1607	----	None 
61890	----	The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter By LEIGH BRACKETT More feared than the deadly green snakes, the hideous red beetles of that outpost of Earth Empire, was the winged dragon-queen of Jupiter and her white Legions of Doom. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Tex stirred uneasily where he lay on the parapet, staring into the heavy, Jupiterian fog. The greasy moisture ran down the fort wall, lay rank on his lips. With a sigh for the hot, dry air of Texas, and a curse for the adventure-thirst that made him leave it, he shifted his short, steel-hard body and wrinkled his sandy-red brows in the never-ending effort to see. A stifled cough turned his head. He whispered. "Hi, Breska." The Martian grinned and lay down beside him. His skin was wind-burned like Tex's, his black eyes nested in wrinkles caused by squinting against sun and blowing dust. For a second they were silent, feeling the desert like a bond between them. Then Breska, mastering his cough, grunted: "They're an hour late now. What's the matter with 'em?" Tex was worried, too. The regular dawn attack of the swamp-dwellers was long overdue. "Reckon they're thinking up some new tricks," he said. "I sure wish our relief would get here. I could use a vacation." Breska's teeth showed a cynical flash of white. "If they don't come soon, it won't matter. At that, starving is pleasanter than beetle-bombs, or green snakes. Hey, Tex. Here comes the Skipper." Captain John Smith--Smith was a common name in the Volunteer Legion--crawled along the catwalk. There were new lines of strain on the officer's gaunt face, and Tex's uneasiness grew. He knew that supplies were running low. Repairs were urgently needed. Wasn't the relief goin' to come at all? But Captain Smith's pleasant English voice was as calm as though he were discussing cricket-scores in a comfortable London club. "Any sign of the beggars, Tex?" "No, sir. But I got a feeling...." "H'm. Yes. We all have. Well, keep a sharp...." A scream cut him short. It came from below in the square compound. Tex shivered, craning down through the rusty netting covering the well. He'd heard screams like that before. A man ran across the greasy stones, tearing at something on his wrist. Other men ran to help him, the ragged remnant of the force that had marched into new Fort Washington three months before, the first garrison. The tiny green snake on the man's wrist grew incredibly. By the time the first men reached it, it had whipped a coil around its victim's neck. Faster than the eye could follow, it shifted its fangs from wrist to throat. The man seemed suddenly to go mad. He drew his knife and slashed at his comrades, screaming, keeping them at bay. Then, abruptly, he collapsed. The green snake, now nearly ten feet long, whipped free and darted toward a drainage tunnel. Shouting men surrounded it, drawing rapid-fire pistols, but Captain Smith called out: "Don't waste your ammunition, men!" Startled faces looked up. And in that second of respite, the snake coiled and butted its flat-nosed head against the grating. In a shower of rust-flakes it fell outward, and the snake was gone like a streak of green fire. Tex heard Breska cursing in a low undertone. A sudden silence had fallen on the compound. Men fingered the broken grating, white-faced as they realized what it meant. There would be no metal for repairs until the relief column came. It was hard enough to bring bare necessities over the wild terrain. And air travel was impracticable due to the miles-thick clouds and magnetic vagaries. There would be no metal, no ammunition. Tex swore. "Reckon I'll never get used to those varmints, Captain. The rattlers back home was just kid's toys." "Simple enough, really." Captain Smith spoke absently, his gray eyes following the sag of the rusty netting below. "The green snakes, like the planarians, decrease evenly in size with starvation. They also have a vastly accelerated metabolism. When they get food, which happens to be blood, they simply shoot out to their normal size. An injected venom causes their victims to fight off help until the snake has fed." Breska snarled. "Cute trick the swamp men thought up, starving those things and then slipping them in on us through the drain pipes. They're so tiny you miss one, every once in a while." "And then you get that." Tex nodded toward the corpse. "I wonder who the war-chief is. I'd sure like to get a look at him." "Yes," said Captain Smith. "So would I." He turned to go, crawling below the parapet. You never knew what might come out of the fog at you, if you showed a target. The body was carried out to the incinerator as there was no ceremony about burials in this heat. A blob of white caught Tex's eye as a face strained upward, watching the officer through the rusty netting. Tex grunted. "There's your countryman, Breska. I'd say he isn't so sold on the idea of making Venus safe for colonists." "Oh, lay off him, Tex." Breska was strangled briefly by a fit of coughing. "He's just a kid, he's homesick, and he's got the wheezes, like me. This lowland air isn't good for us. But just wait till we knock sense into these white devils and settle the high plateaus." If he finished, Tex didn't hear him. The red-haired Westerner was staring stiffly upward, clawing for his gun. * * * * * He hadn't heard or seen a thing. And now the fog was full of thundering wings and shrill screams of triumph. Below the walls, where the ground-mist hung in stagnant whorls, a host of half-seen bodies crowded out of the wilderness into which no civilized man had ever gone. The rapid-fire pistol bucked and snarled in Tex's hand. Captain Smith, lying on his belly, called orders in his crisp, unhurried voice. C Battery on the northeast corner cut in with a chattering roar, spraying explosive bullets upward, followed by the other three whose duty it was to keep the air clear. Tex's heart thumped. Powder-smoke bit his nostrils. Breska began to whistle through his teeth, a song that Tex had taught him, called, "The Lone Prairee." The ground-strafing crews got their guns unlimbered, and mud began to splash up from below. But it wasn't enough. The gun emplacements were only half manned, the remainder of the depopulated garrison having been off-duty down in the compound. The Jupiterians were swarming up the incline on which the fort stood, attacking from the front and fanning out along the sides when they reached firm ground. The morasses to the east and west were absolutely impassable even to the swamp-men, which was what made Fort Washington a strategic and envied stronghold. Tex watched the attackers with mingled admiration and hatred. They had guts; the kind the Red Indians must have had, back in the old days in America. They had cruelty, too, and a fiendish genius for thinking up tricks. If the relief column didn't come soon, there might be one trick too many, and the way would be left open for a breakthrough. The thin, hard-held line of frontier posts could be flanked, cut off, and annihilated. Tex shuddered to think what that would mean for the colonists, already coming hopefully into the fertile plateaus. A sluggish breeze rolled the mist south into the swamps, and Tex got his first clear look at the enemy. His heart jolted sharply. This was no mere raid. This was an attack. Hordes of tall warriors swarmed toward the walls, pale skinned giants from the Sunless Land with snow-white hair coiled in warclubs at the base of the skull. They wore girdles of reptile skin, and carried bags slung over their brawny shoulders. In their hands they carried clubs and crude bows. Beside them, roaring and hissing, came their war-dogs; semi-erect reptiles with prehensile paws, their powerful tails armed with artificial spikes of bone. Scaling ladders banged against the walls. Men and beasts began to climb, covered by companions on the ground who hurled grenades of baked mud from their bags. "Beetle-bombs!" yelled Tex. "Watch yourselves!" He thrust one ladder outward, and fired point-blank into a dead-white face. A flying clay ball burst beside the man who fired the nearest ground gun, and in a split second every inch of bare flesh was covered by a sheath of huge scarlet beetles. Tex's freckled face hardened. The man's screams knifed upward through the thunder of wings. Tex put a bullet carefully through his head and tumbled the body over the parapet. Some of the beetles were shaken off, and he glimpsed bone, already bare and gleaming. Missiles rained down from above; beetle-bombs, green snakes made worm-size by starvation. The men were swarming up from the compound now, but the few seconds of delay almost proved fatal. The aerial attackers were plain in the thinning mist--lightly-built men mounted on huge things that were half bird, half lizard. The rusty netting jerked, catching the heavy bodies of man and lizard shot down by the guns. Tex held his breath. That net was all that protected them from a concerted dive attack that would give the natives a foot-hold inside the walls. A gun in A Battery choked into silence. Rust, somewhere in the mechanism. No amount of grease could keep it out. Breska swore sulphurously and stamped a small green thing flat. Red beetles crawled along the stones--thank God the things didn't fly. Men fought and died with the snakes. Another gun suddenly cut out. Tex fired steadily at fierce white heads thrust above the parapet. The man next to him stumbled against the infested stones. The voracious scarlet flood surged over him, and in forty seconds his uniform sagged on naked bones. Breska's shout warned Tex aside as a lizard fell on the catwalk. Its rider pitched into the stream of beetles and began to die. Wings beat close overhead, and Tex crouched, aiming upward. His freckled face relaxed in a stare of utter unbelief. * * * * * She was beautiful. Pearl-white thighs circling the gray-green barrel of her mount, silver hair streaming from under a snake-skin diadem set with the horns of a swamp-rhino, a slim body clad in girdle and breast-plates of irridescent scales. Her face was beautiful, too, like a mask cut from pearl. But her eyes were like pale-green flames, and the silver brows above them were drawn into a straight bar of anger. Tex had never seen such cold, fierce hate in any living creature, even a rattler coiled to strike. His gun was aimed, yet somehow he couldn't pull the trigger. When he had collected his wits, she was gone, swooping like a stunting flyer through the fire of the guns. She bore no weapons, only what looked like an ancient hunting-horn. Tex swore, very softly. He knew what that horned diadem meant. This was the war chief! The men had reached the parapet just in time. Tex blasted the head from a miniature Tyrannosaurus, dodged the backlash of the spiked tail, and threw down another ladder. Guns snarled steadily, and corpses were piling up at the foot of the wall. Tex saw the woman urge her flying mount over the pit of the compound, saw her searching out the plan of the place--the living quarters, the water tanks, the kitchen, the radio room. Impelled by some inner warning that made him forget all reluctance to war against a woman, Tex fired. The bullet clipped a tress of her silver hair. Eyes like pale green flames burned into his for a split second, and her lips drew back from reptilian teeth, white, small, and pointed. Then she whipped her mount into a swift spiral climb and was gone, flashing through streamers of mist and powder-smoke. A second later Tex heard the mellow notes of her horn, and the attackers turned and vanished into the swamp. As quickly as that, it was over. Yet Tex, panting and wiping the sticky sweat from his forehead, wasn't happy. He wished she hadn't smiled. Men with blow-torches scoured the fort clean of beetles and green snakes. One party sprayed oil on the heaps of bodies below and fired them. The netting was cleared, their own dead burned. Tex, who was a corporal, got his men together, and his heart sank as he counted them. Thirty-two left to guard a fort that should be garrisoned by seventy. Another attack like that, and there might be none. Yet Tex had an uneasy feeling that the attack had more behind it than the mere attempt to carry the fort by storm. He thought of the woman whose brain had evolved all these hideous schemes--the beetle-bombs, the green snakes. She hadn't risked her neck for nothing, flying in the teeth of four batteries. He had salvaged the lock of silver hair his bullet had clipped. Now it seemed almost to stir with malign life in his pocket. Captain John Smith came out of the radio room. The officer's gaunt face was oddly still, his gray eyes like chips of stone. "At ease," he said. His pleasant English voice had that same quality of dead stillness. "Word has just come from Regional Headquarters. The swamp men have attacked in force east of us, and have heavily beseiged Fort Nelson. Our relief column had been sent to relieve them. "More men are being readied, but it will take at least two weeks for any help to reach us." * * * * * Tex heard the hard-caught breaths as the news took the men like a jolt in the belly. And he saw eyes sliding furtively aside to the dense black smoke pouring up from the incinerator, to the water tanks, and to the broken grating. Somebody whimpered. Tex heard Breska snarl, "Shut up!" The whimperer was Kuna, the young Martian who had stared white-faced at the captain a short while before. Captain Smith went on. "Our situation is serious. However, we can hold out another fortnight. Supplies will have to be rationed still further, and we must conserve ammunition and man-power as much as possible. But we must all remember this. "Help is coming. Headquarters are doing all they can." "With the money they have," said Breska sourly, in Tex's ear. "Damn the taxpayers!" "... and we've only to hold out a few days longer. After all, we volunteered for this job. Jupiter is a virgin planet. It's savage, uncivilized, knowing no law but brute force. But it can be built into a great new world. "If we do our jobs well, some day these swamps will be drained, the jungles cleared, the natives civilized. The people of Earth and Mars will find new hope and freedom here. It's up to us." The captain's grim, gaunt face relaxed, and his eyes twinkled. "Pity we're none of us using our right names," he said. "Because I think we're going to get them in the history books!" The men laughed. The tension was broken. "Dismissed," said Captain Smith, and strolled off to his quarters. Tex turned to Breska. The Martian, his leathery dark face set, was gripping the arms of his young countryman, the only other Martian in the fort. "Listen," hissed Breska, his teeth showing white like a dog's fangs. "Get hold of yourself! If you don't, you'll get into trouble." Kuna trembled, his wide black eyes watching the smoke from the bodies roll up into the fog. His skin lacked the leathery burn of Breska's. Tex guessed that he came from one of the Canal cities, where things were softer. "I don't want to die," said Kuna softly. "I don't want to die in this rotten fog." "Take it easy, kid." Tex rubbed the sandy-red stubble on his chin and grinned. "The Skipper'll get us through okay. He's aces." "Maybe." Kuna's eyes wandered round to Tex. "But why should I take the chance?" He was shaken suddenly by a fit of coughing. When he spoke again, his voice had risen and grown tight as a violin string. "Why should I stay here and cough my guts out for something that will never be anyway?" "Because," said Breska grimly, "on Mars there are men and women breaking their backs and their hearts, to get enough bread out of the deserts. You're a city man, Kuna. Have you ever seen the famines that sweep the drylands? Have you ever seen men with their ribs cutting through the skin? Women and children with faces like skulls? "That's why I'm here, coughing my guts out in this stinking fog. Because people need land to grow food on, and water to grow it with." Kuna's dark eyes rolled, and Tex frowned. He'd seen that same starry look in the eyes of cattle on the verge of a stampede. "What's the bellyache?" he said sharply. "You volunteered, didn't you?" "I didn't know what it meant," Kuna whispered, and coughed. "I'll die if I stay here. I don't want to die!" "What," Breska said gently, "are you going to do about it?" Kuna smiled. "She was beautiful, wasn't she, Tex?" The Texan started. "I reckon she was, kid. What of it?" "You have a lock of her hair. I saw you pick it from the net. The net'll go out soon, like the grating did. Then there won't be anything to keep the snakes and beetles off of us. She'll sit up there and watch us die, and laugh. "But I won't die, I tell you! I won't!" He shuddered in Breska's hands, and began to laugh. The laugh rose to a thin, high scream like the wailing of a panther. Breska hit him accurately on the point of the jaw. "Cafard," he grunted, as some of the men came running. "He'll come round all right." He dragged Kuna to the dormitory, and came back doubled up with coughing from the exertion. Tex saw the pain in his dark face. "Say," he murmured, "you'd better ask for leave when the relief gets here." "_If_ it gets here," gasped the Martian. "That attack at Fort Nelson was just a feint to draw off our reinforcements." Tex nodded. "Even if the varmints broke through there, they'd be stopped by French River and the broken hills beyond it." A map of Fort Washington's position formed itself in his mind; the stone blockhouse commanding a narrow tongue of land between strips of impassable swamp, barring the way into the valley. The valley led back into the uplands, splitting so that one arm ran parallel to the swamps for many miles. To fierce and active men like the swamp-dwellers, it would be no trick to swarm down that valley, take Fort Albert and Fort George by surprise in a rear attack, and leave a gap in the frontier defenses that could never be closed in time. And then hordes of white-haired warriors would swarm out, led by that beautiful fury on the winged lizard, rouse the more lethargic pastoral tribes against the colonists, and sweep outland Peoples from the face of Venus. "They could do it, too," Tex muttered. "They outnumber us a thousand to one." "And," added Breska viciously, "the lousy taxpayers won't even give us decent equipment to fight with." Tex grinned. "Armies are always step-children. I guess the sheep just never did like the goats, anyhow." He shrugged. "Better keep an eye on Kuna. He might try something." "What could he do? If he deserts, they'll catch him trying to skip out, if the savages don't get him first. He won't try it." But in the morning Kuna was gone, and the lock of silver hair in Tex's pocket was gone with him. * * * * * Five hot, steaming days dragged by. The water sank lower and lower in the tank. Flakes of rust dropped from every metal surface at the slightest touch. Tex squatted on a slimy block of stone in the compound, trying to forget hunger and thirst in the task of sewing a patch on his pants. Fog gathered in droplets on the reddish hairs of his naked legs, covered his face with a greasy patina. Breska crouched beside him, coughing in deep, slow spasms. Out under the sagging net, men were listlessly washing underwear in a tub of boiled swamp water. The stuff held some chemical that caused a stubborn sickness no matter what you did to it. Tex looked at it thirstily. "Boy!" he muttered. "What I wouldn't give for just one glass of ice water!" "Shut up," growled Breska. "At least, I've quit being hungry." He coughed, his dark face twisted in pain. Tex sighed, trying to ignore the hunger that chewed his own belly like a prisoned wolf. Nine more days to go. Food and water cut to the barest minimum. Gun parts rusting through all the grease they could put on. The strands of the net were perilously thin. Even the needle in his hand was rusted so that it tore the cloth. Of the thirty-one men left after Kuna deserted, they had lost seven; four by green snakes slipped in through broken drain gratings, three by beetle-bombs tossed over the parapet. There had been no further attacks. In the dark, fog-wrapped nights, swamp men smeared with black mud crept silently under the walls, delivered their messages of death, and vanished. In spite of the heat, Tex shivered. How much longer would this silent war go on? The swamp-men had to clear the fort before the relief column came. Where was Kuna, and why had he stolen that lock of hair? And what scheme was the savage beauty who led these devils hatching out? Water slopped in the tub. Somebody cursed because the underwear never dried in this lousy climate. The heat of the hidden sun seeped down in stifling waves. And suddenly a guard on the parapet yelled. "Something coming out of the swamp! Man the guns!" Tex hauled his pants on and ran with the others. Coming up beside the lookout, he drew his pistol and waited. Something was crawling up the tongue of dry land toward the fort. At first he thought it was one of the scaly war-dogs. Then he caught a gleam of scarlet collar-facings, and shouted. "Hold your fire, men! It's Kuna!" The grey, stooped thing came closer, going on hands and knees, its dark head hanging. Tex heard Breska's harsh breathing beside him. Abruptly the Martian turned and ran down the steps. "Don't go out there, Breska!" Tex yelled. "It may be a trap." But the Martian went on, tugging at the rusty lugs that held the postern gate. It came open, and he went out. Tex sent men down to guard it, fully expecting white figures to burst from the fog and attempt to force the gate. Breska reached the crawling figure, hauled it erect and over one shoulder, and started back at a stumbling run. Still there was no attack. Tex frowned, assailed by some deep unease. If Kuna had gone into the swamps, he should never have returned alive. There was a trap here somewhere, a concealed but deadly trick. Silence. The rank mist lay in lazy coils. Not a leaf rustled in the swamp edges. Tex swore and ran down the steps. Breska fell through the gate and sagged down, coughing blood, and it was Tex who caught Kuna. The boy lay like a grey skeleton in his arms, the bones of his face almost cutting the skin. His mouth was open. His tongue was black and swollen, like that of a man dying of thirst. Kuna's sunken, fever-yellowed eyes opened. They found the tub, in which soiled clothing still floated. With a surge of strength that took Tex completely by surprise, the boy broke from him and ran to the water, plunging his face in and gulping like an animal. Tex pulled him away. Kuna sagged down, sobbing. There was something wrong about his face, but Tex couldn't think what. "Won't let me drink," he whispered. "Still won't let me drink. Got to have water." He clawed at Tex. "Water!" Tex sent someone after it, trying to think what was strange about Kuna, scowling. There were springs of sweet water in the swamps, and even the natives couldn't drink the other. Was it simply the desire to torture that had made them deny the deserter water? Tex caught the boy's collar. "How did you get away?" But Kuna struggled to his knees. "Breska," he gasped. "Breska!" The older man looked at him, wiping blood from his lips. Kuna said something in Martian, retched, choked on his own blood, and fell over. Tex knew he was dead. "What did he say, Breska?" The Martian's teeth showed briefly white. "He said he wished he'd had my guts." His expression changed abruptly. He caught Tex's shoulder. "Look, Tex! Look at the water!" * * * * * Where there had been nearly a full tub, there was now only a little moisture left in the bottom. While Tex watched, that too disappeared, leaving the wood dry. Tex picked up an undershirt. It was as dry as any he'd ever hung in the prairie air, back in Texas. He touched his face. The skin was like sun-cured leather. His hair had not a drop of fog on it. Yet the mist hung as heavy as ever. Captain Smith came out of the radio room, looking up at the net and the guns. Tex heard him mutter, quite unconsciously. "It's the rust that'll beat us. It's the rust that'll lose us Jupiter in the end." Tex said, "Captain...." Smith looked at him, startled. But he never had time to ask what the matter was. The lookout yelled. Wings rushed overhead. Guns chattered from the parapet. The attack was on. Tex ran automatically for the catwalk. Passing Kuna's crumpled body, he realized something he should have seen at first. "Kuna's body was dry when he came into the fort. All dry, even his clothes." And then, "Why did the swamp-men wait until he was safely inside and the door closed to attack?" With a quarter of their guns disabled and two-thirds of their garrison gone, they still held superiority due to their position and powerful weapons. There was no concerted attempt to force the walls. Groups of white-haired warriors made sallies, hurled beetle-bombs and weighed bags of green snakes, and retired into the mist. They lost men, but not many. In the air, it was different. The weird, half-feathered mounts wheeled and swooped, literally diving into the gunbursts, the riders hurling missiles with deadly accuracy. And they were dying, men and lizards, by the dozen. Tex, feeling curiously dazed, fired automatically. Bodies thrashed into the net. Rust flakes showered like rain. Looking at the thin strands, Tex wondered how long it would hold. Abruptly he caught sight of what, subconsciously, he'd been looking for. She was there, darting high over the melee, her silver hair flying, her body an iridescent pearl in the mist. Captain Smith spoke softly. "You see what she's up to, Tex? Those flyers are volunteers. Their orders are to kill as many of our men as possible before they die themselves, but they must fall inside the walls! On the net, Tex. To weaken, break it, if possible." Tex nodded. "And when it goes...." "We go. We haven't enough men to beat them if they should get inside the walls." Smith brushed his small military mustache, his only sign of nervousness. Tex saw him start, saw him touch the bristles wonderingly, then finger his skin, his tunic, his hair. "Dry," he said, and looked at the fog. "My Lord, dry!" "Yes," returned Tex grimly. "Kuna brought it back. He couldn't get wet even when he tried to drink. Something that eats water. Even if the net holds, we'll die of thirst before we're relieved." He turned in sudden fury on the distant figure of the woman and emptied his gun futilely at her swift-moving body. "Save your ammunition," cautioned Smith, and cried out, sharply. Tex saw it, the tiny green thing that had fastened on his wrist. He pulled his knife and lunged forward, but already the snake had grown incredibly. Smith tore at it vainly. Tex got in one slash, felt his knife slip futilely on rubbery flesh of enormous contractile power. Then the venom began to work. A mad look twisted the officer's face. His gun rose and began to spit bullets. Grimly, Tex shot the gun out of Smith's hand, and struck down with the gun-barrel. Smith fell. But already the snake had thrown a coil round his neck and shifted its grip to the jugular. Tex sawed at the rubbery flesh. Beaten as though with a heavy whip, he stood at last with the body still writhing in his hand. Captain Smith was dead, with the snake's jaws buried in his throat. Dimly Tex heard the mellow notes of the war-chief's horn. The sky cleared of the remnants of the suicide squad. The ground attackers vanished into the swamps. And then the woman whirled her mount sharply and sped straight for the fort. Puffs of smoke burst around her but she was not hit. Low over the parapet she came, so that Tex saw the pupils of her pale-green eyes, the vital flow of muscles beneath pearly skin. He fired, but his gun was empty. She flung one hand high in derisive salute, and was gone. And Breska spoke softly behind Tex. "You're in command now. And there are just the fourteen of us left." * * * * * Tex stood staring down at the dead and dying caught in the rusty net. He felt suddenly tired; so tired that just standing and looking seemed too much drain on his wasted strength. He didn't want to fight any more. He wanted to drink, to sleep, and forget. There was only one possible end. His mouth and throat were dry with this strange new dryness, his thirst intensified a hundredfold. The swamp men had only to wait. In another week they could take the fort without losing a man. Even with the reduced numbers of the defenders, this fiendish thing would make their remaining water supply inadequate. And then another thought struck him. Suppose it stayed there, so that even if by some miracle the garrison held out, it made holding the fort impossible no matter how many men, or how much water there was. The men were looking at him. Tex let the dead snake drop to the catwalk and vanish under a pall of scarlet beetles. "Clean up this mess," said Tex automatically. Breska's black eyes were brilliant and very hard. Why didn't the men move? "Go on," Tex snapped. "I'm ranking officer here now." The men turned to their task with a queer reluctance. One of them, a big scar-faced hulk with a mop of hair far redder far than Tex's, stood long after the others had gone, watching him out of narrowed green eyes. Tex went slowly down into the compound. There were no breaks in the net, but another few days of rust would finish them. What was the use of fighting on? If they left now, they might get out alive. Headquarters could send more men, retake Fort Washington. But Headquarters didn't have many men. And the woman with the eyes like pale-green flames wouldn't waste any time. Some falling body had crushed a beetle-bomb caught in the net. The scarlet things were falling like drops of blood on Kuna's body. Tex smiled crookedly. In a few seconds there'd be nothing left of the flesh Kuna had cherished so dearly. And then Tex rubbed freckled hands over his tired blue eyes, wondering if he were at last delirious. The beetles weren't eating Kuna. They swirled around him restlessly, scenting meat, but they didn't touch him. His face showed parchment dry under the whorls of fog. And suddenly Tex understood. "It's because he's dry. They won't touch anything dry." Recklessly, he put his own hand down in the scarlet stream. It divided and flowed around it, disdaining the parched flesh. Tex laughed, a brassy laugh with an edge of hysteria in it. Now that they were going to die anyway, they didn't have to worry about beetle-bombs. Feet, a lot of them, clumped up to where he knelt. The red-haired giant with the green eyes stood over him, the men in a sullen, hard-faced knot behind him. The red-haired man, whose name was Bull, had a gun in his hand. He said gruffly, "We're leavin', Tex." Tex got up. "Yeah?" "Yeah. We figure it's no use stayin'. Comin' with us?" Why not? It was his only chance for life. He had no stake in the colonies. He'd joined the Legion for adventure. Then he looked at Kuna, and at Breska, thinking of all the people of two worlds who needed ground to grow food on, and water to grow it with. Something, perhaps the ancestor who had died in the Alamo, made him shake his sandy head. "I reckon not," he said. "And I reckon you ain't, either." He was quick on the draw, but Bull had his gun already out. The bullet thundered against Tex's skull. The world exploded into fiery darkness, through which he heard Breska say, "Sure, Bull. Why should I stay here to die for nothing?" Tex tried to cry out, but the blackness drowned him. He came to lying on the catwalk. His head was bandaged. Frowning, he opened his eyes, blinking against the pain. Breska hunched over the nearest gun, whistling softly through his teeth. "The Lone Prairee." Tex stared incredulously. "I--I thought you'd gone with the others." Breska grinned. "I just wasn't as dumb as you. I hung behind till they were all outside, and then I barred the door. I'd seen you weren't dead, and--well, this cough's got me anyway, and I hate forced marches. They give me blisters." They grinned at each other. Tex said, "We're a couple of damn fools, but I reckon we're stuck with it. Okay. Let's see how long we can fool 'em." He got up, gingerly. "The Skipper had some books in his quarters. Maybe one of 'em would tell what this dry stuff is." Breska coughed and nodded. "I'll keep watch." Tex's throat burned, but he was afraid to drink. If the water evaporated in his mouth as it had in Kuna's.... He had to try. Not knowing was worse than knowing. A second later he stood with an empty cup in his hand, fighting down panic. Half the water had vanished before he got the cup to his mouth. The rest never touched his tongue. Yet there was nothing to see, nothing to feel. Nothing but dryness. He turned and ran for Captain Smith's quarters. Hertford's _Jungles of Jupiter_, the most comprehensive work on a subject still almost unknown, lay between Kelland's _Field Tactics_ and _Alice in Wonderland_. Tex took it down, leafing through it as he climbed to the parapet. "Here it is," he said suddenly. "'Dry Spots. These are fairly common phenomena in certain parts of the swamplands. Seemingly Nature's method for preserving the free oxygen balance in the atmosphere, colonies of ultra-microscopic animalcules spring up, spreading apparently from spores carried by animals which blunder into the dry areas. "'These animalcules attach themselves to hosts, inanimate or otherwise, and absorb all water vapor or still water nearby, utilizing the hydrogen in some way not yet determined, and liberating free oxygen. They become dormant during the rainy season, apparently unable to cope with running water. They expand only within definite limits, and the life of each colony runs about three weeks, after which it vanishes.'" "The rains start in about a week," said Breska. "Our relief can't get here under nine days. They can pick us off with snakes and beetle-bombs, or let us go crazy with thirst, let the first shower clear out the ani--the whatyoucallits, and move in. Then they can slaughter our boys when they come up, and have the whole of Jupiter clear." Tex told him about Kuna and the beetles. "The snakes probably won't touch us, either." He pounded a freckled fist on the stones. "If we could find some way to drink, and if the guns and the net didn't rust, we might hold them off long enough." "'If'," grunted Breska. "If we were in heaven, we wouldn't have to worry." * * * * * The days that followed blurred into a daze of thirst and ceaseless watching. For easier defence, there was only one way down from the parapet through the net. They took the least rusted of the guns and filled the small gap. They could hold out there until they collapsed, or the net gave. They wasted several quarts of water in vain attempts to drink. Then they gave it up. The final irony of it made Tex laugh. "Here we are, being noble till it hurts, and it won't matter a damn. The Skipper was right. It's the rust that'll lose us Venus in the end--that, and these Dry Spots." Food made thirst greater. They stopped eating. They became mere skeletons, moving feebly in sweat-box heat. Breska stopped coughing. "It's breathing dry air," he said, in a croaking whisper. "It's so funny I could laugh." A scarlet beetle crawled over Tex's face where he lay beside the Martian on the catwalk. He brushed it off, dragging weak fingers across his forehead. His skin was dry, but not as dry as he remembered it after windy days on the prairie. "Funny it hasn't taken more oil out of my skin." He struggled suddenly to a sitting position. "Oil! It might work. Oh, God, let it work! It must!" Breska stared at him out of sunken eyes as he half fell down the steps. Then a sound overhead brought the Martian's gaze upward. "A scout, Tex! They'll attack!" Tex didn't hear him. His whole being was centered on one thing--the thing that would mean the difference between life and death. Dimly, as he staggered into the room where the oil was kept, Tex heard a growing thunder of wings. He groaned. If Breska could only hold out for a moment. It took all his strength to turn the spigot of the oil drum. It was empty. All the stuff had been used to burn bodies. Almost crying, Tex crawled to the next one, and the next. It was the fourth drum that yielded black, viscous fluid. Forcing stiff lips apart, Tex drank. If there'd been anything in him, he'd have vomited. The vile stuff coated lips, tongue, throat. Outside, Breska's gun cut in sharply. Tex dragged himself to the water tank. "Running water," he thought. Tilting his head up under the spigot, he turned the tap. Water splashed out. Some of it hit his skin and vanished. But the rest ran down his oil-filmed throat. He felt it, warm and brackish and wonderful, in his stomach. He laughed, and let go a cracked rebel yell. Then he turned and lurched back outside, toward the steps. The net sagged to the weight of white-haired warriors and roaring lizards. Breska's gun choked and stammered into silence. Tex groaned in utter agony. It was too late. The rust had beaten them. His freckled, oil-smeared face tightened grimly. Drawing his gun, he charged the steps. "Where the hell did you go?" snarled Breska. "The ammo belt jammed." He grabbed for the other gun set in the narrow gap. Then it wasn't rust! And Tex realized something else. There were no rust flakes falling from the net. Something had stopped the rusting. Before, his physical anguish had been too great for him to see that the net strands grew no thinner, the gun-barrels no rustier. Scraps of the explanation shot through Tex's mind. Breska's cough stopping because the air was dried before it reached his lungs. Dry stone. Dry clothing. Dry metal! The water-eating organisms kept the surface dry. There could be no rust. "We've licked 'em, Breska! By God, we've licked 'em!" He shouldered the Martian out of the way, gripped the triggers of the gun. Shouting over the din, he told Breska how to drink, sent him lurching down the steps. He could hold the gap alone for a few minutes. Looking up, Tex found her, swooping low over the fight, her silver hair flying in the wind. Tex shouted at her. "You did it! You outsmarted yourself, lady. You showed us the way!" Scientists could find out how to harness the Dry Spots to keep off the rust, and still let the soldiers drink. And some day the swamps would be drained, and men and women would find new wealth, new life, new horizons here on Jupiter. Breska came back, grinning, and fought the jam out of the gun. White bodies began to pile up, mixed with the saurian carcasses of their war-dogs. And presently the notes of the war-chief's horn drifted down, and the attackers faded back into the swamps. And suddenly, wheeling her mount away from the others, the warrior woman swooped low over the parapet. Tex held his fire. For a moment he thought she was going to dash her lizard into them. Then, at the last second, she pulled him up in a thundering climb. Her face was a cut-pearl mask of fury, but her pale-green eyes held doubt, the beginning of an awed fear. Then she was gone, bent low over her mount, her silver hair hiding her face. Breska watched her go. "For Mars," he said softly. Then, pounding Tex on the chest until he winced. Two voices, cracked, harsh, and unmusical, drifted after the retreating form of the white-haired war-chief. "Oh, bury us not on the lone praire-e-e...." 
41084	----	The Metal Moon By EVERETT C. SMITH and R. F. STARZL Based upon the Fourth Prize ($10.00) winning plot of the Interplanetary Plot Contest won by Everett C. Smith, 116 East St., Lawrence, Mass [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Wonder Stories Quarterly Winter 1932. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] [Illustration: The ship was now coming close to the vast curve of the crystal city. The earthmen became aware that the part below the city level was a dull ugly black.] * * * * * [Illustration: EVERETT C. SMITH] [Illustration: R. F. STARZL] In this story, the joint product of two imaginative minds, we get a very unusual picture of some of the possibilities of interplanetary exploration. We know that as soon as interplanetary travel is possible, expeditions from the earth will be ranging the length and breadth of the solar system searching out the thousands of wonders that are to be discovered. It is quite possible that some of the explorers, whether through accident or desire, may colonize the other planets and develop under new and unusual conditions a new branch of the human race. It is doubtlessly true that if each of the solar planets were to be colonized, at the end of several hundred centuries there would be nine races of human beings who might differ radically from each other and in fact might not recognize each other as members of the same human stock. In this story we do not see nine races but we do see four of them and Mr. Starzl has united the four in a gripping narrative of the great spaces. THE METAL MOON The three men in the tiny space ship showed their apprehension as they watched the gravity meters. Something was distinctly wrong with the ship. "Are you sure that there isn't some undiscovered moon of Jupiter?" asked the youngest of them. He was only about 25, which was very young indeed when his scientific attainments were considered, even for the human race's stage of intellectual development in 1,000,144 A. D. His figure was stocky, powerful, his face rather thin, bold, with piercing black eyes. He was naked, save for short, brilliantly red trunks of metalsilk. His name, "Sine," followed by a numerical identification code, was tattooed indelibly in thin, sharp characters on his broad, bronze-hard chest. The man at the ampliscope removed his head from the eyepiece and shook his head impatiently. His body was bronzed and spare, but the complete absence of hair on his head made him look older than the 48 years indicated by the code following the name on his chest, "Kass." "I tell you, Sine, this pull is no gravity effect. No body of such mass could be invisible, unless it were composed entirely of protons. And even then it would yank Jupiter out of shape, making it look like a pear, but there--" Jupiter presented its usual appearance. The solar system's largest planet seemed enormous at this distance of only a few million miles. It showed its usual marked depression at the poles, but no distortion such as might be caused by a nearby body of enormous mass. "What do you think, Lents?" Kass turned to the third occupant of the little space ship. Lents raised his broad placid face from the pad upon which he had been figuring a complicated equation. He was a large man, slow-moving, and fat. He was sensitive to that fact, so that, besides the usual trunks, he also wore a toga-like garment. His brown eyes blinked in folds of flesh. "No doubt you're right, Kass," Lents rumbled in a deep voice. "I can't see how such a body could exist without pulling all of Jupiter's moons to itself. No, we seem to be specially honored by its attention." They looked at one another soberly. "The question is, can it out-pull us?" Sine remarked. "You ought to know," Kass said. "You designed and built her." Sine made his way forward. It was no longer necessary to use the handholds, for the pull of the mysterious body was already so powerful that it entirely eliminated the free floating so familiar to space travelers. Sine looked through the grated outlook windows, past the gracefully curved bow of the ship. At the very tip was the ether screw of his invention, resembling the screws used for water propulsion in ancient times, except that the pitch was extremely sharp. The tachometer showed that the screw had slowed down to 50,000 revolutions a minute, although the thermometer indicated that the molecular bearings were still reasonably cool. But how long could she stand the strain? How long, indeed, could the sturdy little atomic motor keep those blades turning? It was designed to pull directly away at a distance of only a million miles from the sun, and yet it was being beaten far out here in space by an object as yet invisible. "What a crash that'll be!" Sine murmured, watching the agony of tortured metal. Amidship, Kass was again studying the eyepiece of the ampliscope. Suddenly he stiffened. "I see it! Why, it can't be over a couple of hundred feet in diameter. Cylindrical, I think. Head on to us now." They crowded around him. Lents, with hasty computations, determined that they were still about three thousand miles from the object. "No chance to pull away from it, if we pull straight," and his heavy voice was full of energy as his sleepiness vanished with the need for action. "Set her over, Sine, about 40 degrees. Try for a circular orbit around it--if we can get up enough speed centrifugal force will save us!" Sine did as he was told, and the ship heeled over so that it presented its side to the sinister object, which was still invisible to the unassisted eye. While Kass watched it through the ampliscope, his companions stared through the thick ports at the velvet, gem-studded firmament. They could feel the attraction growing with terrifying speed. "It's turning with us," Kass announced, "and getting closer. If we can swing around it, it will be a very sharp ellipse indeed!" "Try and see if you can get a few more revs out of the screw," Lents suggested, and Sine crept forward, his powerful muscles straining against the pull. He lifted the leaden weight of his arm to the lever. He _must_ get a little more power out of the motor, or they would crash to their deaths in a few minutes! A fine ending for their daring dash to Jupiter--the first space flight since the great comet swarm of 800,768 A. D. Sine pulled back hard on the lever, and the motor gamely responded, moaned and shuddered under the tremendous overload. The tachometer needle quivered, began to climb, 52,000, 55,000, 56,000---- The ship gave a lurch--there was a dull grinding, a hollow, metallic groan. The men picked themselves up from the floor--realizing at once the fatal significance of the lack of effort required. Their movement carried them off the floor--made them grasp handholds. Floating free! That meant falling free! Sine glanced at the tachometer. The dead needle stood at zero. Through the forward window he could see one of the four screw blades, black, motionless. Lents, obeying the habits of a lifetime, elbow hooked in a handhold, was figuring the time required for them to strike. He looked up with a puzzled frown. "We should have struck about right now! Check on that body's position, will you, Kass?" * * * * * The bald-headed scientist pulled himself to the ampliscope. But it was possible to see the object through the ports now, quite plainly. It was black, cylindrical, glinting dully in the sun's light. The space ship was tumbling end over end, lazily, bringing the thing into view first at one port--then another. "No acceleration!" Kass reported, amazement mingling with hope. "Same speed--we may still hit--but no evidence of gravity. We're falling toward it on momentum alone!" Lents' brown eyes twinkled with perplexity in their pits of fat. "The force, whatever it is, doesn't seem like anything in nature. But if we're traveling on momentum alone we can pull away with our emergency rockets--though I hate to waste the fuel." Sine leaped to the rocket controls. "Grab handholds!" he snapped over his shoulder. The men rolled into the padded niches provided for that purpose. Sine's niche was so placed that it would not be necessary to lift a hand against the tremendous pressure of rocket acceleration. A lateral swing of the lever along its quadrant operated the rockets. "Oof!" came a smothered exclamation from Lents as the ship seemed to pause, to leap forward in space again. The star-studded heavens as seen through the ports were hidden by a curtain of flame, electric blue and as stiff seeming as a steel bar--the trail of the forward rockets. For some minutes there was no sound save the subdued thunder of the hull as it trembled under the tug of the rockets. Then a light flashed redly and a gong sounded. The signal that meant, "fuel half gone." Sine shut off the power, crawled out stiffly. His first glance out of a port showed that they were still falling toward the mysterious cylindrical space wanderer. Kass wiped the sweat from his bald head. "No use wasting any more effort," he said hoarsely. "That thing is a space ship, and there are men in it. The force they have been using on us is some kind of gravity beam--probably it's also their means of space propulsion. They mean to capture us, no doubt----" "And they've reversed the beam!" Lents puffed as he turned away from the ampliscope, pulling his sweat-soaked toga away from his fat body with thumb and forefinger. "We're decelerating fast, but we can't feel it because the force acts on every particle of our bodies exactly the same as on the ship----" "Proving," added Sine, looking out of the port curiously, "that it's a true gravity beam!" The utter stillness of their ship gave the illusion that she was motionless, and that the sinister stranger was drifting toward them. "It _is_ a ship!" Lents rumbled. "Look at her ports. But they're shuttered." "Not a bad idea," Sine agreed. "Protection against pin-point meteorites, anyway." They saw now that the cylinder was slightly rounded at each end, and the end presented to them had at its nose a circular projection, not unlike a very large button, that glowed with a lavender light, which they guessed to be the source of the gravity beam. They were torn between the excitement of discovery and a very natural apprehension. In the dim past, more than 200,000 years ago, there had been a regular commerce between Earth and the Jovian colonies. But the comet swarm, coming out of the mysterious depths of space, had released to the solar system such swarms of meteorites as to make interplanetary travel in the spatial belt between Mars and Jupiter utterly suicidal. It required the passing of two thousand centuries to thin them out sufficiently to permit the voyage of exploration in which these three men were engaged. What would these children of Earth look like after 200,000 years of Jovian evolution? Would they be friendly? They must, at any rate, be curious people. The great cylinder was passing over them, and they had a better conception of its size. It was at least twice as big as the 200-foot diameter Kass had estimated, and fully 1500 feet long. A section of its hull slid open, and the scientists felt the tug of mysterious forces on their own little vessel. They drifted up into the opening, knew that the hatch had closed by the shutting out of the solar glare. But there was no lack of light. They could see the welded plates of the hull by an intense saffron light that came from oval plates set in the wall. More of the gravity buttons were ranged around the room. It appeared that they were regularly used in handling freight. Now, as the little captive ship was tugged here and there, the prisoners could see flashes of that penetrating lavender light that seemed somehow solid. "Get ready, men!" Sine said, breaking off his absorbed contemplation of their surroundings. "Strap on your belts, and be sure your disintegrator tubes are in their clips." Lents was already lifting his toga and snapping his weapon belt around his ample waist. A mere strip of flexible metal with pockets for the atobombs and a clip for the delicate little tube--it might easily be taken for a mere ornamental article of apparel. "Hope they're friendly," Kass remarked, patting the buckle shut over his flat diaphragm, "but if they aren't we can give 'em a thing or two to think about." The quartz ports, kept free from frost on the inside by a curtain of hot dry air blown over them through a slit, suddenly misted over on the outside, became opaque with a milky glaze of frost. This told the prisoners that their captors were "bleeding" air into the hold, which did double duty as an airlock. They heard vague clanging of metal on metal, transmitted to them through the hull of their ship. Then a sharp blade scraped away the ice from one of the ports, and a face peered in. They looked at one another for a few moments, these cousins of the human race, separated by 200,000 years of time and impassable meteor-strewn wastes of space. The man at the port turned and beckoned to others, who also surveyed the prisoners. Then the first one, evidently the chief of this massive space vessel, motioned to the prisoners, to open their manports. "Keep together now!" Sine admonished his companions. "If they act unfriendly we'll let them have the ray. Then you two slip back into your own ship while I grab this vacuum suit out of the lock. With that on I can carve a way out, and disable them, too." "It would be a shame!" Kass said as he whirled the handwheel of the inner manport, "but----" The valve opened, and a few minutes later the three Earthmen stepped out to confront the Jovians. There were half a dozen of them, standing firmly, by virtue of the artificial gravity, somehow produced. They were not far different from Earthmen, except that they were shorter, being barely five feet tall. Their tremendous muscles told of the race's adaptation to the superior gravity of Jupiter. Their feet, encased in slippers of some burnished material, were unusually large. They were dressed in an armor of overlapping scales that covered every part of their bodies, even their fingers. But their heads, instead of being armored, were protected by a thin, transparent membrane that followed the shape of their features closely. The Earthmen recognized the protective covering used before the comet swarm as a defense against the then used heat ray. So the Jovians had developed no new weapon! Sine thought comfortably of his little disintegrator tube. He could make those armored men vanish like puffs of smoke. But they made no hostile move, and Sine had leisure to notice their faces. If their bodies were too heavily muscled for grace, their heads atoned for that defect. These were truly Jovian, god-like, combining intense virility, dominance, courage. But there was also about them an expression of intolerance, of ruthlessness, of selfishness. Here were men, it could be seen, who would not be too scrupulous in attaining their ends. But men, too, who could be charming companions. Their leader, the man who had first looked into the port, now detached himself from the group and came forward, his hand outstretched in the old Earth gesture of friendliness. His appearance had all the characteristics of his companions, but in a more striking degree. He was taller than they, more than five feet, and his broad shoulders had the confident bearing of accustomed command. He spoke, in a pleasant, vibrant baritone: "Welcome, men of Earth. Sorry for our little misunderstanding." Sine gripped his hand, returned the muscular grip. "It took us a little while to know what you were. And I may add that I'm pleasantly surprised that we can still understand each other." The Jovian shrugged his shoulder: "Canned speech. No chance for a language to evolve when it's mechanically recorded. But come up to my cabin. It's chilly here, and your manner of dress----" "_That_ has changed!" Sine smiled. "Lents and Kass, will you go ahead?" CHAPTER II The Pleasure Bubble After the first suspicions had worn off, the Earthmen felt that they had been singularly fortunate. To be captured by these intelligent beings had been about the most convenient thing that could happen to them. They might have found the human race entirely wiped out on the gloomy planet. Or they might have been struck by one of the still inconveniently numerous meteorites which would mean, at the very least, being marooned. Had they possessed the ability to look into the future they would not have rested quite so complacently in the hammocks assigned to them in the great patrol ship. The big Jovian, they learned, was chief of the ship. He told them his name was Musters, and introduced his officers. They were an intelligent, efficient lot. From them the Earthmen learned something of the social organization of the human race as it survived on Jupiter. "The race followed its natural evolution," intelligent and handsome young Lieutenant Reko explained to Sine as they leaned against a railing and gazed out of an unshuttered port at the somber splendors of Jupiter as it gradually swelled and covered the firmament. "Like mated to like, and so the superior individuals became more superior, and the inferior ones more inferior. This resulted eventually in two races. Naturally we took steps to properly segregate the inferior race. Our efficiency experts have found ways to put them to work--to make them quite useful in fact. Of course we could not trust them with our weapons, our ships, our really important central power plants----" What were these inferior--these so-called _Mugs_--what were they like? Reko arched aristocratic eyebrows. Why, they were often quite human in their appearance--though occupational diseases, and so forth----. Sine gained the impression that they were kept out of the way in order not to disturb the esthetic comfort of the superior race. "There was a time when we had trouble with them," Lieutenant Reko said. "There were trouble makers among them. They attacked the homes of the First race, seized power control stations. Not fifty years ago there was an insurrection. But the Mugs lost. Thousands upon thousands of them were driven into the swamps and caves on the edge of the Tenebrian Sea. They were never seen again, although we searched for them with our heat rays. Perished, no doubt." None were left now, Reko said, except those actually and fully occupied at certain labors for which they were found efficient. They were allowed to reproduce in sufficient numbers to fill the requirements--no more. "What a rotten fate!" Sine exclaimed. "They are quite a terrible people," Reko pointed out, closing a distasteful subject. A few sleep periods later Musters called his terrestrial guests to his cabin. "I have a pleasant surprise for you," he told them in his musical baritone. "Our planetary conference would wish for me to give you a most pleasant impression of Jupiter, so that interplanetary relations may be resumed under the best possible conditions. For that reason I am going to land you on a satellite that I'll wager will be a revelation to you. It is the goal and object of every one of our people. But it is costly and only a small portion of our population can be accommodated at a time. You may judge the kind of place it is by the name the public has given it: 'The Pleasure Bubble.' Come to the astrogator's cabin now; I'll show it to you." They followed Musters to a compartment in the rounded bow of the great ship, stared out of a quartz port between opened shutters. They saw Jupiter, immense, formidable, a mass of turbulent vapors, a depressingly drab scene. Suddenly Lents exclaimed, incredulous; "Look! A satellite! There is no satellite this close to Jupiter! It's mathematically impossible!" Musters laughed jovially. "It's there, isn't it? That's Jupiter's tenth satellite--The Bubble. It is less than 100,000 miles from the vapor envelope and has to travel so fast that its period is less than 8 hours. It was built by the First Race and set on its orbit so that our people would have a place where they could enjoy the sun, which is never seen from Jupiter's surface." "It _is_ a bubble!" Kass remarked, after an absorbed study of the satellite. It was racing just beneath them, at a dizzy speed, like a bubble blown before the wind. The ship followed the satellite, drawing closer, so that it grew in size and beauty. * * * * * Lents was mentally calculating the rupturing pressure exerted by the atmospheric pressure inside the crystalline ball. He stopped aghast at the thought of the tremendous strain. "That crystalline material stands the strain easily," Musters assured them. "It will resist anything but a direct hit by a very large meteorite. As you can see now, the sphere, which is about a mile in diameter, is bi-sected by a plane surface, on which the city is built. In that little area you will see reproduced the choicest conditions of Earth." He turned earnest, hungry eyes on them: "You don't know how lucky you people of Earth are!" The ship was now coming quite close to the vast curve of the crystal, and they could see glimpses of beautiful structures in fairylike colorings, of small lakes like exquisite gems, of brilliant bursts of light that they conjectured served as substitutes for the sun while it was occulted by the enormous bulk of the planet. Steadily the ship swept downward, to the level of the city, and the Earthmen became aware that the entire sphere was not transparent crystal. The part below the city level was a dull, ugly black. "That's where the machinery is," Musters answered their questions, somewhat shortly, it seemed. "Hydrogen integrators there--to generate the power. Leakage of injurious rays down there--couldn't expect the First race to work there." "Who _does_ run the machinery?" Sine asked curiously. "The labor Mugs, of course!" And Musters changed the subject. The chief left them to their own devices as he superintended the lining up of the big ship's airlocks with the lock gasket of The Bubble. This effected, he bid his guests courteous farewell, assuring them that their ship would be conveyed to the Jovian capital city of Rubio, where they would be given every facility for repairing their damaged motor. Sine was awakened by the talking of Kass and Lents as they sat at their breakfast in their unimaginably luxurious apartment. They were near the top of one of the fairylike towers they had glimpsed, and through the crystalline roof they could see the blackness of star-studded space. Far above was the glint of slanting sunlight on the outer covering of the sphere. This was the fourth morning on The Bubble, and the Earthmen were beginning to become vaguely restless. Their hosts had entertained them royally, but-- "I didn't see anything funny about the way they shoved that labor Mug out of the airlock," Lents was saying. "The poor devil! Stole a little of the juice they call ambrosia. The way that elegant over-civilized crowd laughed!" "They lined up and watched the body floating alongside," Kass added somberly. "And that Mug was as human as you or I." Their words recalled the scene vividly to Sine's mind. The broad, green field between two crescent lakes. The beetling-browed wretch, with eyes full of fear that darted from side to side, led to the center of the field by two splendidly armed warriors, there to be left alone in an agony of uncertainty. He saw again the half-hundred clean-limbed athletes, sons of rich Jovian families. They were lined upon each side of the field. At the signal they dashed in. The frightened labor Mug tried to escape. As one team closed in he doubled, ran directly toward the others, saw his mistake too late. There was a brief savage scrimmage, and the unfortunate victim was stretched unconscious on the sward, while the victors and the vanquished in this curious game joined arms and made for the baths where exquisite nymphs peered coquettishly from behind delicately proportioned columns. Sine reaped uncomprehending and resentful stares when he declined to join them. "Too rich for my blood," Sine told his companions at breakfast as they discussed their experiences. "Hope they take us to Rubio soon. We've done our job, and as for me, I'm not cut out for high Society." After they had completed their breakfast a girl came hesitatingly into their chamber. Sine stared at her curiously. She had none of the enameled beauty of the women he had seen until then, but in her young face was a subdued comeliness that was attractive after the assertive pulchritude that was universal among the young women of the First Race. Unlike the shrewd display of their chiseled perfection, this girl's slender, rounded body was wrapped in a thin, gray garment that concealed as it draped. It was caught by a cord around her waist. Her feet, smaller and more fragile than the sturdy Jovian standard, were encased in neutral buskins. She stood submissively, waiting for them to speak. "What does that girl want?" Kass murmured aside. "My stars, she can't be a labor Mug!" "Come here, girl!" Lents rumbled kindly. "What can we do for you?" The girl came forward hesitatingly. Her voice was soft, lacking the brassy assurance of other Jovian women; "I was sent here, masters, to guide you through hell." Immediately after this startling statement her face turned a brilliant red, then a deathly white. She half turned as if to flee, but, as if realizing the uselessness of flight, she faced them again, defiantly; "I don't care what happens to me!" she declared desperately. "I've told the truth at least once. Jovians call this place The Pleasure Bubble, but they don't have to live in the black half. Now tell them what I have said." "We will not tell anyone what you said, child," Lents rumbled comfortingly. "But tell us. You don't look like the Mugs we've seen so far--nor like the poor fellow we saw put through the airlock. They seemed--a different race. But you--why--on Earth we could hardly tell you from any other kid of your age." A flash of spirit illuminated the girl's tragic, immature face. "They call us a different race!" she exclaimed. "True--but not an inferior race! They are the inferior race, though the stronger. They depend on our knowledge, our labor, to live! My father told me so!" * * * * * Kass, who had been studying her silently, asked, "Your father?" "Yes. The technic in charge of the machinery below. He was ordered to escort you around. But his scars from the rays make it hard for him to breathe today. He is in his bunk. So he sent me in his place." Sine wondered if life under such unnatural and destructive conditions would some day reduce this graceful girl to a horrible parody of humanity. He asked; "Do you work below?" Her clear gray eyes fell on him. "No. I was selected by the Committee to work in the Baths when I am sixteen. I am fifteen now." "Holy twisted nebulae!" Sine swore under his breath. "The kid doesn't know what her work in the Baths is going to be! So the Committee selected her for the Baths!" He felt suddenly a violent dislike for the very rich Jovians, a feeling of fraternity with the Mugs. "We will be very glad to have you guide us," he said formally. "What is your name?" "Proserpina. My father said it is fitting for one who lives where we do." Strange anachronism! That name from the mythology of Earth's youth. Like that goddess of the underworld from misty antiquity, she led them down, down, until it seemed they must be near the bottom of the black hemisphere. It was a world of dim distances, of shadows, of pipes and girders, or grisly abysses from which came mysterious sounds; of locked chambers in which ghastly fires flared. Now and then they met the inhabitants of the place; misshapen Robolds going about unknown tasks. They stumbled suddenly out of unnoticed passages, carrying burdens, grotesque, apelike, weary. Most of them were hideously deformed. Several times, when their journey led them into a certain part of the hemisphere where they felt strange tingling of their nerves, the girl led them away. "We must not go there," she told them. "The integrators are there. There my father received the scars of his chest that keep him from breathing. Most of those who are blind worked there." The Earthmen had already heard hints of the atomic integrators from which the Jovians obtained endless power. They had no desire to get too near those searing by-products of power. "Do you mean to say," Lents asked, puffing a little from their exertions, "that people down here live here all their lives?" "I will show you our home," Proserpina said simply. They came to it presently. A niche, a metal-laced nook, deep in the hull. Gigantic girders formed one side of it. On the other side enormous air conduits. It was clean, bare, not as depressing as they had expected. It was more like a gallery, long and narrow, sparsely furnished. Something rolled out of a bunk at the farther end. Something like a great spider. A man, stooped over, his once powerful body doubled, so that his knuckles almost dragged on the floor-plates. He came toward them, fierce gray eyes looking out at them under bushy brows. So formidable that Sine's muscles tensed. "Are these the visitors, Proserpina?" His voice was husky, as though his constricted chest with difficulty performed its function. He looked at them intensely. "They tell me you are from Earth. Are you with us or against us?" "Father, be careful!" She put her hand over his mouth, to be shaken off impatiently. But the girl's warning had taken effect. The man--it was impossible to tell if he were old or young--looked at them broodingly. "My mother died here," Proserpina said. "And I am afraid he will. His mind is not as clear--" Lents, distressed to the bottom of his generous soul, helped the victim of the Jovian pleasure moon back to his bunk. "This girl," he muttered to Kass, "can't we get her out of here?" He had not meant for her to hear, but her quick ears caught his words, and a ray of hope illuminated her features. She was standing beside Sine, and her thin fingers gripped his hard bronzed arm; "Oh, could you take me away? I will be your slave!" Sine gently disengaged her fingers. He was strangely embarrassed. "I'd like to. But I'm a bachelor man. No place for you, you know." She did not persist. No doubt she realized that she could not leave that gaunt parody of a man who was her father. When they bid farewell to Proserpina they were steeped in profound depression. Alone in their room, they talked over what they had seen, but they could think of no way to save Proserpina from her fate. They were still discussing their visit when the manager of this satellite of delights called on them and informed them that Governor Nikkia of Jupiter awaited them in the capital city, Rubio. A space ferry was even then clamped to the locks to take them to the mother planet. CHAPTER III The Coming of the Teardrops Governor Nikkia was like the majority of the First Race. Although he was not large of stature, his powerful muscles bulged impressively under his clothing. The two relatively slender Earthmen, naked save for their trunks, looked almost ridiculously puny. Lents' portly figure was more impressive, but the big scientist had all he could do to carry his weight, so uncomfortably augmented by Jupiter's great mass. The unaccustomed thickness of the atmosphere, too, made the Earthmen uncomfortable. The heat was excessive, for although the outer cloud masses had been determined by photometric telescopic examination to be near the freezing point of hydrogen, Jupiter's enormous store of internal heat made its surface temperature average around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The humidity was high, and the explorers from Earth were distressed. Nikkia was a good host, however. He ordered out one of the government cars, luxurious conveyances supported by gravity repulsion buttons, and personally accompanied his guests on a tour of inspection through the murky fog. They rode interminably over wet, domed roofs, down through gloomy arcades. Thunder rumbled incessantly, and occasionally there came a lurid glow of lightning. For a city of Rubio's extent, they saw very few people. Occasionally they saw the erect, confident figure of a member of the First Race, tending some mighty engine whose purpose they could only guess. The inhabitants preferred to stay indoors, if they could not afford to dally in The Pleasure Bubble. Nikkia listened with interest to the voyagers' account of their journey through space. But he did not respond with much enthusiasm to the suggestion that interplanetary commerce be resumed. "We are comfortable," he said good-naturedly. "Besides, I'm not sure that the Mugs could build ships suitable for such long trips. They're getting lazier every day!" He shook his head regretfully. "What do you expect?" Sine blurted. "You treat them like slaves, ruin their lives, and then you're surprised because they lack ambition!" Nikkia looked at him in mild astonishment. "But they have to be kept in their place! If we gave them free hand they'd soon run us out. Why, not fifty years ago----" He told again of that uprising that had resulted in the breaking of the Second Race's pretension. "We have to control 'em," he ended smugly. The Earthmen were baffled by the bland indifference of the Jovians to their mother planet. They met many of the First Race in the next few days, but none seemed interested but the so-called Mugs, the Second Race, and their interest was wistful akin to nostalgia. But the three scientists were to learn that the First Race were good fighting men, regardless of their short-comings in other lines. * * * * * The glowing "teardrops" appeared a little over a week later. They were so called because of their shape, but the Jovians knew as little about their nature as did their guests. They appeared early one murky morning, as Kass, Sine and Lents sat at breakfast with Governor Nikkia. The servants, comely, characterless specimens of the Second Race who held themselves snobbishly above their fellows, came panic-stricken; "Your Supremacy!" called one, making a low obeisance. "There are strange lights hanging over the palace!" Nikkia brushed the slight fellow aside, dashed up a stairway to a terrace on the roof, closely followed by his guests. In a few moments they were all soaked by the warm downpour as they stood on the terrace, like an island in a sea of brown fog. There were three of them, roughly egg-shaped, but with an elongated tail. More like tadpoles, save that the tail was rigid and emitted a fiery streak. Obviously they were propelled by a new adaptation of the old rocket principle. They swam back and forth slowly, as if questing for something, leisurely selecting their victims. The strangest thing about them, however, was the light. A brilliant red, almost pink, like the glow of a neon tube, it penetrated the fog. Its pulsations even penetrated brain and body, so that the watchers became unpleasantly conscious of it. Nikkia, watching tensely, turned suddenly on his guests; "Damned funny! Barely you show up, and now this! I don't like it. Are they from the Earth?" Lents swelled in slow and ponderous anger. "Do you think, sir, that we are of the sort to abuse your hospitality by spying on you? We don't know any more about those things than you do!" "Damned funny!" Nikkia repeated to himself. "Wonder if there's any of _them_ left?" "Your Supremacy!" a servant interrupted. "Call from the war office!" He was carrying a drum-like contrivance, carried on a stand, and set it down in front of the governor. "Well?" Nikkia snapped impatiently. The screen which formed the drumhead glowed into life. A Jovian officer, looking exceedingly efficient and warlike in his armor uniform, stood at salute, which Nikkia returned impatiently. "Who are those flyers, Sonta?" the governor snapped. "I don't know, Your Supremacy," the officer growled. "They fail to answer our challenge, and none of the men have seen anything like them." "Then why don't you turn the heat on them?" "We have. Our heat-rays have no effect on them. That pinkish light is a reflector wave of some sort. Several of our beam projectors were burnt up by the kick-back." "Ram 'em then! Ram 'em! Sacred Ganymede! Is our Defense Service degenerating into a crew of Mugs?" * * * * * The officer's image on the screen was seen to flush, to draw itself up resentfully. "We have sent ships up to ram them, Your Supremacy. Three of them have been destroyed." "I was watching. I saw nothing." "The visibility is worse than usual. They are half a mile high. Our own ships are invisible at a hundred yards. It's that cursed light." Nikkia shut him off peremptorily. "Never mind the conversation, Sonta. Get out every available defense craft. Box those teardrops. Ram them. Destroy them--I don't care how!" The screen was suddenly dark, and Nikkia gazed angrily up at the mysterious glowing craft overhead. So far they had done no damage except to the city's fighting ships. "Listen!" Sine exclaimed. His body glistened like wet bronze as he stood in the half darkness and strained to catch some sound over the steady patter of rain. "Lents, quit puffing!" From high overhead, some sounds were coming to them. A steady, droning rush, like the sustained exhaust of rockets. That must be from the visitors, for the official ships were equipped with the gravity buttons. Now and again one of the glowing teardrops would be thrown violently from its course, evidently the effect of impingement of the gravity beam. But not one was disabled. The defense ships were not faring so well. Every little while there would be a fog-muffled crash as one of them crashed, throwing a stone roof into the street. But none fell near the governor's palace. It was uncanny. No sound save that low, sibilant roar, and an occasional crash out there somewhere in the darkness. The mysterious attacking ships so plainly visible and so immune, and the defensive fighting craft, flying in silence and invisibility--crashing anonymously. Nikkia had dropped his air of assurance and calm superiority. He was frankly worried, and still a little suspicious of his guests. This attack--it did seem rather a coincidence. What would Sonta have to report now? He twisted a dial on the side of the communication drum. A junior officer appeared on the screen. "What the devil?" the governor exploded. "Where is Sonta? I'll have him broken for this! Lieutenant, call Colonel Sonta at once!" "Your Supremacy," the lieutenant said respectfully, "Colonel Sonta went up in one of the guard ships, and it has been reported crashed south of the catalyst plants." For a second Nikkia stared at the screen, then snapped the switch wordlessly. The attackers seemed to have broken down the capital's defenses. Here and there, through the thick, greasy fog, a lurid red glow would take life. That was the fog-diffused reflection of a heat-beam, probing the sky for the "teardrops." After a little while the glow would flare up and as suddenly die down, followed by utter blackness. Another heat-beam out of commission. Nikkia was frantically polling all of the city's defense commanders. They reported failure with monotonous regularity. The electronic barrage wall around the city had been passed easily--the equipment wrecked. A proton bombardment had yielded exactly nothing--He snapped the switch, peered eagerly at the mist curtain overhead--there was a series of heavy concussions. The glowing visitors were being bombarded from above. The screen glowed again.... "... but the bombs are all detonated long before they get in effective range of...." Close by a vague shape--a darker shadow in the muggy air, suddenly materialized. It was falling swiftly--a familiar cylindrical shape with rounded ends--one of the Jovian guard ships. It struck scarcely a hundred yards from the palace--struck with a jarring burst of sound like rending metal. Then utter silence again, and darkness. No cry of wounded man. No man could survive that fall and live. "Some kind of emanation--shields them from all known attack--" Nikkia swore monotonously and regularly. The glowing ships now settled down to the real purpose of their attack. They began to course back and forth across the city, methodically. Like burning meteors they disappeared over the horizon, to the city's farthest suburbs, back again, as if over a measured and marked course. And like burning, melting meteorites, they shed trails of sparks, blazing liquid. Wherever these fiery drops landed there ensued immediately a dry crackling, followed by the rattle of falling masonry. As none of the buildings were inflammable, there was no danger of fire. But wherever this incendiary trail fell, stone cracked and crumbled. "They are destroying us! Forty million people live here in Rubio. They will kill us all, women and children too!" "_Who_ are _they_?" Sine asked suddenly. * * * * * Nikkia looked at him bleakly. "Who? Why, the Mugs, of course! Those we banished. Those we thought we wiped out." "Oh, yeh." Sine's intonation was very dry. "They're giving you a dose of your own medicine." Nikkia did not reply. As if he apprehended, too late, that his statement might have sounded like a plea for help, he shrugged his massive shoulders with elaborate indifference, saying; "I and my wives are not afraid to die!" The Earthmen could no longer watch this ruthless destruction, however, regardless of the provocation. "You say that pink light is a protection against every _known_ mode of attack?" Sine asked, turning sharply to the governor. "Yes. And that's sufficient, isn't it?" "Is it proof against _this_?" Sine jerked the little tube out of its clip, directed it against a stone parapet that loomed grotesquely through the fog. A brilliant white beam leaped forth, cutting the fog like a bar of platinum. Then there was darkness, and the governor, examining the parapet, noted with growing hope that a stone pillar, a foot in diameter, had been cut off smoothly, cleanly. "The disintegrating ray!" he murmured. "I have read of that, in fiction. But here! Here it is!" Suddenly he was all energy. "Will you use this weapon against our enemies? I assure you that you will be well rewarded. As much eka-iodine as your ship will carry! My own ship is here, in the courtyard. It is swift, and powerful. You have already learned the controls. Take it. Bring down those murderers!" The fiery meteor was coming toward them again, planting a swath of death a hundred yards wide. There was really only one answer possible. The terrestrial scientists, having come on a mission of peace and discovery, stepped forward in unison. "Give me the activator key!" Sine said crisply. "Lents, will you see that the port gaskets are loose? Kass, I'd like to have you take the controls." "Right! Right!" They ran past the governor of the greatest planet in the solar system, ignoring him, down the broad stairs, through halls of weighty magnificence, and into the rain-sluiced courtyard. The governor's ship was waiting there. Not very large, but fine. Its polished metal gleamed richly. "Quick, inside!" Sine threw open the manport valves. They were inside. The gravity buttons glowed with their peculiarly material lavender light, and the ship rose vertically with swift acceleration. From the sky the death trails left by the invaders were clearly visible through the murk which obscured everything else--a pink, pulsating light. And the three glowing vessels were coming toward them. "Get above them, Kass!" Sine commanded. "When they pass under I'll let them have it." Closer and closer they came, those blobs of light. The Earthmen could see nothing but the light--get no hint of their construction. But that there were men inside they never doubted. The glowing ships seemed to swell, to expand monstrously, and their throbbing emanations became more furious. They seemed to hesitate as they were about to pass beneath. "They see us?" Lents rumbled, pulling at his toga nervously. The cloth was soaked, clinging to his fat body. "Close enough!" Sine decided, leaning out of a port, disintegrator ray tube in his hand. At that instant the strange pink light seemed to encompass the whole planet. They were bathed in it. The fog was a sea of baleful pink. Sine stiffened into impotent rigidity. The ray tube fell from his numbed fingers. He felt himself floating, weightless, in a sea of red that smothered him deliciously. And swiftly even that consciousness was succeeded by black oblivion. CHAPTER IV The Monstrosities "He's coming out of it. Hand me the water, Lents." Sine awoke to see Kass bending over him. He felt weak and languid, and the memory of recent events was returning only slowly. He looked around, saw that he was lying in a chamber about fifteen feet square, evidently hewn out of solid rock. "Are you all right, Sine? Answer me, boy!" Kass' bald head gleamed in the yellowish light of a single emanation tablet on the ceiling. "I'm all right. Where are we?" "Under the sea. Some hidden city of the Second Race--those that were banished. We are prisoners, but honored prisoners it seems." Sine passed his hand over his eyes. "How did we get here?" "Some kind of emanation of theirs--the brightening of that light, I guess. It had a paralyzing effect. I know I froze where I stood, unable to move a step. And I was protected by the hull. Same with Lents. But you had your head out of the port--caught the full effect. It laid you out cold." "They boarded us then," the fat man supplied. "As easy as that! Simply boarded us, herded me and Lents into their own ship, which is just as suitable for navigating in water as in air. As for you, they had to carry you." "Better tell him what to expect," Lents suggested. Kass explained, with considerable scientific interest: "The First Race was not so far wrong in calling them 'terrible people.' They are, a race of monstrosities. Men with four or six arms, men with hair like fur all over their bodies. With heads ten times too large. With boneless tentacles instead of limbs. With scales instead of skin. Quite horrible. And yet, most of them are highly intelligent, with normal human emotions, and painfully conscious of their deformities." "I don't quite understand." Sine was flexing his muscles, sitting up with the support of one elbow. He saw he was lying on a pallet of dried sea weed. "What caused these abnormalities?" "Well, you know--" Lents was speaking judiciously. "You know all about the mutations produced by X-rays in the biological laboratories?" "Of course!" For approximately a million years these actions of X-rays had been understood--their ability to bring about extraordinary mutations in the life-germ, whether animal or vegetable--the acceleration of natural evolution a millionfold. "But you don't mean to say the First Race deliberately brought about these mutations in the Mugs?" "Not deliberately. But they permitted it with utter callousness. You know those hydrogen integrators we saw at a distance in the dark half of The Bubble. Those things are the source of most of the power used by the Jovians. But the generators have a mighty dangerous by-product--the cosmic ray series, for instance, a particularly destructive band below the X-ray spectrum too." Sine nodded comprehension, his eyes hardening as he thought of the grotesque, distorted wreck of humanity who was Proserpina's father. A mere whim of fortune that he had not been condemned to that hell before she was born, or she might have been one of those unfortunate mutations-- Might yet become one! Not only could the rays deform the offspring. They could distort the full-grown, normal body. Sine felt increasingly dismayed as he thought of this immature, quiet-eyed girl, this waif of an alien world. He experienced a recurrence of the indignation he had previously felt. This selfish, superior First Race! Condemning the weaker people to torture and death so they could enjoy a little paradise! The Pleasure Bubble they called it. Sphere of the Damned was better! For the unfortunate consigned to the dark hemisphere was condemned to an inferno that surpassed the Ancient's most perfervid imagination. "I wish we could save Proserpina!" The words were out before Sine knew it. Kass stopped in the middle of a sentence and lifted a quizzical eyebrow. "Oh, get the romantic ideas out of your heads!" Sine snapped. "You know she's just a kid. I couldn't take care of her if we did take her back to Earth. But I'd like to take her out of The Bubble!" Lents pulled at his toga thoughtfully. It was dirty, still wet, and smelled not too pleasantly. "I could take care of her," he said slowly, and his deep bass voice was a little wistful. "My wife would be glad--we're getting old, and no children--" "We-ell," Kass submitted practically. "I'd like to take her away, and her poor old daddy too--or is he old? But what's the use of discussing all that? Here we are prisoners, and she's a prisoner of the First Race, and we shall never see her again. Or the good old Earth either," he added sadly. A man entered the room. He looked more like a normal man than might have been expected--only his exaggerated dish-face, his bulbous forehead proclaiming him just another victim of the First Race's industries. Or his shrill, treble voice as he announced: "Gentlemen of Earth, the Manager and his council expect you in the office. Follow me." He turned, waited for them to come. The Manager's messenger led them up a long, ascending tunnel meagerly lighted at intervals by small emanation tablets. After they had gone perhaps a hundred yards the hewn rock gave way to what was evidently a kind of concrete. "This part of their city is built above the ocean floor," Kass remarked quietly. "They brought us in through airlocks. Passages lead to caves along the shore where the original refugees holed up. These are mostly their children, so marked and deformed even in embryo." Their dish-faced guide now stepped aside as they entered a spacious chamber with a domed ceiling. Here and there it was wet. No doubt above there was the sea. Lents made a rapid mental calculation, rumbled into Sine's ear: "Can't be so deep. Not over a hundred feet; maybe less. Otherwise those arches couldn't carry the weight." * * * * * A hush fell upon the room. The leader of this strange people--the one they called The Manager, was rising from his seat back of a desk. His head was very large, his eyes large, liquid and expressive. A total lack of eyebrows, of hair on his head, gave a mixture of the comical and the obscene to his appearance. But the respect with which his counselors, ranged on either side of him, regarded him, ignored his appearance. They were all, without exception, victims of the strange and terrible mutations of type induced by the First Race's callous disregard to the dangers of the rays. All wore loose garments of drab material which concealed their deformities to some extent. The Manager's large, intense eyes fastened on the Earthmen, and he addressed them: "Men of Earth: We have captured you in battle, but we would be friends with the Old World. Why did you try to fight us?" "You were murdering helpless victims," Sine said shortly. "It was not our fight, but we could not stand by and permit such a thing." Something like amusement flashed up in The Manager's enormous eyes, so old, weary and wise. "So you could not bear to think of an easy death for those of the First Race? What think you of their treatment of us?" He raised a scrawny arm--so thin it suggested a skeleton. "Hunted like beasts--imprisoned and tortured! Are we not human?" "You see," Kass interposed diplomatically--"we were their guests. And in a way their quarrel...." The Manager cut him short peremptorily: "You were their guests! You lolled with them in The Pleasure Bubble, in the beautiful sun! The sun that most of us have never seen! And down in the dark half-human beings like yourselves--toiled and slaved at those devilish integrators to keep the machinery of pleasure going. "You were the guests in the Governor's palace--in the magnificent city of Rubio, though to you it may seem dismal. But did you think of the poor slaves, deep underground, in the slimy sewers, in the uranium pits, in the power plants? You basked in luxury with the First Race, and their fight was your fight--their enemies...." He was working himself into a fury, evidently forgetting the original purpose of this conference with the prisoners. But one of the counselors now approached him, bowed respectfully so that his scaly face was hidden. The Manager cut short his tirade. "What is it, Gnom?" "Isn't The Manager digressing?" Gnom asked in a hollow voice. "These men of Earth are now our guests. They come at an opportune time--when we shall reap the fruits of our long planning. If we wrest power from the First Race, shall we not need the friendship of the Mother Planet? Let them, then, carry our story to Earth, if it be that we may need their help." The Manager stood in thought. At last, coming to a decision, he asked sharply: "With whom do you stand, men of Earth? With us or our oppressors?" Kass and Lents looked at one another blankly. They started as Sine spoke up sonorously, beside them: "Officially, we are supposed to be neutral. But if you attack The Bubble and rescue the poor devils in the dark hemisphere I'll help!" But The Manager shook his enormous head slightly. "That we can not do. That satellite is too far out in space. There is no concealment, and we can not yet fight their patrol ships in space." "Listen!" Sine persisted. "There is a man there I know. He's about ready to die, unless he gets away. And he has a girl, a kid of fourteen or fifteen. The rays haven't made a freak out of her yet. I want to save her. Give me a ship and I'll take her out myself!" "That we can not do. Individuals do not count. One, or a hundred, may die. We can not endanger our plan." The counselors had drawn a little away from the Earthmen, unconsciously symbolizing their support to The Manager. Again he raised his bony arm. "Up above there our ships are destroying every city of the First Race on the planet. Our power-beams for the glowing ships are encircling Jupiter in a network of red and death--death to the oppressors! The Pleasure Bubble's turn will come. And when it is dashed down, master and slave must die together. To save the slaves might let some of the masters escape." "Gentlemen!" Kass was trying to smooth over the situation, "We have been sent here on a voyage of discovery, not of war. We regret your troubles here--but we can take no part in them. Our attitude is friendly to...." "No! Damned if I will!" Sine shouldered his iron-hard body through the close-packed counselors, so that he stood directly before The Manager, who did not shrink from the formidable young man. "If you murder those poor Mugs in the black hemisphere, I'm your enemy from now on!" "And I!" The words boomed and reverberated in the vaulted chamber, and Lents moved his bulky body beside Sine. "And I too!" Kass' naked, skinny torso glistened with sweat. "The First Race may be murderers, but they're magnificent murderers. They wouldn't forget their friends!" The Manager's large, liquid eyes seemed suddenly filmed over. He jerked his enormous head sharply, snapped: "We waste time. Put these meddlers out through the locks, that they may feed the fish." * * * * * But Gnom again interposed. "If The Manager will permit--there is much water on Earth. They may know how to swim--might go to the top and escape--" "True, Gnom. I have a truly great brain, as all the oppressed admit, but details escape me. Call one of the watch, put them to death first." Gnom turned, looked into one of the larger passages that centered on that room. He turned his blank, scaly face. "The watch is not here!" "Perhaps he was called. See!" But before Gnom could execute the order a commotion arose in the passage. A voice called from outside: "Officer of the hour prays audience with The Manager." "Enter." An officer with an extreme hunchback dashed in, bowed low before The Manager. "It is the end!" he gasped. "They watched our glowing ships plunge under the water, and they are setting bombing rockets for this area. The first ranging shots have already been fired. Listen!" After a few moments there came a dull thud, as though a blow had been struck against the ceiling. A pendent drop of water fell. The Manager's hairless face became bleak. "I made great plans, great inventions--forgot a simple detail!" He slumped as he stood, a mixture of the absurd and the tragic. The mutation that had made a brilliant mind had nevertheless left it incomplete, and none had realized it until in this extremity. Again came that dull shock, and this time it seemed a little stronger. The Manager shook off his apathy. His great eyes burned with livid fire, as he called: "Officer of the watch. Take these prisoners to the locks. Kill them and put them out." "I obey!" The officer, squat, with enormous torso, pointed a small wand, pointed with a tiny spot of that peculiar pulsating pink light, threateningly. Stolidly he herded them through a broad corridor. Now and then they passed inhabitants of this submarine city, nightmarish, pitiable creatures, now disturbed, dreading death. Sine wondered vaguely that they should cling to such an unhappy existence. He was recalled to their own predicament when a metal gate, closed by a screw-wheel, loomed up in the poor light. The inside lock! The guard motioned them ahead, stood between them and the passage. He fumbled at his belt, ignoring the dull hammerblows of explosions transmitted by the water. He seized Kass by the throat, prepared to plunge the knife into his body. Sine leaped past, crooked his arm around the man's thick neck, attempted to break his neck. But a giant arm threw him off easily. He fell to the floor. Like an echo came the concussion of another explosion. The guard, without trace of ill-humor, turned his attention to Sine. He pointed the little wand at him, and the light glowed brighter. Sine felt again that torturing paralysis. His senses were leaving him. The pink light was throbbing, expanding.... He wondered why the stones of the passage should be pushing in, spurting water. The pink light faded. Tepid water struck him, stinging like needles. There was a roaring, blackness. A fat arm hooked around his waist--Lents', no doubt. He felt himself borne along in a swirl of water, strangling, fighting blindly. There was another terrific explosion shock, an interminable climbing struggle. Then his head broke water and he breathed air again. Lents came up beside him, puffing and blowing, and after a long wait--so long that they despaired, Kass came weakly to the surface. CHAPTER V The Struggle for Freedom They were afloat, and comparatively safe from the rockets which shrieked out of the leaden sky and threw spectral waterspouts up into the fog before they exploded. Unless one exploded directly under them, or very near, they would be safe--for the time being. "Which way is shore?" Lents puffed. "Rockets seem to come from that way," Sine answered, flipping his hand. "Swim that way. Fish probably lost appetites, so won't bother us." The bombardment had indeed frightened away the monsters of the deep, and even the dead in the ruined submarine city would rest in peace for a while. But the Earthmen, after several hours of swimming, doubted that this was more than a postponement of death. The long greasy swells were rising, presaging another of Jupiter's unimaginably violent storms. "I see a light!" Sine strained his eyes to get another glimpse of it through the brown fog. "There it is again." Something was moving slowly through the air a short distance over the water, following the course of the rockets, which had ceased coming. A powerful searchlight was cutting through the murk. A war party of the First Race, looking for wreckage. In their methodical search they soon found the swimming men, and they were helped into the chief's cabin. Sine, looking up with half-blinded eyes, saw Governor Nikkia sitting in his chair, looking at him coldly. "So!" the governor bit off his words. "The traitors are fished out." His arrogant, handsome face was vindictive, uncompromising. "We forgot that the aborigines of Earth would naturally sympathize with their equals, the Mugs! That was nicely timed, your 'visit.' How long have you been in communication with the rebels?" The Earthmen, weak and exhausted by their long exposure, resisted their desire to lie down on the floor. They stood before the governor, hemmed in by hostile fighting men, and tried to maintain the traditions and dignity of their planet. "We were not in communication with your slaves," Sine declared. "You should know that. Your radio monitors would have picked up any messages, and your own patrol ships picked us up when we were far out in space. Our mission is one of peace. As for your quarrels, they do not concern us. We are strictly neutral." Nikkia laughed, a short, clipped bark in which there was little amusement. "Well, your guilt is a matter of small moment anyway. We have paid the Mugs for the damage they did, and they will not have another chance. And if they had an idea of getting help from Earth, you shall be an object lesson on the uselessness of such hopes." "Meaning?" But Sine and his companions knew that the meaning must be evil. "Meaning," Nikkia snapped, "that from now on you three are Mugs, no better and no worse than the Jovian Mugs. Except that I shall instruct the labor office to put you to work at one of the power integrators--perhaps in The Bubble. We don't want to waste you" he added with grim humor--"and the gravity here on Jupiter might reduce your life of usefulness." The governor turned his back in dismissal, and the prisoners were hustled into a dark, extremely hot storage hold. Here they lay down amid an untidy collection of miscellaneous gear, thick with dust. They rested gratefully until some of their strength should return to them. When they awoke from their sleep of exhaustion they were aware that the ship had landed, and a few minutes later the door of their prison was opened and an officer, heat pistol trained on them, commanded the prisoners to get into another ship for transfer to the metal and crystal satellite where they were condemned to drag out the rest of their lives as slaves. The second coming of the Earthmen to The Bubble was in marked contrast to their first. Instead of the large, commodious lock in the upper hemisphere, they entered this time through a drab, dull orifice in the black half of the sphere. The patrol ship which brought them was contacted without ceremony. They were thrust though with curt orders to ask somebody for the Mug superintendent's office. Then the valve closed behind them. There was a grating sound as it was locked from the outside, and then silence. The ship was gone. They were marooned in the gloom, the grisly domain of the rays and the Mugs. Sentenced for life, with their only companions, a few broken, despairing men. The corridor in which they found themselves sloped gently downward, and artificial gravity made it possible to walk naturally. Sine taking the lead, they passed into the depths. Everywhere were monstrous shadows, with occasional stabbing eerie beams of light. But it seemed that an ominous hush hung over this metal-interlaced gulf. Here there was no sense of motion--no sense of bubble-like lightness. It was like a descent into the nether regions of the ancient--into an inferno. But of the denizens of this dismal place there was no trace. "Let's go to Proserpina's home," Sine suggested. "I'm anxious to see if she's still all right. And the old man too." Accordingly they watched for the numbered corridor, and after some fruitless wandering, came again to the deep crack that was the only home this timid girl knew. She started up in terror as the Earthmen came into view. Not unnaturally, for they were all bristly with unshaven beards and grimy with the dust they had collected when prisoners in the Jovian ship's hold. But after her first reaction of terror she gave a glad cry, and running up to Sine, threw her thin arms around his muscular neck. "Now listen, kid!" The young scientist began with unwonted embarrassment. But the girl clung to him, and he could not quite bring himself to tear her arms away. She released him herself, in a few moments, became suddenly shy. Lents laughed with genuine amusement. "Don't be silly, Sine. She's just glad to see us again. Poor kid was lonesome. Come here, Prosie." * * * * * She went to him, gravely embraced him; then Kass. They noticed she was trembling. "What's the matter?" Kass asked. "You act as if you're glad to see us, but wished we hadn't come." "Why are you here?" she asked with a troubled frown. The Earthmen told her of what had transpired--that they were now condemned for life to serve in the dark hemisphere. As they spoke her fears seemed to vanish. She became radiant with delight. "Then you have come at the right time!" she cried. "Our slavery is at an end, and you shall pilot us back to the Mother planet!" "You're not crazy, are you kid?" Sine asked, lifting her little pointed chin with his hand. "No!" she laughed delightfully. "Not crazy!" And she would have embraced Sine again. "My father has been building a ship for the past two years, hoping to escape to Ganymede, or some other moon of Jupiter. But now we shall go to Earth!" She clapped her hands excitedly. "Listen! Let's get this straight," Lents demanded. "You say your dad has built a ship. Where is it?" "Way down in the bottom of the hemisphere. That's where all the Mugs are, working on it when they have time. Dad's chest feels better again." "They have built a ship, huh?" Sine was trying to suppress the hope that flamed up madly. "How'll they get it out?" "They've made an airlock, so that when we leave the escaping air won't give us away." It was one of these things that seem too good to be true. But when the Earthmen accompanied the girl to the secret workshop, directly next to the sphere's outer skin, they found she had spoken the truth in every respect. The men there, nearly all pathetic wrecks of the First Race's system, were at first a little doubtful about admitting the Earthmen, but one after another they were won over to the idea of seeking sanctuary on Earth rather than on some satellite of Jupiter where they would never be entirely safe. Besides, the Earthmen, though they had been stripped of all their weapons, represented additional fighting strength. They made their final preparations with mixed feelings. Many of the Mugs had relatives on Jupiter, though few had wives or children. Even women of the Second Race had no desire to share the fate of a man condemned to a lifetime in the black half of the Bubble. Those few women who had accompanied their men to the metal satellite would, of course, be taken along, for the escape ship was commodious. The next two weeks were filled with arduous labor, but at last the ship was ready, and observation through a small port which had been installed, showed that they were about to enter the shadow of Jupiter. Under cover of darkness they would leave the airlock. They would accelerate past The Bubble. Centrifugal force would send them away from Jupiter. At the same time their velocity with relation to the sun would be diminished. Lents plotted a long, graceful curve that would bring them to Earth with the best possible speed. Proserpina's father lay on the floor, peering out through the port. "Remember, Jan," Lents reminded him, "as soon as we cut the shadow, you give the order." They were all in the ship save the Earthmen and Jan, lying on the floor like a great spider, with his tremendous chest laboring painfully. "In a moment now," Jan said. "The sun is nearing the limb." "Open! Open, you aberrated spores!" The command came but faintly through the inside valve of the emergency airlock. "They've found out!" Kass gasped. "Quick, never mind the shadow!" Jan had already leaped to the long cylindrical hull, the product of endless labor and sacrifice. "Inside!" Sine shouted. Kass and Sine made for the ship's manports. "I'll take care of the thermite." In his hand he carried a small heat pistol that had long ago been stolen and hidden by a Mug. Quickly he made a circuit of the room, which was like an enormous sheet-metal blister on the inside of the metal satellite. After the thermite had cut out the ship free, that blister would prevent the escape of air, saving the lives of thousands of the First Race and also preventing discovery of their escape for a time. The thermite was piled generously in a ridge all the way around. Sine leaped inside the first valve of the manport, colliding with a soft body. "Get inside, kid!" He leveled his pistol at the thermite ridge where it was nearest to him. High time too. The walls of the blister were radiating heat. The fools were turning their infra-red beams on it! "Lock!" Sine shouted, pressing the trigger and jumping back. Instantly the ship was surrounded by an oval of brilliant orange and white fire. The valve clicked shut in Sine's face, and he dived through the second one into the interior, tripping the lock of that one also. Through the ports nothing was to be seen now save fire. They were in an inferno of brilliant light and heat. But through the glare and smoke Sine saw a white-hot spot suddenly appear on the blister wall. The Jovians were melting their way through! The metal plates sagged like wet paper, dropped limply. Back of the hole, luridly illuminated, stood the foremost of a detachment of fighting men, eager to leap to the fray, waiting only for the metal to cool a little. But the thermite had been burning steadily, biting through the tough skin of the metal moon. Just as the fugitives were beginning to wonder whether they would be incinerated in their self-made prison there was a lurch. Through the hull of their own vessel they could hear the tearing of metal as the weakened plates were sheared away. They found themselves in space, with the great ball of the Pleasure Bubble floating away from them. Just outside of the gaping hole in the sphere floated the bodies of twenty or thirty men, blown out by the escaping air. The air was escaping in a prodigious geyser; unimpeded by an atmosphere, it spewed out, visible like a cloud due to its moisture, smooth like an inflating balloon without billows. The ball of vapor expanded swiftly toward the gray vastness of Jupiter 100,000 miles below, enveloping the fugitive ship for a time, then passing on, like an enormous milky white cloud, falling swiftly until it was lost in the darkness, still expanding. Overhead The Bubble continued serenely on its course, the sweeping curve of its crystal hemisphere visible. But now the actinic lights that had served as artificial suns were dark. The great man-made paradise was as cold and dead as the Earth's moon. Death stalked its pleasure palaces. Already up there the pleasant rippling lakes must be skimmed over with ice, the luxuriant vegetation stiff, crackling with frost. Despite the selfishness, the cruelty, the utter callousness of the First Race, Sine felt a pang of regret over the destruction of so much beauty. A messenger from the astrogator's cabin, a man whose skin was seared and scorched so that it looked like an alligator's hide, touched Lents' arm. "Jan would like to have you verify the course." There was apprehension in the man's voice. Member of a race so long enslaved, restrained, he feared the freedom of open space. They swept slowly past The Bubble, gaining speed. Suddenly there was a cry from the stern look-out: "The ship's heating. Stop it! Something's wrong." Sine, rushing to answer the call, found that the ship was indeed heating up. Shielded from the sun's rays as they were, this was inexplicable. And then he saw the dull red pinpoint of light. He had not seen it before, that patrol ship, clinging like a leech to the airlock of the crystal hemisphere. There had been men in there when the air escaped. They had been saved from death by the closing of their automatic airlocks. "Better get back into the shelter of The Bubble," he told Jan after a hurried trip to the astrogator's cabin. The spider man turned the vessel, and they scurried back to shelter. Although the patrol ship tried its gravity buttons on them, the Mugs had fully equipped their own vessel with similar, and larger buttons which were occasionally used in regulating the metal satellite's orbit. They could neutralize the other vessel's gravity force with ease. "And yet," Sine admitted to the serious little group in the cabin, as they once more floated in space under the immense sphere, "they seem to have us stymied." "Suppose they follow us around here?" Kass asked somewhat nervously. "I don't think they can," Sine said. "I noticed when we came to The Bubble first, the ships are locked to the gaskets from inside the sphere. The men inside the ship can not unlock their ship unless they open the emergency air curtain. If they did their air would all escape through the sphere. They could do it, of course, if they put on space suits. But that procedure would take an hour, and in the mean time we could get out of range of their heat rays. So we have them stymied too. Except for one thing----" "Of course," Lents grunted. "We can't get at them, and they can't get at us, but in a few hours we'll be in sunlight again, and some patrol will pick us up." The Mugs, watching fearfully from beyond the doorway, turned aside. Were they, after a mere glimpse of freedom, to be immediately returned to the bondage which had become unbearable to them? Sine felt a small, thin hand slip into his. He looked down into the wistful face of Proserpina looking up at him with hope, with confidence. All at once his shyness vanished as he realized that Proserpina's obvious adoration for him was only the admiration of a child for a very big and very wonderful brother. At the same time his desire to do something to release them all from their peril was intensified by the imperatively felt need to justify her confidence in him. An idea came. "Jan," he asked. "What is the energy output--the total capacity--of our gravity buttons?" Jan named an approximate figure in ergs. "Lents, if you've ever calculated to a purpose, calculate now! How much energy is represented by the mass of that sphere at its orbital velocity?" "I get you!" The fat scientist puffed out his cheeks with excitement. "Have to estimate the mass first." He picked up a stylus from the astrogator's table, worked furiously on a tablet. Kass and Jan watched apprehensively. The Pleasure Bubble, with its freight of the dead, was hurrying remorselessly to its rendezvous with the sunlight. "Whoops!" Lents threw his tablet into the air in extravagant triumph. "She'll do!" "Stations!" shouted Jan, in his curious strained voice, and men rushed eagerly to their posts, still hazy as to their object but cheered by the knowledge that there was hope after all. Then began one of the strangest duels in the history of the solar system. Setting the nose of their vessel against the gigantic metal satellite, they directed the stern gravity buttons against a distant star, and applied full force to slow the sphere in its orbit. The forces liberated were terrific. The sphere's tough skin, three inches thick, buckled and bent inward until the ship was almost buried in a pit of its own creation. Jan stood hunched over the activator lever like a great spider, ready to throw it into neutral at the first sign of an actual rupture, which would send them crashing through the internal cells and girders of the sphere. "She's folding up like a squeezed orange peeling!" Kass muttered, running his hand over his bald head. "Built to withstand internal pressure--nothing like this," Jan gasped. "Stout ship, this!" he added a moment later. "We thought we might have to ram our way out." She was indeed a stout ship--this vessel of escape. Though she shivered and groaned, she gave no indication of failure. "Wonder if the others are pushing against us!" Kass suddenly thought of another possibility. "We--can--outpush 'em." Jan gasped. "Got to sit down. Here you take it!" Sine stepped into his place. Vague shocks and noises were transmitted to them through the hull. The huge sphere was collapsing progressively. Lents came puffing from an observation port. "She's slowing!" he reported triumphantly. "Our trajectory--give her a little more!" The Joy Bubble was becoming more and more disc-shaped, and it was slowly turning on a major axis as the contending forces became uncentered. "Flopping like a flapjack," Lents commented as he watched the shifting vista. A moment later; "It's a close squeeze. See there, past the horizon--a prominence?" It was like a white plume, this jet of vapor thrown far into space. Not uncommon in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere. But it was bright, dazzling! That meant they were not far from the sunlight! "Pull away!" the fat mathematician shouted. "We have to take a chance!" Instantly Sine reversed the lever. Everyone grasped handholds as the ship backed out of the pit. Now they could see the vast ruin they had wrought. Sine gave her all the speed he dared, for the sun, for home! The great ruin was slowly turning, and in a few minutes they saw again the darker shadow that was the fighting patrol ship, still clamped to her side. At the same instant the dull red pinpoint winked on. The Jovians had sighted them again! In a few minutes the hull was getting uncomfortably warm. Lents laid down his pad. "They will crash!" he declared. "But they have an hour, the fools! Instead of trying to burn us why don't they get into their space suits and free themselves?" Jan, resting on the bench, shook his shaggy head. "They are a great people, stupid but great. They will try to punish us till they die." The wreckage drifted closer and closer to Jupiter, and still the red beam played steadily on the fleeing prisoners' ship. The distance had become so great that it could only be seen through an old telescope that the prisoners had somehow procured. But the prisoners were gasping. Their hull was cherry-red on the outside, and still heating. A few more minutes and the heat would be unbearable. "They are getting closer--closer--they are in the sunlight. Now I can see better. I believe they will skip by--no! They've dived into the vapor! They're out again. Skipped out like a flat stone on water. Sinking again--almost over the horizon. Gone, I guess. Whew, it's hot!" They were accelerating so fast that they had to turn on the interior gravity buttons to equalize the pressure on their bodies. Behind lay the vast, fog-bound planet of Jupiter. Ahead was the beautiful sun. And somewhere beyond, and still invisible, Earth the lovely, the green, the Mother of the human race! THE END 
63640	----	JUPITER'S JOKE By A. L. HALEY _Casey Ritter, the guy who never turned down a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods of idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward the great red spot of terrible Jupiter._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Those methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner, and sewed up tight. Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately, in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't going to sell them for dope. But--and this was the 'but' that was likely to deprive the System of my activities--even experimenting with them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not to rat on him before taking the job. Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter. I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out. Then I croaked, "Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir? Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?" Being civil to the court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen, a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence. The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny throat, and told me what for. "You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter," he said. "Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere--" I snorted. "Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy tales! How could any--" The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again. "I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field, the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we say, eminently suited to the task." * * * * * He beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me! Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup.... At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not unless it was a straight suicide mission! I feebly massaged my throat. "Pictures?" I whispered. "Show me 'em." Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out. I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well, a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to gangrene around the edges. The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties had taken my voice again. "How big?" I whispered. He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. "About the size of a man, I believe." I raised my shrinking head. "Take me to jail!" I said firmly, and collapsed onto my chair. A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. "So this is the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!" he sneered. "Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!" I shuddered. "You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!" They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back turned. How stupid could they get? When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C. made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed. At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a right to be; and after awhile I braced him. I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip. "Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me," he says. "I just made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed." "Oh, no!" I moaned. "What were you trying to do, start a feud between us and Mars?" He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. "Buddy," he said reverently, "I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again! Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!" His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a fresh scent. I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of Killicuts on Mars--the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to him. "How'd you make the getaway?" I asked, taking him at his word. He looked loftily past me. "Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise where I cached 'em." "Cached what?" "The rocks, stupe." I hardly heard the cut. "You mean you really did get away with them?" My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was impossible. I'd investigated once myself. He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard coming. That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a week later. * * * * * By that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead, he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, "When I chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl won't give me fer 'em--" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it. "Jupiter!" I goggled at him. "Akroida! Who's she?" He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he was sure I'd been born. "Don't you know nothin', butterhead?" From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke again. The memory still makes me fry. "Akroida," he explained in his own sweet time, "is the queen-scorp of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago, remember?" He winked broadly. "It come from Mars in the first place, you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em, if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out--" He went off into a dream about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back. "You mean those scorpions have really got brains?" "Brains!" he snorted. "Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone. Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce, so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!" He sighed regretfully. "But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer them emeralds." I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins. But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it. So did I. For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone, while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a letter to the S.S.C. The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me, friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad. "I put on a yeller slicker," he confessed sadly. "That there ammonia mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to an audience with the old rip." He shook his head slowly. "The kid that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all. I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it a-purpose to upset her." Then he winked at me. "But then I got off in a corner and cooked up some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida, though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper." He ruminated a few minutes. "Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out with a green an' poiple spacesuit--them's the real Jupiter colors--an' put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful." II Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp. I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and to remind me that this was public service, strictly. "These--" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold--"These jewels are as nothing, Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade--" He paused, his long nose twitching cynically--"IF you succeed, your reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man." That twitch of the nose riled me no little. "I ain't failed yet!" I snarled at him. "Just you wait till I do, feller!" I slipped the string of emeralds back into its little safe. "Instead of sniping at me, why don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?" With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and passionate purple. I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean. That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise! The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor, I eased along. But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally. There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty. Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing, though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too. I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even intimate--or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its expression. I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone else. "I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming lady," I informed him. "However, I have something very special in the way of jewels--not with me, naturally--and the rumor is that she might be interested." He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up screaming.... Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted. Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye, and I gagged again. My actions didn't bother him a bit. "Jewels, did you say?" he tapped out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff.... * * * * * A shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it, and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo. Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, "How's about taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida, old pal?" Or words to that effect. He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. "Anything! Just anything you desire, my dearest friend." I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. "I'm Casey Ritter. What's your label, chum?" "Attaboy," he ticked coyly. "Attaboy?" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. "Who named you that?" He simpered. "My dear friend, Pard Hoskins." I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. "How come you aren't mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?" He hung his silly head. "I fear I am colorblind," he confessed sadly. Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him. "Lead off, old pal," I sang out, and then had to tap it. "I'll follow in my boat." Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place? Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts. Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me. Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions, all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt. Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth. It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly. It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant. In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my eyeballs felt paralyzed. Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C. persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds. Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was fumbling, too. "Zero hour, chump!" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the airlock. III That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of space. In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me--just right, in fact--and still they had furniture sitting around in the air as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather? Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls. We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it glowed like the inside of a red light. No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all that red! A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one! Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple--not a green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit. Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding, shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire. Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went across to her alone with the arsenic. Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I could hear her question reverberate away over where I was. "Who from?" asked Akroida. That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code at all. "Who from?" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush. "Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly remarkable jewels," he confessed coyly. Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. "His name?" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my direction. "Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?" Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. "I--uh--the stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention to the--uh--trader. He does seem to resemble an--ah--earthman." He ducked his head and fearfully waited. A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. "An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?" Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly. The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with that dragon's tail of hers. * * * * * I began to quake all over. My nice little jail, I thought frantically. My cozy little cell. Those dear sweet guards. I'd left them all to be eaten alive by that purple devil. Why didn't I bat my silly brains out on my cell wall when this idea first sneaked in? Marooned on that damned hassock a hundred feet above the floor I began to think, and fast. "Bring him here!" roared Akroida, tapping it out so fast it sounded like gunfire. She gnashed her mandibles and glared until I started shriveling. "Bring him here! He'll dare to come around and insult me, will he? I'll flail him limb from limb and chew his bones to shreds! I'll bite him into chunks! I'll.... Bring him here!" She made a furious lunge at Attaboy. Trembling and blanching to a muddy lavender, he got out of there and scrambled over to me with big tears rolling down his stiff shell cheeks. Why the poor purple sap, I thought, he really cares! These things really have feelings! I looked at him with new respect and even a little affection. "Look, kid," I admonished, trying to keep my fingers from shaking as I tapped. "Just don't worry about a thing. I still think I can handle this. Just take me across slow and easy, and we'll hope for the best." With a mournful sigh he picked me up, tossed me onto his shoulder, and as per instructions, drifted over to the floating platform. All I had was the little bottle of Pard's scorp-scent. "This had better be good!" I confided to the image of Pard Hoskins, which somehow managed to get between me and that raging she-dragon on the couch. "This had sure better be good, son!" I waited until Akroida was leaning forward practically gnashing her mandibles in my face while her front pair of legs grabbed and pawed for me. She was too fat and bulky to jump at me, or I'd have been a dead planet-bo right there. But I had to take the chance. There wasn't a drop of perfume to waste. At the last moment I lifted that precious little bottle and squirted the stuff right in her face. Her mandibles flew open and stayed there. Slowly her front legs dropped; a film of ecstasy formed over those wild glittering eyes. She sank back and began to croon. Yes, croon! My helmet vibrated with it. Then her long skinny front legs made beckoning motions to me. Frosts of romance! She wanted me to share her couch! Attaboy didn't ask if I was willing. Delightedly he dumped me beside her. And then, having inhaled some of that perfume himself and not being able to tear himself away, he forgot all about etiquette and curled up beside us to bask some more in those luscious mists. * * * * * What's more revolting than a hopper-scorp in a tantrum? I'll tell you, chums: a hopper-scorp in the throes of infatuation! Especially when the hopper-scorp in question is Akroida. For one thing, she's so big. And for another, she's so unmentionably thorough. She was infatuated from the spike on her repulsive forehead down to the devilish sting on her tail. With me! I tried to tell her it was Attaboy she must love, not me. She merely wallowed her hideous head, as big as a bucket, in my suffering lap, clattering it against my enameled space suit; she rolled her horrible eyes while her whole monstrosity of a body twitched and quivered with emotion. I tried to turn the conversation to the emeralds. She wasn't even interested. We hadn't needed the emeralds at all; we'd only needed Pard's special concoction. Furtively, behind the horseplay, I began to plan to salvage those emeralds for myself. That stuff must have been making me delirious, too. I don't know how long that blood-curdling love scene went on. That awful she-scorp picked me up and rocked me while I scraped diamonds and rubies along my visor and chest. She signalled servants who were hovering on all sides taking in the show, and they rushed to bring tidbits that I had to hide behind cushions because I couldn't open my helmet in that atmosphere. Then the servants, getting whiffs of that cursed perfume, would snuggle up with us, until there wasn't elbow room on that big couch. Akroida would churn her tail around and knock them all off so that she could cuddle me better. Then she got the idea of singing to me. And my air was running out. Finally, while I still had a bit of air left, the jag began to wear off, and Akroida slumped over and went to sleep holding me tenderly against her breast-shell. The moment I felt her grip relax, I wiggled out of there. Attaboy was fast asleep too. Desperately I decided that I could row through the air if those scorps could. Grabbing Attaboy's arm, I stepped off into nothing. Sure enough, the anti-grav worked for me, too. Sweating with the thought of what would have been left of Casey Ritter if it hadn't, I sort of swam away from there, towing my guide. Out at the boat, I anchored him outside the airlock and crawled inside. I'm not ashamed to admit that I got out of my helmet, gasped in some good old oxygen, and collapsed. What a day! IV When the time rolled around for my next visit to Akroida, I decided to play it cool and careful. I was fortified with a snooze, a slug of Scotch, and a meal, but I still wasn't busting out with courage. I made a mental note to be damn cautious about that perfume. Maybe it was necessary to overdo it that first time, with her shouting for my blood, but that was all past I hoped. I sprayed just a tiny bit on my suit, calculated to soothe and lure but not to excite. I wanted no more cuddling with Akroida, please! Then with my pal Attaboy, I stiffened my backbone and plunged out into that poison gas they call atmosphere. I let Attaboy ferry me. He was very hazy about our return trip from Akroida's chamber, so I decided to leave him ignorant. No use to let even him know I could locomote the scorpion way. I might need to make a getaway, and surprise might be of the very essence. But I didn't need to worry. Old Akroida had slept off her jag, and right away I found out that she wasn't queen-scorp for nothing. The old girl was real canny. She made Attaboy park me on a hassock just within tapping distance, and sat there holding her head in a way that made me soften with sympathy, knowing just how she felt. Many's the time.... Yes, sir, poor old Ak was nursing a real, ten-karat hangover. She waved a claw so feebly it didn't even stir those ropes of jewels hung all over her. "Casey Ritter," she tapped. "What did you do to me?" All to myself, inside my hard-shell suit, I began to laugh; but it was no laughing matter, because she was beginning to regain her strength. She pointed a claw at me, and it was quite a bit steadier than the wave had been. "You did something!" she accused, and very intelligently, too, for a body that had never before had a hangover. "What was it?" I didn't like the tone of that, and began tapping out a hasty denial. "Not intentionally, noble queen, believe me! I simply brought you that exquisite perfume as a gift from an admirer of yours whom I met on my way here. I had no idea how strong it was. I should have tested it first on your servant here." I pointed to Attaboy. "I can see that we need to thin it some, but it's wonderful, isn't it, now?" She didn't even flutter an antenna at this coyness. "Earthman," she tapped out sternly, "you want something. Earthmen always bring trouble, and they always want something! No Earthman brings presents to Akroida from simple friendship. Tell me what you're after, Casey Ritter!" I sighed. "O.K., noble queen. I just wanted to calm you down so I could talk to you. I didn't have any idea that perfume would affect you that way. I just thought you'd like it, and then you'd be pleasant and we could talk." She snorted like an old war horse, but that hurt her head. After a minute of clutching it, she groaned, and then tapped carefully, "I'm calm now. You can talk. What do you want?" "Fine," I tapped out heartily. "I want to make a trade with you." Her lack of enthusiasm would have chilled a wooden Indian. But I figured that the time had come to get on with it, regardless. She just wasn't going to stall, or let me, either. "Ah, yes, a trade!" was all she said, but she gave it a nasty twist. I plunge. "I want to swap your anti-gravity secret for a string of the most magnificent emeralds you ever dreamed of, Akroida. Why, they'd make that batch you're wearing look like little glass beads! You'll have to see them to--" She didn't let me finish. A sort of high-pitched cackle of amazement issued from her bony jaws; but then she floored me by changing the subject completely, I thought. That was just my little error. A man can sure miss the boat when dealing with these foreign races. She began to ask me questions about the Earth, and was she interested! She even forgot about her hangover. And she completely ignored the emeralds. You'd have thought I hadn't even mentioned the things. * * * * * This went on for about an hour, and then all of a sudden she leaned back on her paris-green cushions, inhaled a pinch of arsenic, and began to chuckle a sort of brassy chuckle that sent shivers down my back. The chuckles got bigger and bigger until she busted out into a full-size horse laugh that would have jangled the chandelier if there'd been one to jangle. Her head bounced back and forth on her skinny neck, and the Halcyon Diamond bounced around on her chest like a loose headlight. All her jewels began to bounce and jangle. Droves of servants swarmed around to peek, while Attaboy just floated there with his mouth wide open. I nudged him. "What's so funny?" I asked, but he only shook his head dumfounded. That awful laughing was sure giving me the creeping jeevies, and it wasn't until she finally tapered off in a series of snorts and giggles that I began to breathe again. I braced myself for what might come next. But talk about unpredictable females! Human or scorpion, they're all the same. She floored me again. "It's a deal, Casey Ritter!" She tapped out the words with relish. "Fair and open, straight across the board. Those emeralds for our anti-gravity plans and formulae." I was stunned. A statement like that after that laugh! And she hadn't even seen the emeralds. You couldn't tell old horse trader Ritter that there wasn't something phony. But she just snickered at my expression and waved to the servants who were still hovering around. It took a dozen of them to hoist her up. With me following on Attaboy, we flew down a serpentine hallway for half a mile until we came to a room even bigger than her audience chamber, only this one was filled with machinery suspended in the air just like the furniture was up above. It was big machinery, too, but it didn't seem to matter. Akroida waved a feeler at it all. "Just to show you that I'm not holding anything back," she tapped out. "Here it all is, and there on the wall are the plans and descriptions." Attaboy flew me over, and I stared at them. They were a real neat job, and the mathematics were the same old math we use on Earth, or I was even more of a sucker than I thought I was. I shook the old bean to clear it, but I still couldn't get a glimmer about the caper she was staging. But I could still hear that laugh.... Well, the rest is history, as the books say. With me still not believing a word of it, we made the trade, fair and open, as Akroida had said. She even let me stand by while her scorps copied the plans, and then I checked and rechecked a dozen times. Not a phony mark anywhere. When I handed over the emeralds, she cooed in rapture. A thing like that coo? Well, she did. Akroida didn't hardly know I was going. She just waved me, her lover-for-a-day, carelessly away and went on stroking those beauties, while the hopper-scorps hovered around in such crowds that Attaboy and I had to elbow our way out of there. As a parting gift, out at the edge of that hellish Red Spot, I reached out of the lock and handed Attaboy the little bottle with what was left of the perfume. "Here you are, pal," I tapped. "This'll promote you to Court Lover number one. Kiss the old girl for me." V Back on Earth I was still trancing around feeling the air with my fingers and pinching myself here and there just to make sure I had really got out of that inferno all in one piece, when they hauled me out to the airport to present me with my ship. They even made a ceremony of it and gave me a medal for distinguished service to Mankind. And who do you think presented the medal? I looked at the dapper little figure waltzing over all togged out in the S.S.C. uniform, and then I did a double take. It was no other than my old pal of the Iron College, perfume-manufacturer for hopper-scorps, Pard Hoskins. He came over and clapped me on the back, but I didn't feel a thing. I was paralyzed. So I'd been taken for a ride right from the start. So they'd outsmarted me all the way: out-fought and out-figured me, and even planted a stoolie on me and made me like it. I didn't hear a word they said, nor even notice when they pinned the medal on. When they got through with me, I just crawled into my beautiful new ship like it was an old tin can and headed out. I didn't even care right then if I landed back in Akroida's bony lap. I'd have stuck my head in her mandibles and told her, "Chew it up, Ak. It's just a cabbage, anyway." But a funny thing happened. Out there, mooning along all alone in the dark with not a soul in a million miles, I heard Akroida laughing. It was a horrible sound, a kind of metallic neighing and snorting, but pretty soon I began laughing, too. I didn't know what the joke was, but all of a sudden I knew I'd find out some day. It did me a lot of good. I braced up and went on to Venus, where I made some real good trades. I didn't try any more capers, though. I was all capered out. It wasn't until a year later, in a joint on Mars, that I ran into Pard Hoskins again. I gave him the old frost, but he only grinned sort of sad and touched me for some of that filthy Martian beer. He looked real seedy. "What's the matter?" I asked, as sarcastic as I could manage. "They sending you over the road again to nab another sucker?" He shook his head, and sighed into his beer. "I got fired, Casey," he confessed. "Over that there Killicut caper. Those plans--I might of known." He shook his head again like a tired old man. A shiver ran over me. "Here it comes," I thought. "What about those plans?" I asked. "Weren't they all O.K.?" He sighed again. "Nope. Oh, the plans was O.K. They was strictly bona fide. Only they won't work on Earth. I told 'em about that anti-grav in the first place. Then I almost caused an inter-world incident stealin' the Killicut Emeralds. And now the damn thing won't work on Earth!" He set to chewing his lip and staring into his beer. I took him by his scrawny shoulder and shook. "Why won't it work?" I yelled. "I knew there was something, the way she laughed! Why won't it work?" He stared dully at me. "Laugh, did she? Well, she sure had the last laugh. It won't work in our atmosphere; just on a chlorine or methane planet. It works like the poles of a battery. That Great Red Spot is just the negative pole. All those there plants change the atmosphere just enough to make it a strong negative field. Then all they have to do is counter-balance that with enough positive, and there they are. It works like anti-gravity, only it ain't. Only we ain't got an atmosphere we can work that way. Cripes! So she laughed!" His hoarse voice stopped and he stared bitterly at the wall. Then he cussed for two minutes without stopping. He took a big swig of that rotten beer. "I'll bet she's laughing herself fat, the old rip!" Well, I hope she is. In the dead of night sometimes I can hear her; and pretty soon I'm laughing, too.... 
30214	----	Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Stories October 1931. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. [Illustration: At this the titanic thing went wholly, colossally mad.] The Red Hell of Jupiter _A Complete Novelette_ By Paul Ernst * * * * * CHAPTER I _The Red Spot_ [Sidenote: What is the mystery centered in Jupiter's famous "Red Spot"? Two fighting Earthmen, caught by the "Pipe-men" like their vanished comrades, soon find out.] Commander Stone, grizzled chief of the Planetary Exploration Forces, acknowledged Captain Brand Bowen's salute and beckoned him to take a seat. Brand, youngest officer of the division to wear the triple-V for distinguished service, sat down and stared curiously at his superior. He hadn't the remotest idea why he had been recalled from leave: but that it was on a matter of some importance he was sure. He hunched his big shoulders and awaited orders. "Captain Bowen," said Stone. "I want you to go to Jupiter as soon as you can arrange to do so, fly low over the red area in the southern hemisphere, and come back here with some sort of report as to what's wrong with that infernal death spot." He tapped his radio stylus thoughtfully against the edge of his desk. "As you perhaps know, I detailed a ship to explore the red spot about a year ago. It never came back. I sent another ship, with two good men in it, to check up on the disappearance of the first. That ship, too, never came back. Almost with the second of its arrival at the edge of the red area all radio communication with it was cut off. It was never heard from again. Two weeks ago I sent Journeyman there. Now _he_ has been swallowed up in a mysterious silence." An exclamation burst from Brand's lips. Sub-Commander Journeyman! Senior officer under Stone, ablest man in the expeditionary forces, and Brand's oldest friend! Stone nodded comprehension of the stricken look on Brand's face. "I know how friendly you two were," he said soberly. "That's why I chose you to go and find out, if you can, what happened to him and the other two ships." Brand's chin sank to rest on the stiff high collar of his uniform. "Journeyman!" he mused. "Why, he was like an older brother to me. And now ... he's gone." * * * * * There was silence in Commander Stone's sanctum for a time. Then Brand raised his head. "Did you have any radio reports at all from any of the three ships concerning the nature of the red spot?" he inquired. "None that gave definite information," replied Stone. "From each of the three ships we received reports right up to the instant when the red area was approached. From each of the three came a vague description of the peculiarity of the ground ahead of them: it seems to glitter with a queer metallic sheen. Then, from each of the three, as they passed over the boundary--nothing! All radio communication ceased as abruptly as though they'd been stricken dead." He stared at Brand. "That's all I can tell you, little enough, God knows. Something ominous and strange is contained in that red spot: but what its nature may be, we cannot even guess. I want you to go there and find out." Brand's determined jaw jutted out, and his lips thinned to a purposeful line. He stood to attention. "I'll be leaving to-night, sir. Or sooner if you like. I could go this afternoon: in an hour--" "To-night is soon enough," said Stone with a smile. "Now, who do you want to accompany you?" Brand thought a moment. On so long a journey as a trip to Jupiter there was only room in a space ship--what with supplies and all--for one other man. It behooved him to pick his companion carefully. "I'd like Dex Harlow," he said at last. "He's been to Jupiter before, working with me in plotting the northern hemisphere. He's a good man." "He is," agreed Stone, nodding approval of Brand's choice. "I'll have him report to you at once." He rose and held out his hand. "I'm relying on you, Captain Bowen," he said. "I won't give any direct orders: use your own discretion. But I would advise you not to try to land in the red area. Simply fly low over it, and see what you can discern from the air. Good-by, and good luck." Brand saluted, and went out, to go to his own quarters and make the few preparations necessary for his sudden emergency flight. * * * * * The work of exploring the planets that swung with Earth around the sun was still a new branch of the service. Less than ten years ago, it had been, when Ansen devised his first crude atomic motor. At once, with the introduction of this tremendous new motive power, men had begun to build space ships and explore the sky. And, as so often happens with a new invention, the thing had grown rather beyond itself. Everywhere amateur space flyers launched forth into the heavens to try their new celestial wings. Everywhere young and old enthusiasts set Ansen motors into clumsily insulated shells and started for Mars or the moon or Venus. The resultant loss of life, as might have been foreseen, was appalling. Eager but inexperienced explorers edged over onto the wrong side of Mercury and were burned to cinders. They set forth in ships that were badly insulated, and froze in the absolute zero of space. They learned the atomic motor controls too hastily, ran out of supplies or lost their courses, and wandered far out into space--stiff corpses in coffins that were to be buried only in time's infinity. To stop the foolish waste of life, the Earth Government stepped in. It was decreed that no space ship might be owned or built privately. It was further decreed that those who felt an urge to explore must join the regular service and do so under efficient supervision. And there was created the Government bureau designated as the Planetary Exploration Control Board, which was headed by Commander Stone. * * * * * Under this Board the exploration of the planets was undertaken methodically and efficiently, with a minimum of lives sacrificed. Mercury was charted, tested for essential minerals, and found to be a valueless rock heap too near the sun to support life. Venus was visited and explored segment by segment; and friendly relations were established with the rather stupid but peaceable people found there. Mars was mapped. Here the explorers had lingered a long time: and all over this planet's surface were found remnants of a vast and intricate civilization--from the canals that laced its surface, to great cities with mighty buildings still standing. But of life there was none. The atmosphere was too rare to support it; and the theory was that it had constantly thinned through thousands of years till the last Martian had gasped and died in air too attenuated to support life even in creatures that must have grown greater and greater chested in eons of adaptation. Then Jupiter had been reached: and here the methodical planet by planet work promised to be checked for a long time to come. Jupiter, with its mighty surface area, was going to take some exploring! It would be years before it could be plotted even superficially. * * * * * Brand had been to Jupiter on four different trips; and, as he walked toward his quarters from Stone's office, he reviewed what he had learned on those trips. Jupiter, as he knew it, was a vast globe of vague horror and sharp contrasts. Distant from the sun as it was, it received little solar heat. But, with so great a mass, it had cooled off much more slowly than any of the other planets known, and had immense internal heat. This meant that the air--which closely approximated Earth's air in density--was cool a few hundred yards up from the surface of the planet, and dankly hot close to the ground. The result, as the cold air constantly sank into the warm, was a thick steamy blanket of fog that covered everything perpetually. Because of the recent cooling, life was not far advanced on Jupiter. Too short a time ago the sphere had been but a blazing mass. Tropical marshes prevailed, crisscrossed by mighty rivers at warmer than blood heat. Giant, hideous fernlike growths crowded one another in an everlasting jungle. And among the distorted trees, from the blanket of soft white fog that hid all from sight, could be heard constantly an ear-splitting chorus of screams and bellows and whistling snarls. It made the blood run cold just to listen--and to speculate on what gigantic but tiny-brained monsters made them. Now and then, when Brand had been flying dangerously low over the surface, a wind had risen strong enough to dispel the fog banks for an instant; and he had caught a flash of Jovian life. Just a flash, for example, of a monstrous lizard-like thing too great to support its own bulk: or a creature all neck and tail, with ridges of scale on its armored hide and a small serpentine head weaving back and forth among the jungle growths. * * * * * Occasionally he had landed--always staying close to the space ship, for Jupiter's gravity made movement a slow and laborious process, and he didn't want to be caught too far from security. At such times he might hear a crashing and splashing and see a reptilian head loom gigantically at him through the fog. Then he would discharge the deadly explosive gun which was Earth's latest weapon, and the creature would crash to the ground. The chorus of hissings and bellowings would increase as he hastened slowly and laboriously back to the ship, indicating that other unseen monsters of the steamy jungle had flocked to tear the dead giant to pieces and bolt it down. Oh, Jupiter was a nice planet! mused Brand. A sweet place--if one happened to be a two-hundred-foot snake or something! He had always thought the entire globe was in that new, raw, marshy state. But he had worked only in one comparatively small area of the northern hemisphere; had never been within thirty thousand miles of the red spot. What might lie in that ominous crimson patch, he could not even guess. However, he reflected, he was soon to find out, though he might never live to tell about it. Shrugging his shoulders, he turned into the fifty story building in which was his modest apartment. There he found, written by the automatic stylus on his radio pad, the message: "Be with you at seven o'clock. Best regards, and I hope you strangle. Dex Harlow." * * * * * Dex Harlow was a six-foot Senior Lieutenant who had been on many an out-of-the-way exploratory trip. Like Brand he was just under thirty and perpetually thirsting for the bizarre in life. He was a walking document of planetary activity. He was still baked a brick red from a trip to Mercury a year before: he had a scar on his forehead, the result of jumping forty feet one day on the moon when he'd meant to jump only twenty; he was minus a finger which had been irreparably frost-bitten on Mars; and he had a crumpled nose that was the outcome of a brush with a ten-foot bandit on Venus who'd tried to kill him for his explosive gun and supply of glass, dyite-containing cartridges. He clutched Brand's fingers in a bone-mangling grip, and threw his hat into a far corner. "You're a fine friend!" he growled cheerfully. "Here I'm having a first rate time for myself, swimming and planing along the Riviera, with two more weeks leave ahead of me--and I get a call from the Old Man to report to you. What excuse have you for your crime?" "A junket to Jupiter," said Brand. "Would you call that a good excuse?" "Jupiter!" exclaimed Dex. "Wouldn't you know it? Of course you'd have to pick a spot four hundred million miles away from all that grand swimming I was having!" "Would you like to go back on leave, and have me choose someone else?" inquired Brand solemnly. "Well, no," said Dex hastily. "Now that I'm here, I suppose I might as well go through with it." Brand laughed. "Try and get you out of it! I know your attitude toward a real jaunt. And it's a real jaunt we've got ahead of us, too, old boy. We're going to the red spot. Immediately." * * * * * Dex's sandy eyebrows shot up. "The red spot! That's where Coblenz and Heiroy were lost!" "And Journeyman," added Brand. "He's the latest victim of whatever's in the hell-hole." Dex whistled. "Journeyman too! Well, all I've got to say is that whatever's there must be strong medicine. Journeyman was a damn fine man, and as brave as they come. Have you any idea what it's all about?" "Not an idea. Nobody has. We're to go and find out--if we can. Are you all ready?" "All ready," said Dex. "So am I. We'll start at eleven o'clock in one of the Old Man's best cruisers. Meanwhile, we might as well go and hunt up a dinner somewhere, to fortify us against the synthetic pork chops and bread we'll be swallowing for the next fortnight." They went out; and at ten minutes of eleven reported at the great space ship hangars north of New York, with their luggage, a conspicuous item of which was a chess board to help while away the long, long days of spacial travel. Brand then paused a little while for a final check-up on directions. They clambered into the tiny control room and shut the hermetically sealed trap-door. Brand threw the control switch and precisely at eleven o'clock the conical shell of metal shot heavenward, gathering such speed that it was soon invisible to human eyes. He set their course toward the blazing speck that was Jupiter, four hundred million miles away; and then reported their start by radio to Commander Stone's night operator. The investigatory expedition to the ominous red spot of the giant of the solar system was on. CHAPTER II _The Pipe-like Men_ Brand began to slacken speed on the morning of the thirteenth day (morning, of course, being a technical term: there are no horizons in space for the sun to rise over). Jupiter was still an immense distance off; but it took a great while to slow the momentum of the space ship, which, in the frictionless emptiness of space, had been traveling faster and faster for nearly three hundred hours. Behind them was the distant ball of sun, so far off that it looked no larger than a red-hot penny. Before them was the gigantic disk of Jupiter, given a white tinge by the perpetual fog blankets, its outlines softened by its thick layer of atmosphere and cloud banks. Two of its nine satellites were in sight at the moment, with a third edging over the western rim. "Makes you think you're drunk and seeing triple, doesn't it?" commented Dex, who was staring out the thick glass panel beside Brand. "Nine moons! Almost enough for one planet!" Brand nodded abstractly, and concentrated on the control board. Rapidly the ship rocketed down toward the surface. The disk became a whirling, gigantic plate; and then an endless plain, with cloud formations beginning to take on definite outline. "About to enter Jupiter's atmosphere." Brand spoke into the radio transmitter. Over the invisible thread of radio connection between the space ship and Earth, four hundred million miles behind, flashed the message. "All right. For God's sake, be careful," came the answer, minutes later. "Say something at least every half hour, to let us know communication is unbroken. We will sound at ten second intervals." The sounding began: _peep_, a shrill little piping noise like the fiddle of a cricket. Ten seconds later it came again: _peep_. Thereafter, intermittently, it keened through the control room--a homely, comforting sound to let them know that there was a distant thread between them and Earth. * * * * * Lower the shell rocketed. The endless plain slowly ceased its rushing underneath them as they entered the planet's atmosphere and began to be pulled around with it in its revolution. Far to the west a faint red glow illumined the sky. The two men looked at each other, grimly, soberly. "We're here," said Dex, flexing the muscles of his powerful arms. "We are," said Brand, patting the gun in his holster. The rapid dusk of the giant planet began to close in on them. The thin sunlight darkened; and with its lowering, the red spot of Jupiter glared more luridly ahead of them. Silently the two men gazed at it, and wondered what it held. They shot the space ship toward it, and halted a few hundred miles away. Watery white light from the satellites, "that jitter around in the sky like a bunch of damned waterbugs," as Dex put it, was now the sole illumination. They hung motionless in their space shell, to wait through the five-hour Jovian night for the succeeding five hours of daylight to illumine a slow cruise over the red area that, in less than a year, had swallowed up three of Earth's space ships. And ever as they waited, dozing a little, speculating as to the nature of the danger they faced, the peep, peep of the radio shrilled in their ears to tell them that there was still a connection--though a very tenuous one--with their mother planet. * * * * * "Red spot ten miles away," said Brand in the transmitter. "We're approaching it slowly." The tiny sun had leaped up over Jupiter's horizon; and with its appearance they had sent the ship planing toward their mysterious destination. Beneath them the fog banks were thinning, and ahead of them were no clouds. For some reason there was a clarity unusual to Jupiter's atmosphere in the air above the red section. "Red spot one mile ahead, altitude forty thousand feet," reported Brand. He and Dex peered intently through the port glass panel. Ahead and far below, their eyes caught an odd metallic sheen. It was as though the ground there were carpeted with polished steel that reflected red firelight. Tense, filled with an excitement that set their pulses pounding wildly, they angled slowly down, nearer to the edge of the vast crimson area, closer to the ground. The radio keened its monotonous signal. Brand crawled to the transmitter, laboriously, for his body tipped the scales here at nearly four hundred pounds. "We can see the metallic glitter that Journeyman spoke of," he said. "No sign of life of any kind, though. The red glow seems to flicker a little." Closer the ship floated. Closer. To right and left of them for vast distances stretched the red area. Ahead of them for hundreds of miles they knew it extended. "We're right on it now," called Brand. "Right on it--we're going over the edge--we're--" Next instant he was sprawling on the floor, with Dex rolling helplessly on top of him, while the space ship bounced up twenty thousand feet as though propelled by a giant sling. * * * * * The peep, peep of the radio signalling stopped. The space ship rolled helplessly for a moment, then resumed an even keel. Brand and Dex gazed at each other. "What the hell?" said Dex. He started to get to his feet, put all his strength into the task of moving his Jupiter-weighted body, and crashed against the top of the control room. "Say!" he sputtered, rubbing his head. "Say, what _is_ this?" Brand, profiting by his mistake, rose more cautiously, shut off the atomic motor, and approached a glass panel again. "God knows what it is," he said with a shrug. "Somehow, with our passing into the red area, the pull of gravity has been reduced by about ten, that's all." "Oh, so that's all, is it? Well, what's happened to old Jupe's gravity?" Again Brand shrugged. "I haven't any idea. Your guess is as good as mine." He peered down through the panel, and stiffened in surprise. "Dex!" he cried. "We're moving! And the motor is shut off!" "We're drawing down closer to the ground, too," announced Dex, pointing to their altimeter. "Our altitude has been reduced five thousand feet in the last two minutes." Quickly Brand turned on the motor in reverse. The space ship, as the rushing, reddish ground beneath indicated, continued to glide forward as though pulled by an invisible rope. He turned on full power. The ship's progress was checked a little. A very little! And the metallic red surface under them grew nearer as they steadily lost altitude. "Something seems to have got us by the nose," said Dex. "We're on our way to the center of the red spot, I guess--to find whatever it was that Journeyman found. And the radio communication his been broken somehow...." Wordlessly, they stared out the panel, while the shell, quivering with the strain of the atomic motor's fight against whatever unseen force it was that relentlessly drew them forward, bore them swiftly toward the heart of the vast crimson area. * * * * * "Look!" cried Brand. For over an hour the ship had been propelled swiftly, irresistibly toward the center of the red spot. It had been up about forty thousand feet. Now, with a jerk that sent both men reeling, it had been drawn down to within fifteen thousand feet of the surface; and the sight that was now becoming more and more visible was incredible. Beneath was a vast, orderly checkerboard. Every alternate square was covered by what seemed a jointless metal plate. The open squares, plainly land under cultivation, were surrounded by gleaming fences that hooked each metal square with every other one of its kind as batteries are wired in series. Over these open squares progressed tiny, two legged figures, for the most part following gigantic shapeless animals like figures out of a dream. Ahead suddenly appeared the spires and towers of an enormous city! Metropolis and cultivated land! It was as unbelievable, on that raw new planet, as such a sight would have been could a traveler in time have observed it in the midst of a dim Pleistocene panorama of young Earth. It was instantly apparent that the city was their destination. Rapidly the little ship was rushed toward it; and, realizing at last the futility of its laboring, Brand cut off the atomic motor and let the shell drift. Over a group of squat square buildings their ship passed, decreasing speed and drifting lower with every moment. The lofty structures that were the nucleus of the strange city loomed closer. Now they were soaring slowly down a wide thoroughfare; and now, at last, they hovered above a great open square that was thronged with figures. Lower they dropped. Lower. And then they settled with a slight jar on a surface made of reddish metal; and the figures rushed to surround them. * * * * * Looking out the glass panel at these figures, both Brand and Dex exclaimed aloud and covered their eyes for a moment to shut out the hideous sight of them. Now they examined them closely. Manlike they were: and yet like no human being conceivable to an Earth mind. They were tremendously tall--twelve feet at least--but as thin as so many animated poles. Their two legs were scarce four inches through, taper-less, boneless, like lengths of pipe; and like two flexible pipes they were joined to a slightly larger pipe of a torso that could not have been more than a foot in diameter. There were four arms, a pair on each side of the cylindrical body, that weaved feebly about like lengths of rubber hose. Set directly on the pipe-like body, as a pumpkin might be balanced on a pole, was a perfectly round cranium in which were glassy, staring eyes, with dull pupils like those of a sick dog. The nose was but a tab of flesh. The mouth was a minute, circular thing, soft and flabby looking, which opened and shut regularly with the creature's breathing. It resembled the snout-like mouth of a fish, of the sucker variety; and fish-like, too, was the smooth and slimy skin that covered the beanpole body. * * * * * Hundreds of the repulsive things, there were. And all of them shoved and crowded, as a disorderly mob on Earth might do, to get close to the Earthmen's ship. Their big dull eyes peered in through the glass panels, and their hands--mere round blobs of gristle in the palms of which were set single sucker disks--pattered against the metal hull of the shell. "God!" said Brand with a shudder. "Fancy these things feeling over your body...." "They're hostile, whatever they are," said Dex. "Look out: that one's pointing something at you!" One of the slender, tottering creatures had raised an arm and leveled at Brand something that looked rather like an elongated, old-fashioned flashlight. Brand involuntarily ducked. The clear glass panel between them and the mob outside gave him a queasy feeling of being exposed to whatever missile might lurk in the thing's tube. "What do we do now?" demanded Dex with a shaky laugh. "You're chief of this expedition. I'm waiting for orders." "We wait right here," replied Brand. "We're safe in the shell till we're starved out. At least they can't get in to attack us." But it developed that, while the slimy looking things might not be able to get in, they had ways of reaching the Earthmen just the same! * * * * * The creature with the gun-like tube extended it somewhat further toward Brand. Brand felt a sharp, unpleasant tingle shoot through his body, as though he had received an electric shock. He winced, and cried out at the sudden pain of it. "What's the matter--" Dex began. But hardly had the words left his mouth when he, too, felt the shock. A couple of good, hearty Earth oaths exploded from his lips. The repulsive creature outside made an authoritative gesture. He seemed to be beckoning to them, his huge dull eyes glaring threateningly at the same moment. "Our beanpole friend is suggesting that we get out of the shell and stay awhile," said Dex with grim humor. "They seem anxious to entertain us--_ouch!_" As the two men made no move to obey the beckoning gesture, the creature had raised the tube again; and again the sharp, unpleasant shock shot through them. "What the devil are we going to do?" exclaimed Brand. "If we go out in that mob of nightmare things--it's going to be messy. As long as we stay in the shell we have some measure of protection." "Not much protection when they can sting us through metal and glass at will," growled Dex. "Do you suppose they can turn the juice on harder? Or is that bee-sting their best effort?" As though in direct answer to his words, the blob-like face of the being who seemed in authority convulsed with anger and he raised the tube again. This time the shock that came from it was sufficient to throw the two men to the floor. "Well, we can't stay in the ship, that's certain," said Brand. "I guess there's only one thing to do." Dex nodded. "Climb out of here and take as many of these skinny horrors with us into hell as we can," he agreed. Once more the shock stung them, as a reminder not to keep their captors waiting. With their shoulders bunched for abrupt action, and their guns in hand, the two men walked to the trap-door of the ship. They threw the heavy bolts, drew a deep breath--and flung open the door to charge unexpectedly toward the thickest mass of creatures that surrounded the ship! * * * * * In a measure their charge was successful. Its very suddenness caught some of the tall monstrosities off guard. Half a dozen of them stopped the fragile glass bullets to writhe in horrible death on the red metal paving of the square. But that didn't last long. In less than a minute, thin, clammy arms were winding around the Earthmen's wrists, and their guns were wrenched from them. And then started a hand-to-hand encounter that was all the more hideous for being so unlike any fighting that might have occurred on Earth. With a furious growl Dex charged the nearest creature, whose huge round head swayed on its stalk of a body fully six feet above his own head. He gathered the long thin legs in a football grip, and sent the thing crashing full length on its back. The great head thumped resoundingly against the metal paving, and the creature lay motionless. For an instant Dex could only stare at the thing. It had been so easy, like overcoming a child. But even as that thought crossed his mind, two of the tall thin figures closed in behind him. Four pairs of arms wound around him, feebly but tenaciously, like wet seaweed. They began to constrict and wind tighter around him. He tore at them, dislodged all but two. His sturdy Earth leg went back to sweep the stalk-like legs of his attackers from under them. One of the things went down, to twist weakly in a laborious attempt to rise again. But the other, by sheer force of height and reach, began to bear Dex down. Savagely he laced out with his fists, battering the pulpy face that was pressing down close to his. The big eyes blinked shut, but the four hose-like arms did not relax their clasp. Dex's hands sought fiercely for the thing's throat. But it had no throat: the head, set directly on the thin shoulders, defied all throttling attempts. * * * * * Then, just as Dex was feeling that the end had come, he felt the creature wrench from him, and saw it slide in a tangle of arms and legs over the smooth metal pavement. He got shakily to his feet, to see Brand standing over him and flailing out with his fists at an ever tightening circle of towering figures. "Thanks," panted Dex. And he began again, tripping the twelve-foot things in order to get them down within reach, battering at the great pulpy heads, fighting blindly in that expressed craving to take as many of the creatures into hell with him as he could manage. Beside him fought Brand, steadily, coolly, grim of jaw and unblinking of eye. Already the struggle had gone on far longer than they had dreamed it might. For some reason the grotesque creatures delayed killing them. That they could do so any time they pleased, was certain: if the monsters could reach them with their shock-tubes through the double insulated hull of the space ship, they could certainly kill them out in the open. Yet they made no move to do so. The deadly tubes were not used. The screeching gargoyles, instead, devoted all their efforts to merely hurling their attenuated bodies on the two men as though they wished to capture them alive. Finally, however, the nature of the battle changed. The tallest of the attackers opened his tiny mouth and piped a signal. The ring of weaving tall bodies surrounding the two opened and became a U. The creatures in the curve of the U raised their shock-tubes and, with none of their own kind behind the victims to share in its discharge, released whatever power it was that lurked in them. The shock was terrific. Without the glass and metal of the ship to protect them, out in the open and defenceless, Brand and Dex got some indication of its real power. Writhing and twitching, feeling as though pierced by millions of red hot needles, they went down. A swarm of pipe-like bodies smothered them, and the fight was over. CHAPTER III _The Coming of Greca_ The numbing shock from the tubes left the Earthmen's bodies almost paralyzed for a time; but their brains were unfogged enough for them to observe only too clearly all that went on from the point of their capture. They were bound hand and foot. At a piping cry from the leader, several of the gangling figures picked them up in reedy arms and began to walk across the square, away from the ship. Brand noticed that his bearers' arms trembled with his weight: and sensed the flabbiness of the substance that took the place in them of good solid muscle. Physically these things were soft and ineffectual indeed. They had only the ominous tubes with which to fight. The eery procession, with the bound Earthmen carried in the lead, wound toward a great building fringing the square. In through the high arched entrance of this building they went, and up a sloping incline to its tower-top. Here, in a huge bare room, the two were unceremoniously dumped to the floor. While three of the things stood guard with the mysterious tubes, another unbound them. A whole shower of high pitched, piping syllables was hurled at them, speech which sounded threatening and contemptuous but was otherwise, of course, entirely unintelligible, and then the creatures withdrew. The heavy metal door was slammed shut, and they were alone. Brand drew a long breath, and began to feel himself all over for broken bones. He found none; he was still nerve-wracked from that last terrific shock, but otherwise whole and well. "Are you hurt, Dex?" he asked solicitously. "I guess not," replied Dex, getting uncertainly to his feet. "And I'm wondering why. It seems to me the brutes were uncommonly considerate of us--and I'm betting the reason is one we won't like!" Brand shrugged. "I guess we'll find out their intentions soon enough. Let's see what our surroundings look like." They walked to the nearest window-aperture, and gazed out on a startling and marvelous scene. * * * * * Beneath their high tower window, extending as far as the eye could reach, lay the city, lit by the reddish glare of the peculiar metal with which its streets were paved. For the most part the metropolis consisted of perfectly square buildings pierced by many windows to indicate that each housed a large number of inmates. But here and there grotesque turrets lanced the sky, and symbolic domes arched above the surrounding flat metal roofs. One building in particular they noticed. This was an enormous structure in the shape of a half-globe that reared its spherical height less than an eighth of a mile from the building they were in. It was situated off to their right at the foot of a vast, high-walled enclosure whose near end seemed to be formed by the right wall of their prison. They could only see it by leaning far out of the window; and it would not have come to their attention at all had they not heard it first--or, rather, heard the sound of something within it: for from it came a curious whining hum that never varied in intensity, something like the hum of a gigantic dynamo, only greater and of a more penetrating pitch. "Sounds as though it might be some sort of central power station," said Brand. "But what could it supply power for?" "Give it up," said Dex. "For their damned shock-tubes, perhaps, among other things--" He broke off abruptly as a sound of sliding bolts came from the doorway. The two men whirled around to face the door, their fists doubling instinctively against whatever new danger might threaten them. * * * * * The door was opened and two of their ugly, towering enemies came in, their tubes held conspicuously before them. Behind came another figure; and at sight of this one, so plainly not of the race of Jupiter, the Earthmen gasped with wonder. They saw a girl who might have come from Earth, save that she was taller than most Earth women--of a regal height that reached only an inch or two below Brand's own six foot one. She was beautifully formed, and had wavy dark hair and clear light blue eyes. A sort of sandal covered each small bare foot; and a gauzy tunic, reaching from above the knee to the shoulder, only half shielded her lovely figure. She was bearing a metal container in which was a mess of stuff evidently intended as food. The guards halted and stepped aside to let her pass into the room. Then they backed out, constantly keeping Dex and Brand covered with the tubes, and closed and barred the door. The girl smiled graciously at the admiration in the eyes of both the men--a message needing no inter-planetary interpretation. She advanced, and held the metal container toward them. "Eat," she said softly. "It is good food, and life giving." * * * * * For an instant Brand was dumbfounded. For here was language he could understand--which was incredible on this far-flung globe. Then he suddenly comprehended why her sentences were so intelligible. She was versed in mental telepathy. And versed to a high degree! He'd had some experience with telepathy on Venus; but theirs was a crude thought-speech compared to the fluency possessed by the beautiful girl before him. "Who are you?" he asked wonderingly. "I am Greca"--it was very hard to grasp names or abstract terms--"of the fourth satellite." "Then you are not of these monsters of Jupiter?" "Oh, no! I am their captive, as are all my people. We are but slaves of the tall ones." Brand glanced at Dex. "Here's a chance to get some information, perhaps," he murmured. Dex nodded; but meanwhile the girl had caught his thought. She smiled--a tragic, wistful smile. "I shall be happy to tell you anything in my power to tell," she informed him. "But you must be quick. I can only remain with you a little while." She sat down on the floor with them--the few bench-like things obviously used by the tall creatures as chairs were too high for them--and with the informality of adversity the three captives began to talk. Swiftly Brand got a little knowledge of Greca's position on Jupiter, and of the racial history that led up to it. * * * * * Four of the nine satellites of Jupiter were now the home of living beings. But two only, at the dawn of history as Greca knew it, had been originally inhabited. These were the fourth and the second. On the fourth there dwelt a race, "like me," as Greca put it--a kindly, gentle people content to live and let live. On the second had been a race of immensely tall, but attenuated and physically feeble things with great heads and huge dull eyes and characters distinguished mainly for cold-blooded savagery. The inhabitants of the fourth satellite had remained in ignorance of the monsters on the second till one day "many, many ages ago," a fleet of clumsy ships appeared on the fourth satellite. From the ships had poured thousands of pipe-like creatures, armed with horrible rods of metal that killed instantly and without a sound. The things, it seemed, had crowded over the limits of their own globe, and had been forced to find more territory. They had made captive the entire population of the satellite. Then--for like all dangerous vermin they multiplied rapidly--they had overflowed to the first and fifth satellites--the others were uninhabitable--and finally to the dangerous surface of Jupiter itself. Everywhere they had gone, they had taken droves of Greca's people to be their slaves, "and the source of their food," added Greca, with a shudder; a statement that was at the moment unintelligible to the two men. * * * * * Brand stared sympathetically at her. "They treat them very badly?" he asked gently. "Terribly! Terribly!" said Greca, shuddering again. "But you seem quite privileged," he could not help saying. She shook her dainty head pathetically. "I am of high rank among my people. I am a priestess of our religion, which is the religion of The Great White One who rules all the sky everywhere. The Rogans" (it was the best translation Brand could make of her mental term for the slimy tall things that held them captive) "--the Rogans hold my fate over the heads of my race. Should they rebel, I would be thrown to the monster in the pen. Of course the Rogans could crush any revolt with their terrible tubes, but they do not want to kill their slaves if they can help it. They find it more effective to hold their priestesses in hostage." Brand turned from personal history to more vital subjects. "Why," he asked Greca, "are the shining red squares of metal laid everywhere over this empire of the Rogans?" "To make things light," was the reply. "When the Rogans first came to this mighty sphere, they could hardly move. Things are so heavy here, somehow. So their first thought was to drive my enslaved people to the casting and laying of the metal squares and the metal beams that connect them, in order to make things weigh less." "But how do the plates function?" * * * * * Greca did not know this, save vaguely. She tried to express her little knowledge of the scientific achievements of the savage Rogans. After some moments Brand turned to Dex and said: "As near as I can get it, the Rogans, by this peculiar red metal alloy, manage to trap and divert the permanent lines of force, the magnetic field, of Jupiter itself. So the whole red spot is highly magnetized, which somehow upsets natural gravitational attraction. I suppose it is responsible for the discoloration of the ground, too." He turned to question the girl further about this, but she had got nervously to her feet already. "I'll be taken away soon," she said. "I was brought in here only to urge you to eat the food. I must be interpreter, since the Rogans speak not with the mind, and I know their hateful tongue." "Why are they so anxious for us to eat?" demanded Dex with an uneasy frown. "So you will be strong, and endure for a long time the--the ordeal they have in store for you," faltered the girl at last. "They intend to force from you the secret of the power that drove your ship here, so they too may have command of space." "But I don't understand," frowned Brand. "They must already have a means of space navigation. They came here to Jupiter from the satellites." "Their vessels are crude, clumsy things. The journey from the nearest satellite is the limit of their flying range. They have nothing like your wonderful little ships, and they want to know how to build and power them." * * * * * She gazed sorrowfully at them and went on: "You see, yours is the fourth space ship to visit their kingdom; and that makes them fearful because it shows they are vulnerable to invasion. They want to stop that by invading your planet first. Besides their fear, there is their greed. Their looking-tubes reveal that yours is a fruitful and lovely sphere, and they are insatiable in their lust for new territories. Thus they plan to go to your planet as soon as they are able, and kill or enslave all the people there as they have killed and enslaved my race." "They'll have a job on their hands trying to do that!" declared Dex stoutly. But Brand paled. "They can do it!" he snapped. "Look at those death-tubes of theirs. We have no arms to compete with that." He turned to Greca. "So the Rogans plan to force the secret of our motors from us by torture?" She nodded, and caught his hand in hers. "Yes. They will do with you as they did with the six who came before you--and who died before surrendering the secret." "So! We know now what happened to Journeyman and the others!" burst out Dex. "I'll see 'em in hell before I'll talk!" "And me," nodded Brand. "But that doesn't cure the situation. As long as ships disappear in this red inferno, so long will the Old Man keep sending others to find out what's wrong. The Rogans will capture them as easily as they captured us. And eventually someone will happen along who'll weaken under torture. Then--" * * * * * He stopped. A dread vision filled his mind of Earth depopulated by the feebly ferocious Rogans, of rank on rank of Earth's vast armies falling in stricken rows at the shock of the Rogans' tubes. Greca caught the vision. She nodded. "Yes, that is what would happen if they found ways of reaching your globe." "But, God, Brand, we can't allow that!" cried Dex. "We've got to find a way to spike the guns of these walking gas-pipes, somehow!" Brand sighed heavily. "We are two against hundreds of thousands. We are bare-handed, and the Rogans have those damned tubes. Anyway, we are on the verge of death at this very moment. What under heaven can we do to spike their guns?" He was silent a moment: and in the silence the steady hum from the domed building outside came to his ears. "What's in that big, round topped building, Greca?" he asked quietly. "I do not know, exactly," replied the girl. "There is some sort of machinery in it, and to it go connecting beams from all the square metal plates everywhere. That is all I know." Brand started to question her further, but her time was up. The two guards poked their loathsome pumpkin heads in the doorway and contemptuously beckoned her out. She answered resignedly, in the piping Rogan tongue, and went with them. But she turned to wave shyly, commiseratingly at the two men; and the expression in her clear blue eyes as they rested on Brand made his heart contract and then leap on with a mighty bound. "We have in ally in her," murmured Brand. "Though God only knows if that will mean anything to us...." CHAPTER IV _In the Tower_ "What I can't figure out," said Dex, striding up and down the big bare room, "is why we're needed to tell them about the atomic motor. They've got our ship, and three others besides. I should think they could learn about the motor just by taking it apart and studying it." Brand grinned mirthlessly, recalling the three years of intensive study it had taken him to learn the refinements of atomic motive power. "If you'd ever qualified as a space navigator, Dex, you'd know better. The Rogans are an advanced race; their control of polar magnetism and the marvelously high-powered telescopes Greca mentions prove that; but I doubt if they could ever analyze that atomic motor with no hint as to how it works." Silence descended on them again, in which each was lost in his own thoughts. How many hours had passed, the Earthmen did not know. They had spent the time in fruitless planning to escape from their tower room and go back to the ship again. Though how they could get away in the ship when the Rogans seemed able to propel it where-ever they wished against the utmost power of their motor, they did not attempt to consider. One of Jupiter's short nights had passed, however--a night weirdly made as light as day by red glares from the plates, which seemed to store up sunlight, among their other functions--and the tiny sun had risen to slant into their window at a sharp angle. Suddenly they heard the familiar drawing of the great bolts outside their door. It was opened, and a dozen or more of the Rogans came in, with Greca cowering piteously in their midst and attempting to communicate her distress to Brand. * * * * * At the head of the little band of Rogans was one the prisoners had not seen before. He was of great height, fully two feet taller than the others; and he carried himself with an air that proclaimed his importance. The tall one turned to Greca and addressed a few high-pitched, squeaky words to her. She shook her head; whereupon, at a hissed command, two of the Rogans caught her by the wrists and dragged her forward. "They have come to question you," Greca lamented to Brand. "And they want to do it through me. But I will not! I will not!" Brand smiled at her though his lips were pale. "You are powerless to struggle," he said. "Do as they ask. You cannot help us by refusing, and, in any case, I can promise that they won't learn anything from us." The tall Rogan teetered up to the prisoners on his gangling legs, and stared icily at them. Crouched beside him, her lovely body all one mute appeal to the Earthmen to forgive her for the part she was forced to play, was Greca. At length the Rogan leader spoke. He addressed his sibilant words to Greca, though his stony eyes were kept intently on the Earthmen. "He says," exclaimed Greca telepathically, "to inform you first that he is head of all the Rogan race on this globe, and that all on this globe must do as he commands." Brand nodded to show he understood the message. "He says he is going to ask you a few questions, and that you are to answer truthfully if you value your lives:" "First, he wants to know what the people of your world are like. Are they all the same as you?" * * * * * Dex started to reply to that; but Brand flung him a warning look. "Tell him we are the least of the Earth people," he answered steadily. "Tell him we are of an inferior race. Most of those on Earth are giants five times as large as we are, and many times more powerful." Greca relayed the message in the whistling, piping Rogan tongue. The tall one stared, then hissed another sentence to the beautiful interpreter. "He wants to know," said Greca, "if there are cities on your globe as large and complete as this one." "There are cities on Earth that make this look like a--a--" Brand cast about for understandable similes--"like a collection of animal burrows." "He says to describe your planet's war weapons," was the next interpretation. And here Brand let himself go. With flights of fancy he hadn't known he was capable of, he described great airships, steered automatically and bristling with guns that discharged explosives powerful enough to kill everything within a range of a thousand miles. He told of billions of thirty-foot giants sheathed in an alloy that would make them invulnerable to any feeble rays the Rogans might have developed. He touched on the certain wholesale death that must overtake any hostile force that tried to invade the planet. "The Rogan shock-tubes are toys compared with the ray-weapons of Earth," he concluded. "We have arms that can nullify the effects of yours and kill at the same instant. We have--" But here the Rogan leader turned impatiently away. Greca had been translating sentence by sentence. Now the tall one barked out a few syllables in a squeaky voice. "He says he knows you are lying," sighed Greca. "For if you on Earth have tubes more effective than theirs why weren't you equipped with them on your expedition here to the red kingdom?" Brand bit his lips. "Check," he muttered. "The brute has a brain in that ugly head." * * * * * The Rogan leader spoke for a long time then; and at each singsong word, Greca quivered as though lashed by a whip. At length she turned to Brand. "He has been telling what his hordes can do, answering your boasts with boasts of his own. His words are awful! I won't tell you all he said. I will only say that he is convinced his shock-tubes are superior to any Earth arms, and that he states he will now illustrate their power to you to quell your insolence. I don't know what he means by that...." But she and the Earthmen were soon to find out. The Rogan leader stepped to the window and arrogantly beckoned Brand and Dex to join him there. They did; and the leader gazed out and down as though searching for something. He pointed. The two Earthmen followed his leveled arm with their eyes and saw, a hundred yards or so away, a bent and dreary figure trudging down the metal paving of the street. It was a figure like those to be seen on Earth, which placed it as belonging to Greca's race. The tall leader drew forth one of the shock-tubes. Seen near at hand, it was observed to be bafflingly simple in appearance. It seemed devoid of all mechanism--simply a tube of reddish metal with a sort of handle formed of a coil of heavy wire. The Rogan pointed the tube at the distant figure. Greca screamed, and screamed again. Coincident with her cry, as though the sound of it had felled him, the distant slave dropped to the pavement. * * * * * That was all. The tube had merely been pointed: as far as Brand could see, the Rogan's "hand" had not moved on the barrel of the tube, nor even constricted about the coil of wire that formed its handle. Yet that distant figure had dropped. Furthermore, fumes of greasy black smoke now began to arise from the huddled body; and in less than thirty seconds there was left no trace of it on the gleaming metal pavement. "So that's what those things are like at full power!" breathed Dex. "My God!" The Rogan leader spoke a few words. Greca, huddled despairingly on the floor, crushed by this brutal annihilation of one of her country-men before her very eyes, did not translate. But translation was unnecessary. The Rogan's icy, triumphant eyes, the very posture of his grotesque body, spoke for him. "That," he was certainly saying, "is what will happen to any on your helpless planet who dare oppose the Rogan will!" He whipped out a command to the terror-stricken girl. She rose from her crouching position on the floor; and at length formulated the Rogan's last order: "You will explain the working of the engine that drove your space ship here." Dex laughed. It was a short bark of sound, totally devoid of humor, but very full of defiance. Brand thrust his hands into the pockets of his tunic, spread his legs apart, and began to whistle. * * * * * A quiver that might have been of anger touched the Rogan leader's repulsive little mouth. He glared balefully at the uncowed Earthmen and spoke again, evidently repeating his command. The two turned their backs to him to indicate their refusal to obey. At that, the tall leader pointed to Dex. In an instant three of the guards had wound their double pairs of arms around his struggling body. Brand sprang to help him, but a touch of the mysterious discharge from the leader's tube sent him writhing to the floor. "It's no use, Brand," said Dex steadily. He too had stopped struggling, and now stood quietly in the slimy coils of his captors' arms. "I might as well go along with them and get it over with. I probably won't see you again. Good luck!" He was borne out of the room. The Rogan leader turned to Brand and spoke. "He says that if your comrade does not tell him what he wants to know, your turn will come next," sobbed Greca. "Oh! Why does not The Great White One strike these monsters to the dust!" She ran to Brand and pressed her satiny cheek to his. Then she was dragged roughly away. The great door clanged shut. The heavy outer fastenings clicked into place. Dex had gone to experience whatever it was that Journeyman and the rest had experienced in this red hell. And Brand was left behind to reflect on what dread torments this might comprise; and to pray desperately that no matter what might be done to his shrinking body he would be strong enough to refuse to betray his planet. CHAPTER V _The Torture Chamber_ Swiftly Dex was carried down the long ramp to the ground floor, the arms of his captors gripping him with painful tightness. Heading the procession was the immensely tall, gangling Rogan leader, clutching Greca by the wrist and dragging her indifferently along to be his mouthpiece. They did not stop at the street level; they continued on down another ramp, around a bend, descending an even steeper incline toward the bowels of Jupiter. Their descent ended at last before a huge metal barrier which, at a signal from the leader, drew smoothly up into the ceiling to disclose a gigantic, red-lit chamber underlying the foundations of the building. In fear and awe, Dex gazed around that huge room. It resembled in part a nightmare rearrangement of such a laboratory as might be found on Earth; and in part a torture chamber such as the most ferocious of savages might have devised had they been scientifically equipped to add contrivances of supercivilization to the furthering of their primitive lust for cruelty. There were great benches--head-high to the Earthman--to accommodate the height of the Rogan workmen. There were numberless metal instruments, and glass coils, and enormous retorts; and in one corner an orange colored flame burnt steadily on a naked metal plate, seeming to have no fuel or other source of being. There was a long rack of cruelly pointed and twisted instruments. Under this was a row of long, delicate pincers, with coils on the handles to indicate that they might be heated to fiendish precision of temperatures. There were gleaming metal racks with calibrated slide-rods and spring dials to denote just what pull was being exerted on whatever unhappy creature might be stretched taut on them. There were tiny cones of metal whose warped, baked appearance testified that they were little portable furnaces that could be placed on any desired portion of the anatomy, to slowly bake the selected disk of flesh beneath them. * * * * * Dex shuddered; and a low moan came from Greca, whose clear blue eyes had rested on the contents of this vast room before in her capacity as hostage and interpreter for the inhuman Rogans. And now another sense of Dex's began to register perception on his brain. A peculiar odor came to his nostrils. It was a musky, fetid odor, like that to be smelled in an animal cage; but it was sharper, more acrid than anything he had ever smelled on Earth. It smelled--ah, he had it!--_reptilian_. As though somewhere nearby a dozen titanic serpents were coiled ready to spring! Looking about, Dex saw a six-foot square door of bars in one wall of the laboratory--like the barred entrance to a prison cell. It was from the interstices of this door that the odor seemed to emanate; but he had no chance to make sure, for now the Rogan leader approached him. "I will first show you," he said, through his mouthpiece, Greca, "what happens to those who oppose our orders. We have a slave who tried to run away into the surrounding jungles three suns ago...." A man was dragged into the chamber. He was slightly taller and more stockily muscled than an Earthman might be; but otherwise, in facial conformation and general appearance, he might have come here straight from New York City. Dex felt a great pang of sympathy for him. He was so plainly one of humankind, despite the fact that he had been born on a sphere four hundred million miles from Dex's. The fellow was paralyzed with horror. His eyes, wide and glazed, darted about the torture room like those of a trapped animal. And yet he made no move to break away from the clutch of the two Rogans who held him. He knew he was helpless, that wild-eyed glance told Dex. Knew it so thoroughly that not even his wildest terror could inspire him to try to make a break for freedom, or strike back at the implacable Rogan will. * * * * * At a nod from the leader, the man was stripped to the waist. Here Dex started in amazement. The man's broad chest was seamed and crisscrossed by literally hundreds of tiny lateral scars, some long healed, and some fresh incisions. He was dragged to a metal plate set upright in the wall, and secured to it by straps of metal. Evidently the miserable being knew what this portended, for he began to scream--a monotonous, high-pitched shriek that didn't stop till he was out of breath. The Rogan leader stared at him icily, then depressed a small lever set in the wall beside him. The plate against which the captive was bound began to shine softly with a blue light. The slave twisted in his bonds, screaming again. Rhythmic shudders jerked at his limbs. His lips turned greenish white. The shudders grew more pronounced till it seemed as though he were afflicted with a sort of horrible St. Vitus dance. Then the tall Rogan pulled back the lever. The slave hung away from his supporting shackles, limp and unconscious. Dex moistened his lips. An electric shock? No, it was something more terrible than that. Some other manifestation of the magnetic power the Rogans had harnessed--a current, perhaps, that depolarized partly the atoms of the body structure? He could only guess. But the convulsed face of the unfortunate victim showed that the torment, whatever it was, was devilish to the last degree! "That will be the next to the last fate reserved for you," the Rogan informed Dex, through Greca. "Death follows soon after that--but not too soon for you to see and feel what waits for you behind the barred door!" And he nodded toward the cage-entrance affair, from which came the musky, reptilian stench. "Now that you have seen something of what will happen to you if you refuse to tell us what we want to know, we shall proceed," said the leader. * * * * * He pointed toward one of the gargantuan work benches, and two of the Rogans slid down from it a contrivance that looked familiar to Dex. An instant's scrutiny showed him why it was familiar: it was a partly dismantled atomic motor. In spite of the ordeal that faced him, Dex felt a thrill of elation as he looked at the motor. In its scattered state, it told a mute story: a story of long and intensive study by the Rogans, which had yielded them no results! Only too obviously, the intricate secret of atomic power had not let itself be solved. On the heels of the elation that filled his heart, came a sickening realization of his dilemma. He could not have told the Rogans what they wanted to know even if he had wished to! He himself didn't know the principles of the atomic engine. As Brand had remarked, he was no space navigator; he was simply a prosaic lieutenant, competent only at fighting, not at all versed in science. He knew, though, that it would do no good to assert his ignorance to the Rogans. They simply wouldn't believe him. "You will rebuild this engine for us," ordered the tall leader, "showing us the purpose of each part, and how the power is extracted from the fuel. After that you will set it running for us, and instruct us in its control." Dex braced himself. His final moment had come. By way of indicating his refusal he looked away from the dismantled motor and said nothing. The Rogan repeated his command. Dex made no move. Then the leader acted. He said something to the Rogan guards who had been standing by all this while, alert against an outbreak from their prisoner. Dex was caught up, carried to one of the metal racks, and thrown down on its calibrated bed. Loops of metal, like handcuffs, were snapped around his wrists and ankles; and a metal hoop was clamped over his throat, pinning him to the torture rack. Resistance would have been useless, and Dex submitted quietly. * * * * * The contrivance, with him on it, was wheeled toward the barred door. It was halted at a spot marked on the floor, about thirty feet from the bars. The Rogan leader stepped alongside the rack, with Greca trembling beside him. Dex closed his eyes for a moment, grimly marshaling strength of will to go through the trial that was just beginning. The Rogan leader depressed another lever in the rock wall. The barred door slid slowly up, to reveal the receding darknesses of some great cave, or room, that adjoined the laboratory. Dex rolled his eyes so that he could watch the doorway; and, in a cold perspiration, waited for whatever might appear. It was not long in coming! The reptilian smell suddenly grew stronger. There was a booming hiss, a savage bellowing. A clattering of vast scales rattled out as some body weighing many tons was dragged over rock flooring. Then, before Dex's staring eyes appeared a huge, wedge-shaped head, at sight of which he bit his lips to keep from crying aloud. Often enough he had seen one of those terrific heads looming in the fog of the northern hemisphere of Jupiter. He did not know the genus of the vast monster that bore it, but he did know it for the fiercest of the lizard giants that roamed the Jovian jungles. A creature larger than a terrestrial whale, with great long neck and heavy long tail dragging yards behind it, it would find the puny bulk of a man nothing but a morsel in its jaws! Again the gigantic thing hissed and bellowed. And then its huge head came through the six-foot door and its neck uncoiled to send the gaping jaws within a foot of Dex. There it struggled to reach him, prevented by the small doorway that restrained the bulk of its enormous body, its head only inches away from the cleverly measured spot to which the metal rack had been wheeled. * * * * * Dex stared, hypnotized, into the dull, stony eyes of the beast, gasping for breath in the stench of its exhalations. The jaws snapped shut, fanning his cheek. He fought for self-control. Steady! Steady! The slimy Rogans had no intention of feeding him to the thing yet. Not till they had made more determined efforts to wring from him the secret of the motor. They were just prefacing actual physical torture with hellish mental torture, that was all. That he was right in his guess was proved in a few moments. He heard a louder hiss from the great lizard so near him. Opening his eyes, he saw the Rogan leader in the process of forcing the serpentine neck to withdraw foot by foot back into the doorway, using his shock-tube as a sort of distant prod. The monster swayed its ugly flat head back and forth, hissing deafeningly at the sting of the tube, now and again lunging with its vast unseen body at the too narrow entrance that kept it from entering the laboratory. Dex could hear the foundation walls of the building creak at the onslaught of that tremendous weight. If it would only break through! he thought savagely. But it wasn't going to. In a short while it was cowed by the deadly tube, and withdrew its head awkwardly from the chamber. The barred door slid down into place: and the Rogan leader once more turned his attention to his prisoner. "You will be wheeled within reach of the creature as the last step of your fate," Dex was informed. "Meanwhile, we shall start with something less deadly...." A cogged wheel beside him was turning a notch. Dex felt the sliding bed of the rack crawl slightly under him. Intolerable tension was suddenly placed on his arms and legs. The leader stared at a spring dial; and moved the wheel another notch. The rack expanded again, stretching Dex's body till his joints cracked. "You will tell us what we want to know," said the Rogan, glaring coldly down at him. Dex compressed his lips stubbornly. He couldn't tell them if he wanted to, and, by God, he wouldn't if he could. Another notch, the wheel was turned; and in spite of himself a groan escaped Dex's lips. One more notch, while the metal slide-rods beneath him lengthened a fraction of an inch.... CHAPTER VI _The Inquisition_ Blind, animal fear caught Dex and shook him in its grip. Then rage filled his heart, driving out the fear as a gale dissipates fog. With pain-dimmed eyes he glared at the gangling, hateful figure that gazed down on him with icy eyes. If he could only blast that monstrous, physically feeble but mentally ferocious thing to bits! Annihilate it! Blow it to the four corners of Jupiter! And all the other Rogans with it! And with this thought he suddenly saw, through the red mists of rage, the shock-tube that was dangling indifferently from the Rogan leader's hand. Instantly the red mists began to clear away. Another change took place in the tortured lieutenant's mind. The blind hot rage faded into more deadly, cold wrath. A plan began to bud into thought. It was a futile plan, really. It could not possibly accomplish anything vital. But it _might_ give him a chance for a little revenge before his life was snuffed out--might give him a chance to strike a blow for the dead Journeyman and the other gallant explorers who had perished here in this chamber before him. He closed his eyes to hide the hate and calculation in them. The tall Rogan leaned lower over the rack. "You are ready to do as I command?" he demanded. "Yes," whispered Dex. "Yes." In the beautiful Greca's eyes, as she translated his assent, was horror. But then, faintly, her mind caught the thought that lay beneath the Earthman's apparent surrender. She veiled her own eyes with long lashes, lest they betray the captive's plan to the alert Rogan. Her lips moved silently; perhaps she was praying to her Great White One. * * * * * "Release him," the Rogan ordered, triumph in his bird-like, shrill voice. The metal hoops were unfastened. Dex stretched his outraged body, wincing with the pain of movement; then felt life and strength returning to him. "Come with us to the motor," commanded the Rogan, his dull eyes glinting in anticipation of learning the coveted secret that should add one more planet to the Rogan's tyranny. Dex walked to the dismantled atomic engine with him. He walked slowly, pretending more stiffness and weakness than he really owned to. No use in letting his captors know that his resilient muscles were so quickly throwing off the torment of the rack. As he walked he kept his gaze covertly on that shock-tube that dangled in the leader's grasp. The rest of the guard had none; they had laid their weapons down on a far bench on their entrance to the chamber, depending on the one with which their leader was armed. Eagerly the Rogans crowded around Dex and the motor that had thus far baffled them. They bent down from their twelve-foot heights to bring their staring goggle-eyes closer to the lesson in atomic motive power, till Dex was in a sort of small dome of Rogans, with their long, pipe-like legs forming the wall around him, and their thin torsos inclining forward to make a curved ceiling over him. The Rogan leader drew Greca within the circle to interpret the Earthman's explanations. Dex moved a trifle, to bring himself nearer the tall leader. Again he glanced covertly at the shock-tube. "The first thing to tell about our motor," said Dex, stalling for time, "is that it utilizes the breaking up of the atom as its source of power." * * * * * He edged closer to the Rogan leader. "You see those electrodes?" he said, pointing to two copper castings in a chamber between the fuel tank and the small but enormously powerful turbine that whirled with the released atomic energy. The Rogan leader blinked assent. His small, horrible mouth was pursed with his concentration of thought. "The electrodes partially break down the atoms of fuel passing from the tank," explained Dex, desperately attempting scientific phraseology for a matter as far over his head as the remote stars. He raised his hand a trifle, bringing it nearer the Rogan's tube.... "Is that the outlet from the tank?" inquired the Rogan, pointing with the tube, and so raising it out of Dex's reach. "Yes," mumbled Dex, sick with disappointment: he'd been on the point of leaping for the weapon. He sidled close again. Greca bit her lips lest she cry out with suspense. "The partially disintegrated atoms pass into the turbine chamber," he went on, "and are there completely broken down by heat, which has been generated by the explosive energy of the atoms passing in before them." "I warn you to speak true," said the leader, suddenly removing his gaze from the specimen motor and staring icily down at Dex. Dex's hand dropped abruptly from its place near the tube. Again his fingers had come within a foot of it. * * * * * "We will get ahead faster," piped the Rogan, an edge of suspicion sounding in his shrill voice, "if I conduct the explanation. I will ask questions for you to answer. What is the fuel used?" "Powdered zinc," Dex answered promptly. No harm in admitting that. The Rogans must already know it; zinc was common to Jupiter, as Earth spectroscopes had showed long since; and they had no doubt analyzed it by now. The chances were that the leader was merely testing him, to see if he were sincere in his ostensible surrender. That his guess was right, he read in the fishy, dull eyes. The Rogan leader nodded at his answer, and some of the lurking suspicion in his gaze died down. "How is it prepared?" Now this marked the beginning of the end, Dex knew. The preparation of the powdered metal was half the secret of atomic power--and Dex hadn't the faintest idea what it was! This questions-and-answers affair was going to pin him down in short order! "How is it prepared?" repeated the Rogan leader inexorably. "Tell us, or--" But at that instant Dex attained his objective. Once more his hand had crawled slowly toward the tube--till, once more, it was within reach. Then, more bold as his position grew more desperate, he straightened up--and, with a lightning move, had wrenched it from the sucker-disk that held it! He shouted his triumph. He had it! _Now_ let the devils put him back on the torture bed if they could! _Now_ let them try to make him betray his planet! * * * * * There was an alarmed squeak from the Rogan leader, and in an instant the huge laboratory was in an uproar. The Rogan guards whipped their hose-like arms toward the Earthman. Dex, with a sweep of his hands, knocked the pipe-stem legs of two of the guards from under them, leaped over their bodies, and stood at bay in a corner--guarding the bench on which the guards had laid their tubes when they filed into the laboratory. The air resounded with the shrill calls of the excited Rogans. Then they began to close in on him, all the while eyeing the tube in his hand with terror written large on their hideous faces. Dex's eyes blazed with the light of vengeful exultation. For the death of Journeyman and the rest, for the coming inevitable death of himself and Brand, he was going to pay--at least in part--with the captured tube of death in his hand! It was a lovely thought, and for a few seconds he delayed acting in order to savor it. Then, with a smile of pure happiness, he leveled the tube at the nearest Rogan in order to shrivel him to nothingness as he had seen the slave shrivelled in the street. The Rogan did not fall! Full in the face of the death tube he teetered forward, his arms reaching savagely toward the Earthman. Dex stared incredulously. Cold fear crept into his heart. He pointed the tube more accurately, and squeezed harder on the coil handle. Still nothing happened. The Rogans warily drew closer. * * * * * Perspiration began to trickle down Dex's cheeks. In God's name, why didn't the tube work? He had thought all he had to do was point it and squeeze down on the handle. But evidently there was more to the trick than that! He groaned. He had staged all this elaborate play for a weapon as useless to his untrained mind as one of Earth's explosive guns, with the safety-lock clamped on, would have been to an abysmal Venusian savage! By now the nearest Rogan was within reaching distance of him. One of its two pairs of slimy arms uncoiled toward him. The other pair strained to reach around him and get to the weapons on the bench by his side. With a cry, Dex dashed the useless shock-tube down on the reaching arms. As long as he didn't know how to work it anyway, he might as well use it as a club. The Rogan squeaked with pain; the arms recoiled. Dex jerked the tube back over his shoulder for another blow.... There was a shriek from the doomed wretch fastened to the metal plate. The slave that had been tortured before Dex's eyes as an object lesson! He had been returned to consciousness a short time since, and had been writhing and shuddering against the plate. Dex flashed a glance at him over his shoulder, as he shrieked, and cried aloud himself at what he saw. * * * * * The tortured slave was rapidly disappearing! Another shriek left his lips, to be broken off halfway. In an instant nothing was left of the struggling body but a wisp of greasy black smoke! Dex stared stupidly at the tube in his hand. Then, as a squeak of agony sounded from a Rogan in front of him, his mind grasped what had happened. Somehow its mechanism had been jarred into functioning when he dashed it against the groping arm. In some way its death dealing power had been unleashed. With a cry of exultation, Dex began to use it! The Rogan in front of him, squealing, collapsed on the floor, dwindling swiftly into nothingness. Dex turned the mysterious death against another teetering creature. It too went up in oleaginous smoke. The Rogan leader came next. Dex whirled the tube in his direction, and saw him go down. Then he sprang to annihilate still another grotesque monster who had almost reached the bench on which were the other tubes. He shouted and raved as this fourth Rogan crumbled. Torture him, would they! Plan to capture Earth, would they! He'd kill off the whole damned population with this tube! The Rogan survivors, squeaking in panic, gave over their attempts to retrieve the tubes. They dove for various hiding places--under benches, behind retorts, anywhere to get away from the terror running amuck in their midst. And after them sprang Dex, mad with his sudden miraculous success, to ferret them out one by one and blow them into hell with their own horrible death-engine. * * * * * In his ecstasy of rage, Dex overlooked the Rogan leader. He had seen that attenuated monstrosity go down, and had assumed he was dead. But such was not the case. In the corner Dex had vacated when he sprang after the fleeing guard, the tall leader twisted feebly and sat up. One of his four arms was missing, a smoking stump showing where the annihilating ray from the tube had blasted it off at the shoulder. But he was far from being dead. With cold purpose in his great staring eyes, he moved snakily toward the bench Dex had now left unguarded. The Earthman got another Rogan; whirled to track down still another. Promptly the leader sank motionless to the floor. The Rogan leader continued his crawling. He reached the bench, fumbled up and along its surface for the nearest tube. Dex, unconscious of the sure fate gathering behind him to strike him down, dashed past a great glass tank behind which Greca was huddling in mortal fear, and charged down on two more of the squeaking guards. Then, suddenly, some sixth sense warned him that something was wrong. He whirled toward the corner he had left. The Rogan leader, two of his surviving arms propping feebly against the bench, was pointing a shock-tube squarely at him! * * * * * Dex fell to the floor to escape the first discharge of the tube, and leveled his own. He felt the thing grow hot in his hand, saw a blinding blue-white fire leap into being in the space between them as the rays from the two tubes met and absorbed each other. He shifted, to get out of the line and blast the creature he had too hastily reckoned as dead. But he was not quick enough. A fraction before him, the Rogan leader shifted. Dex felt a terrible burning sensation all over his body, as the ray from his tube met the conflicting ray less squarely, and allowed a little of it to reach him. He shrieked as the slave had shrieked when he felt the annihilating current from the plate sweeping through his body. A black fog seemed to close in around the Earthman's senses. He crashed to the floor, with a glimpse of the leering triumph on the Rogan's face as the last picture to stamp itself in his failing consciousness. The tall Rogan, obviously in great agony from his blasted arm, squeaked a faint command. The four guards who were left issued fearfully from their hiding places and came to him. He pointed his tube at Dex Harlow, lying unconscious on the floor. There he hesitated an instant, his soft little mouth slobbering in his rage and pain. Then he let the tube sink slowly off its line. He gave another command. The four guards picked the Earthman up and carried him to the metal torture-plate on which the slave had met his death. The tall leader's eyes gleamed with vicious hatred as the limp body was fastened to the metal. Mouthing and squealing with the pain of his seared arm-stump, he wobbled toward the lever, a mere turn of which would readily convert the plate into a bed of agony. CHAPTER VII _In the Power-House_ Alone in the prison room, after Dex had been dragged away to be subjected to the Rogan inquisition, Brand gnawed at his fingers and paced distractedly up and down the stone flooring. For a while he had no coherent thought at all; only the realization that his turn came next, and that the Rogans would leave no refinement of torment untried in their effort to wring from him the secret of the atomic engine. He went to the window, and absent-mindedly stared out. The whining hum from the great domed building off to the right, like the high-pitched droning of a swarm of gargantuan bees, came to his ears. He listened more intently, and leaned out of the window to look at the building. Under that dome, it came to him again, was, in all probability, the mainspring of the Rogan mechanical power. If only he could get in there and look around! He might do some important damage; he might be able to harass the enemy materially before the time came for him to die. He leaned farther out of the window, and examined the hundred feet or so of sheer wall beneath him. He saw, scrutinizing it intently, that the stone blocks that composed it were not smooth cut, but rough hewn, with the marks of the cutters' chisels plainly in evidence. Also there was a considerable ridge between each layer of blocks where the Rogans' mortar had squeezed out in the process of laying the wall. Never in sanity would a man have thought of the thing Brand considered then. To attempt to clamber down that blank wall, with only the slight roughness of the protruding layers of mortar to hang on to, was palpable suicide! * * * * * Brand shrugged. He observed that to a man already condemned to death, the facing of probable suicide shouldn't mean much. With scarcely an increase in the beating of his heart, he swung one leg out over the broad sill. If he fell, he escaped an infinitely worse death; if he didn't fall, he might somehow win his way into that domed building whence the hum came. Cautiously, clutching at the rough stone with finger tips that in a moment or two became raw and bleeding masses, he began his slow descent. As he worked his way down, he slanted to the right, toward the near wall of the retaining yard whose end was formed by the round structure that was his goal. Beneath him and to the left the broad street swarmed with figures: the tall ones of the Rogans and the shorter, sturdier ones of slaves. Any one of those dozens of grotesque pedestrians might glance up, see him, and pick him off with the deadly tubes. Under his fingers the mortar crumbled and left him hanging, more than once, by one hand. For fully five minutes his life hung by a thread apt to be severed at any time. But--he made it. Helped by the decreased gravity of the red spot, and released from inhibiting fear by the fact that he was already, figuratively, a dead man, he performed the incredible. With a last slithering step downward, he landed lightly on the near wall of the enclosure, and started along its broad top toward his objective. Now he was in plain sight of any one who might be looking out the windows of the tower building or from the dome ahead of him; but this was a chance he had to take, and at least he was concealed from the swarms in the street. Making no effort to hide himself by crawling along the top of the wall, he straightened up and began to run toward the giant dome. * * * * * Hardly had he gone a dozen steps when he suddenly understood the meaning of the high-walled enclosure to his right! Off in a far corner rose a slate colored mound that at first glance he had taken for a great heap of inanimate dirt. The mound began to move toward him--and metamorphosed into an animal, a thing that made Brand blink his eyes to see if he were dreaming, and then stop, appalled, to look at it. He saw a body that dwarfed the high retaining walls to comparative insignificance. It had a tree-like tail that dragged behind it; and a thirty-foot, serpentine neck at the end of which was a head like a sugar barrel that split into cavernous jaws lined with backward-pointing teeth. Two eyes were set wide apart in the enormous head, eyes that were dead and cold and dull, yet glinting with senseless ferocity. It was the sort of thing one sees in delirium. With increasing energy the creature made for him, till finally it was approaching his sector of the wall at a lumbering run that was rapid for all its ungainliness. It was apparent at a glance that the snaky neck, perched atop the lofty shoulder structure, would raise the head with its gaping jaws to his level on the wall! Brand ran. And after him thudded the gigantic lizard, its neck arching up and along the wall to reach him. A scant five yards ahead of the snapping jaws, Brand reached his goal, the dome, and clambered over its curved, metal roof away from the monster's maw. He stopped to pant for breath and wipe the sweat from his streaming face. "Thank God it didn't get me," he breathed, looking back at the bellowing terror that had pursued him. "Wonder why it's there? It's too ferocious to be tamed and used in any way: it must be kept as a threat to hold the slaves in hand. It certainly looks well fed...." He shuddered; then he began to explore the dome of the building for a means of entrance. * * * * * There was no opening in the roof. A solid sheet of reddish metal, like a titanic half-eggshell, it glittered under him in an unbroken piece. He crept down its increasingly precipitous edge till he reached a sort of cornice that formed a jutting circle of stone around it. There he leaned far over and saw, about ten feet below him, a round opening like a big port-hole. From it were streaming waves of warm, foul air, from which he judged it to be a ventilator outlet. He scrambled over the edge of the cornice, hung at arm's length, and swung himself down into the opening. And there, perched high up under the roof, he looked down at an enigmatic, eery scene. That the structure was indeed a strange sort of power-house was instantly made evident. But what curious, mysterious, and yet bewilderingly simple machinery it held! In the center was a titanic coil of reddish metal formed by a single cable nearly a yard through. Around this, at the four corners of the compass, were set coils that were identical in structure but a trifle smaller. From the smaller coils to the larger streamed, unceasingly, blue waves of light like lightning bolts. Along a large arc of the wall was a stone slab set with an endless array of switches and insulated control-buttons. Gauges and indicators of all kinds, whose purpose could not even be guessed at, were lined above and below, all throbbing rhythmically to the leap of the electric-blue rays between the monster coils. * * * * * Almost under Brand's perch a great square beam of metal came through the building wall from outside, to be split into multitudinous smaller beams that were hooked up with the bases of the coils. Across from him, disappearing out through the opposite wall, was an identical beam. "The terminals for the metal plate system that extends over the whole red spot," murmured Brand. "This building _is_ important. But what can I do to throw sand in the gears before I'm caught and killed...?" He surveyed the great round room below him more thoroughly. Now he saw, right in the center of the huge control board, a solitary lever, that seemed a sort of parent to all the other levers and switches. It was flanked by a perfect army of gauges and indicators; and was covered by a glass bell which was securely bolted to the rock slab. "That looks interesting," Brand told himself. "I'd like to see that closer, if I can climb down from here without being observed.... Why"--he broke off--"where is everybody!" For the first time, in the excitement and concentration of his purpose, the emptiness of the place struck him. There was no sign of light in the great building--no workmen or slaves anywhere. There was just the great coils, with the streamers of blue light bridging them and emitting the high-pitched, monotonous hum audible outside the dome, and the complicated control board with its quivering indicator needles and mysterious levers. That was all. "Must be out to lunch," muttered Brand, his eyes going fascinatedly toward that solitary, parent lever under its glass bell. "Well, it gives me a chance to try some experiments, anyway." * * * * * It was about fifty feet from his perch to the floor; but a few feet to one side was a metal beam that extended up to help support the trussed weight of the roof. He jumped for this, and quickly slid down it. He started on a run for the control board; but almost immediately he stopped warily to listen: it seemed to him that he had caught, faintly, the squeaking, high tones of Rogan conversation. Miraculously, the sound seemed to come from a blank wall to his left. He crept forward to investigate.... The mystery was solved before he had gone very far. There was an opening in the wall leading off to an annex of some kind outside the dome building. The opening was concealed by a set-back, so that at first glance it had seemed part of the wall itself. From this opening drifted the chatter of Rogans. Brand stole closer, finally venturing to peer into the room beyond from an angle where he himself could not be seen. And he found that his whimsical reference to "lunch" had contained a ghastly element of fact! In that annex were several dozen of the teetering, attenuated Rogans, and an equal number of slaves. And the relation of the slaves and the Rogans was one that made Brand's skin crawl. Each Rogan had stripped the tunic from the chest of his slave. Now, as Brand watched, each drew a keen blade from his belt, and made a shallow gash in the shrinking flesh. There were a few stifled screams--some of the slaves were women--but for the most part the slashing was endured in stoical silence. When red drops began to ooze forth, the Rogans stooped and applied their horrible little mouths to the incisions.... "The slimy devils!" Brand whispered hoarsely, at sight of that dreadful feeding. "The inhuman, monstrous vermin!" But now one or two of the Rogans had begun to utter squeaks of satiation; and Brand hastened away from there and toward the control board again. He hadn't an idea of what he might accomplish when he reached it; he didn't know but that a touch of the significant looking parent-lever might blast him to bits; but he did know that he was going to raise absolute hell with something, somewhere, if he possibly could. * * * * * Swiftly he approached the great master-lever, protected by its bell of glass. (At least it looked like glass, for it was crystal clear and reflected gleamingly the blue light from the nearby coils). He tapped it experimentally with his knuckles.... At once pandemonium reigned in the great vaulted building. There was a siren-like screaming from a device he noticed for the first time attached under the domed roof. A clanging alarm split the air from half a dozen gongs set around the upper walls. Squealing shouts sounded behind Brand. He whirled, and saw the Rogans, interrupted in their terrible meal, pouring in from the annex and racing toward him. Rage and fear distorted their hideous faces as they pointed first to the big lever and then at the escaped Earthman. They redoubled their efforts to get at him, their long unsteady legs covering the distance in great bounds. Brand swore. Was he to be caught again before he had accomplished a certain thing? When he had already managed to win clear to his objective? He hammered at the glass bell with his fists, but realized with the first blow that he was only wasting time trying to crack it bare-handed. He glanced quickly about and saw a metal bar propped up against the control board near him. * * * * * He sprang for it, grasped it as a club, and returned to the glass bell. Raising his arms high, he brought the thick metal bar down on the glass with all his strength. With a force that almost wrenched his arms from their sockets, the bar rebounded from the glass bell, leaving it uncracked. "Unbreakable!" groaned Brand. Desperately he tried again, whirling the bar high over his head and bringing it smashing down. The result was the same as before as far as breaking the bell was concerned. But--a little trickle of crushed rock came from around the bolts in the slab to which the bell was fastened. A third time be brought the bar down. The glass bell sagged a bit sway from the slab.... He had no chance for more assaults on it. The nearest Rogans had leaped for him. Slimy arms were coiling around him, while the loathsome sucker-disks tore at his unprotected face and throat. Savagely Brand lashed out with the bar. It caved in a pair of the long, skinny legs, bringing a bloated round head down within reach. He smashed it with the bar, exulting grimly as the blow crumpled bone and flesh almost down to the little mouth which was yet carmine from its recent feeding. The process seemed a sound one to Brand, unable as he was to reach the Rogans' heads that towered six feet above his own. Methodically, swinging the bar with the weight of his body behind it, he repeated the example. First a crash of the bar against a pair of legs, then the crushing in of the Rogan's head when he toppled with agonized squeals to the floor. Again and again he crushed the life out of a Rogan with his one-two swing of the deadly bar. They were thinning down, now. They were wavering in their charges against the comparatively insignificant being from another planet who was defending himself so fiercely. * * * * * Finally one of their number turned and ran toward an exit, waving his four arms and adding his high-pitched alarms to the incessant ringing of the gongs and shrieks of the warning siren up under the roof. The rest rushed the Earthman in a body. Steadily, almost joyfully, Brand fought on. He had expected to be annihilated by one of the Rogan shock-tubes long before now; but as yet there was no sign of any. Either these Rogan workmen were not privileged to carry the terrible things, or they were too occupied to think of going and getting them; anyhow, Brand was left free to wield his bar and continue crushing out the lives of the two-legged vermin that attacked him. With almost a shock of surprise, he saw finally that he had battered their number down to three. At that he took the offensive himself. He rammed the bluntly pointed end of the bar almost through one writhing torso, broke the back of a second with a whistling blow, and tripped and exterminated the third almost in as many seconds. The creatures, without their death-tubes, were as helpless as crippled rats! Panting, he turned again toward the loosened glass bell, and battered at it with the precious bar. Gradually the bolts that held it to the stone slab were wrenched out, till only one supported it. But at this point, from half a dozen set-back doorways, streams of infuriated Rogans began pouring into the building and toward him. The one that had fled had come back with help. CHAPTER VIII _Tremendous Odds_ Like living spokes of a half-wheel, with the Earthman as the hub, the Rogans converged toward Brand, a howling roar outside indicating that there were hundreds more waiting to jam into the dome as soon as they were able. There were still no shock-tubes in evidence: evidently the worker who had gone for help had gathered the first Rogan citizens he had encountered on the streets. But the very numbers of the mob spelled defeat for Brand. However, there was still the great lever behind him to yank away from its switch-socket. The glass bell was almost off now. With a last mad blow, he knocked loose the remaining bolt that held it. The bell clattered to the floor. A concerted shriek came from the crowding Rogans as they saw the Earthman's hand close on the lever. Whatever effect the throwing of that master-switch could have, there was no doubt that they were extremely anxious to prevent it! And now, in the rear of the crowding columns, appeared Rogans taller than the others, with an authoritative air, who waved before them, eager to unleash their power, batteries of the death-tubes. Resigning himself to annihilation in the next instant, Brand pulled down hard on the lever. * * * * * The effect wrought by the throwing of that great switch was almost indescribable. In a flash, as though all had been struck at once by a giant's hand, every Rogan in the mob shot toward the floor, long thin legs caving under him as if turned to water. Writhing feebly, they endeavored to get up, but could not; and, still weakly ferocious, began to creep toward the Earthman like huge-headed worms. Brand himself had been thrown to the floor with the falling of that switch. He had felt as though an invisible ocean had been poured on him, weighting him down intolerably. To move arms or legs required enormous effort; and to get up on his feet again was like rising under a two-hundred-pound pack. The movement of the switch, he saw, had cut off the gravity reducing apparatus of the Rogans--whatever that might consist of. They were now, abruptly, subjected to the full force of gravity exerted by Jupiter's great mass. They could no more stand erect on their tottering, lofty legs than they could fly. But, though greatly handicapped by the gravity pull, they were still not entirely helpless. Like huge, long insects they continued to worm their way toward Brand, using their four arms and their boneless legs to help urge them over the flooring. And in their rear the Rogan guards struggled to lift their tubes and level them at the escaped prisoner. Prompt to avoid that, Brand went down on his hands and knees. Thus he was shielded by the foremost crawling Rogans: the ones in the rear, with the tubes, could not raise themselves high enough to bore down over their fellows' heads at the Earthman. Squatting on his knees, Brand awaited the first resolute crawlers. And, on his knees, whirling the now thrice weighty bar at heads that were conveniently low enough to be accessible, he began his last stand. * * * * * On the Rogans came, evidently determined, at any sacrifice of life, to get the Earthman away from that vital control board. And to right and left, crouching low to escape the tubes of the guards slowly crawling forward from the rear, Brand laid about him with the bar. He got a little sick at the havoc he was wreaking on these slow-moving, gravity-crippled things: but remembrance of their grisly feeding habits, and the torture they must by now have inflicted on Dex, kept him flailing down on soft heads with undiminished effort. With the gravity pull what it was, the Earthman was immeasurably stronger than any individual Rogan. For a time the contest was all in his favor. It was like killing slugs in a rose garden! Nevertheless, these slugs were, after all, twelve feet long and possessed of intelligence, besides being hundreds in number. After a while the tide of battle began to turn in their favor. Brand began to feel his arms ache burningly with the sustained effort of wielding a weapon that now weighed about twenty-five pounds. He knew he couldn't keep up the terrific strain much longer. And, in addition, he could see that the armed Rogans in the rear were steadily forging ahead among the unarmed attackers, till they soon must be in a position to blast him with their weapons. Brand brought down his bar, with failing force but still deadly effect, on the loathsome face of the nearest Rogan, grunting with satisfaction as he saw it crumple into a shapeless mass. He thrust it, spear-like, into another face, and another. Then, abruptly, he found himself weaponless. Raising it high to bring it down on an attacker who was almost about to seize him, he felt the metal bar turn white hot, and dropped it with a cry as it seared the skin from the palms of his hands. Some Rogan guard in the rear had managed to train his tube on the bar; and in the instant of its rising had almost melted it. * * * * * Weaponless and helpless, Brand crawled slowly back before the tortuously advancing mob, keeping close enough to them to be shielded from the tubes of the rear guards. Without his club he knew the end was a matter of seconds. He had an impulse to leap full into the mass of repulsive, crawling bodies and die fighting as his fists battered at the gruesome faces. But a second impulse, and a stronger one, was the blind instinct to preserve his life as long as possible. Hesitantly, almost reluctantly, acting on the primitive instinct of self-preservation, he continued to back away from the advancing horde; away from the switch and toward the rear of the dome. With the instant of his withdrawal, a Rogan turned toward the lever to push it back up into contact and release the red kingdom from the burden of Jupiter's unendurable gravity. And now ensued a curious struggle. The lever, placed for the convenience of creatures twelve feet or more tall, was about five feet from the floor. And the Rogan couldn't reach it! * * * * * Stubbornly he heaved and writhed in an effort to raise his inordinately heavy body from the floor to a point where one of the weaving arms could reach the switch. But the pipe-stem legs would not bear its weight. Each time it nearly reached the lever, only to fall feebly back again in a snarl of tangled limbs. Meanwhile, Brand had flashed a quick look back over his shoulder to see, in the wall behind him, a metal door he hadn't noticed before. He found time for a flashing instant to wonder why there were no Rogans entering from that doorway, too; but it was a vain wonder, and it faded from his mind as the ever advancing, groping monsters before him kept crowding him back. Instinctively he changed his course a trifle, to edge toward the metal door. Perhaps, behind it, there was sanctuary for a few moments. Perhaps he could force it open, spring out, and bar it again in the faces of the pursuing mob. It sounded improbable, but at least it offered him a slim chance where before no chance had seemed possible. He reached the door at last, fumbled behind him and felt, high over his head, a massive sliding bolt. * * * * * In the spot Brand had left, the struggle to throw the gravity-lever back into closed contact position went on. The Rogan who was fruitlessly trying to reach up to it paused and said something to one near him. That one halted, and began to crawl toward him. The two of them tried to reach it, one bracing the other and helping him pry his body up from the implacable pull of Jupiter's uninsulated mass. The top Rogan reached a little higher. The flesh sucker-disk that served as a hand almost grasped the lever, but failed by only a few inches. A third Rogan crawled up. And now, with two arching their backs to help the other, the thing was done. The hose-like, groping arm went up and pushed the lever back into place. The blue streamer began to hum and crackle from coil to coil again. The invisible weight that pressed down was released as once more the giant planet's gravity was nullified. The Rogans got eagerly to their feet and began to race toward Brand in their normal long bounds. Brand, just cautiously rising, when the power went back on, found himself leaping five feet into the air with the excess of his muscular effort. And in that leap he saw the Rogans in the rear straighten up and point their tubes. However, also in that leap, his fumbling hand shot back the bolt that securely shut the metal door. With a shout of defiance he jumped out of the door and slammed it shut after him, feeling it grow searing hot an instant later under the impact of the rays from the tubes that had been trained on him. A stinging shock reached him through the metal, flinging him to the ground. He rolled out of its range and leaped to his feet to race away from there. Then, with a gasp, he flattened his body back against the wall of the dome building. He was in the enclosure that held the gigantic, lizard-like thing that had nearly got him on his escape from the tower room. He wheeled frantically to go back and face the Rogan death-tubes. Anything rather than wait while that mammoth heap of tiny-brained ferocity ran him down and tore him to shreds! But even as he turned, he heard the bolt shoot home on the inside of the door; heard vengeful squeals of triumph from his pursuers. * * * * * At the other end of the enclosure, near the foot of the tower building, the great lizard eyed him unblinkingly, its tremendous jaws gaping to reveal a cavernous mouth that was hideously lined with bright orange colored membrane. Then, squatting lower with every step it took, like a mountainous cat about to spring on its prey, it began to stalk on its tree-like legs toward the tiny creature that had leaped into its yard with it. Brand whirled this way and that, mechanically seeking a way out. There was none. The walls of the great enclosure were not like the wall of the tower. Here were no rough hewn stones, with protruding ridges of mortar set between. These walls were as smooth as glass, and just as smooth was the curved wall of the dome building behind him. The monstrous beast stalked nearer, almost on its belly now. As it advanced, the great tail stirred up a cloud of reddish dust, and left behind it a round deep depression in a surface already crisscrossed with a multitude of similar depressions. A bellowing hiss came from its gaping mouth, and it increased its pace to a thunderous, waddling rush. CHAPTER IX _Into the Enclosure_ In the torture chamber Dex wavered slowly back to consciousness to get the growing impression that he was being immersed in a bath of liquid fire. Burning, intolerable pain assailed him with increasing intensity as his senses clarified. At last he groaned and opened his eyes, for the moment not knowing where he was nor how he had come to be there. He saw strange torture instruments and tall monstrosities with pumpkin-shaped heads surrounding him closely in a semicircle, and staring at him out of great, dull eyes. Remembrance came back with a rush, and he gathered his muscles to spring at the hateful figures. But he could not move. At waist and throat, at wrists and ankles, were hoops of metal. He closed his eyes again while the burning waves of invisible fire shot through him recurrently from head to foot. Dully he wondered that he was still alive. His last recollection had been of the Rogan leader pointing his shock-tube full at him, his shapeless countenance working with murderous fury. However, alive he was; and most unenviably so! His hands, circumscribed to a few inches of movement by the bonds on his wrists, felt the smooth substance at his back. And with a thrill of horror he realized his position: he was crucified against the metal slab on which the slave had writhed in agony a short half hour ago. Again he strained and tugged, vainly, to get free. Off to one side, pressed back against a huge glass experimental tank, he saw the beautiful Greca, her eyes wide with horror; and caught her frantic pleading message to her "Great White One." * * * * * The Rogan leader, squealing and grimacing, advanced toward the victim on the metal plate. One of the long arms went out and a sucker-disk was pressed to Dex's cheek. Dex quivered at the loathsome contact of that soft and slimy substance; then set his jaws to keep from groaning as the disk was jerked away, to carry with it a fragment of skin and flesh. Gingerly, the tall leader felt the twitching, blackened stump of his blasted arm. Dex grinned mirthlessly at that: he'd struck one or two blows in his own defense, anyhow! At sight of the Earthman's grin, an expression of defiance and grim joy that needed no interpreting to be understandable, the Rogan leader fairly danced with rage. His long arm went out to the switch beside the plate, and pulled it down another notch--just a little, not nearly to the current that had torn at the slave. At the increased torment resulting from that slight movement of the regulating lever, Dex yelled aloud in spite of all his will power. It seemed as though his whole body were about to burst into self-generated flame. Every cell and fiber of him seemed on the verge of flying apart. He could feel his eyes start from his head, could feel every hair on his scalp stand up as though discharging electric sparks. A minute or two of that and he would go mad! He cried out again, and twisted helplessly in his bonds. And then the terrible torture stopped. The Rogan had not touched the switch--yet whatever sort of current it was that charged the plate was abruptly clicked off, as though someone at a distance had cut a wire or thrown a master-switch. * * * * * Simultaneously with its ceasing, an invisible, crushing sea seemed to envelope everything. Dex felt his body sag against his metal bonds as if it had been changed to lead. Before him the Rogans, who had been crowding closer to watch gloatingly each grimace he made, shot doorward as though their pipe-stem legs had been swept from under them. The leader fell on the stump of his seared arm and, a deafening squeal of rage and pain came from his little mouth. His tube fell from his grasp and rolled over the floor half a dozen yards away from him. Amazed, observing the stricken creatures only dimly through a haze of pain, Dex saw them struggle vainly to get up again, and heard them chattering excitedly to themselves. For the moment, in the face of this queer phenomenon, the prisoner seemed to be forgotten. And Dex was quick to seize the momentary advantage. "Greca!" he called. "The tube! There--on the floor!" The girl raised her head quickly, and followed his imploring gaze. Laboriously she started for the tube. At the same instant the Rogan leader began to feel around him for his lost weapon. Not finding it, he raised his head and glanced about for it. He saw the girl making her way toward it and, with a squeak of terror, began to crawl toward it himself. * * * * * He was not quick enough. The girl, though not nearly as active under the increased pull of gravity as a person of Earth might be, was yet more agile than the Rogans. And she was the faster mover in this tortuous, snail-like race. While the Rogan leader was still several feet away, she retrieved the shock-tube. "Kill him!" begged Dex. "And all the rest of the filthy creatures!" With feminine horror of the thing that faced her, Greca hesitated an instant--a hesitation almost long enough to be fatal. Then, just as the Rogan leader was reaching savagely out for her, she leveled the tube at him and turned it to its full power. One last thin squeal came from the Rogan's mouth, a squeal that cracked abruptly at its height. What had been its gangling body drifted up in inky smoke. "The others!" called Dex. "Quick! Before they get their weapons--" Greca swept the death-tube in a short arc in front of her, over the bodies of the remaining Rogans, as if spraying plants with a hose. One after another, toppling in swift succession like grotesque falling dominoes, the creatures sagged to the floor and melted away. That one small part of Jupiter's red spot, at least, was cleared of Rogan population. * * * * * Long shudders racked Greca's body, and her lips were a bloodless line in her pallid face. But she did not go into womanly hysterics or swoon at the slaughter it had been her lot to inflict. Moving as quickly as she could, she went to the metal slab and began, with shaking fingers, to undo the fastenings that held Dex prisoner. "Good girl," said Dex, patting her satiny bare shoulder as he stood free again. "You're a sport and a gentleman. You don't understand the terms? They're Earth words, Greca, that carry the highest praise a man can give a woman. But let's get out of here before another gang comes and takes us again. Where can we hide?" "I don't know any hiding places," confessed Greca despairingly. "The Rogans swarm everywhere. We will be seen the moment we try to leave here." "Well, we'll hunt for a hole, anyway," said Dex. He essayed to walk. What with the tendency of his muscles to jerk and collapse with the aftermath of the torture he had endured, and the sudden and inexplicable increase in gravity that bore him down, he made heavy going of it. "First we'll go up and get Brand." "Yes, yes," said Greca, a soft glow in her clear blue eyes. "Let us go quickly." She started toward the door, panting with the effort of moving. But Dex halted an instant, to stoop and pick up another of the tubes. "We might as well have one of these apiece," he said. "You've proved you have the grit to use one; and maybe the dirty rats will think twice about rushing us if we each have a load of death in our hands." * * * * * They made their way out of the torture laboratory, and up the incline to the street level. And it was just as they reached this that the burden of gravity under which they staggered was lifted from their shoulders as quickly as it had descended on them. Dex raised his arms just in time to fend his body from a collision with the wall in front of him. "Now what!" he exclaimed. Greca lifted her hand for silence, inclined her head, and listened intently. As she did so, Dex heard the same noise her quick ears had caught an instant before his: a distant pandemonium of ringing gongs and siren shrieks, and squealing cries of a multitude of agitated Rogans. "What the devil--" began Dex. But again Greca raised her hand to silence him, and listened once more. As she listened, her sea-blue eyes grew wider and wider with horror. Then, frantically, she began to race down a long corridor away from the street door. Dex hastened to follow her. "What is it?" he demanded, when he had caught up to her flying little feet. "This is not the way up to the room where Brand--" "Your friend is not there," she interrupted. She explained swiftly, distractedly: "From the shouts of the Rogans I learn that he got into the great dome building, somehow, and then was driven into the pen of the...." Dex could not get the next term she used. But her telepathic message of the peril she mentioned formed in his mind clearly enough. He got a flashing brain picture of a great, high-walled yard with a monster in it of the kind he had caught a close-range glimpse a short while before. Also, he saw a blurred, tiny figure, running from wall to wall, that was Greca's imagining of Brand and his efforts to escape the enormous beast. "Good heavens!" groaned Dex. "Penned in with one of the things they showed me while I was stretched on the rack! Are you sure, Greca?" She nodded, and tried to run faster. "This way," she gasped, turning down a passage to the left that ended in a massive metal door. "This leads to the enclosure. Oh, if only we can be in time!" Her slim fingers tore at a massive bolt that secured the door. "Here," said Dex, wrenching it open for her. And they stepped out into thin sunlight, onto a hard surface of reddish ground that was crisscrossed with innumerable rounded furrows like the tracks old-fashioned, fifty-passenger airplane wheels used to make on soft landing fields. * * * * * Greca shrieked, and pointed to the far end of the enclosure. Down there, flattened against the wall of the dome building, was Brand. And waddling toward him with a tread that caused the ground to quiver, was a mate to the hideous creature the Rogans had used to terrify Dex in the torture chamber. Dex leveled the tube he was carrying, swore, hit it frenziedly against his hand. "How do you work this damned thing, Greca--Oh! Like that! There--see if _that_ puts a sting in your hide!" The distant monster stopped its advance toward Brand. A raw white spot as big as a dinner plate leaped into being on one of its enormous hind legs. It whirled with an ear-splitting hiss, to see what thing was causing such pain in its rear. The frightful head whipped back at the end of the long neck, to nuzzle at the seared spot. Then the giant lizard turned toward Brand again. A second time Dex pressed the central coil that formed the handle of the tube, as Greca had showed him how to do. A second time the ray shot down the field to flick a chunk of flesh weighing many pounds from the monster's flank. And this time it definitely abandoned the quarry behind it. With a scream like the keening of a dozen steam whistles, it charged back over its tracks toward the distant pigmies that were inflicting such exasperating punishment on it. Dex swept the tube before him in a short half-circle. A smoking gash appeared suddenly in the vast fore-quarters of the monster. It stopped abruptly, its clawed feet plowing along the ground with the force of its momentum. An instant it stood there. Then, with its head swinging from side to side and lowered so that its looped neck dragged on the reddish, dusty ground, it began to back away from the source of its hurt, bellowing and hissing its rage and bewilderment. "Brand!" shouted Dex. "This end! Run, while I hold the thing off!" Brand began to race down the long enclosure, ten feet to a leap. The great lizard darted after him, like a cat after an escaping mouse; but a flick of the tube sent it bellowing and screaming back to its corner. "Dex!" gasped Brand. "Thank God!" For a moment he leaned, white and shaken, against the wall. Then Greca caught his hand in both of hers, and Dex put his arm supportingly around his shoulder. They retreated back through the doorway behind them, and slid the bolt across the metal door. CHAPTER X _The "Tank Scheme"_ "Thank God you came when you did," repeated Brand. Then, with a moment in which, figuratively, to get his feet back on earth, the wonder of Dex's appearance struck him. "How did you manage to get away?" he asked. "I was sure--I thought--when they dragged you out of the tower room I wouldn't see you again--" Rapidly Dex gave an account of his ordeal in the torture chamber, telling Brand in a few words how he had attempted to win free of the Rogans, how he had almost succeeded, only to be caught again and clamped to the death-plate on the wall. "But just as the big fellow was about to cook me for good and all," he concluded, "something happened to the current, and to the gravity at the same time--" "That was when I pulled the lever in the dome building!" exclaimed Brand. He told of what had befallen him in the Rogan power-house. "That lever, Dex!" he said swiftly. "It's the keynote of the whole business. It absolutely controls the pull of gravity, and Lord knows what else besides. If we could only get at it again! Perhaps we could not only shut it off so that Jupiter's pull would function again, but also reverse the process so its gravity would be _increased_! Think what that would mean! Every Rogan in the red empire stretched out and immovable, possibly crushed in by his own weight!" "It's a wonderful thought," sighed Dex; while Greca's eyes glowed with a sudden hope for her enslaved race, "but I don't see how we could ever--" He stopped; and glanced in alarm down the passage behind them. Greca and Brand, hearing the same soft noise, whirled to look, too. * * * * * Far down the passage, just sneaking around the bend, was a group of Rogan guards, each armed with a death-tube. "Back to the pen!" cried Brand. He slid the bolt, and jerked the door open. They rushed into the walled enclosure again, the slamming of the door behind them cutting off the enraged squeals of the Rogans. "This isn't going to mean anything but a short delay, I'm afraid," said Brand, clenching his fists in an agony of futility. "They'll be in here in a minute, and get us like trapped rats." "Not before we get a lot of them," said Dex grimly. "But that isn't enough, man! We don't want to die, no matter how decently we do it. We've won free, and stayed free this long; now, somehow, we've got to reach our ship and get back to Earth to warn them of the danger that hides here for our planet!" He strode tensely up and down, smacking his fist into his palm. "The lever!" he exclaimed. "That lever! It's our only answer! If we could get to it.... But how can we? We couldn't break into the dome, now the Rogans are on the watch for us, with anything less than a charge of explosives. Or a tank. God, how I'd like to have an old-fashioned, fifty-ton army tank here now!" Greca exclaimed aloud as Brand's fleeting mental picture of one of Earth's unwieldy, long-discarded war tanks registered on her brain. "There is the great beast there," she said hesitantly, pointing a slim forefinger at the huge lizard that had backed into a far corner and was regarding them out of dull, savage eyes. Then she shook her head. "But that is impossible. Impossible!" * * * * * The men stared at her, with dawning realization in their minds. Then they gazed at each other. "Of course," said Brand. "Of course! Greca, you're marvelous! Wish we had a tank? Why, we've got one! A four-legged mountain of meat that ought to be able to plow through the side of that dome like a battering ram through cardboard!" "But it's not possible," replied Greca, her head dropping dejectedly. "My people, as driven slaves, till the fields with great animals that were trapped in the surrounding jungles. They harness other great animals to haul burdens. But none of the beasts are like _this_ one. This kind cannot be tamed or harnessed. It is too ferocious. It is used only as a scourge of fear, to crush us into complete submission." "Can't be tamed?" Brand said. "We'll see about that! Come on, Dex." "Just a minute," said Dex. He flattened against the wall, motioning them to do the same. Then he leveled his tube at the door. Slowly, cautiously, the door began to swing back; and the Rogan that Dex had heard fumbling with the bolt stuck his huge head out to locate the escaped prisoners. Dex pressed the release coil of his tube. Without a sound, the Rogan slumped to the ground, a smoking cavity in its shoulders at the spot where its head had been set. In an instant the body, too, disappeared; an upward coiling wisp of black smoke marking its vanishing. Another Rogan, tiptoeing out, met the same fate; and another. And then the door was banged shut again, and the bolt ground into place on the inside. "That'll teach 'em to be careful how they try to rush us from _that_ door," said Dex, through set teeth. "Now let's see if that tank scheme of ours can be worked." * * * * * He picked up a tube dropped by one of the Rogans, and handed it to Brand; showing him which coil to press to get full force, as Greca had in turn informed him. "Down the field," commanded Brand. "We'll go about thirty yards apart, and try to herd this brute back through the walls of the dome building. Once it's inside, we'll try to rush to the lever before the Rogans can down us, and jam the thing past its terminal peg and into reverse action. I don't know that there _is_ a reverse to it--but we can try. "Greca dear,"--the girl started at the warmth of his thought, and a faint pink rose to her pale cheeks--"you'd better stay by my side. Your place as hostage-priestess of your people wouldn't save you if those devils catch you now. Besides, you can keep your tube leveled at the doorway as we go, and discourage any Rogans who might pluck up courage to try coming out again." They started down the field toward the nightmare thing that snarled and hissed in its corner. On one side of the big enclosure walked Brand, with Greca close beside him, glancing continuously over her shoulder at the rear door, and holding her tube in readiness to check any charge the Rogans might attempt to make from the tower building. On the other side, keeping an equal pace, advanced Dex. With tubes of death as whips, and with death for themselves set as the stake for which they gambled, they went about their attempt to drive the brainless monster before them through the solid wall of the dome building. And there followed what was probably the strangest animal act the universe has ever witnessed. * * * * * The first thing to do was to rout the enormous lizard out of the corner where sullen fear had sent it squatting. Dex contrived to do that by standing next to the wall at its side, and sending a searing ray that just touched the scaly, tremendously thick hide. The monster bellowed deafeningly, and, with a spot smoking on its flank, waddled sideways to the center of the field. Its head and swaying long neck faced the Earthmen and its back was against the wall of the dome building. To that extent, at least, they had the creature placed; but they soon found that the struggle had only just begun. Brand got far enough around to focus his tube on the tip of the huge tail, in an effort to swing the gigantic thing about. There was an unearthly shriek from the colossal beast, and a foot and a half of its tail disappeared. "Careful," called Dex, his jaw set and grim as the monster lashed out in its wrath. "If you bore in too long with that tube there'll be nothing left of our tank but a cloud of smoke." Brand nodded, wordlessly, walking on the balls of his feet like a boxer, holding himself ready to swerve the thing should it charge them. Which--next instant--it did! With a whistling bellow it gathered its tons of weight and thundered with incredible quickness at the gnats that were stinging its flanks and tail. Desperately Brand played the tube across the vast chest, scoring a smouldering gash in the scale-covered flesh just above the gash Dex had seared a few moments before. "Sorry, old fellow," Brand muttered to the screaming beast. "We hate to bait you like this, but it has to be done. Come on, now, through that wall behind you, and give us a chance at the lever." * * * * * But through the wall behind it the vast creature, not unnaturally, refused to go! It darted from side to side. Backward and forward. Up to the wall, only to back bewilderedly away from it. And constantly the tubes flicked their blistering, maddening rays along its monstrous sides and tail, as the Earthmen tried to guide it into the wall. "Hope there's enough left of it to do the trick," said Brand, white-lipped. The monster was smoking in a dozen spots now, and several of the hump-like scales on its back had been burned away till the vast spine looked like a giant saw that was missing a third of its teeth. "God, I'm thinking we'll kill it before we can drive it through that wall!" Greca nodded soberly, keeping her eyes on the distant door to their rear. Twice that door had been opened, and twice she had directed the death rays into its opening to mow down the gangling figures behind it. But she had said nothing of this to her man. He was busy enough with his own task! "The door to the dome--" Dex shouted suddenly. But Brand merely nodded, even as a discharge from his tube annihilated the Rogan that had appeared in the doorway before them. He had seen that door stealthily opening even before Dex had. "It had better be soon, Dex!" he called. "Rogans in front of us--Rogans behind us--and--look out! On your side of the fence, there!" Dex whirled in time to pick off a grotesque, pipe-like figure that had suddenly appeared on the broad wall of the enclosure. Then he turned to the frenzied problem of driving the monster through the building wall. "The thing's going mad, Brand!" he cried, his voice high-pitched and brittle. "Watch out!" * * * * * It was only too evident that his statement was true. The baited monster, harried blindly this way and that, hounded against the blank wall behind it by something that bit chunks of living flesh out of its legs and sides, was losing whatever instinctive mental balance it had ever had. Its dimly functioning brain, probably no larger than a walnut in that gigantic skull, ceased more and more to guide it. With a rasping scream that set the Earthmen's teeth on edge, it charged for the wall on Dex's side. Dex just managed to swerve it with a blast from the tube so prolonged that half its great lower jaw fell away. At this the titanic thing went wholly, colossally mad! It whirled toward Brand, jerking around again as a searing on that side jarred its dull sensory nerves, then headed at last straight toward the stone wall of the dome building. With the rays from both tubes flicking it like monstrous spurs, it charged insanely toward the bulge of the circular wall. With all its tons and tons of weight it crashed against the stonework. There was a thunderous crackling noise, and the wall sagged in perceptibly, while the metal roof bent to accommodate the new curvature of its supporting beams. The monstrous lizard, jerked off its huge legs by the impact, staggered up and retreated toward the two men. But again the maddening pain in its hindquarters sent it careening toward the building wall. This time it raised high up on its hind legs in a blind effort to climb over it. "God, it must be five stories tall!" ejaculated Brand. Thunderingly its forelegs came down on the edge of the roof. * * * * * There was another deafening crash of stone and shrieking of torn metal. Just under the cornice, the wall sagged away from the roof and the top rows of heavy stone blocks slithered inward. "Again!" shouted Brand. His tube was pointing almost continuously now at the metal door leading from the dome building. The Rogans inside, at the shocks that were battering down a section of their great building, were all trying to get out to the yard at once. In a stream they rushed for the doorway. And in loathsome heaps they fell at the impact of the ray and shriveled to nothingness on the bombarded threshold. "Once more--" Brand repeated, his voice hoarse and tense. And as though the monster heard and understood, it rushed again with all its vast weight and force against the wall in a mad effort to escape the things that were blasting the living flesh from its colossal framework. This charge was the last. With a roaring crash a section of the building thirty yards across went back and down, leaving the massive roof to sag threateningly on its battered truss-work. * * * * * It was as though the side of an ant-heap had been ripped away. Inside the domed building hundreds of Rogans ran this way and that on their elongated legs, squealing in their staccato, high-pitched tongue. With blind fury the mad monster charged in through the gaping hole it had battered for itself. In all directions the Rogans scattered. Then an authoritative tall figure with a tube in each of its four sucker-disks, whipped out a command and pointed to the great coils which lay immediately in the berserk monster's path. The command restored some sort of order. Losing their fear of the beast in their greater fear of the damage it might do, the Rogans massed to stop it before it could demolish the Rogan heart of power. At this point Brand saw an opening of the kind he had been praying for. The Rogans had retreated before the terrific charge of the monster in such a way that the space between its vast bulk and the control board was clear. "After me!" he shouted to Dex. "One of us has got to reach that lever while the creature's still there to shield us!" The two Earthmen dashed through the jagged hole in the wall and raced to the control board just as the huge lizard, a smoking mass, sank to the floor. Brand gazed almost fearfully at the lever-slot. Was there a reverse to the gravity-control action? There was room in the slot for the lever to be pulled down below the neutral point, if that meant anything.... * * * * * Behind them the great bulk of the dead lizard was disappearing with incredible quickness under the rays of the tubes directed on it. Now the pumpkin-shaped heads on the opposite side were visible through a fleeting glimpse of a skeleton that was like the framework of a skyscraper. And now the colossal bones themselves were melting, while over everything hung a pall of greasy black smoke. "Hurry, for God's sake!" gasped Dex. Brand threw down the lever till it stuck. At once that invisible ocean poured crushingly over them, throwing them to their knees and sweeping the Rogans flat on their hideous faces just as half a hundred tubes were flashing down to point at the Earthmen. "More--if you can!" grated Dex, whirling this way and that and spraying the massed Rogans with his death-dealing tube. Dozens went up in smoke under that discharge; but other dozens remained to raise themselves laboriously and slowly level their suddenly ponderous weapons at the Earthmen. Brand set his jaw and threw all his weight on the lever. It bent a little, caught at the neutral point--and then jammed down an appreciable distance beyond it. * * * * * Instantly the blue streamers, that had stopped their humming progress from coil to coil with the movement of the switch to neutral, started again in reversed direction. And instantly the invisible ocean pressed down with appalling, devastating force. Greca and Brand and Dex were flattened to the floor as if by blankets of lead. And the scattered Rogans about them ceased all movement whatever. "Oh," sobbed Greca, fighting for breath. "Oh!" "We can't stand this," panted Dex. "We've fixed the Rogans, all right. But we've fixed ourselves, too! That lever has to go up a bit." Brand nodded, finding his head almost too heavy for his neck to move. Sweat beaded his forehead--sweat that trickled heavily off his face like drops of liquid metal. With a tremendous struggle he got to his knees beneath the master-switch. There he found it impossible to raise his arms; but, leaning back against the control board and so getting a little support, he contrived to lift his body up enough to touch the down-slanting lever with his head and move it back along its slot a fraction of an inch. The giant coils hummed a note lower; and some of the smashing weight was relieved. "That does it, I think," Brand panted, his voice husky with exhaustion and triumph. He began to crawl laboriously toward the nearest street exit. "On our way!" he said vibrantly. "To the space ship! We leave for Earth at once!" * * * * * Slowly, fighting the sagging weight of their bodies, the two Earthmen inched their way to the street, helping Greca as they went. Among the sprawled forms of the Rogans they crept, with great dull eyes rolling helplessly to observe their progress, and with feeble squeals of rage and fear and malediction following their slow path. On the street a strange and terrible sight met their eyes. Strewn over the metal paving like wheat stalks crushed flat by a hurricane, were thousands of Rogans. Not a muscle of their pipe-like arms or legs could they move. But the gravity that crushed them rigidly to the ground did not quite hold motionless the shorter and more sturdily built slaves. Among the thousands of squealing, panting Rogans that lay as though paralyzed on the metal paving, crawled equal thousands of Greca's enslaved people. Their eyes flamed with fanatic hate. And methodically--not knowing what had caused their loathed masters to be stricken helpless, and not caring as long as they _were_ helpless--the slaves were seeking out the shock-tubes that here and there had fallen from the clutch of Rogan guards. Already many had found them; and everywhere gangling, slimy bodies were melting in oily black smoke that almost instantly vanished in thin air. As it was in these streets and in the great square in the center of which rested the Earthmen's ship, just so, they knew, was it being repeated all over the red empire. Slowly crawling, fiercely exulting slaves were exterminating the tyrannous things that had held them so long in dreadful bondage! Before the sun should set on another flashing Jovian day there would be no Rogan left in the red spot. * * * * * "And so it ends," said Brand with a great sigh. He moved over beside Greca, and touched her lovely bare shoulders. They were shaking convulsively, those shoulders; and she had buried her face in her hands to keep from gazing at the ghastly carnage. Brand pressed her to him. "It's terrible--yes. But think what it means! The knell of all the Rogans been sounded to-day. As soon as the secret of these death-tubes has been analyzed by our science and provided against, my friend and I will return from Earth with a force that shall clear the universe of the slimy devils. Meanwhile, your people are safe here; with the gravity what it is, no Rogan attacking hordes can land." They crawled tortuously over the square to the space ship. Brand turned again to Greca; and now in his eyes was a look that needed no language of mind or tongue for its complete expression. "Will you come to Earth with me, Greca, and stay by my side till we return to set your people in power again?" Greca shook her head, slowly, reluctantly. "My people need leaders now. I must stay and help direct them in their new freedom. But you--you'll come back with the others from Earth?" "Try and stop him!" grinned Dex. "And try and stop me, too! From what I know now of the way they grow 'em on your satellite"--his eyes rested on Greca's beauty with an admiration that turned her to rosy confusion--"I'd say I'd found the ideal spot to settle down in!" Brand laughed. "He's answered for me too. And now, a salute that is used on Earth to express a promise...." He kissed her--to her utter astonishment and perplexity, but to her dawning pleasure. "Good-by for a little while." The two Earthmen hoisted themselves heavily over the sill of the control room of their ship, and crawled inside. They secured the trap-door, and turned on the air-rectifiers. Brand moved to the controls, waved to Greca, who was smiling at him through the glass panel, and pointed the ship on its triumphant, four hundred million mile journey home. * * * * *