outward in streams. the wedding guests leapt to their feet with startled cries, starting running back toward higher ground. the wedding march ended in a clatter of discords. and bob reached the asteroid as it went to pieces completely. he found himself ankle-deep in rivulets of liquid metal. he was swept off his feet, came up hanging onto a jagged boulder of floating iron ore. he looked around on a mad scene. screams, yells, tangled legs. "_bob!_" starre's voice. bob plunged toward her, yelling above the general tumult. for a radius of several hundred feet, there was a sluggishly moving liquid. people were floating on it, or standing in it ankle-deep, dumbfounded. bob reached starre, swept her up in his arms, went slushing off to the edge of the pool. starre was laughing uncontrollably. "there's a helicopter on the other side of the house," she cried. "we can get away before they get organized." * * * * * they found queazy in a room at the somers hotel. he opened the door, and the worry on his face dissipated as he saw them. behind him on a table were stacks of five-thousand-dollar bills. before he could say anything, starre demanded of him, "i couldn't get married on an asteroid if the asteroid wasn't there any more, could i, queazy? one minute the asteroid was there and the next minute i was wading in a metal lake." "quicksilver," bob parker agreed happily. "the asteroid was almost entirely frozen mercury, except for an outer solid layer of iron ore, tungsten, quartz, cinnabar." "i just took exterior readings," starre explained, sheepishly. "so i figured," continued bob, "that if i took a lot of spectroscopic readings of the interior i could determine exactly how big a mass of frozen quicksilver there was. and how long it would take to thaw out once it was inside earth's atmosphere! "that's the reason i had things scheduled to the dot, queazy. i coaxed the asteroid along until the mercury was almost thawed out. when the wedding started, it melted all at once, being the same temperature all the way through. satisfied?" queazy looked grave. as gravely, he moved back to the table, gestured to the money. "i hate to spoil your fun, bob," he said slowly. "we'll have to give this back to burnside. he didn't ask for quicksilver, you know." "didn't he?" bob grinned smugly. "but he asked for cinnabar, didn't he? wherever you find quicksilver you find cinnabar. cinnabar is a source of quicksilver. and vice versa. cinnabar is a sulphide of quicksilver! nope, we earned that money, queazy, my boy. it's ours legally. hands off!" he put starre's shoe on her foot after emptying it of some more quicksilver. she stood up then, moved very close. "you can ask me now, can't you, bob?" she whispered. she kissed him. "and if you do, that's my answer." which, of course, made the question totally unnecessary. the soul eaters by william conover firebrand dennis brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing koerber whose ships were the scourge of the void. but his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet--fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories fall . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "_and so, my dear_," dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, "_i'm afraid i can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets--or is it six? with regret i bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. anyway, there will be no temptation, for i'm sailing on a new assignment i've accepted. i did love you.... good-by._" dennis brooke had lost count of the times he'd read marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder--limpid as a child's. the barbaric rhythms of the _congahua_, were a background of annoyance in dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. the girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. he wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. but venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude--the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests. dennis brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. when the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. if the loss of marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of space, was quite as deadly. for he had been grounded. true, koerber's escape from the i.s.p. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous jovian chamber, in venus' fabulous inter-planetary palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of i.s.p. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate. a night in the jovian chamber, was to be emperor for one night. every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the chamber. it cost a young fortune. but to pleasure mad, boom-ridden venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. only it had cost dennis brooke far more than a sheaf of credits--it had cost him the severe rebuff of the i.s.p., and most of his heart in marla. dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious _verbena_, fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of martian _bacca-glas_, and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young martian at the next table. there was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? dennis couldn't tell. but his senses became instantly alert. danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote. his steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this martian stranger, he was unaware of the mercurian dancer. the latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. and now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly. some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled martian curse. without warning, the martian was on his feet with the speed of an hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of dennis brooke. a high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a terran girl cried out. then the martian's hand reached out hungrily. but dennis was not there. * * * * * leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him. the martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. he staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. but he was not through. his powerful right shot like a blast straight for dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. it caught the martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor. dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit--an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary league. only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them. "looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, brooke!" the police lieutenant favored dennis with a wry smile. "if i'm not mistaken this chap's a member of bren koerber's pirate crew. who else could afford to risk his neck at the international, and have in his possession a disintegrator? pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! anyway, we'll radio the i.s.p., perhaps they have details on this dandy!" he eyed admiringly the priceless martian embroideries on the unconscious martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black _acerine_ on his finger. dennis brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the athenian statues of another age. a faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. "i'm grounded, gillian, it'd take the capture of koerber himself to set me right with the i.s.p. again--you don't know bertram! to him an infraction of rules is a major crime. damn venus!" he reached for his glass of _verbena_ but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming _bacca-glas_ shards. he laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the mercurian dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive palace. "better come to headquarters with me, dennis," the lieutenant said gently. "we'll say you captured him, and if he's koerber's, the credit's yours. a trip to terra's what you need, venus for you is a hoodoo!" * * * * * the stern, white haired i.s.p. commander behind the immense aluminil desk, frowned slightly as dennis brooke entered. he eyed the six foot four frame of the captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak: "sit down, dennis. i've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. the first one you already know--your capture of one of koerber's henchmen--has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. but that's not really why i've brought you here." he frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed. "marla starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her--a delicate piece of work here on terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. and," he paused, grimacing, "somewhere between venus and terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. it is three days overdue. all passengers, a cargo of radium from venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself--seem to have vanished." dennis brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. his large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. he stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision. "marla!" he breathed at last. the thought of marla in the power of koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast. "commander," dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled commander bertram himself--and that grizzled veteran of the i.s.p., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul. "commander, give me one ... _one_ chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! let me try, and i promise you ..." in his torture, dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, "i promise you that i will either bring you koerber, or forfeit my life!" commander bertram nodded his head. "i brought you here for that purpose, son. we have reached a point in our war with koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!" he reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. "you'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. this, dennis," the commander emphasized his words, "is your chance to redeem yourself!" he fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle. * * * * * they watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of venus. on the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real. a flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. they saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. it was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side. tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. to the commander of the i.s.p., and to captain brooke, it was an old story. atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly genton shells. the great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank. commander bertram turned slowly to face the young i.s.p. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes. "and that's the sixth one in a month. sometimes the survivors reach terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again." "when do i leave, commander!" dennis brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice. "right now, if you wish. we have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull--a new design against genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. it just about surpasses anything ever invented. get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard." he extended his hand. "you're the best spacer we have--aside from your recklessness--and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw." bertram smiled thinly. "happy landing!" ii their nerves were ragged. days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space. to all but captain brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular i.s.p. patrol spacers. it placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. the lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew. day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast. and suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. instantly the i.s.p. cruiser came to life. in a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. on the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport. presently they were within reaching distance, and captain brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room: "prepare to board!" every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but george randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, mars, venus and terra. he felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. his young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. but presently, captain brooke named those who were to go beside himself: "you, tom and scotty, take one emergency plane, and dallas!" "yes, captain!" dallas bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice. "you and i'll take a second emergency!" there was a pause in the voice of the captain from the control room, then: "test space suits. test oxygen helmets! atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!" george randall breathed a sigh of relief. he watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame. inside the liner, captain dennis brooke had finished making a detailed survey. "no doubt about it," he spoke through the radio in his helmet. "cargo missing. no survivors. no indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. and finally, those genton shells could only have been fired by koerber!" he tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. only a great resolve to deal with koerber once and for all remained to him. dennis tried not to think of marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. when he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic: "prepare to return!" scotty byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at captain brooke. they all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. but they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with dennis brooke they could and did feel safe. tom jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. behind him came dallas bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by scotty, and finally captain brooke himself. all left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately. * * * * * aboard the i.s.p. cruiser, a surprise awaited them. it was young george randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits. "captain brooke ... captain, recordings are showing on the new 'jet analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. can't be far!" he was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement. dennis brooke smiled. his own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were koerber. it had to be! no interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles kp degrees, minutes, fp degrees of ceres elliptic plane. none but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! this was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits. dennis, tom jeffery and scotty byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. there could be no doubt now! the "jet analyzer" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic--could be nothing else. instantly captain brooke was at the inter-communication speaker: "crew, battle stations! engine room, full speed!" scotty byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. aboard the i.s.p. cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. all but george randall. now that action was imminent. something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his i.s.p. uniform. a growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control. in the compact, super-armored control room, captain brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. it seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. it grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit. but at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was--a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the i.s.p. cruiser. for it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. as if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the i.s.p. cruiser with such a maneuver. ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no i.s.p. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. but to dennis brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take koerber with him. weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, dennis saw his quarry slow down. instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing genton-shells. the battle was on at last. from the banked atom-cannon of the i.s.p. cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. a ragged rent back toward midship showed on koerber's cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. then dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. at such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact. it was then that dennis brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind koerber's ship. he saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. it struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. it was then that koerber played his last card. sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the i.s.p. cruiser down with him. a powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the i.s.p. cruiser. * * * * * with a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. again koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it. "george randall!" he shouted desperately into the speaker. "cut all jets in the rocket room! hurry, man!" he banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap. "randall! i've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... cut all the jets!" but there was no response. randall's screen remained blank. then koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the i.s.p. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf. beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. the readings in the planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. it showed diameter miles; composition mineral and radio-active. gravity seven-eighths of terra. it couldn't be! unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between jupiter and mars. only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity. and then began another type of battle. hearing the captain's orders to randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, scotty byrnes himself cut the jets. the magnetic repulsion plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. far in the distance they could see koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the planetoid was rushing up to engulf them. iii the atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. to the silent crew of the i.s.p. cruiser, the strange world to which koerber's magnetic beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. as far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon. "pretty much of a mess!" dennis brooke's face was impassive as he turned to scotty byrnes. "what's your opinion? think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?" scotty eyed the damage. the atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. the crash-landing had not helped either. "well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, captain, but," he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud. "but what? speak up man!" it was tom jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash. "but, you may as well know it," scotty replied quietly. "that parting shot of koerber's severed our main rocket feed. i had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!" for a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. dennis brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his i.s.p. uniform, while scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. dallas bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs. "i think we got koerber, though," he said at last. "while tom was doing a job of navigation, i had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!" "to hell with koerber!" tom jeffery exploded. "you mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?" "easy, tom!" captain brooke's tones were like ice. on his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. "where's randall?" "probably hiding his head under a bunk!" dallas laughed with scorn. his contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. a man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the i.s.p. "considering the gravity of this planetoid," dennis brooke said thoughtfully, "it's going to take some blast to get us off!" "maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!" scotty said hopefully. he was an eternal optimist. "better break out those repair plates," dennis said to scotty. "tom, you get the welders ready. i've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to koerber's ship. i must know," he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled. a figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. it was george randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing. "captain ... i ... i wanted ..." he paused unable to continue. "you wanted what?" captain brooke's voice was terse. "perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?" "sir, i wanted to know if ... if i might help scotty with the welding job...." that wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. but somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. his candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. it softened the anger in brooke's heart. thinking it over calmly, dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. but there had been an instant when he'd found randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck! "certainly, randall," he replied in a much more kindly tone. "we'll need all hands now." "thank you, sir!" randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship. "but for him we wouldn't be here!" dallas exclaimed. "aagh!" he shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. "cowards are hell!" he spat. "easy, dallas, randall's a kid, give 'im a chance." dennis observed. "you captain ... you're defending 'im? why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!" "yep," dennis nodded. "but i'm still keeping my senses clear. no feuds on my ship. get it!" the last two words cut like a scimitar. dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. one by one they re-entered the cruiser. * * * * * absorbedly randall added finishing flourishes to the plate of beryloid he had just finished welding. with the heavy atomic welder in his hands, he paused to inspect the job. inwardly he wished that scotty and dallas would hurry with that final plate. he could just barely hear them pounding it into shape, within the cruiser. unconsciously he shivered. outside the cruiser, it was cold, and breathing was laborious, for despite the gravity, the atmosphere was thin, diffused. besides, this shadowy world of dark crags and palely creeping sunlight had an uncanny feel, as if it were evil. for the hundredth time he twisted around and surveyed the rocky terrain behind him. determinedly he squared his shoulders and jutted out his chin. it was bad enough to have muffed a chance to add glory to the i.s.p., not to speak of having the rest of the crew think him demented. still the feeling of being _watched_ persisted. randall cursed his imagination, and over-wrought nerves that made him feel what palpably didn't exist. he closed his young eyes for a second and strove to steady his nerves. he breathed deeply of the tenuous atmosphere and exhaled slowly; then he opened his eyes, feeling more calm and turned to make one final survey, and stood rooted to the ground as if petrified. from a dark crevice in the jagged wall behind the i.s.p. spacer, something seemed to glide effortlessly into the open. about twenty feet from randall it paused and remained stationary, hovering above the rocky surface. it was perfectly spherical, fully three feet in diameter, and had george randall not been hysterical with dread, he would have seen that it was exquisitely beautiful, a softly shining, transparent globe that pulsed rhythmically with lambent fires. a wavering, lavender corona, like an aura, surrounded it as it began to spin slowly. from nerveless hands the atomic welder dropped to the ground, as a wave of surging panic engulfed randall. with an eerie, half-strangled scream he clawed for the atom-blast at his hip. he had a brief impression that the globe was sentiently alive, and that something that felt like tendrils of fire probed his brain. his hair stood on end as the icy fear deepened to the verge of madness. "scotty! dallas!" he shouted, and then realized he couldn't be heard above the pounding within the cruiser. he aimed at the globe and squeezed the trigger. the tremendous energy released by the atom-blast flung the globe back, by blasting the surrounding air in furious waves, but regaining its equilibrium the globe began to zoom forward again, _undamaged_! randall waited no longer, he raced for the open hatch of the cruiser with the speed of horror. he scrambled madly, almost dived into the opening and had the presence of mind to pull the lever that slammed the door shut behind him. he lay there panting, completely unnerved by the experience. dishevelled and horror-stricken was the way scotty and dallas found him, when on hearing the hatch clang shut, they rushed in to investigate. "what happened, an attack? koerber's men?" scotty queried. "speak up, randall!" dallas shook him briefly. "what was it? you look as if you'd seen a ghost!" "there's something out there.... i don't know what it is, but it's alive. it almost got me!" he shuddered. "something alive on this barren world? unless it was one of koerber's men, you've been seeing ghosts again, kid!" scotty said not unkindly. he was well aware of spacemen's mirage, the affliction that sometimes drove newcomers mad. "it was real," randall persisted. "and it was alive ... a glowing globe of energy that hung just above me, a few feet away. i blasted at it with my gun, and it just spun, then came forward." * * * * * he rose from the floor and moved over to the starboard port to look outside. scotty and dallas stood beside him. they gazed curiously in every direction, as far as they could see. "don't see a thing," dallas said stolidly. "come on, son! i'll fix you a sedative," he said contemptuously. "wait a minute dallas," scotty interrupted. "randall's right. take a look at that big pile of rocks over there ... to the left, dallas!" "by the red-tailed picaroons on jupiter's satellites!" dallas swore swiftly. "i've seen a lot of queer sights, but nothing like this!" he exclaimed. suddenly he turned to randall. "how do you know it's alive? for all we know it's just a globe of radio-active energy native to this hell-spot." randall colored, hesitated and finally blurted out. "i ... i just felt it was alive. i sensed it trying to contact my mind.... oh, i know it sounds crazy, i know you'll laugh, but the thing was trying to probe my brain, dallas!" scotty suddenly thought of captain brooke and tom jeffery who had gone on an exploratory trip. "i wonder about the captain and tom," he said in alarm. "if there's one of these whirling demons on this rock there's sure to be others." he raced to the communications set and turned it on. but it was silent. dallas gazed at randall for a second with a faint, scornful smile. "alive, eh? we'll see." he patted the atom-blast at his hip. "never saw nothin' dangerous yet that this couldn't put a hole through!" he exclaimed inelegantly. "hold on, dallas!" the more prudent scotty tried to dissuade him. "if that thing's radio-active, it may be deadly! we're not afraid of it, man ... but we don't know what it is." "you boys stay and play the radio!" dallas turned lightly on his feet for all his tremendous bulk and soon the airlock had hissed open and he was gone. both scotty and randall watched him half-fearful, half in admiration as he strode away from the cruiser. the luminous, iridescent sphere hovering over the rocks, whirled faster and faster as dallas moved away from the ship. rapidly the whirling accelerated until it was a pulsing vortex of exquisite hues of living light. then, it began to move slowly forward toward the walking man. in the macabre landscape of the planetoid, the rotund dallas was not unlike a sphere himself, as gun in hand he unhesitatingly went forward to meet the globe. calmly he aimed the atom-blast and suddenly there was a flash from the muzzle of the gun. but the flood of vicious atomic energy failed to harm the globe, on the contrary, it seemed to flame in a cataract of colors, flaming into living light. then the fluorescent flare died down to normal again and the sphere stopped, motionless as if it were appraising dallas. in unfeigned wonder, the blimp-like dallas bernan stared at the globe. "a full charge from the blaster, and the damn thing takes it like a drink of milk!" he murmured audibly. reaching over he picked up a good sized rock and threw it at the sphere. but the rock bounced back as if it had hit an impenetrable wall of energy. the globe was unharmed, it merely hung there quiescent now, as if observing the strange creature from another planet that had suddenly appeared. another rock followed the first, then another and another, until rocks were flying in every direction as they rebounded from the globe. and dallas began to laugh! to his matter-of-fact mind, the sphere was merely a bunch of radio-active gas that repelled matter of certain types like the stones he had thrown, and was drawn by organic matter. a bunch of gas! he roared. and the globe was retreating, floating backwards effortlessly, whirling faster and faster, until as dallas flung a final rock it darted upward and swiftly disappeared down the great valley. as dallas turned to go back to the cruiser, a flicker of movement caught his eye. instantly he aimed his atom-blast, but as quickly lowered, and a joyous expression came into his vast face. clambering down the tumbled rocks and boulders just ahead of the spacer, captain brooke and tom jeffery were hurrying toward him, the latter carrying the insulated leadite specimen box. "hiya, captain! we just laid a ghost. see our pretty company?" dallas roared with laughter. "yes, we saw it," captain brooke replied. "what was it? looked like a transparent globe of some sort. radioactive?" "naw! just a bunch of gas!" dallas explained. "well, we have another kind of company ... about twenty miles from here," dennis said grimly. "get into the ship, we're holding a conference, dallas." * * * * * seated in the small dining-room of the cruiser, the entire crew listened to the captain's report on their trip, while scotty brewed coffee skillfully and cocked his ears to the narrative. tom laid the leadite specimen box on the table without a word, then sat back. "i'll cut corners on this," he began. "because we have a lot to do, and a very short time to do it in. approximately twenty miles westwards, there's a cavern that runs through the crags around us. jeffery and i started to explore it, but fortunately stopped just in time. it happens that koerber and his thugs have landed on the other side of the crags. this cave is filled with some sort of radio-active mineral, unfortunately, the main deposits are at the other end of the cavern system, and koerber and his gang are already in possession! he must have crashed there. pity the situation is not reversed, we'd have ample fuel then!" "but, captain," randall spoke impulsively, "why can't we get some of the mineral from this end of the cavern and blast off this awful place?" dallas gave the youngster a look of withering disgust from across the table. "no good," tom jeffery answered for the captain without looking at randall. "the stuff at this end's mostly rubble; we had to dig the better part of an hour to find a piece rich enough to use." he pointed to the leadite box. "the plan is simplicity itself," captain brooke continued. "we'll use this specimen for fuel to zoom over the crags and attack koerber ... we've got to take possession of the other end of the cave. without sufficient fuel, we can't fight koerber to a finish, and i intend to go into that black cruiser of his if i have to crack it open like a venusian palm-nut!" dallas and scotty's eyes glowed. "any time you say, captain!" the latter said eagerly. "cruiser's hull's finished but for a few minor touches. just give the word!" iv captain brooke tightened his safety belt thoughtfully, then his glance travelled slowly to where lieutenant jeffery sat, fingers poised over the gleaming bank of keys. "i suppose we really should test this specimen first," the captain observed. "however, if we did, i doubt if we'd have enough left for fuel to smash koerber." he flipped a tiny switch in the panel before him. the silver screen lighted, and scotty's features appeared. "ready 'n waiting on the firing line cap'n!" "switch over to relays and strap in, scotty, i'll give you thirty seconds," dennis grinned, then turned to jeffery: "ready lieutenant?" jeffery took one more look into the v-screen, made a last second check of his objective--the high peak about twenty miles down the valley. as soon as the peak was reached, the cruiser would be under full manual control and he would dart the swift sky-tiger from the heights down on koerber's spacer, in a terrific power dive. he nodded satisfied, "yes, sir, ready!" "take off!" the command whipped out and jeffery's fingers flashed over the rows of keys with automatic precision. for the fraction of a second there was a muffled, rumbling thunder. then, both dennis brooke and jeffery were slammed back against their air-cushions as the astounding crescendo of acceleration hit them. twisting his head slowly, captain dennis looked at his navigator in astonishment. tom jeffery had always been the acme of dependability, his precision in plotting had practically become a legend in the i.s.p. "cruiser's running wild!" jeffery gasped painfully. "the key bank must ... be out ... of order. i'd never ... never use that much speed on take-off!" "slack off...." dennis gritted. he saw jeffery struggle to get his long, supple hands back on the keys. blood throbbed and pounded in surging waves at his temples, and he knew he'd black out in a matter of seconds if his navigator didn't reach those keys. concentrating all his remaining energy, jeffery reached and pushed one hand forward, but it was like pushing against an invisible wall. his hand refused to move any further, and then he felt the impenetrable blackness welling up inside his brain. nervelessly the navigator's hand dropped, but two fingers scraped over the key-bank and the flashing cruiser changed its course. the ship angled upward sharply and gradually reduced its speed. like two punch-drunk mortals, dennis and jeffery shook their heads, doggedly trying to clear the clinging black webs from their brains. they were not unnerved, for to these two, danger was too familiar a face, it was a constant shadow at their heels, the eternal companion at their table--without it, life would have seemed flat, without zest. "worse than a shot of martian _absytron_! whew!" jeffery exclaimed, startled out of his usually laconic state. "that mineral's terrific!" "i was just thinking the same thing," captain brooke agreed quietly. "which makes it doubly important that we settle scores with koerber and leave this planetoid. if the reaction of this mineral's true, we've found a new type of fuel, far more powerful than anything known to us at present." "imagine if that space-rat gets hold of it," jeffery concurred in awed tones. "he could rule the space-lanes, commit any crime and outpace any ship in the universe!" "besides," dennis said ruminatively, "this mineral'd make terra independent of venus for her supply of radio-actives. it would usher in a new era, jeffery!" suddenly it seemed to dennis that there was even more at stake than the smashing of a dangerous outlaw, than the recovery of his former state in the i.s.p., or the avenging of marla, if she were dead--the destiny of terra was at stake too. as if one of those cross-roads of life, at which an individual is sometimes poised by fate, had opened before his gaze, and history awaited being written in the invisible pages of space. he had come prepared to die to fulfill a mission--but now matters had changed. the need was not to die, but to live, that an unsuspecting world might rise to new heights of achievement on the incredibly radio-active marvel of this unknown planetoid. with a swift movement he threw on the panel switch, and his voice boomed out: "all hands attention! koerber has seen us, no doubt. but whether or not he's fore-warned, we attack as scheduled. stand-by!" the i.s.p. cruiser swept back up the long valley, until it was almost opposite the pirate's camp. only the tremendous mountain range separated them. glancing at the banks of keys, the instruments and dials under the v-screen, dennis issued orders: "scotty, give it everything you have!" he grinned as scotty gave back one of his inimitable replies. "dallas!" "yes, sir!" "take the stern turret, and start firing when we pull out--angle thirty-eight, precision!" he again threw a quick glance at the panel. "randall! take forward position, secondary turret. hold fire till they open up, or until i give you the command. got it?" "yes, sir," randall's voice was tense. it was then captain dennis turned to his navigator. "i'll take the main forward turret myself, jeffery! now, use a thirty-five degree dive, pull out at five-hundred feet and use ma- to pull out and regain altitude." he grinned fleetingly at the startled jeffery. "but ... but you're going to man the forward turret--get the gunner, cap'n ... i...." but dennis silenced him with a swift gesture. "taking no chances, i want to be sure that spawn of barrabas's smeared, if i have to do it myself!" * * * * * the long, gleaming cruiser was like the spear of the angel gabriel, unerring, fatal, as the skillful fingers of its navigator in the control room swept over the keys and the ship obediently canted downward. suddenly it took the plunge in a supernal power-dive that sent it hurtling straight at the pirate's camp below. all around the cruiser a rain of genton-shells exploded in buffeting succession, as the cruiser quivered and strained holding the dizzying dive. from the main forward turret, a stream of fire scorched the surroundings below, starting great fires on the stacked supplies which had been removed from koerber's ship to facilitate repairs. the atom-blast raised clouds of iridescent mineral as it peeled the ground like a gigantic knife. but the genton-shells prevented close aim, as the explosions buffeted the cruiser off her course. captain dennis finally came into the control room. "they saw us, all right," he growled angrily. "i wasn't able to come closer than a hundred feet of koerber's ship with the gun!" "they've almost got us boxed in, sir. i can't hold her on much longer." "all right then, jeffery, pull out ... right bank ... that should throw them off long enough for us to break away. give me a few seconds to adjust my sights, i'm going back to the turret!" the great cruiser had reached its objective and swept like a stupendous bird of death over the pirate camp spewing a rain of death. two pirates caught behind mounds of supplies and provisions were blasted together with the boxes that protected them. the stern turret of the black pirate cruiser was a melting, incandescent mass as captain brooke's atom-blast found its mark. suddenly the meteor-like vessel canted to the right and zoomed upward at the same time, then with vertiginous speed flashed beyond the range of the pirate's full fire-power, leaving koerber cursing in impotent fury. the sound of wracking concussions died away; the unearthly ascending whine of the atom-blasts ceased, and the cruiser flashed back to base. "at least we'll have a choice this time where to set the ship down," lieutenant jeffery said wryly, as he watched the changed scene on the v-screen before him. watching also, dennis brooke suddenly leaned forward with great interest, but abruptly the emergency thermo-bulb flashed on and off and a shrill buzzer sounded. dennis threw the switch quickly. "we'll have to set her down, cap'n!" scotty announced. "she's reached the danger mark." "hell!" jeffery exclaimed succinctly. "set her down!" dennis ordered, but the ship was already headed groundwards. the air lock on the cruiser opened and the crew jumped to the ground. it was the same bizarre landscape, harsh, dantesque, extreme. "since we've reached a temporary impasse," the captain explained to them, "we may at least examine something i happened to see just prior to landing. i have a vague idea concerning this small world; it is just possible i may be right." "what did you see, sir?" randall, forever impulsive and emotional, asked, curiously apprehensive. "you probably won't like the idea so much, lieutenant," captain brooke said quietly, shifting the weight of his atom-blast on his hip. he smiled thinly, "we're going to investigate some of those playmates of yours--the spheres!" randall's face tightened with a peculiar expression. he started to speak, then noting dallas' sardonic smile, he stopped. "just before we landed," the captain continued, "i saw a large pit filled with the globes up in the plateau just ahead. i want to try an experiment. from what i saw happened with you dallas, when you tried to blast that globe and then threw rocks at it and it went away, and yet, it pursued randall ... well, i have a theory that i want to test. if it works, we may yet turn the tables on koerber." * * * * * with perfect confidence, captain dennis turned and began to stride toward the plateau in the near distance. without hesitation dallas strode behind him, followed by scotty and jeffery, and a few other lesser members of the crew. only randall hesitated as if an awful premonition paralyzed his steps. he seemed to make an heroic effort, and hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence he began to follow the leaders. at last they were standing at the rim of the vast pit; looking down, dennis realized it must be all of a mile in width. it seemed filled with clusters of the globes which vibrated gently at the bottom. "millions of the damned things!" dallas exclaimed. the pit sloped down to a point at the center of the bottom, and there was the immense cluster of globes that dennis had seen. from small ones, the size of thermo-bulbs, to gigantic spheres fully six feet in diameter, it was a pulsating, shimmering mass of changing opalescences, a seething cauldron of prismatic hues, dormant now, but ready to flame into living light. randall, the last to arrive, approached the edge and gazed down. the ethereal, ghostly seeming spheres with their pulsating auras sent an icy shiver of dread along his taut nerves. he shuddered and turned to the others. "let's go," he said hoarsely. "those demons might come floating up here!" there was a hysterical quality to his voice that did not pass unnoticed to captain dennis, who was observing him closely. "let's go!" randall cried again, his face contorted. suddenly there was a stream of movement below; from the central mass of globes, several detached themselves and floated silently upwards in swirls of living light. cold, unreasoning fear surged into randall's mind. in his hysteria, the spheres were coming after him! his thin face with the wide, fear-stricken blue eyes was ashen while his lips twitched to form words that failed to come. at last he managed to scream: "run! they're coming after us." and randall was racing pell-mell back to the spacer. captain dennis stood his ground, dallas beside him. "come here, you fool!" dennis cried exasperated. but it was too late. with flashing speed two of the spheres outraced randall and now hovered over him. they were whirling into a vortex of incredible light, lovely beyond description, and beneath them, convulsed with horror, randall raced for his life. "action!" dennis shouted. instantly several atom-blasts spewed their deadly charge into the two pursuing globes. they drank in the awful energy charge and glowed supernally vivid, still unharmed, then, swooping downwards they charged randall, and the boy was fighting them, flailing his arms wildly, haphazardly trying to fend them off. the other members of the party had now held their fire, for randall was enmeshed in the luminous globes. and suddenly the globes seemed to become part of the boy's body, enveloping it in their translucent, fatal embrace. before their eyes, they saw the boyish form shrivel and fall crumpled to the ground as if all the energy had been absorbed in that unearthly embrace of living light. in an instant it was over. v lazily, the two spheres floated upward, their fire deepening into swirls of colors, swirling slowly over the prostrate figure as if exulting. unutterable horror showed in captain brooke's eyes; then flaming anger shook him. "the dirty...." dennis ground out the words from set, taut lips. furiously he began blasting at the globes. the spheres rocked and twisted in the tortured air currents, then gradually they rose and floated up the valley. dennis kneeled beside the still form of randall; slid his hand under the boy's jacket. he rose slowly and faced the rest of the awed crew, his eyes topaz slits of consuming fury. "now we know how dangerous, how deadly those entities are; for make no mistake, they are entities. a strange, unearthly form of life that can suck a man's life-energy. randall had good reason to be afraid, poor kid! those globes react to the most powerful of the emotions, and fear being perhaps one of the strongest, unerringly draws them. i feel somehow responsible for this boy's death. still, he has not died in vain, for in his sacrifice, he has given us a clue to koerber's ultimate defeat." he paused gazing somberly at the still form at his feet: "remember, he died a hero, for whatever success we may have, we shall owe to him!" rocks iridescent and vari-hued were piled high into a cairn, making randall's last resting place, in the depths of the space he had feared so. the remaining members of the crew walked back slowly to the waiting ship. a dark silence hung over the group as they filed to their respective sleeping quarters. all but captain dennis, dallas, jeffery and scotty, who went on to their council room. quietly they took their places at the small table. jeffery sat with his long hands on his lap, silent, while scotty methodically tamped down the venusian tobacco with which he had filled his blackened pipe. dallas said nothing. his vast bulk overflowed the seat and his tremendous chest heaved with emotions alien to his nature. all of them seemed, to be waiting for captain dennis brooke's words. the latter sat down last, absorbed in thought. when he spoke, his voice was quiet, sombre almost. "i told you," he began without preamble, "that i had a vague theory about those spheres. well, i know now. randall proved it this afternoon. there can be no doubt that those globes are radio-active--the way they react to our atom-guns leads me to believe that they subsist on energy--radiant energy from the mineral and radio-actives of this planetoid. their atomic scale must be such that their component atoms make up the two missing elements in our atomic scale! _this is the first time that man has ever encountered these two elements._ and of course, this is the first time these spheres have ever encountered humans--organic life--on an atomic scale so far removed from their own. naturally they're curious. they tried to investigate and what they encountered from randall was _fear_! _perhaps the second strongest emotion._ our fear must send out intangible vibrations that impinge harshly upon their own vibrations and lead them to attack. what fear arouses in them, we shall probably never know. the fact is that our human emotion of _fear_ in conflict with their vibratory rate renders them fatal, and even seems to draw them with a strange magnetic attraction!" for a moment every one of the four was silent, as the explanation cleared so much of the mystery before them. then captain dennis walked over to the locker where the space-suits were racked. he began slipping into one of the bulky suits. "i'm going outside again. if this spacer's insulation against the spheres, there's no reason why a space-suit should not be also. two of you cover me from the stern turret, and two--including a crew member, from the forward turret, you can at least delay their attack by blasting air currents, in case _they do attack_!" he dogged the last clamp into place and moved heavily through the doorway. * * * * * the men watching from the gun turrets saw dennis approach the vast pit which seemed to be the abode of the sphere. the face-plate of his helmet was open. for minutes he stood motionless on the rim of the pit. they knew he was concentrating, duplicating the emotion of fear. then with a catch in their throats they observed groups of the spheres rise majestically from the depths and swoop toward the waiting dennis. with a swift gesture captain brooke snapped the face-plate closed. the spheres came to a complete stop about twenty feet from the waiting captain. the globes pulsed gently, as if waiting ... waiting. again dennis opened the face-plate wide, then snapped it shut. in the brief interval the spheres had darted into action, sweeping closer. turning at last, captain dennis strode back to the ship, and slowly the flaming globes sank back into the pit out of sight. "it works," scotty yelled delightedly, as the other men ran to their airlock to greet their captain. once again at the table, dennis began: "now we can have a definite plan. here's the strategy, two of us will use space-suits and rocket belts to lure as many of the spheres as possible to a point near koerber's camp, and _one of us must enter koerber's domain with a ready made story_! that man, the one to enter koerber's camp, will be _the bait for the spheres_. he will concentrate on maintaining the powerful emotion of fear in his mind, as strongly as he's able. dennis paused, his hazel eyes brilliant with anticipation, surveying the men around him. "all of us know that the chosen man may not come through this alive--koerber may not believe his story ... the spheres may succeed in getting him. however, if he's clever and quick...." captain dennis shrugged his great shoulders. it was then jeffery interrupted him: "we'll draw lots for that, won't we, captain?" his voice was harsh. a faint nod from dennis accepted the question as a fact. the captain walked over to a cabinet and picked up something. returning to the table he continued: "the fourth man will have to stay here and broadcast." he turned a small box over on the table and several objects the size of small coins, spilled out. "these midget speakers may or may not work--anyway, propaganda at a psychological moment has intense effect, and is worth trying out. the man who goes into koerber's camp will take some of these and get rid of them in strategic places wherever he can. remember, the job of broadcasting is just as important as any other in this set up. keep hammering at them. they won't be able to locate the speakers until it is too late. keep pounding into their heads that this _new weapon of the i.s.p. is invincible_! tell them it is radio-controlled and invulnerable as far as present arms are concerned. keep working on them ... don't let up for a minute!" jeffery had been methodically tearing strips of paper and now he handed them to dennis. "three strips of paper, captain ... and four men!" dennis searched the grim, tense faces before him, then handed the strips to scotty who picked up a book and started putting the strips between the pages. the other members of the council watched his back curiously, until the crash of an overturned chair snapped their heads around. they looked squarely into the muzzle of an atom-blast gun. their jaws went slack with astonishment. "i am the commander of this cruiser," captain brooke's voice, flat and opaque had an unequivocal finality. "walk over to the wall, stand five feet from the base, lean forward and press your hands against the wall!" with the three men completely off balance, dennis methodically disarmed them. he placed all their weapons on the table, and then proceeded to encase himself in one of the bulky space-suits, keeping a careful eye on the fuming dallas. as he dressed he continued to talk. "i know that nothing short of this could convince you to let me be the man to enter koerber's camp. but it's got to be this way. i swore to enter that black cruiser if i had to take it apart, and by venus' thinking spiders, i'll go through with it! if marla's there, she has to be rescued from that cut-throat gang--besides, i think i can make up a much more plausible story, being as i was the one in disgrace with the i.s.p., not you!" he was dressed now, and stood for a moment gazing at their reddened faces. "i'm leaving now, i'll dog this door when i leave. there's an atomic welder in the locker and you can get out in three-quarters of an hour. the rest is up to you men." he was gone as the metal door clanged tightly shut. * * * * * trudging along the iridescent stretch of desolate ground, the thought uppermost in dennis' mind was marla. he was torn between the fear of what that brutal, conscienceless pirate might have done to her, and the fear she might have survived. try as he might to reconstruct the emotion of fear, he failed time after time. only the dull, ceaseless fury at koerber remained in his mind, and his heart, a fury that smouldered in the depths of his being. slowly he approached the camp where koerber's men tried to repair the damage his raid had made. dennis kept his hands slightly in the air, and his feet kept kicking a scuff of glittering dust that could be easily noticed. without warning, an atom-ray blasted bits of a rocky cliff to captain brooke's right and an invisible voice boomed out: "hold it, copper!" there was a noticeable awe in that voice and it made dennis smile. the scum remembered, it seemed! dennis stopped abruptly. "i'll talk to koerber," he said coldly. "hold it right where you are, captain koerber's coming outside," the same voice shouted. cautiously dennis let another of the midget speakers fall to the ground behind him. the circular airlock opened and a ladder descended automatically. down the steps came a short, heavy-set man. his aquiline features would have been handsome because of their symmetry, and the pale olive skin tanned by the vast spaces, but for the perpetual sneer that twisted rather full lips. koerber's wide set eyes, were dark, brilliant, and just now had a sort of incredulous amusement, as if the spectacle of captain dennis brooke come to parley with him were something quite too fantastic to believe. "well ... well! this _is_ a land of miracles!" he flashed a sardonic smile, displaying white, even teeth. "considering my reputation for ... er ... shall we say dishonor?" he smiled again, "you are risking a great deal by coming here, aren't you, captain?" captain brooke shrugged his vast shoulders, and a thin smile of contempt curved his lips. "it occurs to me, koerber, that at my age men are neither rash nor fools ... unless the stakes are high. and," he paused deliberately, conscious of the instant interest his words had aroused, "and it happens that the stakes are beyond ... far beyond all that you and i, and even the i.s.p., are worth. man, our feet are now _on the base of a great empire_!" interest, cupidity and astonishment mingled in the expression of captain koerber's face. finally he guffawed. "captain, they say that too many nights in the jovian chamber turns a man's mind, i am beginning to believe it!" then his face darkened: "let's finish it quick, dennis, what're you selling?" "a partnership in an empire, in exchange for marla!" dennis brooke said quietly but with deadly emphasis, ignoring the pointed barb. koerber still gazed at the space-suited figure incredulously. with an imperious motion of his powerful hand, he motioned captain brooke up the ladder, then followed at a distance, his hand on the atom-blaster. he had not noticed dennis drop another tiny speaker on the ground behind. * * * * * inside the black cruiser, dennis was herded by two gunmen into a spacious cabin. it was furnished in the splendor of priceless loot from the ships of several planets. he felt his atom-blast lifted from its holster and the indignity of exploratory fingers seeking hidden arms. he walked past them to see koerber seated in what had evidently been a martian imperial chair, a throne-like affair of priceless hardwoods, incrusted with rare metals and jewels, and bearing a canopy of soft, ocelandian furs, with jewelled brooches at the corners. he sat silent, the faint satirical smile still on his lips, as if for once in his life the very depths of his involved and merciless soul were filled with joy, as indeed was the case. "speak your piece!" he said insolently, and motioned for the guards to cover the exit. "i shall be brief," dennis shrugged his shoulders. "marla means more to me than anything else. what can she be to you than just another passing conquest? there's no satisfaction in possession without love, koerber--and _there are other things that you would prefer_!" "for instance!" the words came like a whiplash. "wealth beyond even your imagination, and power ... power as you have never even conceived could ever fall into your hands, man!" "how do you know marla's alive?" the sardonic grin became sadistic in its enjoyment at the fleeting shadow of pain that crossed dennis' face. "because," dennis spoke slowly, quietly, "she's too valuable for you to miss the chance to ransom her. you know the i.s.p., never lets its agents down--you knew she'd accepted an assignment, didn't you?" "of course, i have scouts in every planet, and means of communication even you don't know anything about--like that scout you knocked out on venus," he finished venomously. "well?" dennis said laconically. "you'll have to explain better. where's the wealth and all this power you're talking about to come from?" dennis knew he was playing his last card. if the man had even a shred of humanity, of intelligent selfishness, the way was open, if koerber allowed his undying hatred of the i.s.p. to dominate him, he'd have to fight for his life. "all right, i'll give it to you. this planetoid is full of a new radio-active metal of such terrific power that used even in its raw state it can supply power for speeds beyond anything known to us at present. the reason you saw our ship before we attacked was that we used a small specimen of the mineral and it flung us into space with such terrific acceleration that it almost sent us beyond the planetoid's gravity. if my navigator's hand had not fallen on the keys and changed the course, we would have been wrecked. there are untold billions of credits in radio-active mineral strewn on the surface. now, if you can't imagine what that means ... what's the use of my talking. "it'll make us invulnerable. a few tons of this new fuel will purchase a fleet of spacers of the first order, such as this one you have, koerber; and with a fleet powered by the mineral we can conquer any planet. power ..." dennis laughed. "man, we'd lord space!" as dennis spoke, the expression of machiavellian greed and cunning in koerber's face heightened, mingled by triumph. at last his laughter, peal after peal of cold, remorseless laughter thundered in the luxurious cabin. "you fool, you utter fool! _you_ have told me this and expect me to bargain with _you_! so you would share with me supreme power over the known universe.... one reason why i've lived so long is that i never share with anyone, and i never trust anyone, copper!" he flung the final insult in dennis' face, and laughed to see dennis' eyes blaze with murderous fury. "throw him in the cell!" koerber said imperiously. instantly the two gunmen went into action, prodding dennis with drawn blasters. they drove him down a corridor to a metal cell and heaved him into it, then left him lying on the metal floor. vi in the semi-darkness of the armored cell, the wicket through which the guard could watch the prisoner was a square of light. only, there was no guard. only an atomic-welder could have pierced that tough shell--unarmed, within the pirate cruiser, surrounded by armed guards at every exit, dennis hadn't the ghost of a chance. he sat up on the cold metal floor, and strove to point his mind to the task ahead. and the last midget speaker slipped from his pocket to roll across the floor, coming to a stop at a corner of the wall. dennis could not suppress a smile. then he heard a voice he had thought never to hear again. a wave of feeling engulfed him. "dennis ... dennis, my dear!" framed in the wicket, the lovely features of marla, smiling despite the brimming eyes, smiling at him in encouragement. his heart leapt upwards as if it would leave his body, as he rose in a single bound and was at the wicket, kissing hungrily the exquisite lips. he could not speak, for seconds, that marla was alive was that his heart could wish. for a moment he was weak with the tremendous reaction. "you're safe ... safe ... not hurt ... marla," he was incoherently repeating. "quick," marla cautioned. "take this!" she slipped a deadly atom-blast, the smaller variety once carried by women into his hand. "they never found it on me--being a woman i have prerogatives. i have been held for ransom until now, and here on this deserted world, having no means of escape i was allowed comparative freedom within the ship. but i heard what you told koerber, dennis. now that he knows untold wealth is within reach of his hand, he may have another fate in store for me. for the past few days he has been changing ... becoming amorous. i know he's trying to win me, dennis ... as only a woman can know!" "take this blaster back ... and use it!" dennis said fiercely. "no need," she smiled, her eyes luminous. "i have a better way. i'll not be harmed, dennis." she kissed him as if all her heart were in that kiss, despite the vertical bars that divided them, then she was gone, leaving behind the faint fragrance that she always wore, like a scent in the garden ways, or an echo in the wind. one last card remained to him. one last venture wherein his life would hang from so slender a thread, and yet. he began to scream and shout with a passion that raised reverberating echoes in the enclosing metal cell. almost immediately the metal door opened with a bang, and the powerful figure of koerber flanked by guards with drawn atom-blasts was silhouetted in the light. "have you gone space-crazy, you rat?" koerber growled through clenched teeth. "what's the racket for?" "you double-crosser," dennis spat like an animal at bay, "if i have to be caged like this, after telling you about my discovery, at least you could let me have some air. you've got the air rectifiers shut off in here, and it's worse than in the caves! want me to choke?" "haw!" one of the guards guffawed. "that's real good, boss ... saves us the trouble of shooting 'im!" "shut up!" koerber rumbled. "double-crosser, eh? what made you think i'd cut you in on the discovery? but you've given me an idea! branche ... jennings! truss him up and carry him out to the cave. the radio-active minerals'll take care of him better'n anything else." his sadistic nature gloated on the thought of dennis' gradual disintegration as the powerful radio-active vibrations bombarded his being. koerber's smile was like a feline caress, but his eyes were feral in the ecstasy of his triple triumph. he had marla, the wealth and power of a new universe before him, and, his greatest enemy condemned to a horrible death. thoroughly trussed, they carried dennis to the entrance to the cave system where the radio-active minerals were in greatest abundance. then they threw him carelessly on the rough, rocky ground. "i can watch you from here," koerber said silkily, "as you slowly rot away. we'll be working on the spacer for at least four more hours before we blast off, time enough for the effects of the radiations to begin to show, eh dennis?" there was no doubt in captain brooke's mind what would happen to marla, and to the i.s.p. cruiser when koerber was ready to leave. the monstrous egotism of the man demanded a series of triumphs, for he already saw himself as a supreme ruler. he watched the guards walk back to the cruiser, where most of the crew were engaged in final repairs, and he was glad, fiercely glad, so he could concentrate. all the fear he felt for marla, all the horror at the murder of his comrades and the destruction of his cruiser, and the vast, awful vision of a universe ruled by a sadistic madman, utterly evil, began to flood into his mind as he willed himself to emotionally see these things realized. suddenly he was aware that through auto-suggestion, he was beginning to feel fear, _real fear_! he thought of the luminous spheres ... there was something monstrous about them ... the way they sucked the life-energy from poor randall. he continued to elaborate and build up a crescendo of horror. a blast of thunder from koerber's ship shook the cave. * * * * * the distant sun was moving rapidly toward the horizon's rim, and the swift settling twilight enhanced the spumes coming from the jets of the black, pirate spacer. as the rumble of the warming rockets died to a murmur, dennis saw two guards leave the airlock of the pirate cruiser. they were jennings and branche. they must be almost ready to leave, he thought. the guards came to where he lay and roughly jerked him to his feet then dragged him further inside the cave, where the deadly radio-actives would really get to work on his body. then they dropped him unceremoniously as they turned with a start. like black magic, a stentorian voice had begun speaking, filling the melancholy dusk of the eerie planetoid, as the thundering tones seemed to come from everywhere. ear-drums throbbing with the vibration, the guards jerked dennis back to the cave entrance, the binding cords that tied dennis becoming dangerously ragged with the dragging over the rough ground he had endured twice. "bren koerber! attention! this is the i.s.p." the voice rolled and echoed. "you're completely surrounded. resistance will be futile! you have just one minute to get your men together in front of your ship. throw your side-arms in a pile on the ground!" koerber appeared at the lock of the pirate spacer then he scrambled down with surprising agility, followed by three of his men. "who in hell is playing jokes!" the pirate roared. "come on!" he yelled at the two guards now at the cave's entrance. "you ... branche ... jennings! who's getting funny? somebody's going to get their heads blasted off for this!" but instantly on the heels of koerber's tirade, came scotty's voice, magnified a hundred times: "your time's almost up, koerber! fifteen seconds more and _the newest, most deadly weapon of the i.s.p._ will be released against you!" even though he was still concentrating on the spheres and the emotion of fear, dennis felt a sudden exaltation. but he brushed it aside and continued to recreate the terrible fear that had begun to invade his being under his relentless auto-hypnosis. subconsciously he could hear scotty's sonorous voice describing the horrible, irresistible weapon that was to be used. scotty was doing a magnificent job of laying it on, with variations! koerber gazed around in stupefaction, then spying the prone figure at the mouth of the cave, he cursed at dennis and then began to race across to the trussed up figure of his enemy, but he was halted by a hoarse shout from one of his guards: "boss, look! _there is_ something coming!" the guard yelled excitedly. still lying on the ground, where the guards had dropped him, dennis could barely see the top of the cliff behind him. over the edge, high above the plain, swept cluster after cluster of the glowing, gloriously shimmering spheres. a myriad rain of lavender, greens, pulsing reds and flamboyant blues, iridescent, flaming with inward fires and spinning ever faster the spectral globes swept downwards in the deepening twilight with dazzling speed. "get the gun working, you scum!" koerber cursed, pointing to the portable atom-ray still remaining outside the spacer. two men jumped at his order and the livid ray blasted skyward. blasting fiercely for a few seconds, the two outlaws hesitated. astonishment then fear crossed their stubbled faces. the deadly ray was merely expanding the globes, which flared into incandescent light and, kept right on coming down! huge chunks out of the side of the cliff behind the zooming spheres crashed to the plain. and still the glittering flood of glowing globes kept flowing on. his men must have done a wonderful job of luring the deadly spheres, dennis thought with a part of his mind. "needle guns!" koerber screamed, rushing over to the two men who stopped firing. "use your hand guns, men! someone get atomite capsules, we'll blast whatever these things are out of space!" picking up the heavy atom-ray, koerber cradled it in his powerful arms, sweeping the deadly projector in wide arcs through the approaching, luminous mass. suddenly, koerber shouted again. one of the men near the stern of the ship had dropped his weapon and was running, horror-stricken, across the broken ground. "come back here, you rat!" koerber shrieked, swinging the big atom-ray around. but he had no need to fire, a glowing globe fully six feet in diameter, already was pursuing the doomed, fear-maddened creature with vertiginous speed. koerber saw it suddenly descend and envelop the running figure, and in seconds the outlaw was a shrunken mass that dropped to the ground like a squeezed fruit. [illustration: _the spheres rolled down in a deadly wave._] koerber's eyes were blazing as he whirled around and screamed at his men: "fight ... fight you lousy rats!" uncontrollable passion twisted his features in a fiendish snarl at the thought of losing the supreme power and unimaginable wealth he had thought to be within his grasp. his voice rose piercingly above the concussions of the atomite capsules that at his command had been brought into action. but unknown to him, stealthily, a growing fear was creeping into his brain as all his efforts and the deadly fire of atom-blasts, atom-ray and atomite capsules failed to even destroy a single globe. the unearthly, macabre appearance of the luminous globes was already playing havoc with the men's minds, and one by one the outlaws fled shrieking into the darkness, to be consumed by the glowing spheres. * * * * * in the impenetrable blackness of the cave, dennis brooke had stopped building the emotion of fear. with part of his mind he sought to dispel the stubborn auto-hypnosis, and slowly, he was able to regain a measure of normalcy. the thought of marla helped, as with the growing destruction of koerber's men, he deliberately forced himself to see her safe, in his arms. and slowly he came back out of the abyss of fear into which he had purposely pushed his courageous mind. it took patience, infinite patience and time, but time was growing short. he rubbed the frayed bonds that bound his arms back of him, against the jagged outcroppings of radio-active rock, until he burst them with herculean strength, then it took a matter of seconds to free his legs. painfully he stood up, and let the blood course with exquisite torture through his semi-paralyzed limbs. then he sought the tiny atom-blast marla had given him to conceal. the space in front of the black spacer was milling with men battling spheres, a vortex of flaring illumination that hungrily enveloped the maddened crew. now and then, another man sank to the ground a lifeless hulk. suddenly one of the spheres came floating into the cave, curious, attracted by the remnants of the fear vibrations and approached dennis. the captain saw it enter and illuminate the impenetrable darkness, he laughed. a few moments ago it would have meant his life, but now he contemptuously bent down and picking a glittering specimen of radio-active mineral flung it unerringly at the gently spinning globe. as if the sphere weren't even there, the i.s.p. captain strode out of the cave. it was then he saw his own crew, space-suited, exultant, spewing green death from their atom-blasts at the milling remnants of what had been the scourge of the space-lanes. far to one side he spied koerber, now a demoniac figure still firing the few remaining charges left in the atom-ray. saw him finally drop the useless weapon and turn to fend off the swooping spheres. in a few bounds dennis was beside him. at the sight of dennis, the scowling face went black with fury. he sprang forward with both arms jabbing like pistons. dennis swerved and again planted a terrific left to koerber's solar-plexus, it almost doubled the pirate over, but koerber was not through. he knew death was very close, but he meant to take with him the one man he blamed for his defeat. he came in with a fury that swept all before him, impervious of the rain of blows that dennis aimed at his face, and unleashing a right to dennis' jaw, he put every ounce of remaining power behind it. but the i.s.p. captain moved slightly, letting the blow whiz past his face, then flat-footed, he let his right ride with the power of a sledge-hammer. koerber's face lost contour, a gout of dark, welling blood flooded over it and he sank to the ground. suddenly dennis' own men saw him, and came running to where he stood planted over what remained of koerber, pirate of the space lanes. his chest heaving, clothes torn, he heard them as if in a dream, as they shouted in joy at the complete victory they had achieved. it was only when cool hands touched his face, and a remembered fragrance was in his nostrils, that he came out of his daze. a voice was whispering the simple words, "_my dear ... my very dear!_" slowly he gathered marla in his arms and kissed her tenderly, while around him, the hovering spheres sensed another emotion, greater even than fear--but of another kind--that greatest of all emotions, love. * * * * * captain dennis chewed the end of his stylus. after a moment he began to write again in the large metallic book: _b-xa- _ _ sct_ _the plan outlined in the previous entry was carried out. operation successful. bren koerber is being brought back a prisoner. all members of his crew are dead. koerber's cruiser is being towed to ceres base. full report on radio-active mineral discovery has been radioed i.s.p. headquarters, terra. no luminous spheres captured. suggest scientific expedition be sent._ _casualties suffered: one. junior lieutenant george randall killed in performance of duty by one of the spheres. recommend heroism be recognized by posthumous honors. suggest antares cross._ dennis brooke, paused for a moment, uncertain whether or not to enter in the official log book the one burning desire that dominated his thoughts, at last he smiled and with a flourish he added: _leave of absence for two months requested. reason: marriage. miss marla starland has consented to honor me by becoming my wife._ distantly he heard the muffled roar of the warming rockets. the great cruiser was ready to leave the fateful planetoid. he sighed in vast contentment as he unplugged the stylus and gently closed the book. phantom of the seven stars by ray cummings lovely brenda carson, scholarly jerome, pompous livingston ... everyone aboard the _seven stars_ scoffed at the idea of a phantom pirate. but i.p. agent jim fanning didn't laugh. he knew the luxury-liner's innocent looking cargo was already marked for plunder. [transcriber's note: this etext was produced from planet stories winter . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] part of my assignment on this space-flight of the _seven stars_ was to watch the girl. that much, at least, wasn't hard. she was certainly easy to look at--a little beauty, slim with a pert, oval little face framed by unruly pale-gold hair. with mingled starlight and earthlight gleaming in that hair, it was like spun platinum. her name was brenda carson. certainly, she was an inspiring figure to any young man, in her white blouse and corded black and white trousers and her long black traveling cape with its hood dangling at the back of her neck and the cape folds flowing from her slim shoulders almost to the ground. we were several days out from new york, with mars, our destination, hanging like a great dull-red ball among the blazing stars in the black firmament ahead of us, when i first noticed that there was anything queer about brenda. we were sitting under the glassite pressure-dome on the forepeak of the _seven stars_, bathed in the pallid starlight. by ship-routine it was mid-evening. i gestured toward one of the side bull's-eyes of the bow-peak. "gloomy-looking world, that asteroid- ," i said. the little asteroid, one of the many out here in the belt between the orbits of earth and mars, was a small leaden crescent of sunlight with the unlighted portion faintly putty-colored. it was, i knew, a world some five-hundred miles in diameter, amazingly dense so that its gravity was not a great deal less than earth. a bleak, barren little globe. it had an atmosphere breathable for humans; there was water--occasional rainfall; but chemicals in the cloud-vapors poisoned the water for human consumption. the rocks were heavily laden with metals. but they were all base metals, of no particular value. so far as i knew, nobody had ever bothered to settle on asteroid- . it was completely uninhabited. "asteroid- ?" brenda murmured. "is that what it's called?" something in my chance remark had frightened her. her blue eyes as she flung me a quick, startled glance were suddenly clouded with what might have been terror. her brother philip was with us. he quickly said, "asteroid- ? somebody said we pass pretty close to it this voyage." he laughed. "rotten sort of place, by what i've heard. you can have it and welcome." i must explain that i was--and still am--an ip man. my name, jim fanning. i was assigned as lieutenant to patrolship two. i had been on vacation, in new york. my ship, one of the biggest in the interplanetary patrol, was now on roving duty somewhere in the vicinity of mars. then suddenly an emergency with the _seven stars_ had arisen. chief rankin had planted me on her. only the captain knew my identity. to the dozen or so passengers, i was merely a young civilian traveler. "i've never been to asteroid- ," i was saying. and i, too, laughed casually, "i agree with you, carson. nice place to die in, but i guess that's all." there was no question but what brenda was trying to hide her sudden emotion. terror? was that it? we said no more about the asteroid; chatted of other things, and we were presently joined by another of the passengers. "ah, beautiful night," he greeted us. "i never get tired of the glories of the starways. good evening, miss carson." he nodded smilingly to philip carson and me, and drew up a chair with us. his name was arthur jerome, well-known to me, though i had never before met him. he was a big, florid, distinguished-looking man of forty-odd; a habitual interplanetary traveler, who between flights lectured over the earth television networks on things astronomical. we talked for a while, and then suddenly arthur jerome said, "nobody mentions the phantom bandit. you know, if anything could spoil my interest in interplanetary travel, it's to have a weird thing like that come up." "phantom bandit?" brenda carson murmured. "is there--is there really such a thing?" arthur jerome shrugged. "naturally it's had no publicity. but things get out. those last three accidents to space-liners--you can't hide that sort of thing. and you wouldn't call it supernatural. or would you?" * * * * * the phantom of the starways! that was the crux of my being here on the _seven stars_. weird, mysterious thing--no wonder the earth, mars and venus governments had not dared let it get any publicity which they could possibly avoid. for three months now, this earth-year of , mysterious accidents had been happening to commercial space-ships. non-arrival at destination, and then later found by the interplanetary patrol, derelicts in space. gruesome damn' thing. a ship unharmed, save that its air was gone. as though some mysterious accident had broken one of the pressure valves, or deranged the machinery of an exit-porte, so that the air had all hissed out. ship of the dead. everyone aboard lying asphyxiated. it was eerie. a "ghost-vessel" attacking the liners? a modern version of the ancient _flying dutchman_ legend? radio newscasters talked of things like that. a vengeful ghost-ship roaming the starways, with dead pirates aboard, bent on attacking the living navigators whom they hated just because they were alive. it made nice gruesome broadcasting to give the television audience the shivers. supernatural legends easily get support. particularly from hysterical, imaginative women, or cranks who crave publicity. reports had come from amateur astronomers who owned fairly decent telescopes that they had seen the wraith of a pallid ghost-ship hovering up in earth's stratosphere; passengers on liners had hysterically thought they saw the same thing. a supernatural menace. but no reputable observer had ever seen anything. our interplanetary patrol was completely baffled. and what the public didn't know was that those wrecked vessels--one of them, at least--had shown evidence that it had been hit by an electronic space-gun with a range of several hundred miles, which had broken the pressure-dome and let the air out. and in every case the wrecked ship was looted; the passengers' money and jewelry gone; the purser's safe rifled. "anyway, it's a good thing for us," arthur jerome was saying, "the little _seven stars_ ought not to be much of a prize for the phantom raider." he grinned, with his hand ruffling his sandy hair. "let's hope we escape." the _seven stars_ not much of a prize? it was certainly reasonable enough to think that. we had a few martians in the second-class section, and a few earthmen passengers; and just an average commercial cargo. that's what anyone would think; and only the captain and i knew differently. our cargo was anything but average. the boxes, as they had come aboard and been stored in the hold, were labeled as american preserved food-stuffs; technical commercial instruments, german-made prisms, lenses and the like. but in reality those boxes were crammed only with modern electronic weapons of war. it was a shipment purchased by the martian government which was faced by the insurrection of its wealthy colony on deimos. they were unusual weapons of exclusive earth-manufacture. small, for short-range, hand-use only; weapons to disable, but not injure. the recently publicized so-called "paralysis gun" was one of them. the martian government, humane at least in battle with its own people, desperately needed this type of weapon in its forthcoming invasion of deimos to subdue the rebels. * * * * * not much of a prize, our little commercial liner _seven stars_ this voyage? just the opposite! those rich colonists of deimos most certainly would pay well to keep this shipment away for mars! would news of it have leaked out? would the phantom of the starways attack the _seven stars_ for just that purpose? chief rankin, of the interplanetary patrol, certainly thought it a possibility. he had put me aboard here; and as only the captain and i knew, my ship--patrolship- --had been ordered to join us out here somewhere and convoy us to mars. convoy us against an attack by an enemy that you couldn't see! "the phantom raider!" young philip carson was echoing arthur jerome's lugubrious words. "you suppose there is really any such thing?" i saw him exchange a glance with his sister. he laughed, but it wasn't much of a success. "i doubt it," i agreed. "so far as i ever heard, those accidents were--well, just accidents. an air-valve can go wrong, you know, and dump the air out of a ship. air goes quickly, and with a pretty powerful rush, if it once gets started.... gruesome kind of talk, miss carson," i added lightly. she tried to smile. my heart went out to her in that moment. her beauty, i suppose; but somehow she seemed horribly pathetic. that mention of asteroid- mysteriously frightened her; and now this mention of the phantom spaceship terrified her even more. "you're right," arthur jerome agreed. "the supernatural is fascinating. or a thing that you can't see but still can kill you--that's just as gruesome." "and fascinating?" philip carson put in sourly. "well, it may be to you, but it's frightening my sister. let's talk of something else." then another passenger joined us. that girl was a magnet to men. "well, well, miss carson," he boomed as he came up. "you are looking very beautiful in the starlight." he sat down with us. his name was walter j. livingston--the very honorable walter j. livingston to give him his official title. he had just been appointed by the president of the world-federation as earth ambassador to the martian government; was on his way there now to present his credentials. he was a big, heavy-set fellow, with a mass of iron-gray hair, a ribbon across his ruffled shirt-bosom; and the out-jutting jaw and booming voice of a born politician. did he by any chance know the contents of the _seven stars'_ cargo, this voyage? so far as i had been informed, he did not. i studied him now, and instinctively i didn't like him--possibly because of the extravagant compliments he was paying brenda carson. the talk went on, and presently as i glanced up to the little control tower under the pressure-dome above us, i saw the bulky figure of captain wilkes standing there. he caught my gaze and furtively gestured. i excused myself in a moment; sauntered down the narrow side deck, turned a distant corner of the little superstructure. then i went up to its roof, and forward again. in a moment i was in the control tower. * * * * * captain wilkes was there, seated alone with his electro-telescope beside him. he slid the oval doors closed upon us. "your ship's in sight," he greeted me. "thought you'd be interested." patrolship- , coming to convoy us. i took a look through the eye-piece of the telescope. familiar vessel on which i had spent so many months. its long cylindrical alumite hull, with the pressure-dome over its single upper deck, was painted by sunlight on one side and starlight on the other as it headed diagonally toward us. by the range-finder on the telescope i measured its visual length. "ten thousand miles off us," i said to the captain. "yes. just about. now listen, fanning--there'll be no contact. it will circle us, close at hand. if the passengers ask you why we need any convoy--we don't want any panic here you know." what he had in mind about explaining this convoy was never disclosed. he was staring through a duplicate eye-piece, and suddenly his words were checked as he sucked in his breath. "good lord, fanning--" i saw it also--a tiny puff of electronic light at the top of the oncoming patrolship's dome. there was nothing else to be seen, i searched the starfield in that second of premonitory horror. absolutely nothing visible. just that puff of light where an electronic shot must have struck. "fanning--you saw that?" captain wilkes murmured. "yes." another few seconds. it seemed an eternity. and then the patrolship wavered; drunkenly lurching and slowly turning over! ghastly silent drama, out there in space ten thousand miles away. we could not see its details; just the tiny image of the ship, lurching, turning end over end. a derelict in space. my horrified imagination pictured the air hissing out, spewing wreckage and bodies out perhaps. ship of the dead, all in those seconds. then it was hanging poised, slowly turning on a drunken axis of its own. the leprous, smashed dome was for a moment visible as it turned. the phantom raider had struck again! * * * * * my comrades. thirty of them meeting their deaths out there in that moment. the thought numbed me. captain wilkes had leaped to his feet. "why--why, good lord, it got them! and now--us next!" our convoy gone. unquestionably that was because the phantom was after us! "what are you going to do?" i murmured. "not tell the passengers--" "good lord, no. nor the crew. what good would it do? we're not armed with long-range guns--no preparations to make. only spread panic maybe among my men. some of them might want to try and persuade me to turn back to earth." "and you're not going to do that?" "hell, no." captain wilkes was a choleric fellow. his ham-like fist crashed down on his desk. "i was told to run this cargo to mars, and by heaven, fanning, that's what i'm going to do. make a run for it." he swung for his controls. "i can use a greater earth-repulsion and once we get past asteroid- , by a little jockeying i can use that, too. we'll see if there's any damn' phantom-ship going to overtake us." it was a weird, gruesome feeling, realization that in all probability we were being pursued by something we couldn't see. something still ten thousand miles away. could it overtake us? certainly not in less than a few hours, perhaps not even in a day. and then, would there be a flash of an electronic space-gun, weirdly from its unseen source? the crash of our hull, or our pressure-dome exploding outward; the wild rush and hiss of our air out into the vacuum of space? and then death by suffocation all in a minute or two. the thing had me shuddering. i must have been murmuring something of my thoughts, for captain wilkes retorted: "if they crash us with a shot they might very easily injure the cargo. more apt to try running in close to us--a boarding party with powered pressure-suits." his fist thumped his desk again. "an' by heaven, if they try that--you got a gun, fanning?" "yes," i agreed. i had a small weapon of the paralyzer-gun type, efficient at a few feet of range. but of what use against an enemy you couldn't see? wilkes presently dismissed me. "you keep your own counsel," he told me. he lowered his voice. "by what your chief rankin intimated, there's at least a reasonable possibility that we've some damn' spy on board." "well, if that's a fact," i said, "the phantom won't try cracking us with a long-range gun and killing the spy as well as the rest of us." "exactly. that's what i'm counting on. keep your eyes open and your ears stretched. report to me anything that looks queer." * * * * * i left him presently. dogged, indomitable old fellow. he was seated grimly at his desk with his astronomical charts as he figured by what ingenuity he could map an emergency course to give the little _seven stars_ its greatest speed. the ship was silent as i padded the length of the superstructure roof and went down to the stern triangle. by ship-routine it was now about eleven at night. the martian passengers were out of sight, sleeping probably. none of the crew were about, save the man in the aft peak with his small, wide-angle telescope. the wreck of the patrolship was certainly far beyond sight of the naked eye. this stern lookout evidently hadn't spotted it, and in a moment now i knew it would be beyond his range also. the captain and i, doubtless, were the only ones who knew what had happened. i went forward along the side deck. in the men's smoking lounge, amidships in the superstructure, i heard voices, caught a glimpse as i went past of arthur jerome, the television lecturer, and livingston, the earth ambassador to mars, in there with green, the ship's purser. did that mean that brenda carson and her brother were still on the forward peak? i went cautiously forward. they were there--the blobs of them, faintly starlit, showed where they were standing together at one of the side bull's-eyes. upon impulse, instead of joining them, i slid unseen into the shadows of a loading engine. "oh, philip--" the girl's voice was faintly audible in the silence. "i'm so frightened. you think we can do it safely?" "yes, of course. i'll make sure--" he lowered his voice and i lost the rest of it. "when?" she murmured. "i'll just take a look presently. we're not there yet--closer in a few hours." what, in heaven's name, could that mean? were these two spies, planted here on the _seven stars_ by the phantom-bandits? were they discussing the attack which captain wilkes and i feared? certainly it did not seem so. young philip carson wasn't much older than his sister. slim, handsome, rather effeminate-looking fellow, with a weak jaw and slack mouth. he wore black and white trousers, somewhat like hers. he and she seemed devoted to each other. rankin had told me that philip carson had a bad record of gambling and bad companions. was the girl entangled because of him? my mind went back to the meager details which rankin had given me. brenda and philip carson came of a cultured and once-rich family in new york. their father--their only close living relative--had been a research physicist. an eccentric old fellow; he had built a laboratory down on long island where, working in secret, he was laboriously experimenting on something. two years ago the place had exploded. presumably he had been killed. but in the wreckage his body had not been found; nor was there anything to give a clue as to what he had been doing there. had he been building the phantom space-raider? the thought was obvious now. brenda and philip had denied knowing, when the authorities had questioned them. and now they were going to mars, on this of all voyages, and for no reason that they had been able to give. was the vanished eccentric professor robert carson the phantom raider? my heart leaped as i heard another fragment from the girl. "you think you got his message correctly?" "yes, of course i did." "if we can do it safely--oh, phil--the location." "i've got it all figured out, bren," he insisted. "even made a little map--got it in the wallet of my jacket." that stiffened me. i could see the blob of him standing there with her. the folds of his hooded cape, like hers, fell almost to his feet. but his arm held the cape draped a little to one side. i could see his white shirt; he was wearing no jacket. it would be in his sleeping cubby then. for a moment more i crouched in the shelter of the little loading engine; i caught a few more fragments, but they were not important. * * * * * a wallet in young carson's cubby, with a map in it? i shifted silently backward, reached the side deck and padded aft. the smoking lounge was empty now. the little interior cross corridor of the superstructure was dim and silent. carson and his sister had connecting rooms, with corridor doors side by side. cautiously i tried them. they were locked. in a moment i was out to the side deck. carson's window was closed; i pulled at the vertical sash and it yielded, slid outward. the room was dim, with just a faint glow of the corridor light coming over the lattice-grille above the door. i jumped over the sill; landed silently in the room. no need for any lengthy search; his jacket was here, folded on a chair. the wallet was in a pocket. swiftly i riffled through it, came upon a folded square of notepaper. the map? i was opening it. by the dim sheen of reflected light i could see its penciled scrawl. and suddenly i was stricken by the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside. someone coming. i jumped on the chair. through the grille i could catch a glimpse of a cloaked figure coming along the corridor. carson or the girl--in that second i could not tell which. but at all events i had no desire to get caught here by either of them. i got back out the window just in time. aft down the side deck there was the blob of a loitering figure, a big, bulky silhouette. it was walter livingston, the earth-mars ambassador. the tip of his cigarette glowed in the dimness as he stood by one of the side bull's-eyes. was he watching these windows of carson and the girl? did he see me? i had no way of telling. i ran forward, ducked around the superstructure corner. the bow-peak triangle was empty; the chairs where the group of us had been sitting were still here. there was enough light for me to examine the folded sheet of paper i had purloined. it seemed a crude map. a rough, penciled sketch. but a map of what? there were the ragged outlines of what might be intended to represent mountains. the scribbled word: "andros." a dotted line through what might be a mountain pass. and then a tiny x. i stared at the thing, puzzled. a few hundred years ago the fabled surface-ship pirates of earth's romantic sea-history supposedly made maps like this. maps of buried treasure. pirates' gold. were carson and his young sister after some treasure? where? on earth? mars? little deimos? asteroid- ? that thought leaped at me. certainly they had shown a queer interest in my chance remark about asteroid- . we were not far from it now. fifty thousand miles perhaps--would pass at our closest point to it in an hour of two. i stared through the bull's-eye beside me. it was down there, diagonally ahead of us--a full-round, putty-colored disk, with the configurations of its mountains and the turgid clouds of its atmosphere beginning to be visible. but what could any of that have to do with the phantom raider, or the attack on the patrolship and the impending attack upon us? surely there was no treasure on asteroid- . the treasure, if you could call it that, was right here on board the little _seven stars_. i was crouching now in the shadow of the loading engine on the bow-peak, puzzled by my rush of thoughts. should i take this to captain wilkes? vaguely i realized that perhaps i should, but something stopped me. my own instinctive feelings for brenda carson. she seemed somehow so pathetic. surely she was no plotting murderess. her brother--yes. but the girl--protecting someone she loved? was her father really the phantom raider? his invention an x-flyer endowed with mechanical, electronic invisibility? i knew that such a thing was scientifically possible, of course. but professor carson was a frail old man. and my mind leaped back to some other things chief rankin had told me. the phantom was thought to be a notorious earth-criminal who, a few years ago, had been known as the "chameleon." a fellow skilled in the art of wax disguise so that none of the earth crime-trackers really knew what he looked like. he was wanted in both great new york and great london for mail-tube murders. nothing was known of his identity save that he had once had an operation for a fractured skull, where in the back of the skull a big triangular platinum plate had been inserted to take the place of the shattered bone. a criminal surgeon, dying, had confessed that much; had said he had performed the operation. and then he had mumbled something about the chameleon being the phantom raider. surely such a notorious skilled adventurer could not be old professor carson. i decided not to have brenda and philip hauled before the captain now for questioning. * * * * * thoughts are instant things. i was crouching there behind the engine loader no more than a moment; and suddenly down the other side deck just beyond the smoking lounge, i saw a moving figure. a slight figure in dark cloak and hood--the bottoms of black and white trousers were visible. brenda? it made my heart pound. for a second i stared as she ducked into a doorway. i was there in twenty seconds, until i saw the cloaked shadow of her going down a companion ladder into the ship's hold. swiftly i followed. down two eight-foot levels, and then i caught another glimpse of her as she moved into the lower passage. it was a metal catwalk with small cubbies opening from it. the ship's air-renewers, ventilating system; a cubby controlling the hull gravity-plate shifters; other mechanism rooms. she went past them, a furtive little shadow. and stopped at what seemed the door to one of the tiny pressure chambers of an exit-porte in the side of the hull. "oh, you, mr. fanning? what do you want down here?" the voice in the silence so startled me that i whirled. it was kellogg, the ship's gravity-control operator. in his shirtsleeves, pipe in hand, with a green eyeshade on his forehead, he had seen me from the door of his little cubby. "why--" i murmured. "just coming down to see you." i turned to join him. and suddenly a buzzer in his control room interrupted him. i stood while he answered it--an audio-tube for direct voice-transmission. "yes, captain wilkes--" and then kellogg gasped and clutched at the table beside him; then he whirled upon me, his face chalk-white. "our radio-helio is smashed! someone--something smashed it!" our little _seven stars_ was cut off from earth or mars communication! captain wilkes had evidently decided to flash a call for help to earth, and found that the apparatus had been smashed! but even that startling news instantly was stricken from kellogg and me. out in the corridor quite near us a low scream sounded! and then there was the sound of air hissing! "what the devil!" kellogg gasped. my gun was in my hand as we ran. there was nothing in sight on the dim little catwalk. the scream had died. the air-hissing stopped. "somebody went into the pressure-chamber!" kellogg muttered. "what in the hell--" "the pressure-chamber door-slide was closed. i knew the mechanism of these exit-portes. there were four of them in the hull-bottom of the _seven stars_--two on each side. there was an inner door-slide; a sealed pressure-room some ten feet square and six feet high; and an outer door-slide. ordinarily the mechanism was automatic. the outer slide must be closed if the inner one was open. to make an exit, one went into the pressure-room; closed the catwalk door, and with manual control slowly opened the outer slide, so that the air in the sealed room would hiss out into space. after which, with a thirty-second interval, the outer slide would close and the inner one slowly open, admitting the ship's air again into the pressure-room. "someone worked the manual controls wrong!" kellogg was muttering. he gestured to where there was a duplicate set of controls out here in the corridor. "that outer slide opened too quickly!" we could hear the last of the air rushing out with a wild gush. a stab of horror went into my heart. brenda carson in there, trying to escape from the ship--not knowing how to work the controls--opening that outer slide too quickly. the air in the pressure-room was gone in a few seconds. then we heard the click of the outer slide closing. the inner door began very slowly opening. with a muttered curse of impatience kellogg twitched at the control levers here. the inner door slid wide. we clutched at the catwalk rail to hold ourselves against the gust of wind as the little pressure-room filled. and then we rushed into it. pressure suits, powered as i knew by tiny gravity-repulsers and a rocket-stream mechanism, stood here in racks. one of them lay here on the floor, entangled with a rack-post so that it had not blown out. brenda evidently had tried to get into it and failed. "look! good lord--poor little thing--" kellogg murmured. he had slid aside a tiny bull's-eye shade. through it a segment of space outside the hull was visible. we had only a glimpse of a ghastly body, mangled by the explosion of the pressure within itself, out in the pressureless vacuum of space. it floated past us, some forty feet out. held poised by the gravity, the nearness and bulk of the _seven stars_. horrible little satellite, already finding an orbit of its own, slowly circling around us. * * * * * i staggered back from the bull's-eye. as i rushed back along the catwalk my horrified mind was clamoring with the vague thought: had brenda operated that pressure-mechanism wrongly? or had someone on the catwalk, at the controls there, done it? that thought, too, was stricken away. i reached the forward deck triangle. the bow-peak lookout was calling up to captain wilkes: "passenger overboard! brenda carson! it's miss brenda carson!" dead girl in the space-light. i could not look at the horrible thing as it rounded our bow and came slowly floating past again. "you, fanning--what's happened? brenda carson, he says." arthur jerome stood calling to me from his stateroom door at the bow superstructure corner. he was in his nightrobe with a negligee hastily wrapped around him. "yes--" i gasped. "brenda carson. she--" "and i heard something about radio-helio room wrecked." the big, florid television lecturer seemed in a panic. experienced space-traveler, but he had never run into anything like this before. i wouldn't blame him for his terror. but i had no time for him now. the ship was in confusion. i could hear the martians, below deck in the bow, shouting with frightened questions. two or three members of the crew were running up to captain wilkes who was outside his turret calling down orders. i ran down the side deck. one of the excited crew stopped me. "you seen young philip carson? captain wants him." i shook my head and ran on. somebody else was calling carson's name. i mounted the companionway to the superstructure roof. had philip carson vanished? they couldn't find him? well, what i knew about philip carson now i'd certainly tell captain wilkes! suddenly i realized fully that because of brenda i had wanted to keep silent--but there was no need of that now. from the superstructure roof, as i ran forward along it, i could see down to the side deck. a cloaked figure there. philip carson. i had just a glimpse as he darted into a door under me. a ladder was nearby. my little paralyzer-gun was in my hand as i climbed down the ladder, reached the dark side-deck. the commotion was all up forward; there was no one here at the moment. the corridor door into which carson had run was beside me. i ran into it, ten feet or so and into a cross corridor. came to his doorway. it was locked. i ran around to the deck again. his window was near here. the glassite pane of the window was closed and locked. the inner fabric-shade was drawn down. what was he doing in there? searching for his map? for other things which might be incriminating? i had a few instruments hidden in my clothes, tiny devices which we of the interplanetary patrol sometimes have occasion to use--a small electric listener and a tiny x-ray fluoroscope screen. the listener yielded the sound of a man's panting breath, his furtive, fumbling movements within the dark little cubby. then i tried the x-ray, through the fabric-shrouded glassite pane of the window. it shot its invisible, soundless rays through the window into the cubby. the little hooded three-inch screen in my palm glowed with the greenish fluoroscopic x-ray image. a kneeling skeleton was revealed--the skeleton of a man kneeling in there with his back to me. i stared, and suddenly gasped, with my breath stopped. the back of the skeleton's skull was visible--the image-shadow there was of a different density from the bones of his skull! a dark triangular patch--not bone, but metal! the man with the metal skull! philip carson, of notorious chameleon fame! the phantom raider! i had him here identified at last! had him trapped here! * * * * * with a blow of my gun-butt i smashed through the glassite pane; tore the fabric-shade aside. this room was dark. i had an instant's glimpse of the dark blob of his crouching figure. there was the whiz of something he threw at me; the tinkling of glass as some fragile little thing struck against my forehead. i recall that my paralyzer ray darted into the dark room. perhaps it caught him, held him for a second. but my head was reeling; my senses swiftly fading, with a cold sweat breaking out all over me. and then i was aware that i had fallen to the deck with my gun clattering away. with my last dim thought came the realization that i was fainting. that tiny glass globe which had broken against my forehead--i knew what it was! a little bomb of acetycholine, a weird drug to lower the blood-pressure and cause me to faint. i fought, but it was useless. my senses faded. then after an interval i seemed vaguely to be conscious that someone was bending over me. a dark cloak.... again i knew only blankness; and then slowly my senses were coming back. weak, dizzy, with my head roaring, my body bathed in cold sweat, i found myself still lying on the dark deck. perhaps i had been out only a moment or two. i could still hear the commotion up forward. i staggered to my feet; saw the cloaked figure as it ran into the superstructure. carson making his getaway! i had a glimpse of him again, two levels down on the dim catwalk, and saw him dart into the pressure-chamber. i was too late getting there. the metal pressure-door closed in my face. but i had him! i could do to him what he had done to brenda! i started for the manual controls. i could open that outer slide, let the pressure-room air out with a rush before he could get into his space suit, blast him out into space, or suffocate him in the pressure-room. but i had over-taxed my strength. my blood-pressure was still too low from that accursed drug. my senses were fading again and i sank to the floor. weakly i tried to call kellogg. but he wasn't in his little nearby cubby now. i did not quite lose consciousness this time. i heard the air slowly going out through the outside opening slide. then heard the click as the automatic mechanism closed it. the corridor slide in another moment, automatically was slowly opening. the rush of air into the little room helped revive me. i got to my feet again; ran into the room. i could see the empty space on the rack where he had taken one of the powered pressure suits and escaped. at the bull's-eye observation porte i had a glimpse of him--a bloated figure in his air-filled suit--a tiny comet with a radiance of rocket-stream like a tail behind it. the blob of him in a moment had vanished. where did he expect to go? diagonally ahead, and far down in the glittering starfield, the round, putty-colored disk of asteroid- was visible. my strength had almost fully come back to me now. quickly i got into another of the power-suits. they were a somewhat old-fashioned model, but adequate enough, a double-shelled fabric with electronic pressure-absorbing current in it; air-renewers, and the small power-units. i bloated the suit in another moment; closed the corridor slide. i let the air rush out through the outer slide as quickly as i dared. and then i catapulted out, not bothering with the rocket-stream but using full gravity-repulsion against the bulk of the _seven stars_. far down, ahead of me, for an instant i could just see the speck which was the fleeing carson. over me the bulk of the _seven stars_ hung, a great alumite cylinder, receding, dwindled by distance until it was only a tiny speck, lost among the blazing stars. with the huge, dull-lead disk of asteroid- growing in visual size under me, i hurtled downward, using the asteroid's full attraction now as i sped after the escaping carson. * * * * * alone in space; a little drifting world of yourself. it is an eerie feeling. i have no idea how long that descent to asteroid- took; one loses all sense of time as well as space, hurtling alone through the starry universe. the _seven stars_ long since was gone, vanished in the black illimitable distances of the blazing firmament above me. head down, with full attraction in the little gravity plates of the padded shoulders of my bloated suit, like a diver i headed, hurtling for the dull-lead surface. i had picked up velocity swiftly. the great round disk of asteroid- widened, spread, crawled outward and seemed visually coming up. for a time, sunlight was a thin stream on its distant curving limb of mountains. then i went into the cone of its shadow. at once the look of the weird leaden mountains changed; starlight and earthlight mellow with a faint sheen that struck down through the clouds and tinged the giant ragged peaks with a tinting glow. the clouds, still far down, were broken in thin stratas here over this hemisphere. the disk had widened now so that presently it filled all the lower half of the firmament; and a visual convexity had come to it. i tried to calculate my velocity by the apparent enlarging of the desolate scene as it rushed up at me. where was carson? long since, i had lost sight of the tiny speck which had been he. was i overtaking him? i could not tell. with the leaden glow of the asteroid's surface as a background, i knew i could be quite close to him and still not see him. undoubtedly he was not using his rocket-stream now; had only used it in starting, for quick repulsion against the ship's hull. i was sure he could not be very far below me unless, during the time which had passed, he had headed in some other direction, departing from a straight, swift descent. could he drop faster than i was dropping? i doubted it. unless he was very skilled--or very desperate, holding the asteroid's attraction to a dangerous point. i held my own until i dared hold it no longer. i was in the upper atmosphere now. in every direction, save above me, the planet's dark surface spread out to its jagged, circular horizon. then at last i dared not hold the attraction longer. with all the tiny plates in my suit electronized to full repulsion, i began slackening my fall. still i had not glimpsed carson. disappointment was within me. what a long chance was this! a five-hundred-mile hemisphere of utter desolation. no food; no water. and i had no weapons or instruments, save the single little paralyzer-gun which i had snatched from the deck when i recovered my senses. i was beginning to be sorry now that i had so hastily left the _seven stars_. no chance of getting back; the die was cast, here on little asteroid- pitted against this resourceful, youthful astonishing interplanetary murderer. what was carson's plan? escape from the ship had been a desperate necessity for him, of course. and my memory was back to the fragments i had heard between him and brenda. i could understand them better now! they had planned from the beginning to escape to asteroid- ! and poor little brenda, entangled in this criminality with her brother, had left the ship first, and met her death. memory of the map they had had came suddenly to me. i had it in my pocket now; i tried to conjure what it had looked like. outlines of mountains; the word andros. was that the name of one of the asteroid's mountain peaks? probably it was. i cursed myself for my ignorance. the phantom raider probably was based upon this desolate asteroid. a hide-out here, with food and water and possibly with some of the raiders' men living here. and carson was dropping now to join them. what chance had i against a layout like that? but i had no choice now but hurtle downward, trying to check my descent as best i could. for a time, as i came out from under the clouds, with the dark, fantastic surface of naked, ragged little peaks no more than twenty or thirty thousand feet down, it seemed that i had been too brash; i was dropping too fast; never would i be able to check it. i would crash.... * * * * * but that, too, was an error, born of my momentarily despairing thoughts. i was presently poised, some ten thousand feet up. the highest of the little peaks was no more than half that. they stood in a tumbled mass--jagged needle-spires--rocks and buttes and great round-top boulders, with ravines and gullies between them. scene of utter, naked desolation, convulsed landscape, frozen into immobility. and suddenly my heart was pounding with abrupt exultation. far down, where the starlight and earthlight bathed a little peak, i saw the speck which was the descending carson! just for a second the tiny outline of his bloated suit was clear against the background of a shining rock. then he dropped into an inky shadow and was gone again. i tried to mark the spot. a little triplet of spires, standing like sentinels above a small dark valley. was that andros, a landmark here? probably it was. i was down in perhaps another half hour, with the triplet of spires standing up against what was now a sullen sky of broken leaden clouds through which the starlight and earthlight fitfully shone. i had landed, by all that i could judge, about half an earth-mile from where carson had dropped. had he seen me coming down above him? perhaps. perhaps not. with my helmet off, and with my lungs panting as they tried to adjust themselves to the weird air, i crouched for a moment in the shadow of a rock, peering, listening. there was nothing. it seemed a dead world, myself its only inhabitant--a silence so utter that my own breath, my pounding heart were roaring in my ears. i started in a moment, heading along a ridged, fantastic little terrain at the bottom of a shadowed valley. the deflated suit hung in baggy folds upon me; the bulky helmet was folded, hanging down from the back of my neck. half a mile to where carson had dropped. gun in hand i advanced as cautiously as i could, until presently i was following a ragged ditch with the triple spires of andros looming above me. was this where carson had landed? so far as i could judge, it seemed so. i was tense, alert with the vague, horrible feeling that i was walking into ambush. then ahead of me, in a distant shadow, it seemed that there was a faint stir of movement. soundlessly i melted down to the lead-gray rocks. i could not see the shadow now, but every instant i expected the luminous darkness to be stabbed with a bursting bolt. there was nothing. suddenly the stillness was broken by a faint scraping sound. it seemed fairly close, and into the darkness from whence it had come i aimed my ray; pressed its lever. there was a faint, gasping scream; then a choked silence. i jumped to my feet, holding the paralyzer-gun leveled as it throbbed and quivered in my grip. got him! he couldn't move. he was rooted there in the darkness, with rigid, stiffened muscles as the ray held him. i saw him in an instant, the dark blob of him almost merged with the shadows, with his baggy space-suit like my own deflated in folds upon him, and his helmet folded back. triumphant, i dashed forward; and then stopped transfixed, amazed. the paralyzed figure, stricken upright here on the rocks wasn't young carson! above the folded helmet there was a head of bobbed blonde hair! brenda! brenda, not dead! not that ghastly thing that was a gruesome little satellite of the _seven stars_! i saw her rigid face, with goggling mouth and staring eyes. brenda mute, stricken by my ray. i snapped it off frantically; called to her as i dashed up. and as the ray released her, i saw her waver; then, with her knees buckling, she sank into a little heap on the ground. if only i had some water to dash into her face! frantically i knelt, holding her head, brushing her curls from her damp forehead. the ray, i knew, upon her for so short a time, should not quite do this to her. it was her emotion, her terror which had caused her to faint. my mind went back to that hooded figure, cloaked, which i had chased in the ship's corridor. i had had a vague indecision, then had decided it was brenda--and the ship's lookout at the bow-peak had confirmed my fears. but that had been philip, and it was brenda whom i had chased that second time, following her out the porte, hurtling into space after her. "brenda--" she opened her eyes presently, bewildered, but she was unharmed. "oh--you--i was so frightened." * * * * * i held her as she recovered, and presently she was filling in all the grim details of her tragic little story. whatever her brother philip's propensities for gambling and bad companions, he had been no criminal. they had lost their father; had been truthful when they said they did not know what professor carson had been building in his lonely little laboratory. but they knew enough so that when the phantom bandit began his mysterious raids, they suspected it was their father's ship; the laboratory explosion merely a blind. he had often mentioned, when they were children, that the dream of his life was to discover and perfect electronic invisibility. "albert einstein of two hundred years ago," she was telling me now. "father studied his writings and his theories very closely. he said that the secret of practical mechanical invisibility was clearly forecast by einstein's discoveries." "and you think now," i murmured, "your father is this mysterious phantom raider?" her little face clouded. her blue eyes, misty with earthlight which was striking down upon us now through the clouds, gazed at me with a pathetic appeal. "we did not know. we--we were afraid so. and then philip got a message one night--" weird occurrence. young carson had been on the porch of their long island home. from the sky overhead, where nothing was to be seen, had come a little stab of waving white light. a helio signal. from their father? certainly it seemed so. it told them to come secretly to asteroid- . he would be there, at the base of andros. and so they had come to try and help their father. "help him?" i murmured. "yes. oh, mr. fanning--" "jim is shorter," i interjected. "--jim, you see, we couldn't believe father is a criminal. captured maybe and forced to operate his ship by these bandits, and appealing to us for help." desperate adventure indeed. but they had tackled it; had taken passage on the little _seven stars_ which they understood would pass very close to asteroid- , this voyage. and they had known completely nothing of the _seven stars'_ cargo or of any plot which the raider might have against her! brenda gasped now when i told her of those angles. and there were still other angles that puzzled me. "brenda, have you ever heard of an earth-criminal called the chameleon?" she had not; and when i described his exploits of a few years ago, she was convinced that by no possible chance could her aged father have been secretly doing things like that. nor philip either, for that matter. she declared it vehemently, and i believed her. but the man with the metal skull had been on the _seven stars_ as stowaway, or spy among the passengers, ship's officers or crew. i had seen him there in young carson's stateroom. brenda, when i was chasing her, had eluded me. "i saw you fighting with somebody at philip's window," she told me now. "i was going to escape from the ship then." "even though philip was dead, you were going on with your plans alone?" "yes, why not?" she smiled her twisted little smile. "then i saw you fall to the deck. i ran, bent over you. i--i thought you were dead. so i--i ran down to the porte and took off. philip and i had planned it so carefully. oh, poor philip!" "he didn't miscalculate those air-mechanisms," i muttered. "that damned villain must have been there in the corridor for an instant while i was talking to kellogg, and shoved the controls--killed philip." and i had tried to do the same thing to brenda! i could only thank the lord now that i had failed! * * * * * the two of us, alone here on asteroid- . no food nor water. perhaps the only inhabitants of this desolate little world. abruptly she was gripping me. "look--jim--look there!" i followed her gesture. up in the leaden sky beyond the looming triple spires of andros, a tiny speck had appeared. a ship coming down. breathlessly we watched. in a few minutes it was a little oblong blob. "it's coming this way, brenda." "yes." it seemed circling a little. by the look it would land on a small level plateau some quarter of a mile from us. we stared, mute, transfixed, watching. and then suddenly i sucked in my breath with a new shock of startled amazement. there was something familiar about that cylindrical alumite hull with the curving pressure-dome above it, and those quadruplicate tail-fins. it wasn't the bandit flyer! "that's the _seven stars_!" i gasped. the _seven stars_ unquestionably. we saw her clearly in a moment, as she circled some five miles away from us and headed slowly for the small plateau. captain wilkes undoubtedly had changed his mind about trying to make a run for it. with chaos on his ship--his radio-helio wrecked so that he could not summon another convoy--he had headed down here to hide his vessel. and he did not know, of course, that the phantom raider's base was here! he had brought his little treasure ship into the very camp of the enemy! "we must warn him, brenda." the blob of the little liner dropped from our sight behind a line of broken rock-spires as she settled to the plateau. but we could tell within a few hundred yards of where she had landed. it took us only a few minutes to run there, with the slighter gravity of asteroid- aiding us in our leaps across the intervening little chasms. and then we saw the _seven stars_, where she rested placidly on the level surface. one of her lower portes was open, but there were no figures out on the dim rocks. there was silence inside as we entered the dark little pressure-chamber. as always customary in port, both its outer and inner door-slides were open, admitting the fresh outer air. there was no one to greet us on the lower level catwalk. its single overhead light was burning. we passed kellogg's little cubby. no one was in it. then we mounted the companion ladder; came to the superstructure corridor. queer, this silence. i held brenda, with my heart chilling, sinking. it seemed suddenly that we were prowling like ghouls. the ship was so cold, so silent. with the ventilating fans stilled, the interior air here was turning fetid. i had an impulse to call out. captain wilkes, controlman kellogg, purser green, the crew, the passengers--where were they all? but abruptly i was furtive, with a slow, horrified terror dawning in me so that in the dim corridor i stood suddenly and turned to brenda. "we'd better get back out of here," i murmured. "something queer--" "jim--look!" we stood frozen, transfixed. at the deck doorway a blob was lying. captain wilkes. dead--suffocated. i swept brenda away that she might not get a second glimpse of his puffed, mangled flesh where it had burst outward from its own pressure. there had been a vacuum here! out in space the little _seven stars_ quite evidently had lost her interior air! ship of the dead! i took only one look at the dimly starlit deck triangle; the bodies lying strewn there. little group of humans who had gathered there in a last frenzied panic, clinging to each other, falling one upon the other--suffocating, dying. nothing but the dead here. but this tragedy had happened out in space! and we had seen the _seven stars_ calmly coming down, gracefully, skilfully landing! i swung back to brenda. i gasped, "good lord, we've got to get out!" too late a realization! i was aware suddenly of a dark glistening shape behind us in the corridor--a man in a sleek tight-fitting black robe. his white face, evil with a leer, grinned at us. brenda screamed. i tried to defend us from another dark blob that leaped from a doorway beside me. and then something struck my head. i was aware only that brenda was screaming as i felt myself falling, my senses hurtling off into the soundless abyss of unconsciousness. * * * * * i came at last into a dim half-consciousness in which i realized that i was being carried. i could feel the rhythmic step; and then i knew that i was slung over a man's shoulder and that he was walking with me on the rocks. other dark forms were beside us. with blurred vague vision i could see the little _seven stars_ which we had left. and near at hand another spaceship had landed now, here upon little asteroid- . i was being carried to it. i could glimpse it only vaguely as i hung inert on my captor's shoulder. it was a small ship, smaller than the _seven stars_, and of a type i had never seen before--barrel-finned and with a spreading fan-tail, somewhat in the british earth-design. it rested on the rocks like a long, thin bird, with body puffed out underneath. over it was the conventional glassite pressure dome, low-slung so that its top was no more than ten feet above the single deck. a dead-black bird. the starlight and mellow earthlight were on it, but the black metal surface did not shimmer. my senses wafted away again into another blank interval.... and then dimly my hearing came.... "we're glad to have you, little brenda. you are a treasure indeed. a woman among us--to cook and sew with woman's duties. your father will appreciate that. you do, eh carson?" familiar, suave, ironic voice with a rich booming timber to it of assumed graciousness. i knew i had heard that voice before, but with my swimming senses now i could not quite place it. i felt my eyes opening to a blur of swaying outlines. "you let her alone." the thin frightened voice of an old man. brenda's father. the dim scene clarified as my strength came. i was lying on the floor of a little circular control room, with a black shape beside me. and there were three other figures: brenda, still garbed in her baggy deflated space-suit, with her white tense face staring in my direction; her gray-haired, thin father, in black trousers and black shirt, seated in a little metal chair beside her. and the other figure at the controls--a big, heavy-set man in tight-fitting black garment. tubelight shone on his florid face. arthur jerome, interplanetary traveler, earth television lecturer on things astronomical! the man with the metal skull, unquestionably! notorious chameleon of former years, and now the phantom raider! "this fanning comes to his senses," a voice beside me growled. "ah, so?" it brought jerome with a leap, and then he bent over me. "so that blow on your head didn't kill you, fanning?" "no," i said. "you, jerome. if only i had known--" "quite true," he chuckled. "hindsight is very easy. and now we have you here. you will be useful, if you have any sense, a member of the interplanetary patrol, you should be skilled in many things of our adventuring in space. romantic life, fanning. did you ever read of captain kidd, so long ago? one might say i am his modern incarnation. romantic idea, eh fanning?" a little mad, this fellow. i could well imagine it. but a clever scheming, murderous villain for all that. "much money for you," he added slyly. "i treat all my men well. there are fifteen of us here." "i like money," i said with an assumption of sullenness. "but there are a lot of things i want to know." i found that i was still garbed in the space-suit, but my weapon was gone. i was presently allowed to sit up in a chair beside brenda and her father. but for all my assumption that i could be bribed, it did not deceive the wily jerome. the two other black-garbed men here were closely watching me. * * * * * the phantom flyer. from here in its tiny control room, it did not seem unusually weird. its fittings a dead-black metal. its men garbed in sleek, dead-black, close-fitting fabric suits with black fabric helmets dangling at the back of the neck. i could see that we were in space. through the pressure dome the stars were glittering in a black firmament. where were we going? jerome had not the slightest objection to telling me. perhaps in the back of his mind there was the idea that ultimately he could bribe me, make me one of his band of cutthroats, useful to him. he was a genial, triumphant villain now, flushed with his success, pleased to boast of it before his men and before brenda. old professor carson had not intended that his children come to asteroid- and try to rescue him. that furtive message he had found opportunity to send was intended to bring the interplanetary police. jerome had discovered that the message was sent. on the _seven stars_ he had thrust philip out through the porte; and had been searching philip's stateroom, fearing that some incriminating evidence might be there, when i assailed him. "you were using an x-ray screen?" he jibed at me now. "my metal headplate? much good will it ever do you now to know that i was the chameleon. a clever fellow, that chameleon--but i like the phantom bandit better, don't you?" and then he told me gloatingly how easy it had been for him to don a pressure-suit and hide in the pressure-room while he wrecked the air-valves and let the air out of the doomed _seven stars_. ship of the dead, on which he was the only living human until his phantom raider had come with a boarding party. then the _seven_ had been taken to asteroid- , her cargo of electronic weapons transferred to the arriving x-flyer, and here we were. "headed for deimos," he chuckled. "how glad they will be to see us! a million decimars of interplanetary currency, fanning. you'll want some of it, surely. and then we'll go looking for another adventure. romantic life, eh?" i tried, during those following hours, very cautiously to convince jerome that at heart i might be a villain like himself. perhaps to some extent, i succeeded. at all events, there came at last a brief interval when the controls were locked and brenda, her father and i were out on the tiny forepeak in the starlight, momentarily alone. i had found now that a little freedom of movement was given us. after all, there was nothing that we could do, trapped here. "you know where the exit porte of this ship is?" i murmured. "yes, yes, of course." professor carson was a confused, dazed old man; his life among these cutthroats for so long now had cowed him. "but what--what do you think you could do?" in truth i had no possible idea. but if ever a chance should come for escape-- "in the pressure chamber," i whispered, "would there be pressure suits? one for you--" "yes. yes, there are." a commotion up at the control turret interrupted us. the black-garbed man at the electro-telescope there was shouting. jerome came running; and we followed him up into the turret. he was grim, but ironically smiling. "interplanetary patrolship off there," he said. "patrolship- ." sister ship of my ill-fated vessel. "sighted us?" i murmured. he shrugged. "probably. only three thousand miles away--probably did." his mouth was set into a grim hard line. in his eyes i saw that gleam of fanatic irrationality. "unfortunate, for them. this little vessel of mine has never been sighted before, you know." his lips twitched with a grin. "you see how we are dressed here? why, we've even been down into earth's atmosphere--we've landed and made away without discovery. we'll do that on deimos. and now this patrolship--no one on it will ever live to tell that even for a moment they sighted the phantom raider!" he turned to an intricate bank of levers, dials and tiny vacuum globes that were ranged on a table here at the side of the control room. separate from the space-flying mechanisms. the controls of the mechanical electronic invisibility. "you'll see us go into action now, fanning. it should be interesting." he swung the dials. i felt my senses reel with a weird shock. brenda gave a little gasp. there was a momentary quiver of all the ship; a momentary current-hum. and then silence. my head cleared; the shock was passed. i gripped the arms of my chair and stared. * * * * * a glow like an aura of green radiance suffused the control room. a green glow of unreality throughout all the little ship. i could see it out on the forepeak triangle--the black-garbed figures like wraiths out there in a luminous green gloom. the glassite bull's-eye portes seemed now to have a green film on them. the stars outside were shut away. the transparent glassite dome was spread with the same dull-green opaqueness now. and then i saw, here in the turret walls, in the dome and in the center of each of the bull's-eyes, little holes through which a tiny segment of the starfield still was apparent--windows like dull little eyes puncturing our barrage of invisibility so that we could see outward through them. here in the control room the dull radience shone upon jerome's grinning, triumphant face; it was tinted ghastly, putty-colored by the strange light. and the light glistened on his eyeballs, glowing like phosphorescence--like the eyes of an animal in a hunter's torchlight at night. everyone here, the same. and i saw old professor carson's face--the face of a dead man. his expression was stamped with his mixed emotions. this, his science of which he had been so proud, perverted now into murderous, ghastly warfare by the villainous jerome. then jerome moved to his space-flight controls; through the tiny windows in the barrage i could see that our ship was swinging, heading for the oncoming patrolship. only three thousand miles apart. they would be upon each other in a few minutes. jerome's footsteps as he moved across the room faintly sounded on the metal floor-grid. toneless footsteps in this eerie radiance. unreal--they might have been tinkling bells, or harsh thuds. all timbre had gone from them so that they had lost their identity completely. "not long now, fanning," jerome said. "you'll see that ship go to its death." ghastly dead voice. every overtone had gone from it. it could have been a man's voice, or a woman's. the voice of a dead thing in a hollow tomb. "weird--" i muttered. my own voice the same. and brenda's, as she murmured something in horror. all dead, indistinguishable one from the other. down on the forepeak in the sodden dull-green light, i could see the crew raising the electronic gun-carriages into position now. they were quite evidently of the most modern edretch type, squat projectors with grid faces fitted into vacuum firing portes on each side of the forepeak. guns undoubtedly with an effective range of some five hundred earth-miles. x-flyer going into action. the crew, with their dead putty-colored faces, moved, silently in the soundless ship. up here in the turret with us, jerome's hollow voice was gloating: "that fool patrolship--they have seen us vanish. they know now who their adversary is. want to see them, fanning?" there was no need of a telescope now. a magnified image of the oncoming patrolship as seen through one of the little barrage-vents on our bow, was spread here on a grid-screen in the control turret. fascinated with horror, i watched it--the foreshortened looming bow of the patrolship clearly outlined against the black velvet of the firmament. it had seen us vanish, had turned and was heading straight for where it had last seen us! even as i watched, the image of it was visibly enlarging. a thousand miles away now, probably. but almost in a moment it would be within range! then the wily jerome abruptly swung us sharply. he was still at his gravity-control levers. the starfield rolled sidewise as we turned in a great hundred-mile arc. the maneuver was obvious. the patrolship had marked our position. jerome quite evidently was not sure what range-guns his adversary had. he was taking no chances that a premature shot, aimed by calculation at where we might be, would strike us. patrolship- had guns very similar to these which i saw now being erected here on the x-flyer. it could have been a fairly even battle, a test of electronic battery-strength, of astronomical skill, of reckless daring--and yet, against an invisible enemy it could be no fight at all! i knew the commander of patrolship- well. a stalwart, youngish fellow named rollins. a man of infinite skill, reckless daring. i could picture him now in the turret of his ship, with his mouth set grim and his eyes flashing as he hurtled his little vessel forward. at what? nothing but an apparently empty starfield from some unknown quarter of which a sudden stab of bolt would leap to strike him! i knew what commander rollins was thinking now. he would watch for that first bolt, and if it did not wreck his ship he would fire at the blankness from whence the shot had come. his only chance. an almost hopeless one. and yet he had done his best to hurl himself at us. * * * * * we were circling now. and suddenly it seemed that rollins' ship, with its side spread toward us, off there at some five hundred miles, was slackening its velocity. like a lion at bay, stopping, waiting with an invisible soundless wasp encircling it. one of the gunners down in our forepeak signaled up to jerome. "not yet," jerome called. "when we strike, it must smash. there must not even be a chance of an answering shot." maneuvering for the kill. fascinated, silently i watched as again we were heading for rollins' ship. and within me a vague, desperate thought was growing: there are things through which one has no right to live. if only i could contrive it. jerome was absorbed at his controls, his range-finders and his calculations. my hand touched brenda's arm where she sat beside me. i whispered: "brenda, we may not live through this." "i know." "i mean, if we were to die, to help that other ship." she stared at me, and then at her father. jerome had called the old man, ordered him to the mechanisms of the vessel's invisibility, where he sat checking the dial-readings of his intricate apparatus. briefly, its operation involved three scientific factors: de-electronization, thus to create around any metallic object a barrage of magnetic field of a new type to any previously developed; color-absorption, by which there can be no reflected light from the de-electronized object; and the albert einstein principle of the natural bending of light-rays when passing through a magnetic field. in effect then, the total color-absorption into the de-electronized object would make it, when viewed externally, a _nothingness_ to see. a blankness, like an outlined dark hole. but that in itself is not invisibility--merely a silhouette. the background would be blotted out, so that the invisible object would be perceived by the background it obscured. the magnetic field, however, by natural law which einstein discovered, bends the light-rays from the background, _around_ the intervening object. the background thus seems complete. the intervening object has vanished! simple in theory; but it was an intricate little apparatus here which now old professor carson was attending. i stared at him as he bent so earnestly over it. his beloved brain-child. for that moment brenda tenderly regarded him. and then she turned to me. her eyes were misted. "whatever you think best," she murmured. tensely i was waiting my chance. that tiny row of fragile vacuum tubes. my heart pounded suddenly as jerome locked his space-controls and darted down to the forepeak to consult one of his men at a gun-range finder. i muttered: "brenda take your father and get out of here quickly!" a burly, black-garbed guard was coming in from the turret balcony to watch us in jerome's absence. i added in a swift undertone: "go down with jerome. find some pretense to help him." they would escape jerome's wrath and there was just a chance that they might live through this. they had only reached the little balcony outside the turret when the guard came in. i was on my feet. "sit down," he commanded. he was between me and the little table where carson's tiny row of vacuum tubes glowed dull-green. and in that second i leaped, head down like a battering ram. with my skull striking his middle he went backward, spun as he tried to get his balance. and he landed, sprawled forward on carson's little table. there was a tinkling crash as the de-electronizers short-circuited. a hiss of neutronic flame which in that second with its half-million ultra-pressure oscillating volts, electrocuted the luckless villain who was sprawled there. i was down on the floor, crawling in the chaos. amazing, electronic turmoil. the shock of it swiftly spread around the little vessel; made the senses of everyone on board momentarily reel. i was aware of thin slivers of neutronic fire darting upward from the cooking flesh of the sprawling man's body. neutronic fire that all in that second of deranged current darted throughout the ship. a split second of flash; but in that second the darting tiny slivers of light-fire everywhere were drinking up the weird green glow. the muffled ghastly, toneless sounds of the ship's interior were brought to life. down on the forepeak jerome gasped a startled curse. one of his men fell with reeling senses. and light was here. normal celestial light, streaming down through our transparent dome where the blazing firmament of stars was now clearly to be seen. we had lost our invisibility! gone. irrevocably gone. at least this combat would be upon an equality! rollins at last had his equal chance with the phantom raider! patrolship- was clearly apparent now through our forward dome. i saw rollins swing his bow toward us. there was a tiny violet flash from his forepeak. the first shot! it came like a great violet lightning bolt hurtling at us! * * * * * there was a puff of electronic light up at our dome-peak. a shower of red-yellow sparks. i held my breath as rollins' little circle of violet beam struck us full, and clung. a second. ten seconds, while the shower of sparks sprayed like a little fountain of light-points. would the outer shell of our dome crack? it seemed to hold. ten seconds, and then rollins' ray snapped off and vanished. a test shot. i knew it was not a weakness of his electronic power. a great, long-range space-gun with a single snap-bolt ordinarily can do little damage. it is the duration of seconds over which the bolt can cling, eating its way with generated interference-heat, fusing and breaking its opposing armored substance. and this was rollins' first tentative test. verifying his range, and our ship's resistance. a conservation of his electronic power. in space-gun battle, the available reserve of battery strength is vital. a long-range gun, with ten seconds of sustained voltage, drains any battery-series faster than the whirling electro-dynamos can build them up. then there must be an interval of replenishment. my heart pounded with exultation as the thoughts swept me. rollins had been grimly desperate, undoubtedly, against an invisible enemy. but his adversary was visible now. an equality of battle; and so rollins would use his wits, his skill of judgment. this damned murderous jerome would have all he could do to match tactics with the skilful commander of patrolship- ! in those chaotic seconds i was still on the floor near the door of the control room. inside it the dead, roasted body of my guard lay sprawled face down upon the wreckage of the invisibility-controls. the current there was shut off now. the slivers of light-fire were gone. down on our forepeak jerome and his gunners were recovering. jerome was gazing up, wildly cursing. i staggered to the little turret-balcony, where brenda and her father, white-faced, were clinging to its rail. "that damned fool!" i shouted. "in there--in the turret. he stumbled and fell on the control table." would it serve as an excuse? would the raging jerome stab at me now with a heat-bolt? or would he believe me? i felt sure that no one actually had seen what had happened. "you damned--why--why--" jerome for that instant glared up at me, his hand instinctively reaching for his belt. but in all the chaos, turning his wrath upon me must have struck him as futile. and it was stricken from his mind by the confusion around him. acrid choking fumes were swirling through our little vessel, fumes from the deranged current of the de-electronizers. one of jerome's men dashed up to him. "a fire on our stern-deck. i put it out." "go back to your post." jerome shoved him away impatiently; turned, came up and went into his turret, and seated himself at his gravity controls. through the dome-peak i could see rollins' ship, going in the opposite direction from us, hurtling past us. two hundred miles off. in a moment it had passed and was out of range. then it was turning, mounting in a great arc and hurtling back at us! * * * * * jerome stabbed first. a hit! the violet sword dimly glowing, luminous as it ignited the motes of intervening star-dust, leaped across the narrowing angle and struck with a puff of glare. jerome held it, clinging. five seconds. ten. fifteen. i could hear the throb and whir of our dynamos as they struggled with the load. the big dial levers on jerome's desk quivered, slowly turned backward toward zero as our batteries drained. for those seconds rollins took it with no answering shot. would his forepeak dome hold? i could see the tiny puff of fountain-light there where the violet beam was boring. and then rollins answered! from his stern-peak this time diagonally away from us, his beam shot out. not directly at us, but at our bolt-stream. two great violet rapiers in space, sliding one upon the other. midway between the vessels they clashed. the interference cut our beam from rollins' vessel. out there in space for breathless seconds both the beams held firm. amazing sight of pyrotechnic beauty, that area where the beams clashed. another ten seconds, each of them an eternity. the giant circle of the interference area slowly was backing toward rollins' ship! our beam, at reckless full-power now, was pushing it back. only twenty or thirty miles now from its target. a buzzer sounded at jerome's elbow. he reached for his audiphone. the panic-stricken voice of our controlman in the ship's hull sounded: "chief! dynamo bearing running hot! an' we're almost at zero in the main battery." jerome disconnected with a grim curse. another few seconds. the narrowing angle of the hurtling ships had brought them within a hundred miles of each other. and then suddenly, again it was rollins who was the more cautious. from the tail of his vessel a stream of burning gas suddenly was issuing. a widening fluorescent comet-tail streaming out behind him. and then he was turning, heading away from us! in retreat! the interference area of the two clashing sword-beams broke. the great prismatic spark shower died. our bolt, plunging through, for a second may have struck the turning, retreating rollins. no one here could say. rollins' bolt had snapped off. the image of his ship merged with the gas cloud. vanished behind its masking cloak. jerome snapped off our beam. his face was triumphant; his enemy fleeing, trying to mask his retreat with a cloud of burning gas. "by heaven, i've got him!" jerome was muttering. "damn' fool, trying to fight the phantom." the starfield swung as we turned, headed at the gas-cloud where it hung in a vast luminous fog of prismatic color as though a comet had burst there. triumphant pursuit of our enemy. but i held my breath. i found brenda beside me. her hand, cold dank, gripped mine. our eyes met. there was nothing to say. surely we both knew what little chance we had of coming out of this alive. the luminous gas-cloud swarmed to the sides as our ship plunged headlong into it. and then we were through it. * * * * * there was no warning as rollins' bolt struck us! he had not tried to escape but was poised here in ambush, bow toward us, no more than fifty miles away, off to one side by skilled calculation so that there was only his narrow bow as our target and we were almost broadside to him! the bolt struck us midway of the hull in a shower of sparks that mounted up and clouded our instruments. clinging, full-power beam. rollins at last striking for the kill! wildly our guns tried to intercept it. one of our forepeak guns went out of commission with a back-firing burst which shattered it and killed the man at its controls. the fumes of the explosion came wafting up, acrid, choking. there was a sudden panic of confusion here, but jerome leaped to his feet with his roaring voice steadying his men. then two of our guns, stem and bow, stabbed beams that struck the patrolship's bow and clung. but still that blast at our hull persisted. eating, fusing the metallic hull-plate. weird, transfixed drama as the seconds passed. i knew that rollins now would never yield. this bolt would cling to the limit of his batteries. the audiphone beside jerome was screaming with the hull-controlman's panic-stricken voice: "chief--hull plate is bending--bulging--" then i saw, through the shower of sparks outside, that rollins' ship was edging even closer. one of our two bolts had wavered and broken, with exhausted battery. the other, weakened by all jerome's reckless firing, was futilely clinging to its target with a shower of sparks paling now by diminished voltage. and then from the patrolship, little blobs were popping out. catapulted bombs, hurtling at us with this close, twenty-mile range. some exploded in mid-space fired by the free electrons which hung heavy here around us. and then one struck us, exploded with a dull concussion against our stern. and then another, and another. "jim--jim dear--goodbye." brenda's murmured words brought me suddenly to myself. only sixty seconds had passed since we burst out of the gas-cloud and rollins had jumped to finish us. sixty seconds, but it had brought chaos here on the phantom ship. my chance! old professor carson beside us was in a daze; white-faced, numbly staring. "the exit-porte," i muttered. "brenda, make your father hurry." fumes of green-yellow chlorine mingled with oil-smoke, were surging around us as we staggered up the little catwalk from the balcony to the dome-top. jerome may have seen us. his voice was shouting desperate orders, and curses, but whether at us or not i never knew. a gunner down on the deck fired at us with a hand-ray, but it missed. "brenda, hurry! get your father into a space-suit." she and i still were garbed in the space-suits from the _seven stars_. in the tiny exit-porte, one of jerome's crew, himself trying to escape, lunged at me, but i felled him with a blow of my fist into his face. the closing slide-door of the tiny pressure chamber shut away the chaos. then our suits were inflated; our helmets fixed and we catapulted into the glare of outside space. i flung on my rocket-stream; clung to brenda and her father. my metal-tipped fingers on the metallic plate of her shoulder made audiphone contact. "hold tight, brenda." "yes, jim." "i'll tow us." horrible, chaotic seconds as the showering electronic sparks from the doomed phantom flyer enveloped us. indescribable glaring confusion of deranged electricity and fusing, bubbling, flying metal-fragments. prismatic light that blinded. we came through it in a moment, out into the starlight with the glaring, staggering vessel, receding behind and above us as my rocket-stream and gravity-plates drew us out of the line of fire. the patrolship was hardly ten miles away now. i signalled with a helmet-flare. interplanetary code signal. rollins saw it; recognized it; answered it! we hurtled forward. behind us, well overhead now, jerome's harried, wavering ship suddenly cracked. with a great burst of interior pressure the dome, to which rollins' main beam had shifted, abruptly exploded outward. ghastly, silent explosion. it spewed wreckage. little hurtling dots of shattered glassite and metal and mangled humans--blobs that spewed out, were caught by the vessel's attraction, finding their orbits so that they circled, gruesome satellites of their convulsed world. then the last of rollins' blasting beams snapped off. back there the broken ship hung leprous, with fused, still bubbling dome. like a bent finger of colored light for a moment more it glowed. and then it went dark. dead x-flyer among the stars. the end of the dreaded phantom of the starways.