The Essential E. E. Smith Anthology

The Galaxy Primes
Masters of Space
The Skylark of Space
Skylark Three
Spacehounds of IPC
Subspace Survivors
Triplanetary
The Vortex Blaster

       THE GALAXY PRIMES

By E. E. SMITH

CHAPTER 1

Her hair was a brilliant green. So was her spectacularly filled halter. So were her tight short-shorts, her lipstick, and the lacquer on her finger-and toe-nails. As she strolled into the Main of the starship, followed hesitantly by the other girl, she drove a mental probe at the black-haired, powerfully-built man seated at the instrument-banked console.

Blocked.

Then at the other, slenderer man who was rising to his feet from the pilot's bucket seat. His guard was partially down; he was telepathing a pleasant, if somewhat reserved greeting to both newcomers.

She turned to her companion and spoke aloud. "So _these_ are the system's best." The emphasis was somewhere between condescension and sneer. "Not much to choose between, I'd say ... 'port me a tenth-piece, Clee? Heads, I take the tow-head."

She flipped the coin dexterously. "Heads it is, Lola, so I get Jim--James James James the Ninth himself. You have the honor of pairing with Clee--or should I say His Learnedness Right the Honorable Director Doctor Cleander Simmsworth Garlock, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Science, Prime Operator, President and First Fellow of the Galaxian Society, First Fellow of the Gunther Society, Fellow of the Institute of Paraphysics, of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, of the College of Mathematics, of the Congress of Psionicists, and of all the other top-bracket brain-gangs you ever heard of? Also, for your information, his men have given him a couple of informal degrees--P.D.Q. and S.O.B."

* * *

The big psionicist's expression of saturnine, almost contemptuous amusement had not changed; his voice came flat and cold. "The less you say, Doctor Bellamy, the better. Obstinate, swell-headed women give me an acute rectal pain. Pitching your curves over all the vizzies in space got you aboard, but it won't get you a thing from here on. And for your information, Doctor Bellamy, one more crack like that and I take you over my knee and blister your fanny."

"Try it, you big, clumsy, muscle-bound gorilla!" she jeered. "_That_ I want to see! Any time you want to get both arms broken at the elbows, just try it!"

"Now's as good a time as any. I like your spirit, babe, but I can't say a thing for your judgment." He got up and started purposefully toward her, but both non-combatants came between.

"Jet back, Clee!" James protested, both hands against the heavier man's chest. "What the hell kind of show is _that_ to put on?" And, simultaneously:

"Belle! Shame on you! Picking a fight already, and with nobody knows how many million people looking on! You know as well as I do that we may have to spend the rest of our lives together, so act like civilized beings--please--both of you! And don't...."

"Nobody's watching this but us," Garlock interrupted. "When pussy there started using her claws I cut the gun."

"That's what _you_ think," James said sharply, "but Fatso and his number one girl friend are coming in on the tight beam."

"Oh?" Garlock whirled toward the hitherto dark and silent three-dimensional communications instrument. The face of a bossy-looking woman was already bright.

"Garlock! How _dare_ you try to cut Chancellor Ferber off?" she demanded. Her voice was deep-pitched, blatant with authority. "Here you are, sir."

The woman's face shifted to one side and a man's appeared--a face to justify in full the nickname "Fatso."

"'Fatso', eh?" Chancellor Ferber snarled. Pale eyes glared from the fat face. "That costs you exactly one thousand credits, James."

"How much will this cost me, Fatso?" Garlock asked.

"Five thousand--and, since nobody can call me that deliberately, demotion three grades and probation for three years. Make a note, Miss Foster."

"Noted, sir."

"Still sure we aren't going anywhere," Garlock said. "_What_ a brain!"

"Sure I'm sure!" Ferber gloated. "In a couple of hours I'm going to buy your precious starship in as junk. In the meantime, whether you like it or not, I'm going to watch your expression while you push all those pretty buttons and nothing happens."

"The trouble with you, Fatso," Garlock said dispassionately, as he opened a drawer and took out a pair of cutting pliers, "is that all your strength is in your glands and none in your alleged brain. There are a lot of things--including a lot of tests--you know nothing about. How much will you see after I've cut one wire?"

"You wouldn't dare!" the fat man shouted. "I'd fire you--blacklist you all over the sys...."

Voice and images died away and Garlock turned to the two women in the Main. He began to smile, but his mental shield did not weaken.

"You've got a point there, Lola," he said, going on as though Ferber's interruption had not occurred. "Not that I blame either Belle or myself. If anything was ever calculated to drive a man nuts, this farce was. As the only female Prime in the system, Belle should have been in automatically--she had no competition. And to anybody with three brain cells working the other place lay between you, Lola, and the other three female Ops in the age group.

"But no. Ferber and the rest of the Board--stupidity _uber alles_!--think all us Ops and Primes are psycho and that the ship will never even lift. So they made a Grand Circus of it. But they succeeded in one thing--with such abysmal stupidity so rampant I'm getting more and more reconciled to the idea of our not getting back--at least, for a long, long time."

"Why, they said we had a very good chance...." Lola began.

"Yeah, and they said a lot of even bigger damn lies than that one. Have you read any of my papers?"

"I'm sorry. I'm not a mathematician."

"Our motion will be purely at random. If it isn't, I'll eat this whole ship. We won't get back until Jim and I work out something to steer us with. But they must be wondering no end, outside, what the score is, so I'm willing to call it a draw--temporarily--and let 'em in again. How about it, Belle?"

"A draw it is--temporarily." Neither, however, even offered to shake hands.

"Smile pretty, everybody," Garlock said, and pressed a stud.

"... the matter? What's the matter? Oh...." the worried voice of the System's ace newscaster came in. "Power failure _already_?"

"No," Garlock replied. "I figured we had a couple of minutes of privacy coming, if you can understand the meaning of the word. Now all four of us tell everybody who is watching or listening _au revoir_ or good-bye, whichever it may turn out to be." He reached for the switch.

"Wait a minute!" the newscaster demanded. "Leave it on until the last poss...." His voice broke off sharply.

"Turn it back on!" Belle ordered.

"Nix."

"Scared?" she sneered.

"You chirped it, bird-brain. I'm scared purple. So would you be, if you had three brain cells working in that glory-hound's head of yours. Get set, everybody, and we'll take off."

"Stop it, both of you!" Lola exclaimed. "Where do you want us to sit, and do we strap down?"

"You sit here; Belle at that plate beside Jim. Yes, strap down. There probably won't be any shock, and we should land right side up, but there's no sense in taking chances. Sure your stuff's all aboard?"

"Yes, it's in our rooms."

The four secured themselves; the two men checked, for the dozenth time, their instruments. The pilot donned his scanner. The ship lifted effortlessly, noiselessly. Through the atmosphere; through and far beyond the stratosphere. It stopped.

"Ready, Clee?" James licked his lips.

"As ready as I ever will be, I guess. Shoot!"

The pilot's right hand, forefinger outstretched, moved unenthusiastically toward a red button on his panel ... slowed ... stopped. He stared into his scanner at the Earth so far below.

"Hit it, Jim!" Garlock snapped. "_Hit_ it, for goodness sake, before we _all_ lose our nerve!"

James stabbed convulsively at the button, and in the very instant of contact--instantaneously; without a fractional microsecond of time-lapse--their familiar surroundings disappeared. Or, rather, and without any sensation of motion, of displacement, or of the passage of any time whatsoever, the planet beneath them was no longer their familiar Earth. The plates showed no familiar stars nor patterns of heavenly bodies. The brightly-shining sun was very evidently not their familiar Sol.

"Well--we went _somewhere_ ... but not to Alpha Centauri, not much to our surprise." James gulped twice; then went on, speaking almost jauntily now that the attempt had been made and had failed. "So now it's up to you, Clee, as Director of Project Gunther and captain of the good ship _Pleiades_, to boss the more-or-less simple--more, I hope--job of getting us back to Tellus."

* * *

Science, both physical and paraphysical, had done its best. Gunther's Theorems, which define the electromagnetic and electrogravitic parameters pertaining to the annihilation of distance, had been studied, tested, and applied to the full. So had the Psionic Corollaries; which, while not having the status of paraphysical laws, do allow computation of the qualities and magnitudes of the stresses required for any given application of the Gunther Effect.

The planning of the starship _Pleiades_ had been difficult in the extreme; its construction almost impossible. While it was practically a foregone conclusion that any man of the requisite caliber would already be a member of the Galaxian Society, the three planets and eight satellites were screened, psionicist by psionicist, to select the two strongest and most versatile of their breed.

These two, Garlock and James, were heads of departments of, and under iron-clad contract to, vast Solar System Enterprises, Inc., the only concern able and willing to attempt the building of the first starship.

Alonzo P. Ferber, Chancellor of SSE, however, would not risk a tenth-piece of the company's money on such a bird-brained scheme. Himself a Gunther First, he believed implicitly that Firsts were in fact tops in Gunther ability; that these few self-styled "Operators" and "Prime Operators" were either charlatans or self-deluded crackpots. Since he could not feel that so-called "Operator Field," no such thing did or could exist. No Gunther starship could ever, possibly, work.

He did loan Garlock and James to the Galaxians, but that was as far as he would go. For salaries and for labor, for research and material, for trials and for errors; the Society paid and paid and paid.

Thus the starship _Pleiades_ had cost the Galaxian Society almost a thousand million credits.

Garlock and James had worked on the ship since its inception. They were to be of the crew; for over a year it had been taken for granted that would be its only crew.

* * *

As the _Pleiades_ neared completion, however, it became clearer and clearer that the displacement-control presented an unsolved, and quite possibly an insoluble, problem. It was mathematically certain that, when the Gunther field went on, the ship would be displaced instantaneously to some location in space having precisely the Gunther coordinates required by that particular field. One impeccably rigorous analysis showed that the ship would shift into the nearest solar system possessing an Earth-type planet; which was believed to be Alpha Centauri and which was close enough to Sol so that orientation would be automatic and the return to Earth a simple matter.

Since the Gunther Effect did in fact annihilate distance, however, another group of mathematicians, led by Garlock and James, proved with equal rigor that the point of destination was no more likely to be any one given Gunther point than any other one of the myriads of billions of equiguntherial points undoubtedly existent throughout the length, breadth, and thickness of our entire normal space-time continuum.

The two men would go anyway, of course. Carefully-calculated pressures would make them go. It was neither necessary nor desirable, however, for them to go alone.

Wherefore the planets and satellites were combed again; this time to select two women--the two most highly-gifted psionicists in the eighteen-to-twenty-five age group. Thus, if the _Pleiades_ returned successfully to Earth, well and good. If she did not, the four selectees would found, upon some far-off world, a race much abler than the humanity of Earth; since eighty-three percent of Earth's dwellers had psionic grades lower than Four.

This search, with its attendant fanfare and studiedly blatant publicity, was so planned and engineered that two selected women did not arrive at the spaceport until a bare fifteen minutes before the scheduled time of take-off. Thus it made no difference whether the women liked the men or not, or vice versa; or whether or not any of them really wanted to make the trip. Pressures were such that each of them had to go, whether he or she wanted to or not.

* * *

"Cut the rope, Jim, and let the old bucket drop," Garlock said. "Not too close. Before we make any kind of contact we'll have to do some organizing. These instruments," he waved at his console, "show that ours is the only Operator Field in this whole region of space. Hence, there are no Operators and no Primes. That means that from now until we get back to Tellus...."

"_If_ we get back to Tellus," Belle corrected, sweetly.

"_Until_ we get back to Tellus there will be no Gunthering aboard this ship...."

"_What?_" Belle broke in again. "Have you lost your mind?"

"There will be little if any lepping, and nothing else at all. At the table, if we want sugar, we will reach for it or have it passed. We will pick up things, such as cigarettes, with our fingers. We will carry lighters and use them. When we go from place to place, we will walk. Is that clear?"

"You seem to be talking English," Belle sneered, "but the words don't make sense."

"I didn't think you were that stupid." Eyes locked and held. Then Garlock grinned savagely. "Okay. You tell her, Lola, in words of as few syllables as possible."

"Why, to get used to it, of course," Lola explained, while Belle glared at Garlock in frustrated anger. "So as not to reveal anything we don't have to."

"Thank you, Miss Montandon, you may go to the head of the class. All monosyllables except two. That should make it clear, even to Miss Bellamy."

"You ... you _beast_!" Belle drove a tight-beamed thought. "I was never so insulted in my life!"

"You asked for it. Keep on asking for it and you'll keep on getting it." Then, aloud, to all three, "In emergencies, of course, anything goes. We will now proceed with business." He paused, then went on, bitingly, "If possible."

"One minute, please!" Belle snapped. "Just why, Captain Garlock, are you insisting on oral communication, when lepping is so much faster and better? It's stupid--reactionary. Don't you ever lep?"

"With Jim, on business, yes; with women, no more than I have to. What I think is nobody's business but mine."

"What a way to run a ship! Or a project!"

"Running this project is my business, not yours; and if there's any one thing in the entire universe it does _not_ need, it's a female exhibitionist. Besides your obvious qualifications to be one of the Eves in case of Ultimate Contingency...." he broke off and stared at her, his contemptuous gaze traveling slowly, dissectingly, from her toes to the topmost wave of her hair-do.

"Forty-two, twenty, forty?" he sneered.

"You flatter me." Her glare was an almost tangible force; her voice was controlled fury.

"Thirty-nine, twenty-two, thirty-five. Five seven. One thirty-five. If any of it's any of your business, which it isn't. You should be discussing brains and ability, not vital statistics."

"Brains? You? No, I'll take that back. As a Prime, you _have_ got a brain--one that really works. What do _you_ think you're good for on this project? What can you do?"

"I can do anything any man ever born can do, and do it better!"

"Okay. Compute a Gunther field that will put us two hundred thousand feet directly above the peak of that mountain."

"That isn't fair--not that I expected fairness from you--and you know it. That doesn't take either brains or ability...."

"Oh, no?"

"No. Merely highly specialized training that you know I haven't had. Give me a five-tape course on it and I'll come closer than either you or James; for a hundred credits a shot."

"I'll do just that. Something you _are_ supposed to know, then. How would you go about making first contact?"

* * *

"Well, I wouldn't do it the way _you_ would--by knocking down the first native I saw, putting my foot on his face, and yelling 'Bow down, you stupid, ignorant beasts, and worship me, the Supreme God of the Macrocosmic Universe'!"

"Try again, Belle, that one missed me by...."

"Hold it, both of you!" James broke in. "What the hell are you trying to prove? How about cutting out this cat-and-dog act and getting some work done?"

"You've got a point there," Garlock admitted, holding his temper by a visible effort. "Sorry, Jim. Belle, what were you briefed for?"

"To understudy you." She, too, fought her temper down. "To learn everything about Project Gunther. I have a whole box of tapes in my room, including advanced Gunther math and first-contact techniques. I'm to study them during all my on-watch time unless you assign other duties."

"No matter what your duties may be, you'll have to have time to study. If you don't find what you want in your own tapes--and you probably won't, since Ferber and his Miss Foster ran the selections--use our library. It's good--designed to carry on our civilization. Miss Montandon? No, that's silly, the way we're fixed. Lola?"

"I'm to learn how to be Doctor James'...."

"Jim, please, Lola," James said. "And call him Clee."

"I'd like that." She smiled winningly. "And my friends call me 'Brownie'."

"I see why they would. It fits like a coat of lacquer."

* * *

It did. Her hair was a dark, lustrous brown, as were her eyebrows. Her eyes were brown. Her skin, too--her dark red playsuit left little to the imagination--was a rich and even brown. Originally fairly dark, it had been tanned to a more-than-fashionable depth of color by naked sun-bathing and by practically-naked outdoor sports. A couple of inches shorter than the green-haired girl, she too had a figure to make any sculptor drool.

"I'm to be Dr. Jim's assistant. I have a thousand tapes, more or less, to study, too. It'll be quite a while, I'm afraid, before I can be of much use, but I'll do the best I can."

"If we had hit Alpha Centauri that arrangement would have been good, but as we are, it isn't." Garlock frowned in thought, his heavy black eyebrows almost meeting above his finely-chiseled aquiline nose. "Since neither Jim nor I need an assistant any more than we need tails, it was designed to give you girls something to do. But out here, lost, there's work for a dozen trained specialists and there are only four of us. So we shouldn't duplicate effort. Right? You first, Belle."

"Are you asking me or telling me?" she asked. "And that's a fair question. Don't read anything into it that isn't there. With your attitude, I want information."

"I am asking you," he replied, carefully. "For your information, when I know what should be done, I give orders. When I don't know, as now, I ask advice. If I like it, I follow it. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough. We're apt to need any number of specialists."

"Lola?"

"Of course we shouldn't duplicate. What shall I study?"

"That's what we must figure out. We can't do it exactly, of course; all we can do now is to set up a rough scheme. Jim's job is the only one that's definite. He'll have to work full time on nebular configurations. If we hit inhabited planets he'll have to add their star-charts to his own. That leaves three of us to do all the other work of a survey. Ideally, we would cover all the factors that would be of use in getting us back to Tellus, but since we don't know what those factors are.... Found out anything yet, Jim?"

"A little. Tellus-type planet, apparently strictly so. Oceans and continents. Lots of inhabitants--farms, villages, all sizes of cities. Not close enough to say definitely, but inhabitants seem to be humanoid, if not human."

"Hold her here. Besides astronomy, which is all yours, what do we need most?"

"We should have enough to classify planets and inhabitants, so as to chart a space-trend if there is any. I'd say the most important ones would be geology, stratigraphy, paleontology, oceanography, xenology, anthropology, ethnology, vertebrate biology, botany, and at least some ecology."

"That's about the list I was afraid of. But there are only three of us. The fields you mention number much more."

"Each of you will have to be a lot of specialists in one, then. I'd say the best split would be planetology, xenology, and anthropology--each, of course, stretched all out of shape to cover dozens of related and non-related specialties."

"Good enough. Xenology, of course, is mine. Contacts, liaison, politics, correlation, and so on, as well as studying the non-human life forms--including as many lower animals and plants as possible. I'll make a stab at it. Now, Belle, since you're a Prime and Lola's an Operator, you get the next toughest job. Planetography."

"Why not?" Belle smiled and began to act as one of the party. "All I know about it is a hazy idea of what the word means, but I'll start studying as soon as we get squared away."

"Thanks. That leaves anthropology to you, Lola. Besides, that's your line, isn't it?"

"Yes. Sociological Anthropology. I have my M.S. in it, and am--was, I mean--working for my Ph.D. But as Jim said, it isn't only the one specialty. You want me, I take it, to cover humanoid races, too?"

"Check. You and Jim both, then, will know what you're doing, while Belle and I are trying to play ours by ear."

"Where do we draw the line between humanoid and non-human?"

"In case of doubt we'll confer. That covers it as much as we can, I think. Take us down, Jim--and be on your toes to take evasive action fast."

* * *

The ship dropped rapidly toward an airport just outside a fairly large city. Fifty thousand--forty thousand--thirty thousand feet.

"Calling strange spaceship--you must be a spaceship, in spite of your tremendous, hitherto-considered-impossible mass--" a thought impinged on all four Tellurian minds, "do you read me?"

"I read you clearly. This is the Tellurian spaceship _Pleiades_, Captain Garlock commanding, asking permission to land and information as to landing conventions." He did not have to tell James to stop the ship; James had already done so.

"I was about to ask you to hold position; I thank you for having done so. Hold for inspection and type-test, please. We will not blast unless you fire first. A few minutes, please."

* * *

A group of twelve jet fighters took off practically vertically upward and climbed with fantastic speed. They leveled off a thousand feet below the _Pleiades_ and made a flying circle. Up and into the ring thus formed there lumbered a large, clumsy-looking helicopter.

"We have no record of any planet named 'Tellus'; nor of any such ship as yours. Of such incredible mass and with no visible or detectable means of support or of propulsion. Not from this part of the galaxy, certainly ... could it be that intergalactic travel is actually possible? But excuse me, Captain Garlock, none of that is any of my business; which is to determine whether or not you four Tellurian human beings are compatible with, and thus acceptable to, our humanity of Hodell ... but you do not seem to have a standard televideo testing-box aboard."

"No, sir; only our own tri-di and teevee."

"You must be examined by means of a standard box. I will rise to your level and teleport one across to you. It is self-powered and fully automatic."

"You needn't rise, sir. Just toss the box out of your 'copter into the air. We'll take it from there." Then, to James, "Take it, Jim."

"Oh? You can lift large masses against much gravity?" The alien was all attention. "I have not known that such power existed. I will observe with keen interest."

"I have it," James said. "Here it is."

"Thank you, sir," Garlock said to the alien. Then, to Lola: "You've been reading these--these Hodellians?"

"The officer in the helicopter and those in the fighters, yes. Most of them are Gunther Firsts."

"Good girl. The set's coming to life--watch it."

The likeness of the alien being became clear upon the alien screen; visible from the waist up. While humanoid, the creature was very far indeed from being human. He--at least, it had masculine rudimentary nipples--had double shoulders and four arms. His skin was a vividly intense cobalt blue. His ears were black, long, and highly dirigible. His eyes, a flaming red in color, were large and vertically-slitted, like a cat's. He had no hair at all. His nose was large and Roman; his jaw was square, almost jutting; his bright-yellow teeth were clean and sharp.

After a minute of study the alien said: "Although your vessel is so entirely alien that nothing even remotely like it is on record, you four are completely human and, if of compatible type, acceptable. Are there any other living beings aboard with you?"

"Excepting micro-organisms, none."

"Such life is of no importance. Approach, please, one of you, and grasp with a hand the projecting metal knob."

With a little trepidation, Garlock did so. He felt no unusual sensation at the contact.

"All four of you are compatible and we accept you. This finding is surprising in the extreme, as you are the first human beings of record who grade higher than what you call Gunther Two ... or Gunther Second?"

"Either one; the terms are interchangeable."

"You have minds of tremendous development and power; definitely superior even to my own. However, there is no doubt that physically you are perfectly compatible with our humanity. Your blood will be of great benefit to it. You may land. Goodbye."

"Wait, please. How about landing conventions? And visiting restrictions and so on? And may we keep this box? We will be glad to trade you something for it, if we have anything you would like to have?"

"Ah, I should have realized that your customs would be widely different from ours. Since you have been examined and accepted, there are no restrictions. You will not act against humanity's good. Land where you please, go where you please, do what you please as long as you please. Take up permanent residence or leave as soon as you please. Marry if you like, or simply breed--your unions with this planet's humanity will be fertile. Keep the box without payment. As Guardians of Humanity we Arpalones do whatever small favors we can. Have I made myself clear?"

"Abundantly so. Thank you, sir."

"Now I really must go. Goodbye."

Garlock glanced into his plate. The jets had disappeared, the helicopter was falling rapidly away. He wiped his brow.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said.

* * *

When his amazement subsided he turned to the business at hand. "Lola, do you check me that this planet is named Hodell, that it is populated by creatures exactly like us? Arpalones?"

"Exactly, except they aren't 'creatures'. They are humanoids, and very fine people."

"You'd think so, of course ... correction accepted. Well, let's take advantage of their extraordinarily hospitable invitation and go down. Cut the rope, Jim."

* * *

The airport was very large, and was divided into several sections, each of which was equipped with runways and/or other landing facilities to suit one class of craft--propellor jobs, jets, or helicopters. There were even a few structures that looked like rocket pits.

"Where are you going to sit down, Jim? With the 'copters or over by the blast-pits?"

"With the 'copters, I think. Since I can place her to within a couple of inches. I'll put her squarely into that far corner, where she'll be out of everybody's way."

"No concrete out there," Garlock said. "But the ground seems good and solid."

"We'd better not land on concrete," James grinned. "Unless it's terrific stuff we'd smash it. On bare ground, the worst we can do is sink in a foot or so, and that won't hurt anything."

"Check. A few tons to the square foot, is all. Shall we strap down and hang onto our teeth?"

"Who do you think you're kidding, boss? Even though I've got to do this on manual, I won't tip over a half-piece standing on edge."

James stopped talking, pulled out his scanner, stuck his face into it. The immense starship settled downward toward the selected corner. There was no noise, no blast, no flame, no slightest visible or detectable sign of whatever force it was that was braking the thousands of tons of the vessel's mass in its miles-long, almost-vertical plunge to ground.

When the _Pleiades_ struck ground the impact was scarcely to be felt. When she came to rest, after settling into the ground her allotted "foot or so," there was no jar at all.

"Atmosphere, temperature, and so on, approximately Earth-normal," Garlock said. "Just as our friend said it would be."

James scanned the city and the field. "Our visit is kicking up a lot of excitement. Shall we go out?"

"Not yet!" Belle exclaimed. "I want to see how the women are dressed, first."

"So do I," Lola added, "and some other things besides."

Both women--Lola through her Operator's scanner; Belle by manipulating the ship's tremendous Operator Field by the sheer power of her Prime Operator's mind--stared eagerly at the crowd of people now beginning to stream across the field.

"As an anthropologist," Lola announced, "I'm not only surprised. I am shocked, annoyed, and disgruntled. Why, they're _exactly_ like white Tellurian human beings!"

"But _look_ at their _clothes_!" Belle insisted. "They're wearing anything and everything, from bikinis to coveralls!"

"Yes, but notice." This was the anthropological scientist speaking now. "Breasts and loins, covered. Faces, uncovered. Heads and feet and hands, either bare or covered. Ditto for legs up to there, backs, arms, necks and shoulders down to here, and torsos clear down to there. We'll not violate any conventions by going out as we are. Not even you, Belle. You first, Chief. Yours the high honor of setting first foot--the biggest foot we've got, too--on alien soil."

"To hell with that. We'll go out together."

"Wait a minute," Lola went on. "There's a funny-looking automobile just coming through the gate. The Press. Three men and two women. Two cameras, one walkie-talkie, and two microphones. The photog in the purple shirt is really a sharpie at lepping. Class Three, at least--possibly a Two."

"How about screens down enough to lep, boss?" Belle suggested. "Faster. We may need it."

"Check. I'm too busy to record, anyway--I'll log this stuff up tonight," and thoughts flew.

"Check me, Jim," Garlock flashed. "Telepathy, very good. On Gunther, the guy was right--no signs at all of any First activity, and very few Seconds."

"Check," James agreed.

"And Lola, those 'Guardians' out there. I thought they were the same as the Arpalone we talked to. They aren't. Not even telepathic. Same color scheme, is all."

"Right. Much more brutish. Much flatter cranium. Long, tearing canine teeth. Carnivorous. I'll call them just 'guardians' until we find out what they really are."

* * *

The press car arrived and the Tellurians disembarked--and, accidentally or not, it was Belle's green slipper that first touched ground. There was a terrific babel of thought, worse, even, than voices in similar case, in being so much faster. The reporters, all of them, wanted to know everything at once. How, what, where, when, and why. Also who. And all about Tellus and the Tellurian solar system. How did the visitors like Hodell? And all about Belle's green hair. And the photographers were prodigal of film, shooting everything from all possible angles.

"Hold it!" Garlock loosed a blast of thought that "silenced" almost the whole field. "We will have order, please. Lola Montandon, our anthropologist, will take charge. Keep it orderly, Lola, if you have to throw half of them off the field. I'm going over to Administration and check in. One of you reporters can come with me, if you like."

The man in the purple shirt got his bid in first. As the two men walked away together, Garlock noted that the man was in fact a Second--his flow of lucid, cogent thought did not interfere at all with the steady stream of speech going into his portable recorder. Garlock also noticed that in any group of more than a dozen people there was always at least one guardian. They paid no attention whatever to the people, who in turn ignored them completely. Garlock wondered briefly. Guardians? The Arpalones, out in space, yes. But these creatures, naked and unarmed on the ground? The Arpalones were non-human people. These things were--what?

At the door of the Field Office the reporter, after turning Garlock over to a startlingly beautiful, leggy, breasty, blonde receptionist-usherette, hurried away.

* * *

He flecked a feeler at her mind and stiffened. How could a Two--a high Two, at that--be working as an usher? And with her guard down clear to the floor? He probed--and saw.

"Lola!" He flashed a tight-beamed thought. "You aren't putting out anything about our sexual customs, family life, and so on."

"Of course not. We must know their mores first."

"Good girl. Keep your shield up."

"Oh, we're so glad to see you, Captain Garlock, sir!" The blonde, who was dressed little more heavily than the cigarette girls in Venusberg's Cartier Room, seized his left hand in both of hers and held it considerably longer than was necessary. Her dazzling smile, her laughing eyes, her flashing white teeth, the many exposed inches of her skin, and her completely unshielded mind; all waved banners of welcome.

"Captain Garlock, sir, Governor Atterlin has been most anxious to see you ever since you were first detected. This way, please, sir." She turned, brushing her bare hip against his leg in the process, and led him by the hand along a hallway. Her thoughts flowed. "I have been, too, sir, and I'm simply delighted to see you close up, and I hope to see a lot more of you. You're a wonderfully pleasant surprise, sir; I've never seen a man like you before. I don't think Hodell ever saw a man like you before, sir. With such a really terrific mind and yet so big and strong and well-built and handsome and clean-looking and blackish. You're wonderful, Captain Garlock, sir. You'll be here a long time, I hope? Here we are, sir."

She opened a door, walked across the room, sat down in an overstuffed chair, and crossed her legs meticulously. Then, still smiling happily, she followed with eager eyes and mind Garlock's every move.

Garlock had been reading Governor Atterlin; knew why it was the governor who was in that office instead of the port manager. He knew that Atterlin had been reading him--as much as he had allowed. They had already discussed many things, and were still discussing.

The room was much more like a library than an office. The governor, a middle-aged, red-headed man a trifle inclined to portliness, had been seated in a huge reclining chair facing a teevee screen, but got up to shake hands.

"Welcome, friend Captain Garlock. Now, to continue. As to exchange. Many ships visiting us have nothing we need or can use. For such, all services are free--or rather, are paid by the city. Our currency is based upon platinum, but gold, silver, and copper are valuable. Certain jewels, also...."

"That's far enough. We will pay our way--we have plenty of metal. What are your ratios of value for the four metals here on Hodell?"

"Today's quotations are...." He glanced at a screen, and his fingers flashed over the keys of a computer beside his chair. "One weight of platinum is equal in value to seven point three four six...."

"Decimals are not necessary, sir."

"Seven plus, then, weights of gold. One of gold to eleven of silver. One of silver to four of copper."

"Thank you. We'll use platinum. I'll bring some bullion tomorrow morning and exchange it for your currency. Shall I bring it here, or to a bank in the city?"

"Either. Or we can have an armored truck visit your ship."

"That would be better yet. Have them bring about five thousand tanes. Thank you very much, Governor Atterlin, and good afternoon to you, sir."

"And good afternoon to you, sir. Until tomorrow, then."

Garlock turned to leave.

"Oh, may I go with you to your ship, sir, to take just a little look at it?" the girl asked, winningly.

"Of course, Grand Lady Neldine, I'd like to have your company."

She seized his elbow and hugged it quickly against her breast. Then, taking his hand, she walked--almost skipped--along beside him. "And I want to see Pilot James close up, too, sir--he's not nearly as wonderful as you are, sir--and I wonder why Planetographer Bellamy's hair is green? Very striking, of course, sir, but I don't think I'd care for it much on me--unless you'd think I should, sir?"

* * *

Belle knew, of course, that they were coming; and Garlock knew that Belle's hackles were very much on the rise. She could not read him, except very superficially, but she was reading the strange girl like a book and was not liking anything she read. Wherefore, when Garlock and his joyous companion reached the great spaceship--

"How come you picked up _that_ little man-eating shark?" she sent, venomously, on a tight band.

"It wasn't a case of picking her up." Garlock grinned. "I haven't been able to find any urbane way of scraping her off. First Contact, you know."

"She wants altogether too much Contact for a First--I'll scrape her off, even if she is one of the nobler class on this world...." Belle changed her tactics even before Garlock began his reprimand. "I shouldn't have said that, Clee, of course." She laughed lightly. "It was just the shock; there wasn't anything in any of my First Contact tapes covering what to do about beautiful and enticing girls who try to seduce our men. She doesn't know, though, of course, that she's supposed to be a bug-eyed monster and not human at all. Won't Xenology be in for a rough ride when we check in? Wow!"

"You can play _that_ in spades, sister." And for the rest of the day Belle played flawlessly the role of perfect hostess.

It was full dark before the Hodellians could be persuaded to leave the _Pleiades_ and the locks were closed.

* * *

"I have refused one hundred seventy-eight invitations," Lola reported then. "All of us, individually and collectively, have been invited to eat everything, everywhere in town. To see shows in a dozen different theaters and eighteen night spots. To dance all night in twenty-one different places, ranging from dives to strictly soup-and-fish. I was nice about it, of course--just begged off because we were dead from our belts both ways from our long, hard trip. My thought, of course, is that we'd better eat our own food and take it slowly at first. Check, Clee?"

"On the beam, dead center. And you weren't lying much, either. I feel as though I'd done a day's work. After supper there's a thing I've got to discuss with all three of you."

Supper was soon over. Then:

"We've got to make a mighty important decision," Garlock began, abruptly. "Grand Lady Neldine--that title isn't exact, but close--wondered why I didn't respond at all, either way. However, she didn't make a point of it, and I let her wonder; but we'll have to decide by tomorrow morning what to do, and it'll have to be airtight. These Hodellians expect Jim and me to impregnate as many as possible of their highest-rated women before we leave. By their Code it's mandatory, since we can't hide the fact that we rate much higher than they do--their highest rating is only Grade Two by our standards--and all the planets hereabouts up-grade themselves with the highest-grade new blood they can find. Ordinarily, they'd expect you two girls to become pregnant by your choices of the top men of the planet; but they know you wouldn't breed down and don't expect you to. But how in all hell can Jim and I refuse to breed them up without dealing out the deadliest insult they know?"

There was a minute of silence. "We can't," James said then. A grin began to spread over his face. "It might not be too bad an idea, at that, come to think of it. That ball of fire they picked out for you would be a blue-ribbon dish in anybody's cook-book. And Grand Lady Lemphi--" He kissed the tips of two fingers and waved them in the air. "Strictly Big League Material; in capital letters."

"Is that nice, you back-alley tomcat?" Belle asked, plaintively; then paused in thought and went on slowly, "I won't pretend to like it, but I won't do any public screaming about it."

"Any anthropologist would say you'll have to," Lola declared without hesitation. "I don't like it, either. I think it's horrible; but it's excellent genetics and we cannot and must not violate systems-wide mores."

"You're all missing the point!" Garlock snapped. He got up, jammed his hands into his pockets, and began to pace the floor. "I didn't think any one of you was _that_ stupid! If _that_ was all there were to it we'd do it as a matter of course. But _think_, damn it! There's nothing higher than Gunther Two in the humanity of this planet. Telepathy is the only ESP they have. High Gunther uses hitherto unused portions of the brain. It's transmitted through genes, which are dominant, cumulative, and self-multiplying by interaction. Jim and I carry more, stronger, and higher Gunther genes than any other two men known to live. Can we--_dare_ we--plant such genes where none have ever been known before?"

Two full minutes of silence.

"That one has _really_ got a bone in it," James said, unhelpfully.

* * *

Three minutes more of silence.

"It's up to you, Lola," Garlock said then. "It's your field."

"I was afraid of that. There's a way. Personally, I like it less even than the other, but it's the only one I've been able to think up. First, are you absolutely sure that our refusal--Belle's and mine, I mean--to breed down will be valid with them?"

"Positive."

"Then the whole society from which we come will have to be strictly monogamous, in the narrowest, most literal sense of the term. No exceptions whatever. Adultery, anything illicit, has always been not only unimaginable, but in fact impossible. We pair--or marry, or whatever they do here--once only. For life. Desire and potency can exist only within the pair; never outside it. Like eagles. If a man's wife dies, even, he loses all desire and all potency. That would make it physically impossible for you two to follow the Hodellian Code. You'd both be completely impotent with any women whatever except your mates--Belle and me."

"That will work," Belle said. "_How_ it will work!" She paused. Then, suddenly, she whistled; the loud, full-bodied, ear-piercing, tongue-and-teeth whistle which so few women ever master. Her eyes sparkled and she began to laugh with unrestrained glee. "But do you know what you've done, Lola?"

"Nothing, except to suggest a solution. What's so funny about that?"

"You're wonderful, Lola--simply priceless! You've created something brand-new to science--an impotent tomcat! And the more I think about it...." Belle was rocking back and forth with laughter. She could not possibly talk, but her thought flowed on, "I just love you all to pieces! An _impotent tomcat_, and he'll _have_ to stay true to me--Oh, this is simply _killing_ me--I'll _never_ live through it!"

"It _does_ put us on the spot--especially Jim," came Garlock's thought.

* * *

He, too, began to laugh; and Lola, as soon as she stopped thinking about the thing only as a problem in anthropology, joined in. James, however, did not think it was very funny.

"And that's less than half of it!" Belle went on, still unable to talk. "Think of Clee, Lola. Six two--over two hundred--hard as nails--a perfect hunk of hard red meat--telling this whole damn cockeyed region of space that he's impotent, too! And with a perfectly straight face! And it ties in so _beautifully_ with his making no response, yes or no, when she propositioned him. The poor, innocent, impotent lamb just simply didn't have even the faintest inkling of what she meant! Oh, my...."

"Listen--_listen_--_listen_!" James managed finally to break in. "Not that I want to be promiscuous, but...."

"There, there, my precious little impotent tomcat," Belle soothed him aloud, between giggles and snorts. "Us Earth-girls will take care of our lover-boys, see if we don't. You won't need any nasty little...." Belle could not hold the pose, but went off again into whoops of laughter. "_What_ a brain you've got, Lola! I thought I could imagine _anything_, but to make these two guys of ours--the two absolute tops of the whole Solar System--it's a stroke of genius...."

"Shut up, will you, you human hyena, and _listen_!" James roared aloud. "There ought to be _some_ better way than that."

"Better? Than sheer perfection?" Belle was still laughing but could now talk coherently.

"If you can think of another way, Jim, the meeting is still open." Garlock was wiping his eyes. "But it'll have to be a dilly. I'm not exactly enamored of Lola's idea, either, but as the answer it's one hundred percent to as many decimal places as you want to take time to write zeroes."

There was more talk, but no improvement could be made upon Lola's idea.

"Well, we've got until morning," Garlock said, finally. "If anybody comes up with anything by then, let me know. If not, it goes into effect the minute we open the locks. The meeting is adjourned."

* * *

Belle and James left the room; and, a few minutes later, Garlock went out. Lola followed him into his room and closed the door behind her. She sat down on the edge of a chair, lighted a cigarette, and began to smoke in short, nervous puffs. She opened her mouth to say something, but shut it without making a sound.

"You're afraid of me, Lola?" he asked, quietly.

"Oh, I don't.... Well, that is...." She wouldn't lie, and she wouldn't admit the truth. "You see, I've never ... I mean, I haven't had very much experience."

"You needn't be afraid of me at all. I'm not going to pair with you."

"You're not?" Her mouth dropped open and the cigarette fell out of it. She took a few seconds to recover it. "Why not? Don't you think I could do a good enough job?"

She stood up and stretched, to show her splendid figure to its best advantage.

Garlock laughed. "Nothing like that, Lola; you have plenty of sex appeal. It's just that I don't like the conditions. I never have paired. I never have had much to do with women, and that little has been urbane, logical, and strictly _en passant_; on the level of mutual physical desire. Thus, I have never taken a virgin. Pairing with one is very definitely not my idea of urbanity and there's altogether too much obligation to suit me. For all of which good reasons I am not going to pair with you, now or ever."

"How do you know whether I'm a virgin or not? You've never read me that deep. Nobody can. Not even you, unless I let you."

"Reading isn't necessary--you flaunt it like a banner."

"I don't know what you mean.... I certainly don't do it intentionally. But I ought to pair with you, Clee!" Lola had lost all of her nervousness, most of her fear. "It's part of the job I was chosen for. If I'd known, I'd've gone out and got some experience. Really I would have."

"I believe that. I think you would have been silly enough to have done just that. And you have a very high regard for your virginity, too, don't you?"

"Well, I ... I used to. But we'd better go ahead with it. I've _got_ to."

"No such thing. Permissible, but not obligatory."

"But it was assumed. As a matter of course. Anyway ... well, when that girl started making passes at you, I thought you could have just as much fun, or even more--she's charming; a real darling, isn't she?--without pairing with me, and then I had to open my big mouth and be the one to keep you from playing games with _anyone except_ me, and I certainly am not going to let you suffer...."

"Bunk!" Garlock snorted. "Sheer flapdoodle! Pure psychological prop-wash, started and maintained by men who are either too weak to direct and control their drives or who haven't any real work to occupy their minds. It applies to many men, of course, possibly to most. It does not, however, apply to all, and, it lacks one whole hell of a lot of applying to me. Does that make you feel better?"

"Oh, it does ... it does. Thanks, Clee. You know, I like you, a lot."

"Do you? Kiss me."

She did so.

"See?"

"You _tricked_ me!"

* * *

"I did not. I want you to see the truth and face it. Your idealism is admirable, permanent, and shatter-proof; but your starry-eyed schoolgirl's mawkishness is none of the three. You'll have to grow up, some day. In my opinion, forcing yourself to give up one of your hardest-held ideals--virginity--merely because of the utter bilge that those idiot head-shrinkers stuffed you with, is sheer, plain idiocy. I suppose that makes you like me even less, but I'm laying it right on the line."

"No ... more. I'll argue with you, when we have time, about some of your points, but the last one--if it's valid--has tremendous force. I didn't know men felt that way. But no matter what my feeling for you really is, I'm really grateful to you for the reprieve ... and you know, Clee, I'm pretty sure you're going to get us back home. If anyone can, you can."

"I'm going to try to. Even if I can't, it will be Belle, not you, that I'll take for the long pull. And not because you'd rather have Jim--which you would, of course...."

"To be honest, I think I would."

"Certainly. He's your type. You're not mine; Belle is. Well, that buttons it up, Brownie, except for one thing. To Jim and Belle and everyone else, we're paired."

"Of course. Urbanity, as well as to present a united front to any and all worlds."

"Check. So watch your shield."

"I always do. That stuff is 'way, 'way down. I'm awfully glad you called me 'Brownie,' Clee. I didn't think you ever would."

"I didn't expect to--but I never talked to a woman this way before, either. Maybe it had a mellowing effect."

"You don't _need_ mellowing--I do like you a lot, just exactly as you are."

"If true, I'm very glad of it. But don't strain yourself; and I mean that literally, not as sarcasm."

"I know. I'm not straining a bit, and this'll prove it."

She kissed him again, and this time it was a production.

"That was an eminently convincing demonstration, Brownie, but don't do it too often."

"I won't." She laughed, gayly and happily. "If there's any next time, you'll have to kiss me first."

She paused and sobered. "But remember. If you should change your mind, any time you really want to ... to kiss me, come right in. I won't be as silly and nervous and afraid as I was just now. That's a promise. Good night, Clee."

"Good night, Brownie."

CHAPTER 2

Next morning, Garlock was the last one, by a fraction of a minute, into the Main. "Good morning, all," he said, with a slight smile.

"Huh? How come?" James demanded, as all four started toward the dining nook.

Garlock's smile widened. "Lola. She brought me a pot of coffee and wouldn't let me out until I drank it."

"_Brought?_"

"Yeah. They haven't read their room-tapes yet, so they don't know that room-service is practically unlimited."

"Why didn't I think of that coffee business a couple of years ago?"

"Well, why didn't I think of it myself, ten years ago?"

Belle's eyes had been going from one, man to the other. "Just _what_ are you two talking about? If it's anybody's business except your own?"

"He is an early-morning grouch," James explained, as they sat down at the table. "Not fit to associate with man or beast--not even his own dog, if he had one--when he first gets up. How come you were smart enough to get the answer so quick, Brownie?"

"Oh, the pattern isn't too rare." She shrugged daintily, sweeping the compliment aside. "Especially among men on big jobs who work under tremendous pressure."

"Then how about Jim?" Belle asked.

"Clee's the Big Brain, not me," James said.

"You're a lot Bigger Brain than any of the men Lola's talking about," Belle insisted.

"That's true," Lola agreed, "but Jim probably is--must be--an icebox raider. Eats in the middle of the night. Clee probably doesn't. It's a good bet that he doesn't nibble between meals at all. Check, Clee?"

"Check. But what has an empty stomach got to do with the case?"

"Everything. Nobody knows how. Lots of theories--enzymes, blood sugar, endocrine balance, what have you--but no proof. It isn't always true. However, six or seven hours of empty stomach, in a man who takes his job to bed with him, is very apt to uglify his pre-breakfast disposition."

Breakfast over and out in the Main:

"But when a man's disposition is ugly all the time, how can you tell the difference?" Belle asked, innocently.

"I'll let that pass," Garlock's smile disappeared, "because we've got work to do. Have any of you thought of any improvement on Lola's monogamous society?"

No one had. In fact--

"There may be a loop-hole in it," Lola said, thoughtfully. "Did any of you happen to notice whether they know anything about artificial insemination?"

"D'you think I'd stand for _that_?" Belle blazed, before Garlock could begin to search his mind. "I'd scratch anybody's eyes out--if you'd thought of that idea as a woman instead of as a near-Ph.D. in anthropology you'd've thrown it into the converter before it even hatched!"

"Invasion of privacy? That covers it, of course, but I didn't think it would bother you a bit." Lola paused, studying the other girl intently. "You're quite a problem yourself. Callous--utterly savage humor--yet very sensitive in some ways--fastidious...."

"I'm not on the table for dissection!" Belle snapped. "Study me all you please, but keep the notes in your notebook. I'd suggest you study Clee."

"Oh, I have been. He baffles me, too. I'm not very good yet, you...."

"That's the unders...."

"_Cut_ it!" Garlock ordered, sharply. "I said we had work to do. Jim, you're hunting up the nearest observatory."

"How about transportation? No teleportation?"

"Out. Rent a car or hire a plane, or both. Fill your wallet--better have too much money than not enough. If you're too far away tonight to make it feasible to come back here, send me a flash. Brownie, you'll work this town first. Belle and I will have to work in the library for a while. We'll all want to compare notes tonight...."

"Yeah," James said into the pause, "I could tune in remote, but I don't know where I'll be, so it might not be so good."

"Check. You can 'port, but be _damn_ sure nobody sees or senses you doing it. That buttons it up, I guess."

* * *

James and Lola left the ship; Garlock and Belle went into the library.

"If I didn't know you were impotent, Clee," Belle shivered affectedly and began to laugh, "I'd be scared to death to be alone with you in this great big spaceship. Lola hasn't realized yet what she really hatched out--the screamingest screamer ever pulled on anybody!"

"It isn't _that_ funny. You have got a savage sense of humor."

"Perhaps." She shrugged her shoulders. "But you were on the receiving end, which makes a big difference. She's a peculiar sort of duck. Brainy, but impersonal--academic. She knows all the words and all their meanings, all the questions and all the answers, but she doesn't apply any of them to herself. She's always the observer, never the participant. Pure egg-head ... pure? _That's_ it. She looks, acts, talks, and thinks like a _virgin_.... Well, if that's all, she isn't any--or is she? Even though you've started calling her 'Brownie,' like my now-tamed tomcat, you might not...." She stared at him.

"Go ahead. Probe."

"Why waste energy trying to crack a Prime's shield? But just out of curiosity, are you two pairing, or not?"

"Tut-tut; don't be inurbane. Let's talk about Jim instead. I thought he'd be gibbering."

"No, I'm working under double wraps--full dampers. I don't want him in love with me. You want to know why?"

"I think I know why."

"Because having him mooning around underfoot would weaken the team and I want to get back to Tellus."

"I was wrong, then. I thought you were out after bigger game."

Belle's face went stiff and still. "What do you mean by that?"

"Plain enough, I would think. Wherever you are, you've got to be the Boss. You've never been in any kind of a party for fifteen minutes without taking it over. When you snap the whip everybody jumps--or else--and you swing a wicked knife. For your information I don't jump, I am familiar with knives, and you will never run this project or any part of it."

* * *

Belle's face set; her eyes hardened. "While we're putting out information, take note that I'm just as good with actual knives as with figurative ones. If you're still thinking of blistering my fanny, don't try it. You'll find a rawhide haft sticking up out of one of those muscles you're so proud of--clear enough Mr. Garlock."

"Why don't you talk sense, instead of such yak-yak?"

"Huh?"

"I know you're a Prime, too, but don't let it go to your head. I've got more stuff than you have, so you can't Gunther me. You weigh one thirty-five to my two seventeen. I'm harder, stronger, and faster than you are. You're probably a bit limberer--not too much--but I've forgotten more judo than you ever will know. So what's the answer?"

Belle was breathing hard. "Then why don't you do it right now?"

"Several reasons. I couldn't brag much about licking anybody I outweigh by eighty-two pounds. I can't figure out your logic--if any--but I'm pretty sure now it wouldn't do either of us any good. Just the opposite."

"From your standpoint, would that be bad?"

"What a _hell_ of a logic! You have got the finest brain of any woman living. You're stronger than Jim is by a lot more than the Prime-to-Operator ratio--you've got more initiative, more drive, more guts. You know as well as I do what your brain may mean before we get back. Why in all hell don't you start _using_ it?"

"_You_ are complimenting _me_?"

"No. It's the truth, isn't it?"

"What difference does that make? Clee Garlock, I simply can't understand you at all."

"That makes it mutual. I can't understand a geometry in which the crookedest line between any two given points is the best line. Let's get to work, shall we?"

"Uh-huh, let's. One more bit of information, though, first. Any such idea as taking the Project away from you simply _never_ entered my mind!" She gave him a warm and friendly smile as she walked over to the file-cabinets.

For hours, then, they worked; each scanning tape after tape. At mid-day they ate a light lunch. Shortly thereafter, Garlock put away his reader and all his loose tapes. "Are you getting anywhere, Belle? I'm not making any progress."

"Yes, but of course planets are probably pretty much the same everywhere--Tellus-type ones, I mean, of course. Is all the Xenology as cockeyed as I'm afraid it must be?"

"Check. The one basic assumption was that there are no human beings other than Tellurians. From that they derive the secondary assumption that humanoid types will be scarce. From there they scatter out in all directions. So I'll have to roll my own. I've got to see Atterlin, anyway. I'll be back for supper. So long."

* * *

At the Port Office, Grand Lady Neldine met him even more enthusiastically than before; taking both his hands and pressing them against her firm, almost-bare breasts. She tried to hold back as Garlock led her along the corridor.

"I have an explanation, and in a sense an apology, for you, Grand Lady Neldine, and for you, Governor Atterlin," he thought carefully. "I would have explained yesterday, but I had no understanding of the situation here until our anthropologist, Lola Montandon, elucidated it very laboriously to me. She herself, a scientist highly trained in that specialty, could grasp it only by referring back to somewhat similar situations which may have existed in the remote past--so remote a past that the concept is known only to specialists and is more than half mythical, even to them."

He went on to give in detail the sexual customs, obligations, and limitations of Lola's purely imaginary civilization.

"Then it isn't that you don't want to, but you _can't_?" the lady asked, incredulously.

"Mentally, I can have no desire. Physically, the act is impossible," he assured her.

"What a shame!" Her thought was a peculiar mixture of disappointment and relief: disappointment in that she was not to bear this man's super-child; relief in that, after all, she had not personally failed--if she couldn't have this perfectly wonderful man herself, no other woman except his wife could ever have him, either. But what a shame to waste such a man as that on _any_ one woman! It was really too bad.

"I see ... I see--wonderful!" Atterlin's thought was not at all incredulous, but vastly awed. "It is of course logical that as the power of mind increases, physical matters become less and less important. But you will have much to give us; we may perhaps have some small things to give you. If we could visit your Tellus, perhaps...?"

"That also is impossible. We four in the _Pleiades_ are lost in space. This is the first planet we have visited on our first trial of a new method--new to us, at least--of interstellar travel. We missed our objective, probably by many millions of parsecs, and it is quite possible that we four will never be able to find our way back. We are trying now, by charting the galaxies throughout billions of cubic parsecs of space, to find merely the direction in which our own galaxy lies."

"What a concept! What stupendous minds! But such immense distances, sir ... what can you possibly be using for a space-drive?"

"None, as you understand the term. We travel by instantaneous translation, by means of something we call 'Gunther'.... I am not at all sure that I can explain it to you satisfactorily, but I will try to do so, if you wish."

"Please do so, sir, by all means."

* * *

Garlock opened the highest Gunther cells of his mind. There was nothing as elementary as telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, or the like; it was the pure, raw Gunther of the Gunther Drive, which even he himself made no pretense of understanding fully. He opened those cells and pushed that knowledge at the two Hodellian minds.

The result was just as instantaneous and just as catastrophic as Garlock had expected. Both blocks went up almost instantly.

"Oh, no!" Atterlin exclaimed, his face turning white.

The girl shrieked once, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed on the floor.

"Oh, I'm _so_ sorry ... excuse my ignorance, please!" Garlock implored, as he picked the girl up, carried her across the room to a sofa, and assured himself that she had not been really hurt. She recovered quickly. "I'm very sorry, Grand Lady Neldine and Governor Atterlin, but I didn't know ... that is, I didn't realize...."

"You are trying to break it gently." Atterlin was both shocked and despondent. "This being the first planet you have visited, you simply did not realize how feeble our minds really are."

"Oh, not at all, really, sir and lady." Garlock began deftly to repair the morale he had shattered. "Merely younger. With your system of genetics, so much more logical and efficient than our strict monogamy, your race will undoubtedly make more progress in a few centuries than we made in many millennia. And in a few centuries more you will pass us--will master this only partially-known Gunther Drive.

"Esthetically, Lady Neldine, I would like very much to father you a child." He allowed his coldly unmoved gaze to survey her charms. "I am sorry indeed that it cannot be. I trust that you, Governor Atterlin, will be kind enough to spread word of our physical shortcomings, and so spare us further embarrassment?"

"Not shortcomings, sir, and, I truly hope, no embarrassment," Atterlin protested. "We are immensely glad to have seen you, since your very existence gives us so much hope for the future. I will spread word, and every Hodellian will do whatever he can to help you in your quest."

"Thank you, sir and lady," and Garlock took his leave.

"What an act, my male-looking but impotent darling!" came Belle's clear, incisive thought, bubbling with unrestrained merriment. "For our Doctor Garlock, the Prime Exponent and First Disciple of Truth, _what_ an act! _Esthetically_, he'd like to father her a child, it says here in fine print--Boy, if she only knew! One tiny grain of truth and she'd chase you from here to Andromeda! Clee, I _swear_ this thing is going to kill me yet!"

"Anything that would do that I'm very much in favor of!" Garlock growled the thought and snapped up his shield.

This one was, quite definitely, Belle's round.

* * *

Garlock took the Hodellian equivalent of a bus to the center of the city, then set out aimlessly to walk. The buildings and their arrangement, he noted--not much to his surprise now--were not too different from those of the cities of Earth.

With his guard down to about the sixth level, highly receptive but not at all selective, he strolled up one street and down another. He was not attentive to detail yet; he was trying to get the broad aspects, the "feel" of this hitherto unknown civilization.

The ether was practically saturated with thought. Apparently this was the afternoon rush hour, as the sidewalks were crowded with people and the streets were full of cars. It did not seem as though anyone, whether in the buildings, on the sidewalks, or in the cars, was doing any blocking at all. If there were any such things as secrets on Hodell, they were scarce. Each person, man, woman, or child, went about his own business, radiating full blast. No one paid any attention to the thoughts of anyone else except in the case of couples or groups, the units of which were engaged in conversation. It reminded Garlock of a big Tellurian party when the punch-bowls were running low--everybody talking at the top of his voice and nobody listening.

This whole gale of thought was blowing over Garlock's receptors like a Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did not address anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city--and it did not take long--no one paid any more attention to him than they did to each other.

Probing into and through various buildings, he learned that groups of people were quitting work at intervals of about fifteen minutes. There were thoughts of tidying up desks; of letting the rest of this junk go until tomorrow; of putting away and/or covering up office machines of various sorts. There were thoughts of powdering noses and of repairing make-up.

He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for guardians--he'd have to call them that until either he or Lola found out their real name. Same as at the airport--the more people, the more guardians. What were they? How? And why?

* * *

He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn't make sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it was. It seemed to be a mass-detector ... no, two of them, paired and balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other guardians--balanced across a sort of bridge--_that_ was how they kept the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range receptors there, too, but nothing seemed to be coming in....

While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone's far-flung receptors. Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock, directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insistent, low-pitched, whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of one eye, a yellowish something flashing downward through the air.

At the same moment the woman immediately in front of Garlock stifled a scream and jumped backward, bumping into him and almost knocking him down. He staggered, caught his balance, and automatically put his arm around his assailant, to keep her from falling to the sidewalk.

* * *

In the meantime the guardian, having landed very close to the spot the woman had occupied a moment before, leaped again; this time vertically upward. The thing, whatever it was, was now braking frantically with wings, tail, and body; trying madly to get away. Too late. There was a bone-crushing impact as the two bodies came together in mid-air; a jarring thud as the two creatures, inextricably intertwined, struck the pavement as one.

The thing varied in color, Garlock now saw, shading from bright orange at the head to pale yellow at the tail. It had a savagely-tearing curved beak; tremendously powerful wings; its short, thick legs ended in hawk-like talons.

The guardian's bowed legs had already immobilized the yellow wings by clamping them solidly against the yellow body. His two lower arms were holding the frightful talons out of action. His third hand gripped the orange throat, his fourth was exerting tremendous force against the jointure of neck and body. The neck, originally short, was beginning to stretch.

For several seconds Garlock had been half-conscious that his accidental companion was trying, with more and more energy, to disengage his encircling left arm from her waist. He wrenched his attention away from the spectacular fight--to which no one else, not even the near-victim, had paid the slightest attention--and now saw that he had his arm around the bare waist of a statuesque matron whose entire costume would have made perhaps half of a Tellurian sun-suit. He dropped his arm with a quick and abject apology.

"I should apologize to you instead, Captain Garlock," she thought, with a wide and friendly smile, "for knocking you down, and I thank you for catching me before I fell. I should not have been startled, of course. I would not have been, except that this is the first time that I, personally, have been attacked."

"But what _are_ they?" Garlock blurted.

"I don't know." The woman turned her head and glanced, in complete disinterest, at the two furiously-battling creatures. Garlock knew now that this was the first time, except for that instantly-dismissed thrill of surprise at being the actual target of an attack, that she had thought of either of them. "Orange-yellow? It could be a ... a fumapty, perhaps, but I've no idea, really. You see, such things are none of our business."

She thought at him, a half-shrug, half-grimace of mild distaste--not at the personal contact with the man nor at the savage duel; but at even thinking of either the guardian or the yellow monster--and walked away into the crowd.

Garlock's attention flashed back to the fighters. The yellow thing's neck had been stretched to twice its natural length and the guardian had _eaten_ almost through it. There was a terrific crunch, a couple of smacking, gobbling swallows, and head parted from body. The orange beak still clashed open and shut, however, and the body still thrashed violently.

Shifting his grips, the guardian proceeded to tear a hole into his victim's body, just below its breast-bone. Thrusting two arms into the opening, he yanked out two organs--one of which, Garlock thought, could have been the heart--and ate them both; if not with extreme gusto, at least in a workmanlike and thoroughly competent fashion. He then picked up the head in one hand, grabbed the tip of a wing with another, and marched up the street for half a block, dragging the body behind him.

He lifted a manhole cover with his two unoccupied hands, dropped the remains down the hole thus exposed, and let the cover slam back into place. He then squatted down, licked himself meticulously clean with a long, black, extremely agile tongue, and went on about his enigmatic business quite as though nothing had happened.

Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a "taxi" and was taken out to the _Pleiades_. Belle and Lola were in the Main.

* * *

"I saw the _damndest_ thing, Clee!" Lola exclaimed. "I've been gnawing my fingernails off up to the knuckles, waiting for you!"

Lola's experience had been very similar to Garlock's own, except in that her monster was an intense green in color and looked something like a bat about four feet long, with six-inch canine teeth and several stingers....

"Did you find out the name of the thing?" Garlock asked.

"No. I asked half-a-dozen people, but nobody would even listen to me except one half-grown boy, and the best he could do was that it might be something he had heard another boy say somebody had told him might be a 'lemart.' And as to those lower-case Arpalones, the best I could dig out of anybody was just 'guardians.' Did you do any better?"

"No, I didn't do as well," and he told the girls about his own experience.

"But I didn't find any detectors or receptors, Clee," Lola frowned. "Where were they?"

"'Way up--up here," he showed her. "I'll make a full tape tonight on everything I found out about the guardians and the Arpalones--besides my regular report, I mean--since they're yours, and you can make me one about your friend the green bat...."

* * *

"Hey, I _like_ that!" Belle broke in. "That _could_ be taken amiss, you know, by such a sensitive soul as I!"

"Check." Garlock chuckled. "I'll have to file that one, in case I want to use it sometime. How're you coming, Belle?"

"Nice!" Belle's voracious mind had been so busy absorbing new knowledge that she had temporarily forgotten about her fight with her captain. "I'm just about done here. I'll be ready tomorrow, I think, to visit their library and tape up some planetological and planetographical--notice how insouciantly I toss off those two-credit words?--data on this here planet Hodell."

"Good going. You've been listening to this stuff Lola and I were chewing on--does any of it make sense to you?"

"It does not. I never heard anything to compare with it."

"Excuse me for changing the subject," Lola put in, plaintively, "but when, if ever, do we eat? Do we _have_ to wait until that confounded James boy gets back from wherever it was he went?"

"If you're hungry, we'll eat now."

"_Hungry?_ Look!" Lola turned herself sidewise, placed one hand in the small of her back, and pressed hard with the other her flat, taut belly. "See? Only a couple of inches from belt-buckle to backbone--dangerously close to the point of utter collapse."

"You poor, abused little thing!" Garlock laughed and all three crossed the room to the dining alcove. While they were still ordering, James appeared beside them.

"Find out anything?" Garlock asked.

"Yes and no. Yes, in that they have an excellent observatory, with a hundred-eighty-inch reflector, on a mountain only seventy-five miles from here. No, in that I didn't find any duplication of nebulary configurations with the stuff I had with me. However, it was relatively coarse. Tomorrow I'll take a lot of fine stuff along. It'll take some time--a full day, at least."

"I expected that. Good going, Jim!"

All four ate heartily, and, after eating, they taped up the day's reports. Then, tired from their first real day's work in weeks, all went to their rooms.

* * *

A few minutes later, Garlock tapped lightly at Lola's door.

"Come in." She stiffened involuntarily, then relaxed and smiled. "Oh, yes, Clee: of course. You're...."

"No, I'm not. I've been doing a lot of thinking about you since last night, and I may have come up with an answer or two. Also, Belle knows we aren't pairing, and if we don't hide behind a screen at least once in a while, she'll know we aren't going to."

"Screen?"

"Screen. Didn't you know these four private rooms are solid? Haven't you read your house-tape yet?"

"No. But do you think Belle would actually peek?"

"Do you think she wouldn't?"

"Well, I don't like her very much, but I wouldn't think she would do anything like that, Clee. It isn't urbane."

"She isn't urbane, either, whenever she thinks it might be advantageous not to be."

"What a _terrible_ thing to say!"

"Take it from me, if Belle Bellamy doesn't know everything that goes on it isn't from lack of trying. You wouldn't know about room service, either, then--better scan that tape before you go to sleep tonight--what'll you have in the line of a drink to while away enough time so she will know we've been playing games?"

"Ginger ale, please."

"I'll have ginger beer. You do it like so." He slid a panel aside, his fingers played briefly on a typewriter-like keyboard. Drinks and ice appeared. "Anything you want--details of the tape."

He lighted two cigarettes, handed her one, stirred his drink. "Now, fair lady--or should I say beauteous dark lady?--we will follow the precept of that immortal Chinese philosopher, Chin On."

"You _are_ a Prime Operator, aren't you?" She laughed, but sobered quickly. "I'm worried. You said I flaunted virginity like a banner, and now Belle.... What am I doing wrong?"

"There's a lot wrong. Not so much what you're doing as what you aren't doing. You're too aloof--detached--egg-headish. You know the score, words and music, but you don't sing. All you do is listen. Belle thinks you're not only a physical virgin, but a psychic-blocked prude. I know better. You're so full of conflict between what you want to do--what you know is right--and what those three-cell-brained nincompoops made you think you ought to do that you have got no more degrees of freedom than a piston-rod. You haven't been yourself for a minute since you came aboard. Check?"

"You _have_ been thinking, haven't you? You may be right; except that it's been longer than that ... ever since the first preliminaries, I think. But what can I _do_ about it, Clee?"

"Contact. Three-quarters full, say; enough for me to give you what I think is the truth."

"But you said you _never_ went screens down with a woman?"

"There's a first time for everything. Come in."

* * *

She did so, held contact for almost a minute, then pulled herself loose.

"Ug-gh-gh." She shivered. "I'm glad I haven't got a mind like that."

"And the same from me to you. Of course the real truth may lie somewhere in between. I may be as far off the beam on one side as you are on the other."

"I hope so. But it cleared things up no end--it untied a million knots. Even that other thing--brotherly love? It's a very nice concept--you see, I never had any brothers."

"That's probably one thing that was the matter with you. Nothing warmer than that, certainly, and never will be."

"And I suppose you got the thought--it must have jumped up and smacked you--" Lola's hot blush was visible even through her heavy tan, "how many times I've felt like running my fingers up and down your ribs and grabbing a handful of those terrific muscles of yours, just to see if they're as hard as they look?"

"I'm glad you brought that up; I don't know whether I would have dared to or not. You've got to stop acting like a Third instead of an Operator; and you've got to stop acting as though you had never been within ten feet of me. Now's as good a time as any." He took off his shirt and struck a strong-man's pose. "Come ahead."

"By golly, I'm _going_ to!" Then, a moment later, "Why, they're even _harder_! How do you, a scientist, psionicist, and scholar, keep in such hard shape as that?"

"An hour a day in the gym, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Many are better--but a hell of a lot are worse."

"I'll say." She finished her ginger ale, sat down in her chair, leaned back and put her legs up on the bed. "That was a relief of tension if there ever was one. I haven't felt so good since they picked me as home-town candidate--and that was a mighty small town and eight months ago. Bring on your dragons, Clee, and I'll slay 'em far and wide. But I can't actually _be_ like she is...."

"Thank God for that. Deliver me from _two_ such pretzel-benders aboard one ship."

"... but I could have been a pretty good actress, I think."

"Correction, please. 'Outstanding' is the word."

"Thank you, kind sir. And women--men, too, of course--do bring up certain memories, to ... to...."

"To roll 'em around on their tongues and give their taste-buds a treat."

"Exactly. So where I don't have any appropriate actual memories to bring up, I'll make like an actress. Check?"

"Good girl! Now you're rolling--we're in like Flynn. Well, we've been in screen long enough, I guess. Fare thee well, little sister Brownie, until we meet again." He tossed the remains of their refreshments, trays and all, into the chute, picked up his shirt, and started out.

"Put it _on_, Clee!" she whispered, intensely.

"Why?" He grinned cheerfully. "It'd look still better if I peeled down to the altogether."

"You're incorrigible," she said, but her answering grin was wide and perfectly natural. "You know, if I had had a brother something like you it would have saved me a lot of wear and tear. I'll see you in the morning before breakfast."

* * *

And she did. They strolled together to breakfast; not holding hands, but with hip almost touching hip. Relaxed, friendly, on very cordial and satisfactory terms. Lola punched breakfast orders for them both. Belle drove a probe, which bounced--Lola's screen was tight, although her brown eyes were innocent and bland.

But during the meal, in response to a double-edged, wickedly-barbed remark of Belle's, a memory flashed into being above Lola's shield. It was the veriest flash, instantly suppressed. Her eyes held clear and steady; if she blushed at all it did not show.

Belle caught it, of course, and winked triumphantly at Garlock. She knew, now, what she had wanted to know. And, Prime Operator though he was, it was all he could do to make no sign; for that fleetingly-revealed memory was a perfect job. He would not have--_could_ not have--questioned it himself, except for one highly startling fact. It was of an event that had not happened and never would!

And after breakfast, at some distance from the others, "That is my girl, Brownie! You're firing on all forty barrels. You're an Operator, all right; and it takes a damn good one to lie like that with her mind!"

"Thanks to you, Clee. And thanks a million, really. I'm me again--I think."

Then, since Belle was looking, she took him by both ears, pulled his head down, and kissed him lightly on the lips. The spontaneity and tenderness were perfect at that moment. Clee's appreciation was obvious.

"I know I said you'd have to kiss me next time," Lola said, very low, "but this act needs just this much of an extra touch. Anyway, such little, tiny, sisterly ones as this, and out in public, don't count."

CHAPTER 3

Lola and Garlock went to town in the same taxi. As they were about to separate, Garlock said:

"I don't like those hell-divers, yellow, green, or any other color; and you, Brownie, are very definitely not expendable. Are you any good at mind-bombing?"

"Why, I never heard of such a thing."

"You isolate a little energy in the Op field, remembering of course, that you're handling a hundred thousand gunts. Transpose it into platinum or uranium--anything good and heavy. For one of these monsters you'd need two or three micrograms. For a battleship, up to maybe a gram or so. 'Port it to the exact place you want it to detonate. Reconvert and release instantaneously. One-hundred-percent-conversion atomic bomb, tailored exactly to fit the job. Very effective."

"It would be. My God, Clee, can _you_ do _that_?"

"Sure--so can you. Any Operator can."

"Well, I _won't_. I _never_ will. Besides, I'd probably kill too many people, besides the monster. No, I'll 'port back to the Main if anything attacks me. I'm chain lightning at that."

"Do that, then. And if anything very unusual happens give me a flash."

"I'll do that. 'Bye, Clee." She turned to the left. He walked straight on, toward the business center, to resume his study at the point where he had left off the evening before.

For over an hour he wandered aimlessly about the city; receiving, classifying, and filing away information. He saw several duels between guardians and yellow and green-bat monsters, to none of which he paid any more attention than did the people around him. Then a third kind of enemy appeared--two of them at once, flying wing-and-wing--and Garlock stopped and watched.

Vivid, clear-cut stripes of red and black, even on the tremendously long, strong wings. Distinctly feline as to heads, teeth, and claws. While they did not at all closely resemble flying saber-toothed tigers, that was the first impression that leaped into Garlock's mind.

Two bow-legged guardians came leaping as usual, but one of them was a fraction of a second too late. That fraction was enough. While the first guardian was still high in air, grappling with one tiger, the other swung on a dime--the blast of air from his right wing blowing people in the crowd below thither and yon and knocking four of them flat--and took the guardian's head off his body with one savage swipe of a frightfully-armed paw. Disregarding the carcass both attackers whirled sharply at the second guardian, meeting him in such fashion that he could not come to firm grips with either of them, and that battle was very brief indeed. More and more guardians were leaping in from all directions, however, and the two tigers were forced to the ground and slaughtered.

Since six guardians had been killed, eight guardians marched up the street, dragging grisly loads. Eight bodies, friend and foe alike, were dumped into a manhole; eight creatures squatted down and cleaned themselves meticulously before resuming their various patrols.

* * *

Ten or fifteen minutes later, Garlock felt Lola's half-excited, half-frightened thought. "Clee, do you read me?"

"Loud and clear."

"There's something coming that's certainly none of my business--maybe not even yours."

"Coming," and with the thought he was there. "Where?"

She pointed a thought, he followed it. Far away yet, but coming fast, was an immense flock of flying tigers!

Lola licked her lips. "I'm going home, if you don't mind."

"Beat it."

She disappeared.

"Jim!" Garlock thought. "Where are you?"

"Observatory. Need me?"

"Yes. Bombing. Two point four microgram loads. Focus spot on my right--teleport in."

"Coming in on your right."

"And I on your left!" Belle's thought drove in as he had never before felt it driven. Being a Prime, she did not need a focus spot and appeared the veriest instant later than did James.

"Can you bomb?" Garlock snapped.

"What do _you_ think?" she snapped back.

A moment of flashing thought and the three Tellurians disappeared, materializing five hundred feet in air, two hundred feet ahead of the van of that horrible flight of monsters, drifting before it.

Belle got in the first shot. Not only did the victim disappear--a couple of dozen around it were torn to fragments and the force of the blast staggered all three Tellurians.

"Damn it, Belle, cut down or get to hell out!" Garlock yelped. "I said two point four _micrograms_, not milligrams. Just kill 'em, don't scatter 'em all over hell's half acre--less mess to clean up and I _don't_ want you to kill people down below. Especially I don't want you to kill us--not even yourself."

"'Scuse, please, I guess I was a bit enthusiastic in my weighing."

There began a series of muffled explosions along the front; each followed by the plunge of a tiger-striped body to the ground. Faster and faster the explosions came as the Operator and the Primes learned the routine and the rhythm of the job.

Nor were they long alone. The roaring, screaming howl of jets came up from behind them; four Arpalones appeared at their left, strung out along the front. Each held an extraordinarily heavy-duty blaster in each of his four hands; sixteen terrific weapons were hurling death into the flying horde.

"Slide over, Terrestrials," came a calm thought. "You three take their left front, we'll take their right and center."

As they obeyed the instructions, "_They_ don't give a damn where the pieces fly!" Belle protested. "Why should we be fussy about their street-cleaning department? _I'm_ starting to use fives."

"Okay. We'll have to hit 'em harder, anyway, to keep up. Five or maybe six--just be damn sure not to knock us or the Arpalones out of the air."

Carnage went on. The battle-front, while inside the city limits, was now almost stationary.

"Ha! Help--I hear footsteps approaching on jet-back," Garlock announced. "Give 'em hell, boys--shovel on the coal!"

* * *

A flight of fighter-planes, eight abreast and wing-tips almost touching, howled close overhead and along the line of invasion. They could not fire, of course, until they reached the city limits. There they opened up as one, and the air below became literally filled with falling monsters. Some had only broken wings; some were dead, but more or less whole; many were blown to unrecognizable bits and scraps of flesh.

Another flight screamed into place immediately behind the first; then another and another and another until six flights had passed. Then came four helicopters, darting and hovering, whose gunners picked off individually whatever survivors had managed to escape all six waves of fighters.

"That's better," came a thought from the Arpalone nearest Garlock. "Situation under control, thanks to you Tellurians. Supposed to be two squads of us gunners, but the other squad was busy on another job. Without you, this could have developed into a fairly nasty little infection. I don't know what you're doing or how you're doing it--we were told that you weren't like any other humans, and how true _that_ is--but I'm in favor of it. I thought there were four of you?"

"One of us is not a fighter."

"Oh. You can knock off now, if you like. We'll polish off. Thanks much."

"But don't the boys on the ground need some help?"

"The Arpales? Those idiots you have been thinking of as 'guardians'? Which they are, of course. Uh-uh. Besides, we're air-fighters. Ground work is none of our business. Also, these guns would raise altogether too much hell down there. Bound to hit some humans."

"Check. Those Arpales aren't very intelligent, you Arpalones are extremely so. Any connection?"

"'Way back, they say. Common ancestry, and doing two parts of the same job. Killing these fumapties and lemarts and sencors and what-have-you. I don't know what humanity's job is and don't give a damn. Probably fairly important, some way or other, though, since it's our job to see that the silly, gutless things keep on living. We have nothing to do with 'em, ever. The only reason I'm talking to you is you're not really human at all. You're a fighter, too, and a damn good one."

"I know what you mean," and the three Tellurians turned their attention downward to the scene on the ground.

* * *

The heaviest fighting had been over a large park at the city's edge, which was now literally a shambles. Very few people were to be seen, and those few more moving unconcernedly away from the center of violence. All over the park thousands of Arpales were fighting furiously and hundreds of them were dying. For hundreds of the sencors had suffered only wing injuries, the long fall to ground had not harmed them further, and their tremendous fighting ability had been lessened very little if at all.

"But I'd think, just for efficiency if nothing else," Garlock argued, "you'd support the Arpales _some_ way. Lighter guns or something. Why, thousands of them must have been killed, just in this last hour or so."

"Yeah, but that's their business. They breed fast and die fast. Everything has to balance, you know."

"Perhaps so." Garlock was silenced, if not convinced. "Well, it's about over. What happens to the bodies they're dumping down manholes? They can't go down a sewer that way?"

"Oh, you didn't know? Food."

"Food? For what?"

"The Arpales and us, of course."

"What? You don't mean--you _can't_ mean that they--and by your thought, you Arpalones, too--are cannibals!"

"Cannibals? Explain, please? Oh, eaters-of-our-own-species. Of course--certainly. Why not?"

"Why, self-respect ... common decency ... respect for one's fellow-man ... family ties...." Garlock was floundering; to be called upon to explain his ingrained antipathy to such a custom was new to his experience.

"You are silly. Worse, squeamish. Worst, supremely illogical." The Arpalone paused, then went on as though trying to educate a hopelessly illogical inferior, "While we do not kill Arpales purposely--except when they over-breed--why waste good meat as fertilizer? If a diet is wholesome, nutritious, well-balanced, and tasty, what shred of difference can it _possibly_ make what its ingredients once were?"

"Well, I'll be damned." Garlock quit.

Belle agreed. "This whole deal makes me sick at the stomach and I think my face is turning green too. But I'm devilishly and gleefully glad, Clee, that I was here to hear _somebody_ give you cards, spaces, and big casino and still beat the lights and liver out of you at your own game of cold-blooded logic!"

"We gunners must go now. Would you like to come along with us and see the end of this particular breeding-hole of sencors?"

At high speed the seven flew back along the line of advance of the flying-tiger horde; across a barren valley, toward and to the side of a mountain.

* * *

An area almost a mile square of that mountain's side was a burned, blasted, churned, pocked, cratered and flaming waste; and the four helicopters were still working on it. High-energy beams blasted, fairly volatilizing the ground as they struck in as deep as they could be driven. High-explosive shells bored deep and detonated, hurling shattered rock and soil and yellow smoke far and wide; establishing new craters by destroying the ones existing a moment before.

While it seemed incredible that any living thing larger than a microbe could emerge under its own power from such a hell of energy, many flying tigers did; apparently being blown aloft along with the hitherto undisturbed volume of soil in which the creatures had been. Most of them were not fully grown; some were so immature as to be unrecognizable to an untrained eye; but from all four helicopters hand-guns snapped and cracked. Nothing--but _nothing_--was leaving that field of carnage alive.

"What are you gunners supposed to be doing here?" Garlock asked.

"Oh, the 'copters will be leaving pretty soon--they've got other places to go. But they won't get them all--some of the hatches are too deep--so us four gunners will stick around for two-three days to kill the late-hatchers as they come out."

"I see," and Garlock probed. "There are four cells they won't reach. Shall I bomb 'em out?"

"I'll ask." The slitted red eyes widened and he sent a call. "Commander Knahr, can you hop over here a minute? I want you to meet these things we've been hearing about. They look human, but they really aren't. They're killers, with more stuff and more brains than any of us ever heard of."

Another Arpalone appeared, indistinguishable to Tellurian eyes from any one of the others.

"But why do you want to mix into something that's none of your business?" Knahr was neither officious nor condemnatory. He simply could not understand.

"Since you have no concept of our quality of curiosity, just call it education. The question is, do or do you not want those four deeply-buried cells blasted out of existence?"

"Of course I do."

"Okay. You've got all of 'em you're going to get. Tell your 'copters to give us about five miles clearance, and we'll all fall back, too."

They drew back, and there were four closely-spaced explosions of such violence that one raggedly mushroom-shaped cloud went into the stratosphere and one huge, ragged crater yawned where once churned ground had been.

"But that's _atomic_!" Knahr gasped the thought. "Fall-out!"

"No fall-out. Complete conversion. Have you got a counter?"

They had. They tested. There was nothing except the usual background count.

"There's no life left underground, so you needn't keep this squad of gunners tied up here," Garlock told the commander. "Before we go, I want to ask a question. You have visitors once in a while from other solar systems, so you must have a faster-than-light drive. Can you tell me anything about it?"

"No. Nothing like that would be any of my business." Knahr and the four gunners disappeared; the helicopters began to lumber away.

"Well, _that_ helps--I don't think," Garlock thought, glumly. "_What_ a world! Back to the Main?"

* * *

In the Main, after a long and fruitless discussion, Garlock called Governor Atterlin, who did not know anything about a faster-than-light drive, either. There was one, of course, since it took only a few days or a few weeks to go from one system to another; but Hodell didn't have any such ships. No ordinary planet did. They were owned and operated by people who called themselves "Engineers." He had no idea where the Engineers came from; they didn't say.

Garlock then tried to get in touch with the Arpalone Inspector who had checked the _Pleiades_ in, and could not find out even who it had been. The Inspector then on duty neither knew or cared anything about either faster-than-light drives or Engineers. Such things were none of his business.

"What difference would it make, anyway?" James asked. "No drive that takes 'a few weeks' for an intra-galaxy hop is ever going to get us back to Tellus."

"True enough; but if there is such a thing I want to know how it works. How are you coming with your calculations?"

"I'll finish up tomorrow easily enough."

Tomorrow came, and James finished up, but he did not find any familiar pattern of Galactic arrangement. The other three watched James set up for another try for Earth.

"You don't think we'll ever get back, do you, Clee?" Belle asked.

"Right away, no. Some day, yes. I've got the germ of an idea. Maybe three or four more hops will give me something to work on."

"I hope so," James said, "because here goes nothing," and he snapped the red switch.

* * *

It was not nothing. Number Two was another guardian Inspector and another planet very much like Hodell. It proved to be so far from both Earth and Hodell, however, that no useful similarities were found in any two of the three sets of charts.

Number Three was equally unproductive of helpful results. James did, however, improve his technique of making galactic charts; and he and Garlock designed and built a high-speed comparator. Thus the time required per stop was reduced from days to hours.

Number Four produced a surprise. When Garlock touched the knob of the testing-box he yanked his hand away before it had really made contact. It was like touching a high-voltage wire.

"You are incompatible with our humanity and must not land," the Inspector ruled.

"Suppose we blast you and your jets out of the air and land anyway?" Garlock asked.

"That is perhaps possible," the Inspector agreed, equably enough. "We are not invincible. However, it would do you no good. If any one of you four leaves that so-heavily-insulated vessel in the atmosphere of this planet you will die. Not quickly, but slowly and with difficulty."

"But you haven't tested _me_!" Belle said. "Do you mean they'll attack us on sight?"

"There is no need to test more than one. Anyone who could live near any of you could not live on this planet. Nor will they attack you. Don't you know what the thought 'incompatible' means?"

"With us it does not mean death."

"Here it does, since it refers to life forces. The types are mutually, irreconcilably antagonistic. Your life forces are very strong. Thus, no matter how peaceable your intentions may be, many of our human beings would die before you would, but you will not live to get back to your ship if you land it and leave its protective insulation."

"Why? What is it? How does it work?" Belle demanded.

"It is not my business to know; only to tell. I have told. You will go away now."

Garlock's eyes narrowed in concentration. "Belle, can you blast? I mean, could you if you wanted to?"

"Certainly ... why, I don't _want_ to, Clee!"

"I don't, either--and I'll file that one away to chew on when I'm hungry some night, too. Take her up, Jim, and try another shot."

* * *

Numbers Five to Nine, inclusive, were neither productive nor eventful. All were, like the others, Hodell all over again, in everything fundamental. One was so far advanced that almost all of its humanity were Seconds; one so backward--or so much younger--that its strongest telepaths were only Fours. The Tellurians became acquainted with, and upon occasion fought with, various types of man-sized monsters in addition to the three varieties they had seen on Hodell.

Every planet they visited had Arpalones and Arpales. Not by those names, of course. Local names for planets, guardians, nations, cities, and persons went into the starship's tapes, but that welter of names need not be given here; this is not a catalogue. Every planet they visited was peopled by _Homo Sapiens_; capable of inter-breeding with the Tellurians and eager to do so--especially with the Tellurian men. Their strict monogamy was really tested more than once; but it held. Each had been visited repeatedly by starships; but all Garlock could find out about them was that they probably came from a world somewhere that was inhabited by compatible human beings of Grade Two. He could learn nothing about the faster-than-light drive.

Number Ten was another queer--the Tellurians were found incompatible.

"Let's go down anyway." Belle suggested. "Overcome this unwillingness of ours and find out. What do you think they've got down there, Clee Garlock, that could possibly handle you and me both?"

"I don't think it's a case of 'handling' at all. I don't know what it is, but I believe it's fatal. We won't go down."

"But it doesn't make sense!" Belle protested.

"Not yet, no; but it's a datum. Enough data and we'll be able to formulate a theory."

* * *

"You and your theories! I wish we could get some _facts_!"

"You can call that a fact. But I want you and Jim to do some math. We know that we're making mighty long jumps. Assuming that they're at perfect random, and of approximately the same length, the probability is greater than one-half that we're getting farther and farther away from Tellus. Is there a jump number, N, at which the probability is one-half that we land nearer Tellus instead of farther away? My jump-at-conclusions guess is that there isn't. That the first jump set up a bias."

"Ouch. _That_ isn't in any of the books," James said. "In other words, do we or do we not attain a maximum? You're making some bum assumptions; among others that space isn't curved and that the dimensions of the universe are very large compared to the length of our jumps. I'll see if I can put it into shape to feed to Compy. You've always held that these generators work at random--the rest of those assumptions are based on your theory?"

"Check. I'm not getting anywhere studying my alleged Xenology, so I'm going to work full time on designing a generator that will steer."

"You tried to before. So did everybody else."

"I know it, but I've got a lot more data now. And I'm not promising, just trying. Okay? Worth a try?"

"Sure--I'm in favor of anything that has any chance at all of working."

Jumping went on; and Garlock, instead of going abroad on the planets, stayed in the _Pleiades_ and worked.

* * *

At Number Forty-three, their reception was of a new kind. They were compatible with the people of this world, but the Inspector advised them against landing.

"I do not forbid you," he explained, carefully. "Our humans are about to destroy themselves with fission and fusion bombs. They send missiles, without warning, against visitors. Thus, the last starship to visit us here disregarded my warning and sent down a sensing device as usual--Engineers do not land on non-telepathic worlds, you know--and it was destroyed."

"You're a Guardian of Humanity," Garlock said. "Can't you straighten people out?"

"Of course not!" The Arpalone was outraged. "We guard humanity against incompatibles and non-humans; but it is not our business to interfere with humanity if it wishes to destroy itself. That is its privilege and its own business!"

Garlock probed down. "No telepathy, even--not even a Seven. This planet _is_ backward--back to Year One. And nothing but firecrackers--we're going down, aren't we?"

"I'll say we are!" Belle said. "This will break the monotony, at least," and the others agreed.

"You won't object, I take it," Garlock said to the Inspector, "if we try to straighten them out. We can postpone the blow-up a few years, at least."

"No objections, of course. In fact, I can say that we Guardians of Humanity would approve such action."

Down the _Pleiades_ went, into the air of the nation known as the "Allied Republican Democracies of the World," and an atomic-warheaded rocket came flaming up.

"Hm ... m ... m. Ingenious little gadget, at that," James reported, after studying it thoroughly. "Filthy thing for fall-out, though, if it goes off. Where'll I flip it, Clee? One of their moons?"

"Check. Third one out--no chance of any contamination from there."

The missile vanished; and had any astronomer been looking at that world's third and outermost moon at the moment, he might have seen a tremendous flash of light, a cloud of dust, and the formation of a new and different crater among the hundreds already there.

"No use waiting for 'em, Jim. All three of you toss everything they've got out onto that same moon, being sure not to hurt anybody--yet. I'll start asking questions."

The captain who had fired the first missile appeared in the Main. He reached for his pistol, to find that he did not have one. He tensed his muscles to leap at Garlock, to find that he could not move.

Garlock drove his probe. "Who is your superior officer?" and before the man could formulate a denial, that superior stood helpless beside him.

* * *

Then three--and four. At the fifth:

"Oh, you are the man I want. Prime Minister--euphemism for Dictator--Sovig. Missile launching stations and missile storage? You don't know? Who does?"

Another man appeared, and for twenty minutes the _Pleiades_ darted about the continent.

"Now submarines, atomic and otherwise, and all surface vessels capable of launching missiles." Another man appeared.

This job took a little longer, since the crew of each vessel had to be teleported back to their bases. An immense scrap-pile, probably visible with a telescope of even moderate power, built up rapidly on the third moon.

"Now a complete list of your uranium-refining plants, your military reactors, heavy-water and heavy-hydrogen plants, and so on." Another man appeared, but the starship did not move.

"Here is a list of plants," and Garlock named them, coldly. "You will remember them. I will return you to your office, and you may--or may not, as you please--order them evacuated. Look at your watch. We start destroying them in exactly seventy-two of your hours from this moment. Any and all persons on the properties will be killed; any within a radius of ten of your miles may be killed. Our explosives are extremely powerful, but there is no radioactivity and no danger from the fall-out. The danger is from flash-blindness, flash-burn, sheer heat, shock-wave, concussion, and flying debris of all kinds."

The officer vanished and Garlock turned back to the Prime Minister.

"You have an ally, a nation known as the 'Brotherhood of People's Republics.' Where is its capital? Slide us over there, Jim. Now, Prime Minister Sovig, you and your ally, the second and first most populous nations of your world, are combining to destroy--a pincers movement, let us say?--the third largest nation, or rather, group of nations--the Nations of the North.... Oh, I see. Third only in population, but first in productive capacity and technology. They should be destroyed because their ideology does not agree with yours. They are too idealistic to strike first, so you will. After you strike, they will not be able to. Whereupon you, personally, will rule the world. I will add to that something you are not thinking, but should: You will rule it until one of your friends puts his pistol to the back of your neck and blows your brains out."

* * *

They were now over the ally's capitol; which launched five missiles instead of one. Garlock collected four more men and studied them.

"Just as bad--if possible, worse. Who, Lingonor, is the leader of your opposition, if any?" Another man, very evidently of the same race, appeared.

"Idealistic, in a way, but spineless and corrupt," Garlock announced to all. "His administration was one of the most corrupt ever known on this world. We'll disarm them, too."

They did. The operation did not take very long; as this nation--or group, it was not very clear exactly what it was--while very high in manpower, was very low in technology.

The starship moved to a station high above the Capitol Building of the Nations of the North and moved slowly downward until it hung poised one scant mile over the building. Missiles, jets, and heavy guns were set and ready, but no attack was made. Therefore Garlock introduced himself to various personages and invited them aboard instead of snatching them; nor did he immobilize them after they had been teleported aboard.

"The president, the chief of staff, the Chief Justice, the most eminent scientist, the head of a church, the leaders of the legislative body and four political bosses, the biggest business man, biggest labor leader, and biggest gangster. Fourteen men." As Garlock studied them his face hardened. "I thought to leave your Nations armed, to entrust this world's future to you, but no. Only two of you are really concerned about the welfare of your peoples, and one of those two is very weak. Most of you are of no higher motivation than are the two dictators and your gangster Clyden. You are much better than those we have already disarmed, but you are not good enough."

Garlock's hard eyes swept over the group for two minutes before he went on:

"I am opening all of your minds, friend and foe alike, to each other, so that you may all see for yourselves what depths of rottenness exist there and just how unfit your world is to associate with the decent worlds of this or any other galaxy. It would take God Himself to do anything with such material, and I am not God. Therefore, when we have rid this world of atomics we will leave and you will start all over again. If you really try, you can not only kill all animal life on your planet, but make it absolutely uninhabitable for...."

"Stop it, Clee!" Lola jumped up, her eyes flashing. Garlock dropped the tuned group, but Belle took it over. Everyone there understood every thought. "Don't you _see_, you've done enough? That now you're going too far? That these twenty-odd men, having had their minds opened and having been given insight into what is possible, will go forward instead of backward?"

"Forward? With such people as the Prime Ministers, the labor and business leaders, the bosses and the gangsters to cope with? Do you think they've got spines stiff enough for the job?"

"I'm sure of it. Our world did it with no better. Millions and millions of other worlds did it. Why can't this one do it? Of course it can."

"May I ask a couple of questions?" This thought came from the tall, trim, soldierly Chief of Staff.

"Of course, General Cordeen."

"We have all been taking it for granted that you four belong to some super-human race; some kind or other of _Homo Superior_. Do I understand correctly your thought that your race is _Homo Sapiens_, the same as ours?"

"Why, of course it is," Lola answered in surprise. "The only difference is that we are a few thousand years older than you are."

"You said also that there were 'millions and millions' of worlds that have solved the problems facing us. Were all these worlds also peopled by _Homo Sapiens_? It seems incredible."

"True, nevertheless. On any and every world of this type humanity is identical physically; and the mental differences are due only to their being in different stages of development. In fact, every planet we have visited except this one makes a regular custom of breeding its best blood with the best blood of other solar systems. And as to the 'millions and millions,' I meant only a very large but indefinite number. As far as I know, not even a rough estimate has ever been made--has there, Clee?"

"No, but it will probably turn out to be millions _of_ millions, instead of millions _and_ millions; and squared and then cubed at that. My guess is that it'll take another ten thousand years of preliminary surveying such as we're doing, by all the crews the various Galaxian Societies can put out, before even the roughest kind of an estimate can be made as to how many planets are inhabited by mutually fertile human peoples."

* * *

For a moment the group was stunned. Then:

"Do you mean to say," asked the merchant prince, "that you Galaxians are not the only ones who have interstellar travel?"

"Far from it. In fact, yours is the only world we have seen that does not have it, in one form or another."

"Oh? More than one way? That makes it still worse. Would you be willing to sell us plans, or lease us ships...?"

"So that you could exploit other planets? We will not. You would get nowhere, even if you had an interstellar drive right now. You, personally, are a perfect example of what is wrong with this planet. Rapacious, insatiable; you violate every concept of ethics, common decency, and social responsibility. Your world's technology is so far ahead of its sociology that you not only should be, but actually are being, held in quarantine."

"_What?_"

"Exactly. One race I know of has been inspecting you regularly for several hundreds of your years. They will not make contact with you, or allow you to leave your own world, until you grow up to something beyond the irresponsible-baby stage. Thus, about two and one-half of your years ago, a starship of that race sent down a sensing element--unmanned, of course--to check your state of development. Brother Sovig volatilized it with an atomic missile."

"We did not do it," the dictator declared. "It was the war-mongering capitalists."

"You brainless, mindless, contemptible idiot," Garlock sneered. "Are even you actually stupid enough to try to lie with your mind? To minds linked to your own and to mine?"

"We did do it, then, but it was only a flying saucer."

"Just as this ship was, to you, only a flying saucer, I suppose. So here's something else for you to think about, Brother Sovig, with whatever power your alleged brain is able to generate. When you shot down that sensor, the starship did not retaliate, but went on without taking any notice of you. When you tried to shoot _us_ down, we took some slight action, but did not kill anyone and are now discussing the situation. Listen carefully now, and remember--it is very possible that the next craft you attack in such utterly idiotic fashion will, without any more warning than you gave, blow this whole planet into a ball of incandescent gas."

"Can that actually be done?" the scientist asked. For the first time, he became really interested in the proceedings.

"Very easily, Doctor Cheswick," Garlock replied. "We could do it ourselves with scarcely any effort and at very small cost. You are familiar, I suppose, with the phenomenon of ball lightning?"

"Somewhat. Its mechanism has never been elucidated in any very satisfactory mathematics."

"Well, we have at our disposal a field some...."

"Hold it, Clee," James warned. "Do you want to put out that kind of stuff around here?"

"Um ... m ... m. What do you think?"

* * *

James studied Cheswick's mind. "Better than I thought," he decided. "He has made two really worthwhile intuitions--a genius type. He's been working on what amounts almost to the Coupler Theory for ten years. He's almost got it, but you know intuitions of that caliber can't be scheduled. He might get it tomorrow--or never. I'd say push him over the hump."

"Okay with me. We'll take a vote--one blackball kills it. Brownie? Just the link, of course. A few hints, perhaps, at application, but no technological data."

"I say give it to him. He's earned it. Besides, he isn't young and may die before he gets it, and that would lose them two or three hundred years."

"Belle?"

"In favor. Shall I drop the linkage? No," she answered her own question. "No other minds here will have any idea of what it means, and it may do some of them a bit of good to see one of their own minds firing on more than one barrel."

"Thank you, Galaxians." The scientist's mind had been quivering with eagerness. "I am inexpressibly glad that you have found me worthy of so much help."

* * *

Garlock entered Cheswick's mind. First he impressed, indelibly, six symbols and their meanings. Second, a long and intricate equation; which the scientist studied avidly.

During the ensuing pause, Garlock cut the President and Chief of Staff out of the linkage. "We have just given Cheswick a basic formula. In a couple of hundred years it will give you full telepathy, and then you will begin really to go up. There's nothing secret about it--in fact, I'd advise full publication--but even so it might be a smart idea to give him both protection and good working conditions. Brains like his are apt to be centuries apart on any world."

"But this is ... it could be ... it _must_ be!" Cheswick exclaimed. "I _never_ would have formulated _that_! It isn't quite implicit, of course, but from this there derives the existence of, and the necessity for, electrogravitics! An entirely new field of reality and experiment in science!"

"There does indeed," Garlock admitted, "and it is far indeed from being implicit. You leaped a tremendous gap. And yes, the resultant is more humanistic than technological."

Belle's ear-splitting whistle resounded throughout the Main. "How do you like _them_ tid-bits, Clee?" she asked. "Two hundred years in seventy-eight seconds? You folks will have telepathy by the time your present crop of babies grows up. Clee, aren't you sorry you got mad and blew your top and wanted to pick up your marbles and go home? _Three_ such intuitions in one man's lifetime beats par, even for the genius course."

"It sure does," Garlock admitted, ruefully. "I should have studied these minds--particularly his--before jumping at conclusions."

"May I say a few words?" the president asked.

"You may indeed, sir. I was hoping you would."

"We have been discouraged; faced with an insoluble problem. Sovig and Lingonor, knowing that their own lives were forfeit anyway, were perfectly willing to destroy all the life on this world to make us yield. Now, however, with the insight and the encouragement you Galaxians have given us, the situation has changed. Reduced to ordinary high explosives, they cannot conquer us...."

"Especially without an airforce," Lola put in. "I, personally, will see to it that every bomber and fighter plane they now have goes to the third moon. It will be your responsibility to see to it that they do not rebuild."

"Thank you, Miss Montandon. We will see to it. As for our internal difficulties--I think, under certain conditions, they can be handled. Our lawless element," he glanced at the gangster, "can be made impotent. The corrupt practices of both capital and labor can be stopped. We have laws," here he looked at the members of Congress and the judge, "which can be enforced. The conditions I mentioned would be difficult at the moment, since so few of us are here and it is manifest that few if any of our people will believe that such people as you Galaxians really exist. Would it be possible for you, Miss Montandon, to spend a few days--or whatever time you can spare--in showing our Congress, and as many other groups as possible, what humanity may hope to become?"

"Of course, sir. I was planning on it."

"I'm afraid that is impossible," the Chief of Staff said.

"Why, General Cardeen?" Lola asked.

"Because you'd be shot," Cardeen said, bluntly. "We have a very good Secret Service, it is true, and we would give you every protection possible; but such an all-out effort as would be made to assassinate you would almost certainly succeed."

"Shot?" Garlock asked in surprise. "What with? You haven't anything that could even begin to crack an Operator's Shield."

"With this, sir." Cardeen held out his automatic pistol for inspection.

"Oh, I hadn't studied it ... a pellet-projector...."

"_Pellet!_ Do you call a four-seventy-five slug a pellet?"

"Not much of that, really ... it shoots eight times--shoot all eight of them at her. None of them will touch her."

"_What?_ I _will_ not! One of those slugs will go through three women like her, front to back in line."

"I will, then." The pistol leaped into Garlock's hand. "Hold up one hand, Brownie, and catch 'em. Don't let 'em splash--no deformation, so he can recognize his own pellets."

Holding the unfamiliar weapon in a clumsy, highly unorthodox grip--something like a schoolgirl's first attempt--Garlock glanced once at Lola's upraised palm and eight shots roared out as fast as the gases of explosion could operate the mechanism. The pistol's barrel remained rigidly motionless under all the stress of ultra-rapid fire. Lola's slim, deeply-tanned arm did not even quiver under the impact of that storm of heavy bullets against her apparently unsupported hand. No one saw those bullets strike that gently-curved right palm, but everyone saw them drop into her cupped left hand, like drops of water dripping rapidly from the end of an icicle into a bowl.

"Here are your pellets, General Cardeen." Lola handed them to him with a smile.

"Holy--Jumping--Snakes!" the general said, and:

"Wotta torpedo!" came the gangster's envious thought.

"You see, I am perfectly safe from being 'shot,' as you call it," Lola said. "So I'll come down and work with you. You might have your news services put out a bulletin, though. I never have killed anyone, and am not going to here, but anyone who tries to shoot me or bomb me or anything will lose both hands at the wrists just before he fires. That would keep them from killing anyone standing near me, don't you think?"

"I should _think_ it would," General Cordeen thought, and a pall of awe covered the linked minds. The implications of the naively frank remark just uttered by this apparently inoffensive and defenseless young woman were simply too overwhelming to be discussed.

"Anything else on the agenda, Clee?" Lola asked.

There was not, and the starship's guests were returned, each to his own home place.

And not one of them, it may be said, was exactly the same as he had been.

CHAPTER 4

"I think I'll come along with you and bodyguard you, Lola," Belle said, the following morning after breakfast. "Clee's going to be seven thousand miles deep in mathematics and Jim's doing his stuff at the observatory, and I can't help either of 'em at the moment. You'd do a better job, wouldn't you, if you could concentrate on it?"

"Of course. Thanks, Belle. But remember, it's already been announced--no death. Just hands. I can't really believe that I'll be attacked, but they seem pretty sure of it."

"I'd like to separate anyone like that from his head instead of his hands, but as it is published so it will be performed."

"How about wearing some kind of half-way-comfortable shoes instead of those slippers?" Garlock asked. "That could turn out to be a long, tough brawl, and your dogs'll be begging for mercy before you get back here."

"Uh-uh. Very comfortable and a perfect fit. Besides, if I have to suffer just a little bit for good appearance's sake in a matter of intergalactic amity...."

"A matter of showing off, you mean."

"Why, Clee!" Belle widened her eyes at him. "How you talk! But they're ready, Lola--let's go."

The two girls disappeared from the Main, to appear on the speakers' stand in front of the Capitol Building. President Benton was there, with his cabinet and certain other personages. General Cordeen and his staff. And many others.

"Oh, Miss Bellamy, too? I'm _very_ glad you are here," Benton said, as he shook hands cordially with both.

"Thank you. I came along as bodyguard. May I meet your Secret Service Chief, please?"

"Why, of course. Miss Bellamy, may I present Mr. Avengord?"

"You have the hospital room ready?... Where is it, please?"

"Back of us, in the wing...."

"Just think of it, please, and I will follow your thought.... Ah, yes, there it is. I hope it will not be used. You agree with General Cordeen that there will be one or more attempts at assassination?"

"I'm very much afraid so. This town is literally riddled with enemy agents, and of course we don't know all of them--especially the best ones. They know that if these meetings go through, they're sunk; so they're desperate. We've got this whole area covered like dew--we've arrested sixteen suspects already this morning--but all the advantage is theirs," Avengord finished glumly.

"Not all of it, sir," Belle smiled at him cheerfully. "You have me, and I am a Prime Operator. That is, a wielder of power of no small ability. Oh, you are right. There is an attempt now being prepared."

* * *

While Belle had been greeting and conversing, she had also been scanning. Her range, her sensitivity, and her power were immensely greater than Lola's; were probably equal to Garlock's own. She scanned by miles against the scant yards covered by the Secret Service.

"Where?"

"Give me your thought." The Secret Service man did not know what she meant--telepathy was of course new to him--so she seized his attention and directed it to a certain window in a building a couple of miles away on a hill.

"But they couldn't, from there!"

"But they can. They have a quite efficient engine of destruction--a 'rifle' is their thought. Large, and long, with a very good telescope on it--with crosshairs. If I scan their minds more precisely you may know the weapon.... Ah, they think of it as a 'Buford Mark Forty Anti-Aircraft Rifle'."

"A Buford! My God, they can hit any button on her clothes--get her away, quick!" He tried to jump, but could not move.

"As you were," she directed. "There was another Buford there, and another over there." She guided his thought. "Two men to each Buford. There are now six handless men in your hospital room. If you will send men to those three places you will find the Bufords and the hands. Your surgeon will have no difficulty in matching the hands to the men. If any seek to remove either Bufords or hands before your men get there, I will de-hand them, also."

* * *

To say that the Secret Service man was flabbergasted is to put it very mildly indeed. Cordeen had told him, with much pounding on his desk and in searing, air-blueing language, what to expect-or, rather, to expect _anything_, no matter what and with no limits whatever--but he hadn't believed it then and simply could not believe it now. Goddamn it, such things _couldn't_ happen. And this beautiful, beautifully-stacked, half-naked woman--girl, rather, she couldn't be a day over twenty-five--even if it had been their black-browed, toplofty leader, Captain Garlock himself....

"I am twenty-three of your years old, not twenty-five," she informed him, coldly, "and I will permit no distinction of sex. In your primitive culture the women may still be allowing you men to believe in the fallacy of the superiority of the male, but know right now that I can do anything any man ever born can do and do it better."

"Oh, I'm ... I'm sure ... certainly...." Avengord's thought was incoherent.

"If you want me to work with you you had better start believing right now that there are a lot of things you don't know," Belle went on relentlessly. "Stop believing that just because a thing has not already happened on this primitive, backward, mudball planet of yours, it can't happen anywhere or anywhen. You do believe, however, whether you want to or not, things you see with your own eyes?"

"Yes. I can _not_ be hypnotized."

"I'm very glad you believe that much." Avengord did not notice that she neither confirmed nor denied the truth of his statement. "To that end you will go now into the hospital room and see the bandaging going on. You will see and hear the news broadcast going out as I prepared it."

He went, and came back a badly shaken man.

"But they're sending it out exactly as it happened!" he protested. "They'll all scatter out so fast and so far we'll _never_ catch them!"

"By no means. You see, the amputees didn't believe that they would lose their hands. Their superiors didn't believe it, either; they assured each other and their underlings that it was just capitalistic bluff and nonsense. And since they are all even more materialistic and hidebound and unbelieving than you are, they all are now highly confused--at a complete loss."

"You can say _that_ again. If I, working with you and having you pounding it into my head, couldn't more than half believe it...."

"So they are now very frightened, as well as confused, and the director of their whole spy system is now violating rule and precedent by sending out messengers to summon certain high agents to confer with him in his secret place."

"If you'll tell me where, I'll get over to my office...."

"No. We'll both be in your office in plenty of time. We'll watch Lola get started. It will be highly instructive for you to watch a really capable Operator at work."

* * *

President Benton had been introduced; had in turn finished introducing Lola. The crowd, many thousands strong, was cheering. Lola was stepping into the carefully marked speaker's place.

"You may disconnect these," she waved a hand at the battery of microphones, "since I do not use speech. Not only do I not know any of your various languages, but no one language would suffice. My thought will go to every person on this, your world."

"World?" the President asked in surprise. "Surely not behind the Curtains? They will jam you, I'm afraid."

"My thought, as I shall drive it, will not be stopped," Lola assured him. "Since this world has no telepathy, it has no mind-blocks and I can cover the planet as easily as one mind. Nor does it matter whether it be day or night, or whether anyone is awake or asleep. All will receive my message. Since you wish a record, the cameras may run, although they are neither necessary nor desirable for me. Everyone will see me in his mind, much better than on the surface of any teevee tube."

"And I was going to have her address _Congress_!" the President whispered, aside, to General Cordeen.

Then Lola put her whole fine personality into a smile, directed apparently not only at each separate individual within sight, but also individually at every person on the globe; and when Brownie Montandon set out to make a production of a smile, it had the impact of a pile-driver. Then came her smooth, gently-flowing, friendly thought:

"My name, friends of this world Ormolan, is Lola Montandon. Those of you who are now looking at teevee screens can see my imaged likeness. All of you can see me very much better within your own minds.

"I am not here as an invader in any sense, but only as a citizen of the First Galaxy of this, our common universe. I have attuned my mind to each of yours in order to give you a message from the United Galaxian Societies.

"There are four of us Galaxians in this Exploration Team. As Galaxians it is our purpose here and our duty here to open your minds to certain basic truths, to be of help to you in clearing your minds of fallacies, of lies, and of undefensible prejudices; to the end that you will more rapidly become Galaxians yourselves...."

"Okay. This will go on and on. That's enough to give you an idea of what a trained and polished performer can do. What do you think of _them_ comfits, Chief?" Belle deliberately knocked the Secret Service man out of his Lola-induced mood.

"Huh? Oh, yes." Avengord was still groggy. "She's phenomenal--good--I don't mean goody-goody, but sincere and really...."

"Yeah, but don't fall in love with her. Everybody does and it doesn't do any of them a bit of good. That's her specialty and she's _very_ good at it. I told you she's a smooth, smooth worker."

"You can say _that_ again." Avengord did not know that he was repeating himself. "But it isn't an act. She means it and it's true."

"Of course she means it and of course it's true. Otherwise even she, with all her training, couldn't sell such a big bill of goods." Then, in answer to the man's unspoken question, "Yes, we're all different. She's the contactor, the spreader of the good old oil, the shining example of purity and sweetness and light--in short, the Greaser of the Ways. I'm a fighter, myself. Do you think she could actually have de-handed those men? Uh-uh. At the last minute she would have weakened and brought them in whole. My job in this operation is to knock hell out of the ones Lola can't convince, such as those spies you and I are going to interview pretty quick."

"Even they ought to be convinced. I don't see how anybody could help but be."

"Uh-uh. It'll bounce off like hailstones off of a tin roof. The only thing to do to that kind of scum is kill them. If you'll give me a thought as to where your office is we'll hop over and...."

* * *

Belle and Avengord disappeared from the stand; and, such was Lola's hold, no one on the platform or in the throng even noticed that they were gone. They materialized in Avengord's private office; he sitting as usual at his desk, she reclining in legs-crossed ease in a big leather chair.

"... get to work." Belle's thought had not been interrupted by any passage of time whatever. "What do you want to do first?"

"But I thought you were covering Miss Montandon?"

"I am. Like a blanket. Just as well here as anywhere. I will be, until she gets back to the _Pleiades_. What first?"

"Oh. Well, since I don't know what your limits are--if you have any--you might as well do whatever you think best and I'll watch you do it."

"That's the way to talk. You're going to get a shock when you see who the Head Man is. George T. Basil."

"_Basil_! I'll say it's a shock!" Avengord steadied, frowned in concentration. "Could be, though. _He_ would _never_ be suspected--but they're very good at that."

"Yeah. His name used to be Baslovkowitz. He was trained for years, then planted. None of this can be proved, as his record is perfect. Born citizen, highest standing in business and social circles. Unlimited entry and top security clearance. Right?"

"Right ... and getting enough evidence, in such cases as that, is pure, unadulterated hell."

"I suppose I could kill him, after we've recorded everything he knows," Belle suggested.

"No!" He snapped. "Too many people think of us as a strong-arm squad now. Anyway, I'd rather kill him myself than wish the job off onto--you don't _like_ killing, do you?"

"That's the understatement of the century. No civilized person does. In a hot fight, yes; but killing anyone who is helpless to fight back--in cold blood--ugh! It makes me sick in my stomach even to think of it."

"With the way you can read minds, we can get evidence enough to send them all to jail, and that we'll have to do."

"How about this?" Belle grinned as another solution came to mind. "From those first eight top men, we'll find out a lot of others lower down, and so on, until we have 'em all locked up here. We'll announce that exactly so many spies and agents--giving names, addresses, and facts, of course--got panicky after Lola's address. They fired up their hidden planes and flew back behind the Curtain. Then, when we've scanned their minds and recorded everything you want, I'll pack them all, very snugly and carefully, into Sovig's private office. With the world situation what it then will be, he won't dare kill them--he simply won't know what to do when faced with it."

* * *

Avengord agreed happily. He reached out and flipped the switch of his intercom. "Miss Kimling, come in, please."

The door burst open. "Why, it _is_ you! But you were on the rostrum just a minute.... Oh!" She saw Belle, and backed, eyes wide, toward the door she had just entered. "_She_ was there, too, and it's fifteen _miles_...."

"Steady, Fram. I'd like to present you to Prime Operator Belle Bellamy, who is cleaning out the entire Curtain organization for us."

"But how did you...."

"Never mind that. Teleportation. It took her half an hour to pound it into me, and we can't take time to explain anything now. I'll tell everybody everything I know as soon as I can. In the meantime, don't be surprised at anything that happens, and by that I mean _anything_. Such as solid people appearing on this carpet--on that spot right there--instantaneously. I want you to pay close attention to everything your mind receives, put your phenomenal memory into high gear, listen to everything I record, stop me any time I'm wrong, and be _sure_ I get everything we need."

"I don't know exactly what you're talking about, sir, but I'll try."

"Frankly, I don't, either--we'll just have to roll it as we go along. We're ready for George T. Basil now, Miss Bellamy--I hope. Don't jump, Fram."

* * *

Basil appeared and Fram jumped. She did not scream, however, and did not run out of the office. The master spy was a big, self-assured, affluent type. He had not the slightest idea of how he had been spirited out of his ultra-secret sub-basement and into this room; but he knew where he was and, after one glance at Belle, he knew why. He decided instantly what to do about it.

"This is an outrage!" he bellowed, hammering with his fist on Avengord's desk. "A stupid, high-handed violation of the rights...."

Belle silenced him and straightened him up.

"High-handed? Yes," she admitted quite seriously. "However, from the Galaxian standpoint, you have no rights at all and you are going to be extremely surprised at just how high-handed I am going to be. I am going to read your mind to its very bottom--layer by layer, like peeling an onion--and everything you know and everything you think is going down in Mr. Avengord's Big Black Book."

Belle linked all four minds together and directed the search, making sure that no item, however small, was missed. Avengord recorded every pertinent item. Fram Kimling memorized and correlated and double-checked.

Soon it was done, and Basil, shouting even louder about this last and worst violation of his rights--those of his own private mind--was led away by two men and "put away where he would keep."

"But this _is_ a flagrant violation of law...." Miss Kimling began.

"You can say _that_ again!" her boss gloated. "And if you only knew how tickled I am to do it, after the way they've been kicking _me_ around!

"But I wonder ... are you sure we can get away with it?"

"Certainly," Belle put in. "We Galaxians are doing it, not your government or your Secret Service. We'll start you clean--but it'll be up to you to keep it clean, and that will be no easy job."

"No, it won't; but we'll do it. Come around again, say in five or six years, and see."

"You know, I might take you up on that? Maybe not this same team, but I've got a notion to tape a recommendation for a re-visit, just to see how you get along. It'd be interesting."

"I wish you would. It might help, too, if everybody thought you'd come back to check. Suppose you could?"

"I've no idea, really. I'd like to, though, and I'll see what I can do. But let's get on with the job. They're all in what you call the 'tank' now. Which one do you want next?"

The work went on. That evening there was of course a reception; and then a ball. And Belle's feet did hurt when she got back to the _Pleiades_, but of course she would not admit the fact--most especially not to Garlock.

Exactly at the expiration of the stipulated seventy-two hours, the Galaxians began to destroy military atomic plants; and, shortly thereafter, the starship's crew was again ready to go.

And James rammed home the red button that would send them--all four wondered--_where_?

It turned out to be another Hodell-type world; and, even with the high-speed comparator, it took longer to check the charts than it did to make them.

* * *

The next planet was similar. So was the next, and the next. The time required for checking grew longer and longer.

"How about cutting out this checking entirely, Clee?" James asked then. "What good does it do? Even if we find a similarity, what could we do about it? We've got enough stuff now to keep a crew of astronomers busy for five years making a tank of it."

"Okay. We probably are so far away now, anyway, that the chance of finding a similarity is vanishingly small. Keep on taking the shots, though; they'll prove, I think, that the universe is one whole hell of a lot bigger than anybody has ever thought it was. That reminds me--are you getting anywhere on that N-problem? I'm not."

"I'm getting nowhere, fast. You should have been a math prof in a grad school, Clee. You could flunk every advanced student you had with that one. Belle and I together can't feed it to Compy in such shape as to get a definite answer. We think, though, that your guess was right--if we ever stabilize anywhere it will probably be relative to Hodell, not to Tellus. But the cold fact of how far away we must be by this time just scares the pants off of me."

"You and me both, my ripe and old. We're a _long_ ways from home."

* * *

Jumping went on; and, two or three planets later, they encountered an Arpalone Inspector who did not test them for compatibility with the humanity of his world.

"Do not land," the creature said, mournfully. "This world is dying, and if you leave the protection of your ship, you too will die."

"But _worlds_ don't die, surely?" Garlock protested. "People, yes--but worlds?"

"Worlds die. It is the Dilipic. The humans die, too, of course, but it is the world itself that is attacked, not the people. Some of them, in fact, will live through it."

Garlock drove his attention downward and scanned.

"You Arpalones are doing what looks like a mighty good job of fighting. Can't you win?"

"No, it is too late. It was already too late when they first appeared, two days ago. When the Dilipics strike in such small force that none of their--agents?--devices?--whatever they are?--can land against our beaming, a world can be saved; but such cases are very few."

"But this thought, 'Dilipic'?" Garlock asked, impatiently. "It is merely a symbol--it doesn't _mean_ anything--to me, at least. What are they? Where do they come from?"

"No one knows anything about them," came the surprising answer. "Not even their physical shape--if they have any. Nor where they come from, or how they do what they do."

"They can't be very common," Garlock pondered. "We have never heard of them before."

"Fortunately, they are not," the Inspector agreed. "Scarcely one world in five hundred is ever attacked by them--this is the first Dilipic invasion I have seen."

"Oh, you Arpalones don't die with your worlds, then?" Lola asked. She was badly shaken. "But I suppose the Arpales do, of course."

"Practically all of the Arpales will die, of course. Most of us Arpalones will also die, in the battles now going on. Those of us who survive, however, will stay aloft until the rehabilitation fleet arrives, then we will continue our regular work."

"Rehab?" Belle exclaimed. "You mean you can _restore_ planets so badly ruined that all the people die?"

"Oh, yes. It is a long and difficult work, but the planet is always re-peopled."

"Let's go down," Garlock said. "I want to get all of this on tape."

They went down, over what had been one of that world's largest cities. The air, the stratosphere, and all nearby space were full of battling vessels of all shapes and sizes; ranging from the tremendous globular spaceships of the invaders down to the tiny, one-man jet-fighters of the Arpalones.

* * *

The Dilipics were using projectile weapons only--ranging in size, with the size of the vessels, from heavy machine guns up to seventy-five-millimeter quick-firing rifles. They were also launching thousands of guided missiles of fantastic speed and of tremendous explosive power.

The Arpalones were not using anything solid at all. Each defending vessel, depending upon its type and class, carried from four up to a hundred or so burnished-metal reflectors some four feet in diameter; each with a small black device at its optical center and each pouring out a tight beam of highly effective energy. It was at these reflectors, and particularly at these tiny devices, that the small-arms fire was directed, and the marksmanship of the Dilipics was very good indeed. However, each projector was oscillating irregularly and each fighter-plane was taking evasive action; and, since a few bullet-holes in any reflector did not reduce its efficiency very much, and since the central mechanisms were so small and were moving so erratically, a good three-quarters of the Arpalonian beams were still in action.

* * *

There was no doubt at all that those beams were highly effective. Invisible for the most part, whenever one struck a Dilipic ship or plane everything in its path flared almost instantly into vapor and the beam glared incandescently, blindingly white or violet or high blue--never anything lower than blue. Almost everything material, that is; for guns, ammunition, and missiles were not affected. They did not even explode. When whatever fabric it was that supported them was blasted away, all such things simply dropped; simply fell through thousands or hundreds of thousands of feet of air to crash unheeded upon whatever happened to be below.

The invading task force was arranged in a whirling, swirling, almost cylindrical cone, more or less like an Earthly tornado. The largest vessels were high above the stratosphere; the smallest fighters were hedge-hoppingly close to ground. Each Dilipic unit seemed madly, suicidally determined that nothing would get through that furious wall to interfere with whatever it was that was coming down from space to the ground through--along?--the relatively quiet "eye" of the pseudo-hurricane.

On the other hand, the Arpalones were madly, suicidally determined to break through that vortex wall, to get into the "eye," to wreak all possible damage there. Group after group after group of five jet-fighters each came driving in; and, occasionally, the combined blasts of all five made enough of opening in the wall so that the center fighter could get through. Once inside, each pilot stood his little, stubby-winged craft squarely on her tail, opened his projectors to absolute maximum of power and of spread, and climbed straight up the spout until he was shot down.

And the Arpalones were winning the battle. Larger and larger gaps were being opened in the vortex wall; gaps which it became increasingly difficult for the Dilipics to fill. More and more Arpalone fighters were getting inside. They were lasting longer and doing more damage all the time. The tube was growing narrower and narrower.

All four Galaxians perceived all this in seconds. Garlock weighed out and detonated a terrific matter-conversion bomb in the exact center of one of the largest vessels of the attacking fleet. It had no effect. Then a larger one. Then another, still heavier. Finally, at over a hundred megatons equivalent, he did get results--of a sort. The invaders' guns, ammunition, and missiles were blown out of the ship and scattered outward for miles in all directions; but the structure of the Dilipic ship itself was not harmed.

Belle had been studying, analyzing, probing the things that were coming down through that hellish tube.

"Clee!" She drove a thought. "Cut out the monkey-business with those damn firecrackers of yours and look here--pure, solid force, like ball lightning or our Op field, but entirely different--see if you can analyze the stuff!"

"Alive?" Garlock asked, as he drove a probe into one of the things--they were furiously-radiating spheres some seven feet in diameter--and began to tune to it.

"I don't know--don't think so--if they are, they're a form of life that no sane human being could even imagine!"

"Let's see what they actually do," Garlock suggested, still trying to tune in with the thing, whatever it was, and still following it down.

This particular force-ball happened to hit the top of a six-story building. It was not going very fast--fifteen or twenty miles an hour--but when it struck the roof it did not even slow down. Without any effort at all, apparently, it continued downward through the concrete and steel and glass of the building; and everything in its path became monstrously, sickeningly, revoltingly changed.

"I simply can't stand any more of this," Lola gasped. "If you don't mind, I'm going to my room, set all the Gunther blocks it has, and bury my head under a pillow."

"Go ahead, Brownie," James said. "This is too tough for _anybody_ to watch. I'd do the same, except I've got to run these cameras."

Lola disappeared.

* * *

Garlock and Belle kept on studying. Neither had paid any attention at all to either Lola or James.

Instead of the structural material it had once been, the bore that the thing had traversed was now full of a sparkling, bubbling, writhing, partly-fluid-partly-viscous, obscenely repulsive mass of something unknown and unknowable on Earth; a something which, Garlock now recalled, had been thought of by the Arpalone Inspector as "golop."

As that unstoppable globe descended through office after office, it neither sought out people nor avoided them. Walls, doors, windows, ceilings, floors and rugs, office furniture and office personnel; all alike were absorbed into and made a part of that indescribably horrid brew.

Nor did the track of that hellishly wanton globe remain a bore. Instead, it spread. That devil's brew ate into and dissolved everything it touched like a stream of boiling water being poured into a loosely-heaped pile of granulated sugar. By the time the ravening sphere had reached the second floor, the entire roof of the building was gone and the writhing, racing flood of corruption had flowed down the outer walls and across the street, engulfing and transforming sidewalks, people, pavement, poles, wires, automobiles, people-anything and everything it touched.

* * *

The globe went on down, through basement and sub-basement, until it reached solid, natural ground. Then, with its top a few inches below the level of natural ground, it came to a full stop and--apparently--did nothing at all. By this time, the ravening flood outside had eaten far into the lower floors of the buildings across the street, as well as along all four sides of the block, and tremendous masses of masonry and steel, their supporting structures devoured, were subsiding, crumbling, and crashing down into the noisome flood of golop--and were being transformed almost as fast as they could fall.

One tremendous mass, weighing hundreds or perhaps thousands of tons, toppled almost as a whole; splashing the stuff in all directions for hundreds of yards. Wherever each splash struck, however, a new center of attack came into being, and the peculiarly disgusting, abhorrent liquidation went on.

"Can you do anything with it, Clee?" Belle demanded.

"Not too much--it's a mess," Garlock replied. "Besides, it wouldn't get us far, I don't think. It'll be more productive to analyze the beams the Arpalones are using to break them up, don't you think?"

Then, for twenty solid minutes, the two Prime Operators worked on those enigmatic beams.

"We can't assemble _that_ kind of stuff with our minds," Belle decided then.

"I'll say we can't," Garlock agreed. "Ten megacycles, and cycling only twenty per second." He whistled raucously through his teeth. "My guess is it'd take four months to design and build a generator to put out that kind of stuff. It's worse than our Op field."

"I'm not sure I could _ever_ design one," Belle said, thoughtfully, "but of course I'm not the engineer you are...." Then, she could not help adding, "... yet."

"No, and you never will be," he said, flatly.

"No? That's what _you_ think!" Even in such circumstances as those, Belle Bellamy was eager to carry on her warfare with her Project Chief.

"That's _exactly_ what I think--and I'm so close to knowing it for a fact that the difference is indetectible."

Belle almost--but not quite--blew up. "Well, what _are_ you going to do?"

"Unless and until I can figure out something effective to do, I'm not going to try to do anything. If you, with your vaunted and flaunted belief in the inherent superiority of the female over the male, can dope out something useful before I do, I'll eat crow and help you do it. As for arguing with you, I'm all done for the moment."

Belle gritted her teeth, flounced away, and plumped herself down into a chair. She shut her eyes and put every iota of her mind to work on the problem of finding something--_anything_--that could be done to help this doomed world and to show that big, overbearing jerk of a Garlock that she was a better man than he was. Which of the two objectives loomed more important, she herself could not have told, to save her life.

And Garlock looked around. The air and the sky over the now-vanished city were both clear of Dilipic craft. The surviving Arpalone fighters and other small craft were making no attempt to land, anywhere on the world's surface. Instead, they were flying upward toward, and were being drawn one by one into the bowels of, huge Arpalonian space-freighters. When each such vessel was filled to capacity, it flew upward and set itself into a more-or-less-circular orbit around the planet.

Around and around and around the ruined world the _Pleiades_ went; recording, observing, charting. Fifty-eight of those atrocious Dilipic vortices had been driven to ground. Every large land-mass surrounded by large bodies of water had been struck once, and only once; from the tremendous area of the largest continent down to the relatively tiny expanses of the largest islands. One land-mass, one vortex. One only.

"What d'you suppose _that_ means?" James asked. "Afraid of water?"

"Damfino. Could be. Let's check ... mountains, too. Skip us back to where we started--oceans and mountains both fairly close there."

The city had disappeared long since; for hundreds of almost-level square miles there extended a sparkling, seething, writhing expanse of--of what? The edge of that devouring flood had almost reached the foot-hills, and over that gnawing, dissolving edge the _Pleiades_ paused.

* * *

Small lakes and ordinary rivers bothered the golop very little if at all. There was perhaps a slightly increased sparkling, a slight stiffening, a little darkening, some freezing and breaking off of solid blocks; but the thing's forward motion was not noticeably slowed down. It drank a fairly large river and a lake one mile wide by ten miles long while the two men watched.

The golop made no attempt to climb either foot-hills or mountains. It leveled them. It ate into their bases at its own level; the undermined masses, small and large, collapsed into the foul, corrosive semi-liquid and were consumed. Nor was there much raising of the golop's level, even when the highest mountains were reached and miles-high masses of solid rock broke off and toppled. There was some raising, of course; but the stuff was fluid enough so that its slope was not apparent to the eye.

* * *

Then the _Pleiades_ went back, over the place where the city had been and on to what had once been an ocean beach. The original wave of degradation had reached that shore long since, had attacked its sands out into deep water, and there it had been stopped. The corrupt flood was now being reinforced, however, by an ever-rising tide of material that had once been mountains. And the slope, which had not been even noticeable at the mountains or over the plain, was here very evident.

As the rapidly-flowing golop struck water, the water shivered, came to a weirdly unforgettable cold boil, and exploded into drops and streamers and jagged-edged chunks of something that was neither water nor land; or rock or soil or sand or Satan's unholy brew. Nevertheless, the water won. There was _so_ much of it! Each barrel of water that was destroyed was replaced instantly and enthusiastically; with no lowering of level or of pressure.

And when water struck the golop, the golop also shivered violently, then sparkled even more violently, then stopped sparkling and turned dark, then froze solid. The frozen surface, however, was neither thick enough nor strong enough to form an effective wall.

Again and again the wave of golop built up high enough to crack and to shatter that feeble wall; again and again golop and water met in ultimately furious, if insensate, battle. Inch by inch the ocean's shoreline was driven backward toward ocean's depths; but every inch the ocean lost was to its tactical advantage, since the advancing front was by now practically filled with hard, solid, dead blocks of its own substance which it could neither assimilate nor remove from the scene of conflict.

Hence the wall grew ever thicker and solider; the advance became slower and slower.

Then, finally, ocean waves of ever-increasing height and violence rolled in against the new-formed shore. What caused those tremendous waves--earthquakes, perhaps, due to the shifting of the mountains' masses?--no Tellurian ever surely knew. Whatever the cause, however, those waves operated to pin the golop down. Whenever and wherever one of those monstrous waves whitecapped in, hurling hundreds of thousands of tons of water inland for hundreds of yards, the battle-front stabilized then and there.

All over that world the story was the same. Wherever there was water enough, the water won. And the total quantity of water in that world's oceans remained practically unchanged.

"Good. A lot of people escaped," James said, expelling a long-held breath. "Everybody who lives on or could be flown to all the islands smaller than the biggest ones ... if they can find enough to eat and if the air isn't poisoned."

"Air's okay--so's the water--and they'll get food," Garlock said. "The Arpalones will handle things, including distribution. What I'm thinking about is how they're going to rehabilitate it. That, as an engineering project, is a feat to end all feats."

"_Brother!_ You can play _that_ in spades!" James agreed. "Except that it'll take too many months before they can even start the job, I'd like to stick around and see how they go about it. How does this kind of stuff fit into that theory you're not admitting is a theory?"

"Not worth a damn. However, it's a datum--and, as I've said before and may say again, if we can get _enough_ data we can build a theory out of it."

Then it began to rain. For many minutes the clouds had been piling up--black, far-flung, thick and high. Immense bolts of lightning flashed and snapped and crackled; thunder crashed and rolled and rumbled; rain fell, and continued to fall, like a cloud-burst in Colorado. And shortly thereafter--first by square feet and then by acres and then by square miles--the surface of the golop began to die. To die, that is, if it had ever been even partially alive. At least it stopped sparkling, darkened, and froze into thick skins; which broke up into blocks; which in turn sank--thus exposing an ever-renewed surface to the driving, pelting, relentlessly cascading rain.

"Well, I don't know that there's anything to hold us here any longer," Garlock said, finally. "Shall we go?"

They went; but it was several days before any of the wanderers really felt like smiling; and Lola did not recover from her depression for over a week.

CHAPTER 5

Supper was over, but the four were still at the table, sipping coffee and smoking. During a pause in the casual conversation, James suddenly straightened up.

"I want an official decision, Clee," he said, abruptly. "While we're out of touch with United Worlds you, as captain of the ship and director of the project, are Boss, with a capital B. The Lord of Justice, High and Low. The Works. Check?"

"On paper, yes; with my decisions subject to appeal and/or review when we get back to Base. In practice, I didn't expect to have to make any very gravid rulings."

"I never thought you'd have to, either, but Belle fed me one with a bone in it, so...."

"Just a minute. How official do you want it? Full formal, screens down and recorded?"

"Not unless we have to. Let's explore it first. As of right now, are we under the Code or not?"

"Of course we are."

"Not necessarily," Belle put in, sharply. "Not slavishly to the letter. We're so far away and our chance of getting back is so slight that it should be interpreted in the light of common sense."

* * *

Garlock stared at Belle and she stared back, her eyes as clear and innocent as a baby's.

"The Code is neither long enough nor complicated enough to require interpretation," Garlock stated, finally. "It either applies in full and exactly or not at all. My ruling is that the Code applies, strictly, until I declare the state of Ultimate Contingency. Are you ready, Belle, to abandon the project, find an uninhabited Tellurian world, and begin to populate it?"

"Well, not quite, perhaps."

"Yes or no, please."

"No."

"We are under the Code, then. Go ahead, Jim."

"I broke pairing with Belle and she refused to confirm."

"Certainly I refused. He had no reason to break with me."

"I had plenty of reason!" James snapped. "I'm fed up to here--" he drew his right forefinger across his forehead, "--with making so-called love to a woman who can never think of anything except cutting another man's throat. She's a heartless conniver."

"You both know that reasons are unnecessary and are not discussed in public," Garlock said, flatly. "Now as to confirmation of a break. In simple pairing there is no marriage, no registration, no declaration of intent or of permanence. Thus, legally or logically, there is no obligation. Morally, however, there is always some obligation. Hence, as a matter of urbanity, in cases where no injury exists except as concerns chastity, the Code calls for agreement without rancor. If either party persists in refusal to confirm, and cannot show injury, that party's behavior is declared inurbane. Confirmation is declared and the offending party is ignored."

"Just how would you go about ignoring Prime Operator Belle Bellamy?"

"You've got a point there, Jim. However, she hasn't persisted very long in her refusal. As a matter of information, Belle, why did you take Jim in the first place?"

"I didn't." She shrugged her shoulders. "It was pure chance. You saw me flip the tenth-piece."

"Am I to ignore the fact that you are one of the best telekineticists living?"

"I don't _have_ to control things unless I want to!" She stamped her foot. "Can't you conceive of me flipping a coin honestly?"

"No. However, since this is not a screens-down inquiry, I'll give you--orally, at least--the benefit of the doubt. The next step, I presume, is for Lola to break with me. Lola?"

"Well ... I hate to say this, Clee.... I thought that mutual consent would be better, but...." Lola paused, flushing in embarrassment.

"She feels," James said, steadily, "as I do, that there should be much more to the sexual relation than merely releasing the biological tensions of two pieces of human machinery. That's hardly civilized."

"I confirm, Lola, of course," Garlock said; then went on, partly thinking aloud, partly addressing the group at large. "Ha. Reasons again, and very well put--not off the cuff. Evasions. Flat lies. Something very unfunny here--as queer as a nine-credit bill. In sum, indefensible actions based upon unwarranted conclusions drawn from erroneous assumptions. The pattern is not clear ... but I won't order screens down until I have to ... if the reason had come from Belle...."

"_Me_?" Belle flared. "Why from me?"

"... instead of Jim...." Ignoring Belle's interruption, Garlock frowned in thought. After a minute or so his face cleared.

"Jim," he said, sharply, "have you been consciously aware of Belle's manipulation?"

"Why, no, of course not. She _couldn't_!"

"That's _really_ a brainstorm, Clee," Belle sneered. "You'd better turn yourself in for an overhaul."

"Nice scheme, Belle," Garlock said. "I underestimated--at least, didn't consider carefully enough--your power; and overestimated your ethics and urbanity."

"What are you talking about, Chief?" James asked. "You lost me ten parsecs back."

"Just this. Belle is behind this whole operation; working under a perfectly beautiful smokescreen."

"I'm afraid the boss is cracking up, kids," Belle said. "Listen to him, if you like, but use your own judgment."

"But nobody could make Jim and me really love each other," Lola argued, "and we really do. It's real love."

"Admitted," Garlock said. "But she could have helped it along; and she's all set to take every possible advantage of the situation thus created."

"I still don't see it," James objected. "Why, she wouldn't even confirm our break. She hasn't yet."

"She would have, at the exactly correct psychological moment; after holding out long enough to put you both under obligation to her. There would have, also, been certain strings attached. Her plan was, after switching the pairings...."

"I wouldn't pair with you," Belle broke in viciously, "if you were the only man left in the macrocosmic universe!"

"Part of the smokescreen," Garlock explained. "The re-pairings would give her two lines of attack on me, to be used simultaneously. First, to work on me in bed...."

"See?" Belle interrupted. "He doesn't think I've got any heart at all."

"Oh, you may have one, but it's no softer than your head, and that could scratch a diamond. Second, to work on you two, with no holds barred, to form a three-unit team against me. Her charges that I am losing my grip made a very smart opening lead."

"Do you think I'd _let_ her work on me?" James demanded.

"She's a Prime--you wouldn't know anything about it. However, nothing will happen. Nor am I going to let her confuse the real issue. Belle, you are either inside the Code or a free agent outside it. Which?"

"I have made my position clear."

"To me, yes. To Jim and Lola, decidedly unclear."

"Unclear, then. You can _not_ coerce me!"

"If you follow the Code, no. If you don't, I can and will. If you make any kind of a pass at Jim James from now on, I'll lock you into your room with a Gunther block."

"_You wouldn't dare_!" she breathed. "Besides, you couldn't, not to another prime."

"Don't bet on it," he advised.

After a full minute of silence Garlock's attitude changed suddenly to his usual one of casual friendliness. "Why not let this one drop right here, Belle? I can marry them, with all the official trimmings. Why not let 'em really enjoy their honeymoon?"

"Why not?" Belle's manner changed to match Garlock's and she smiled warmly. "I confirm, Jim. You two are really serious, aren't you? Marriage, declarations, registration, and everything? I wish--I sincerely and really wish you--every happiness possible."

"We really _are_ serious," James said, putting his arm around Lola's waist. "And you won't ... won't interfere?"

"Not a bit. I couldn't, now, even if I wanted to." Belle grinned wryly. "You see, you kids missed the main feature of the show, since you can't know exactly what a Prime Operator is. Especially you can't know what Cleander Simmsworth Garlock really is--he's an out-and-out tiger on wheels. The three of us could have smacked him bow-legged, but of course all chance of that blew up just now. So if you two want to take the big jump you can do it with my blessing as well as Clee's. I'll clear the table."

* * *

That small chore taken care of--a quick folding-up of everything into the tablecloth and a heave into the chute did it--Belle set up the recorder.

"Are you both fully certain that you want the full treatment?" Garlock asked.

Both were certain, and Garlock read the brief but solemn marriage lines.

As the newlyweds left the room, Belle turned to Garlock with a quizzical smile. "Are you going to ask me to pair with you, Clee?"

"I certainly am." He grinned back at her. "I owe you that much revenge, at least. But seriously, I'd like it immensely and we fit like Grace and Poise. Look at that mirror. Did you ever see a better-matched couple? Will you give me a try, Belle?"

"I will not," she said, emphatically. I'll take back what I said a while ago--if you were really the only man left, I would--but as it is, the answer is a definite, resounding, and final '_No_'."

"'Definite' and 'resounding,' yes. 'Final,' I won't accept. I'll wait."

"You'll wait a long time, Buster. My door will be locked from now on. Good night, Doctor Garlock, I'm going to bed."

"So am I." He walked with her along the corridor to their rooms, the doors of which were opposite each other. "In view of the Code, locking your door is a meaningless gesture. Mine will remain unlocked. I invite you to come in whenever you like, and assure you formally that no such entry will be regarded as an invasion of privacy."

Without a word she went into her room and closed the door with a firmness just short of violence. Her lock clicked sharply.

* * *

The next morning, after breakfast, James followed Garlock into his room and shut the door.

"Clee, I want to tell you.... I don't want to get sloppy but...."

"Want to lep it?"

"Hell, no!"

"It's about Brownie, then."

"Uh-huh. I've always liked you immensely. Admired you. Hero, sort of...."

"Yeah. I quote. 'Harder than Pharaoh's heart.' 'Colder than frozen helium,' and all the rest. But this thing about Brownie...." He reached out; two hard hands met in a crushing grip. "How could you possibly lay off? Just the strain, if nothing else."

"A little strain doesn't hurt a man unless he lets it. I've done without for months at a stretch, with it running around loose on all sides of me."

"But she's so ... she's got _everything_!"

"There speaketh the ensorcelled bridegroom. For my taste, she hasn't. She told you, I suppose, when explaining a certain fact, that I told her she wasn't my type?"

"Yes, but...."

"She still isn't. She's a very fine person, with a very fine personality. She is one of the two most nearly perfect young women of her race. Her face is beautiful. Her body is an artist's dream. Her mind is one of the very best. Besides all that, she's a very good egg and a mighty tasty dish. But put yourself in my place.

* * *

"Here's this paragon we have just described. She has extremely high ideals and she's a virgin; never really aroused. Also, she's so full of this sickening crap they've been pouring into us--propaganda, rocket-oil, prop-wash, and psychological gobbledygook--that it's running out of her ears. She's so stuffed with it that she's going to pair with you, ideals and virginity be damned, even if it kills her; even though she's shaking, clear down to her shoes--scared yellow. Also, she is and always will be scared half to death of you--she thinks you're some kind of robot. She's a starry-eyed, soft-headed sissy. A sapadilla. A sucker for a smooth line of balloon-juice and flapdoodle. No spine; no bottom. A gutless doll-baby. Strictly a pet--you could no more love her, ever, than you could a half-grown kitten...."

"That's a _hell_ of a picture!" James broke in savagely. "Even with your cold-blooded reputation."

"People in love can't be objective, is all. If I saw her through the same set of filters you do, I'd be in love with her, too. So let's see if you can use your brain instead of your outraged sensibilities to answer a hypothetical question. If the foregoing were true, what would _you_ do, Junior?"

"I'd pass, I guess. I'd have to, if I wanted to look at myself in the mirror next morning. But that's such an _ungodly_ cockeyed picture, Clee.... But if that's actually your picture of Brownie--and you're no part of a liar--just what kind of a woman could you love? If any?"

"Belle."

"_Belle_! Belle _Bellamy_? Hell's flaming furies! That iceberg? That egomaniac? That Jezebel? She's the hardest-boiled babe that ever went unhung."

"Right, on all counts. Also she's crooked and treacherous. She's a ground-and-lofty liar by instinct and training. I could add a lot more. But she's got brains, ability, and guts--guts enough to supply the Women's Army Corps. She's got the spine and the bottom and the drive. So just imagine her thawed out and really shoveling on the coal--blasting wide open on all forty torches. Back to back with you when you're surrounded; she wouldn't cave and she wouldn't give. Or wing and wing--holding the beam come hell or space-warps. Roll that one around on your tongue, Jim, and give your taste-buds a treat."

"Well, maybe ... if I've got that much imagination ... that's a tough blueprint to read. I can't quite visualize the finished article. However, you're as hard as she is--even harder. You've got more of what it takes. Maybe _you_ can make a Christian out of her. If so, you might have something; but I'm damned if I can see exactly what. Whatever it turned out to be, I wouldn't care for any part of it. You could have it all."

"Exactly; and you can have your Brownie."

"I'm beginning to see. I didn't think you had anything like that in your chilled-steel carcass. And I want to apolo...."

"Don't do it, boy. If the time ever comes when _you_ go so soft on me as to quit laying it on the line and start sifting out your language...." Garlock paused. For one of the very few times in his life, he was at a loss for words. He thrust his hands into his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. "Hell, I don't want to get maudlin, either ... so ... well, how many men, do you think, could have gone the route with me on this hellish job without killing me or me killing them?"

"Oh, that's not...."

"Lay it on the line, Jim. I know what I am. Just one. You. One man in six thousand million. Okay; how many women could live with me for a year without going crazy?"

"Lots of 'em; but, being masochists, they'd probably drive _you_ nuts. And you can't stand 'stupidity'; which, by definition, lets _everybody_ out. Nope, it's a tough order to fill."

"Check. She'd have to be strong enough and hard enough not to be afraid of me, by any trace. Able and eager to stand up to me and slug it out. To pin my ears back flat against my skull whenever she thinks I'm off the beam. Do it with skill and precision and nicety, with power and control; yet without doing herself any damage and without changing her basic feeling for me. In short, a female Jim James Nine."

"Huh? Hell's blowtorches! You think _I'm_ like Belle Bellamy?"

"Not by nine thousand megacycles. Like Belle Bellamy could be and should be. Like I hope she will be. I'd have to give, too, of course--maybe we can make Christians out of each other. It's quite a dream, I admit, but it'll be Belle or nobody. But I'm not used to slopping over this way--let's go."

"I'm glad you did, big fellow--once in a lifetime is good for the soul. I'd say you were in love with her right now--except that if you were, you couldn't possibly dissect her like a specimen on the table, the way you've just been doing. Are you or aren't you?"

"I'll be damned if I know. You and Brownie believe that the poets' concept of love is valid. In fact, you make a case for its validity. I never have, and don't now ... but under certain conditions ... I simply don't know. Ask me again sometime; say in about a month?"

"That's the surest thing you know. Oh, _brother! This_ is a thing I'm going to watch with my eyes out on stalks!"

* * *

For the next week, Belle locked her door every night. For another few nights, she did not lock it. Then, one night, she left it ajar. The following evening, the two again walked together to their doors.

"I left my door open last night."

"I know you did."

"Well?"

"And have you scream to high heaven that I opened it? And put me on a tape for willful inurbanity? For deliberate intersexual invasion of privacy?"

* * *

"Blast and damn! You know perfectly well, Clee Garlock, I wouldn't pull such a dirty, lousy trick as that."

"Maybe I should apologize, then, but as a matter of fact I have no idea whatever as to what you wouldn't do." He stared at her, his face hard in thought. "As you probably know, I have had very little to do with women. That little has always been on a logical level. You are such a completely new experience that I can't figure out what makes you tick."

"So you're afraid of me," she sneered. "Is that it?"

"Close enough."

"And I suppose it's you that cartoonist what's-his-name is using as a model for 'Timorous Timmy'?"

"Since you've guessed it, yes."

"You ... you _weasel_!" She took three quick steps up the corridor, then back. "You say my logic is cockeyed. What system are you using now?"

"I'm trying to develop one to match yours."

"Oh ... I invited that one, I guess, since I know you aren't afraid of God, man, woman, or devil ... and you're big enough so you don't have to be proving it all the time." She laughed suddenly, her face softening markedly. "Listen, you big lug. Why don't you ever knock me into an outside loop? If I were you and you were me, I'd've busted me loose from my front teeth long ago."

"I'm not sure whether I know better or am afraid to. Anyway, I'm not rocking any boat so far from shore."

"Says you. You're wonderful, Clee--simply priceless. Do you know you're the only man I ever met that I couldn't make fall for me like a rock falling down a cliff? And that the falling is altogether too apt to be the other way?"

"The first, I have suspected. The second is chemically-pure rocket-oil."

"I _hope_ it is.... I wish I could be as certain of it as you are.... You see, Clee, I really expected you to come in, last night, and there really _wasn't_ any bone in it. Surely, you don't think I'm going to _invite_ you into my room, do you?"

"I can't see why not. However, since no valid system of logic seems to apply, I accept your decision as a fact. By the same reasoning--however invalid--if I ask you again you will again refuse. So all that's left, I guess, is for me to drag you into my room by force."

He put his left arm around her and applied a tiny pressure against her side; under which she began to move slowly toward his door.

"You admit that you're using force?" she asked. Her face was unreadable; her mental block was at its fullest force. "That I'm being coerced? Definitely?"

"Definitely," he agreed. "At least ten dynes of sheer brute force. Not enough to affect a tape, but enough, I hope, to affect you. If it isn't, I'll use more."

"Oh, ten dynes is enough. Just so it's force."

She raised her face toward his and threw both arms around his neck. His right arm went into action with his left, and Cleander Garlock forgot all about dynes and tapes.

After a time she disengaged one arm; reached out; opened his door. He gathered her up and, lips still locked to lips, carried her over the threshold.

* * *

A few jumps later they met their first really old Arpalone. This Inspector was so old that his skin, instead of the usual bright, clear cobalt blue, was dull and tending toward gray. The old fellow was strangely garrulous, for a Guardian; he wanted them to pause a while and gossip.

"Yes, I am lonesome," he admitted. "It has been a long time since I exchanged thoughts with anyone. You see, nobody has visited this planet--Groobe, its name is--since almost all our humanity was killed, a few periods ago...."

"Killed? How?" Garlock asked sharply. "Not Dilipic?"

"Oh, you have seen them? I never have, myself. No, nothing nearly that bad. Merely the Ozobes. The world itself was scarcely harmed at all. Rehabilitation will be a simple matter, so there's no real reason why some of those Engineers...."

"The beast!" Lola shot a tight-beam thought at her husband. "Who cares anything about the rock and dirt of a _planet_? It's the people that count and his are dead and he's perfectly _complaisant_ about it--just _lonesome_!"

"Don't let it throw you, pet," James soothed. "He's an Arpalone, you know; not a sociological anthropologist."

"... shouldn't come out here and spend a few hours once in a while, but they don't. Too busy with their own business, they say. But while you are physically human, mentally you are not. You're all too ... too ... I can't put my thought exactly on it, but ... more as though you were human fighters, if such a thing could be possible."

"We are fighters. Where we come from, most human beings are fighters."

"Oh? I never heard of such a thing. Where can you be from?"

This took much explanation, since the Arpalone had never heard of inter-galactic travel. "You are willing, then, to fight side by side with us Arpalones against the enemies of humanity? You have actually done so, at times, and won?"

"We certainly have."

"I am glad. I am expecting a call for help any time now. Will you please give me enough of your mental pattern, Doctor Garlock, so that I can call you in case of need? Thank you."

"What makes you think you're going to get an S.O.S. so soon? Where from?"

"Because these Ozobe invasions come in cycles, years apart, but there are always several planets attacked at very nearly the same time. We were the first, this time; so there will be one or two others very shortly."

"Do they always ... kill all the people?" Lola asked.

"Oh, no. Scarcely half of the time. Depends on how many fighters the planet has, and how much outside help can get there soon enough."

"Your call could come from any of the other solar systems in this neighborhood, then?" Garlock asked.

"Yes. There are fifteen inhabited planets within about six light-years of us, and we form a close-knit group."

"What are these Ozobes?"

"Animals. Warm-blooded, but egg-layers, not mammals. Like this," and the Inspector spread in their minds a picture of a creature somewhat like the flying tigers of Hodell, except that the color was black, shading off to iridescent green at the extremities. Also, it was armed with a short and heavy, but very sharp, sting.

"They say that they come from space, but I don't believe it," the old fellow went on. "What would a warm-blood be doing out in space? Besides, they couldn't find anybody to lay their eggs in out there. No, sir, I think they live right here on Groobe somewhere, maybe holed up in caves or something for ten or thirteen years ... but that wouldn't make sense, either, would it? I just don't know...."

* * *

Garlock finally broke away from the lonesome Inspector and the _Pleiades_ started down.

"That's the most utterly _horrible_ thing I ever heard of in my life!" Lola burst out. "Like wasps--only worse--_people_ aren't bugs! Why don't all the planets get together and develop something to kill every Ozobe in every system of the group?"

"That one has got too many bones in it for me to answer," James said.

"I'm going to get hold of that Engineer as soon as we land," Lola said, darkly, "and stick a pin into him."

They found the Engineering Office easily enough, in a snug camp well outside a large city. They grounded the starship and went out on foot; enjoying contact with solid ground. The Head Engineer was an Arpalone, too--Engineers were not a separate race, but dwellers on a planet of extremely high technology--but he did know anything about space-drives. His specialty was rehabilitation; he was top boss of a rehab crew....

* * *

Then Lola pushed Garlock aside. Yes, the Ozobes came from space. He was sure of it. Yes, they laid eggs in human bodies. Yes, they probably stayed alive quite a while--or might, except for the rehab crew. No, he didn't _know_ what would hatch out--he'd never let one live that long, but what the hell else _could_ hatch except Ozobes? No, not one. Not one single damn one. If just one ever did, on any world where he bossed the job, he'd lose his job as boss and go to the mines for half a year....

"Ridiculous!" Lola snapped. "If Ozobes hatched, they couldn't possibly have come from space. If they _did_ come from space, the adult form would have to be something able to get back into space, some way or other. _That_ is simple elementary biology. Don't you see that?"

He didn't see it. He didn't give a damn, either. It was none of his business; he was a rehab man.

Lola ran back to the ship in disgust.

"Something else is even more ridiculous, and _is_ your business," James told the Head Engineer. "Garlock and I are both engineers--top ones. We know definitely that a one-hundred-percent clean-up on such a job as this--millions--simply can't be done. Ever. Under any conditions. Are you lying in your teeth or are you dumb enough to believe it yourself?"

"Neither one," the Engineer insisted, stubbornly. "I've wondered, myself, at how I could get 'em all, but I always do--every time so far. That's why they give me the big job. I'm good at it."

"Oh--Lola's right, Jim," Garlock said. "It's the adult form that hatches; something so different they don't even recognize it. Something able to get into space. Enough survivors to produce the next generation."

"Sure. I'll tell Brownie--she'll be tickled."

"She'll be more than tickled--she'll want to hunt up somebody around here with three brain cells working and give 'em an earful." Then, to the Engineer, "Do you know how they rehab a planet that's been leveled flat by the golop?"

"You've _seen_ one? I never have, but of course I've studied it. Slow, but not too difficult. After killing, the stuff weathers down in a few years--wonderful soil it makes--what makes it slow is that you have to wait fifty or a hundred years for the mountains to get built up again and for the earthquakes to quit...."

"Excuse me, please--I've got a call--we have to leave, right now."

The call was from the Inspector. The nearest planet, Clamer, was being invaded by the Ozobes and needed all the help they could get.

* * *

In seconds the _Pleiades_ was at the Port of Entry.

"Where is this Clamer?" Garlock asked.

The Inspector pointed a thought; all four followed it.

"Let's go, Jim. Maybe...."

"Just a minute!" Lola snapped. She was breathing hard, her eyes were almost shooting sparks as she turned to the old Arpalone and drove a thought so forcibly that he winced.

"Do you so-called 'Guardians of Humanity' care at all about the humanity you're supposed to be protecting?" she demanded viciously, the thought boring in and twisting, "or are you just loafing on the job and doing as little as you possibly can without getting fired?"

Belle and Garlock looked at each other and grinned. James was surprised and shocked. This woman blowing her top was no Brownie Montandon any of them knew.

"We do everything we possibly can," the Inspector was not only shocked, but injured and abused. "If there's any one possible thing we haven't done, even the tiniest...."

"There's plenty!" she snapped. "Plain, dumb stupidity, then, it must be. There must be _somebody_ around here who has been at least exposed to elementary biology! You should have exterminated these Ozobe vermin ages ago. All you have to do is find out what its life cycle is. How many stages and what they are. How the adults get into space and where they go," and she went on, in flashing thoughts, to explain in full detail.

"Are you smart enough to understand that?"

"Oh, yes. Your thought may be the truth, at that."

"And are you interested enough to find out whose business it would be, and follow through on it?"

"Yes, of course. If it works, I'll be quite famous for suggesting it. I'll give you part of the credit...."

"Keep the credit--just see to it that it gets _done_!" She whirled on James. "This loss of human life is so _appallingly_ unnecessary! This time we're going to Clamer, and nowhere else. Push the button, Jim."

"All I can do is set up for it, pet. Whether we...."

"We'll get there!" she blazed. "It's high time we got a break. _Punch_ it! _This_ time the ship's going to _Clamer_, if we have to all get out and _push_ it there! Now punch that button!"

James pushed the button, glanced into his scanner, and froze; eyes staring. He did not even whistle. Belle, however, did; with ear-shattering volume. Garlock's mouth fell open in the biggest surprise of his life. They were in the same galaxy!

All three had studied charts of nebular configurations so long and so intensely that recognition of a full-sphere identity was automatic and instantaneous.

Lola, head buried in scanner, had already checked in with the Port Inspector.

"It _is_ Clamer!" she shrieked aloud. "I _told_ you it was time for our luck to change, if we pulled hard enough! They are being invaded by Ozobes and they did call for help and they didn't think we could possibly get here this fast and we don't need to be inspected because we're compatible or we couldn't have landed on Groobe!"

For five long minutes Garlock held the starship motionless while he studied the entire situation. Then he drove a probe through the mental shield of the general in charge of the whole defense operation.

"Battle-Cruiser _Pleiades_, Captain Garlock commanding, reporting for duty in response to your S.O.S. received on Groobe."

The general, furiously busy as he was, dropped all other business. "But you're _human_! You can't fight!"

"Watch us. You don't know, apparently, that the Ozobe bases are on the far side of your moon. They're bringing their fighters in most of the way in transports."

"Why, they can't be! They're coming in from all directions from deep space!"

"That's what they want you to think. They're built to stand many hours of zero pressure and almost absolute zero cold. Question: if we destroy all their transport, say in three hours, can you handle all the fighters who will be in the air or in nearby space at that time?"

"Very easily. They've hardly started yet. I appoint you Admiral-pro-tem Garlock, in command of Space Operations, and will refer to you any other space-fighters who may come. I thank you, sir. Good luck."

The general returned his attention to his boiling office. His mind was seething with questions as to what these not-human beings were, how or if they knew so much, and so on; but he forced them out of his mind and went, fast and efficient, back to work. James shot the _Pleiades_ up to within a thousand miles or so of the moon.

"How long does it take to learn this bombing business, Jim?" Lola asked.

"About fifteen seconds. All you have to do is _want_ to. Do you, really?"

"I really do. If I don't do something to help these people," it did not occur to her that she had already done a tremendous job, "I'll never forgive myself."

James showed her; and, much to her surprise, she found it very easy to do.

* * *

The vessels transporting the invading forces were huge, spherical shells equipped with short-range drives--and with nothing else. No accommodations, no facilities, no food, no water, not even any air. Each transport, when filled to the bursting-point with as-yet-docile cargo, darted away; swinging around to approach Clamer from some previously-assigned direction. It did not, however, approach the planet's surface. At about two thousand miles out, great ports opened and the load was dumped out into space, to fall the rest of the way by gravity. Then the empty shell, with only its one pilot aboard, rushed back for another load.

"How heavy shots, Clee?" James asked. He and Lola were getting into their scanners. "Wouldn't take as much as a kiloton equivalent, would it?"

"Half a kilo is plenty, but no use being too fussy about precision out here."

* * *

Garlock and Belle were already bombing; James and Lola began. Slow and awkward at first, Lola soon picked up the technique and was firing blast for blast with the others. No more loaded transport vessels left the moon. No empty one, returning toward the moon, reached there. In much less than the three hours Garlock had mentioned, every Ozobian transport craft had been destroyed.

"And now the real job begins," Garlock said, as James dropped the starship down to within a few miles of the moon's surface.

That surface was cratered and jagged, exactly like that of the half always facing Clamer. No sign of activity could be seen by eye, nor anything unusual. Even the immense trap-doors, all closed now, matched exactly their surroundings. Underground, however, activity was violently intense; and, now, confused in the extreme.

"Why, there isn't a single adult anywhere!" Lola exclaimed. "I thought the whole place would be full of 'em!"

"So did I," Belle said. "However, by hindsight, it's plain enough. Their job done, they were killed and eaten. Last meal, perhaps."

"I'm afraid so. Whatever they were, they had hands and brains. Just _look_ at those shops and machines!"

"What do we do, boss?" James asked. "Run a search pattern first?"

"We'll have to, I guess, before we can lay the job out."

It was run and Garlock frowned in thought. "Almost half the moon covered--honeycombed. We'll have to fine-tooth it. Around the periphery first, then spiral into the center. This moon isn't very big, but even so this is going to be a hell of a long job. Any suggestions, anybody? Jim?"

"The only way, I guess. You can't do it hit-or-miss. I'm _damn_ glad we've got plenty of stuff in our Op field and plenty of hydride for the engines. The horses will all know they've been at work before they get the field filled up again."

"So will you, Junior, believe me.... Ready, all? Start blasting."

Then, for three hours, the _Pleiades_ moved slowly--for her--along a plotted and automatically-controlled course. It was very easy to tell where she had been; the sharply-cut, evenly-spaced, symmetrical pits left by the Galaxian's full-conversion blasts were entirely different from the irregularly-cratered, ages-old original surface.

"Knock off, Brownie," Garlock said then. "Go eat all you can hold and get some sleep. Come back in three hours. Jim, cut our speed to seventy-five percent."

Lola shed her scanner, heaved a tremendous sigh of relief, and disappeared.

Three silent hours later--all three were too intensely busy to think of anything except the work in hand--Lola came back.

"Take Belle's swath, Brownie. Okay, Belle, you can lay off. Three hours."

"I'll stay," Belle declared. "Go yourself; or send Jim."

"Don't be any more of a damn fool than you have to. I said beat it."

"And I said I wouldn't. I'm just as good...."

"Chop it off!" Garlock snapped. "It isn't a case of being just as good as. It's a matter of physical reserves. Jim and I have more to draw on for the long shifts than you have. So get the hell out of here or I'll stop the ship and slap you even sillier than you are now."

Belle threw up her head, tossing her shoulder-length green mop in her characteristic gesture of defiance; but after holding Garlock's hard stare for a moment she relaxed and smiled.

"Okay, Clee--and thanks for the kind words."

She disappeared and the work went on.

And finally, when all four were so groggy that they could scarcely think, the job was done and checked. Clamer's moon was as devoid of life as any moon had ever been.

* * *

Lola pitched her scanner at its rack and threw herself face-down on a davenport, sobbing uncontrollably. James sat down beside her and soothed her until she quieted down.

"You'd better eat something, sweetheart, and then for a good, long sleep."

"Eat? Why, I couldn't, Jim, not possibly."

"Let her sleep first, I think, Jim," Belle said, and followed with her eyes as Jim picked his wife up and carried her into the corridor.

"We'd better eat _something_, I suppose," Belle said, thoughtfully. "I don't feel like eating, either, but I never realized until this minute just how much this has taken out of me and I'd better start putting it back in.... She did a wonderful job, Clee, even if she couldn't take it full shift toward the last."

"I'll say she did. I hated like the devil to let her work that way, but ... you knew I was scared witless every second until we topped off."

Exhausted and haggard as she was, Belle laughed. "I know damn-blasted well you weren't; but I know what you mean. Fighting something you don't know anything about, and can't guess what may happen next, is tough. Seconds count." Side by side, they strolled toward the alcove.

"I simply didn't think she had it in her," Belle marveled.

"She didn't. She hasn't. It'll take her a week to get back into shape."

"Right. She was going on pure nerve at the last--nothing else ... but she did a job, and she's so sweet and fine.... I wonder, Clee, if ... if I've been missing the boat...."

"You have not." Garlock sent the thought so solidly that Belle jumped. "If you'd just let yourself be, you'd be worth a million of her, just as you stand."

"Yes? You lie in your teeth, Cleander, but I love it.... Oh, I don't know what I want to eat--if anything."

"I'll think up yours, too, along with mine."

"Please. Something light, and just a little."

"Yeah. Sit down. Just a light snack--a two-pound steak, rare; a bowl of mushrooms fried in butter; French fries, french dips, salad, and a quart of coffee. The same for me, except more of each. Here we are."

"Why, Clee, I couldn't _possibly_ eat half of that...." Then, after a quarter of it was gone, "I _am_ hungry, at that--simply ravenous. I could eat a horse and saddle, and chase the rider."

"That's what I thought. I knew I could, and figured you accordingly."

* * *

They ate those tremendous meals slowly, enjoying every bite and sip; in an atmosphere of friendliness and good fellowship; chatting on a wide variety of subjects as they ate. Neither was aware of the fact that this was the first time they had ever been on _really_ friendly terms. And finally every dish and container was empty, almost polished clean.

"One hundred percent capacity--can chew but can't swallow," Garlock said then, lighting two cigarettes and giving Belle one. "How's that for a masterly job of calibration?"

"Me, too. It'll pass." Belle sighed in repletion. "Your ability to estimate the exact capacity of containers is exceeded only by your good looks and by the size of your feet. And now to hit the good old sack for an indefinite but very long period of time."

"You chirped it, birdie." Still eminently friendly, the two walked together to their doors. Belle put up a solid block and paused, irresolute, twisting the toe of one slipper into the carpet.

"Clee, I ... I wonder ... if...." Her voice died away.

"I know what you mean." He put his arms around her gently, tenderly, and looked deep into her eyes. "I want to tell you something, Belle. You're a woman, not in seven thousand million women, but in that many planets full of women. What it takes, you very definitely and very abundantly have got. And you aren't the only one that's pooped. I don't need company tonight, either. I'm going to sleep until I wake up, if it takes all day. Or say, if you wake up first, why not punch me and we'll have breakfast together?"

"That's a thought. Do the same for me. Good night, Clee."

"Good night, ace." He kissed her, as gently as he had been holding her, opened her door, closed it after her, and stepped across the corridor into his own room.

"_What_ a man!" Belle breathed to herself, behind the solid screens of her room. "He thought I was too tired, not just scared to death too. What a _man_! Belle Bellamy, you ought to be kicked from here to Tellus...." Then she threw back her head, drove a hard little fist into a pillow, and spoke aloud through clenched teeth. "No, damn and blast it, I _won't_ give in. I _won't_ love him. I'll take the Project away from him if it's the last thing I ever do in this life!"

* * *

She woke up the next morning--not morning, either, since it was well after noon--a little before Garlock did, but not much. When she went into his room he was shaved and fully dressed except for one shoe, which he was putting on.

"Hi, boss! Better we eat, huh? Not only am I starving by inches, but if we don't eat pretty quick we'll get only one meal today instead of three. Did you eat your candy bar?"

"I sure did, ace."

"Oh, I'm still 'ace'? You can kiss me, then," and she raised her face toward his.

He kissed her, still tenderly, and they strolled to and through the Main and into the alcove. James and Lola, the latter looking terribly strained and worn, had already eaten, but joined them in their after-breakfast coffee and cigarettes.

"You've checked, of course," Garlock said. "Everything on the beam?"

"Dead center. Even to Lola and her biologists. Everybody's full of joy and gratitude and stuff--as well as information. And we managed to pry ourselves loose without waking you two trumpet-of-doom sleepers up. So we're ready to jump again. I wonder where in _hell_ we'll wind up _this_ time."

"I'm glad you said that, Jim." Garlock said. "It gives me the nerve to spring a thing on you that I've been mulling around in my mind ever since we landed here."

"Nerve? You?" James asked, incredulously. "Pass the coffee-pot around again, Brownie. If that character there said what I heard him say, this'll make your hair stand straight up on end."

"On our jumps we've had altogether too much power and no control whatever...." Garlock paused in thought.

"Like a rookie pitcher," Belle suggested.

"Uh-uh," Lola objected. "It _couldn't_ be that wild. He'd have to stand with his back to the plate and pitch the ball over the center-field stands and seven blocks down-town."

"Cut the persiflage, you two," Garlock ordered. "Consider three things. First, as you all know, I've been trying to figure out a generator that would give us intrinsic control, but I haven't got any farther with it than we did back on Tellus. Second, consider all the jumps we've made except this last one. Every time we've taken off, none of us has had his shield really up. You, Jim, were concentrating on the drive, and so were wide open to it. The rest of us were at least thinking about it, and so were more or less open to it. Not one of us has ever ordered it to take us to any definite place; in fact, I don't believe that anyone of us has ever even suggested a destination. Each one of us has been thinking, at the instant of energization of the fields, exactly what you just said, and with exactly the same emphasis.

"Third, consider this last jump all by itself. It's the first time we've ever stayed in the same galaxy. It's the first time we've ever gone where we wanted to. And it's the first time--here's the crux, as I see it--that any of us has been concentrating on any destination at the moment of firing the charge. Brownie was willing the _Pleiades_ to this planet so hard that we all could taste it. The rest of us, if not really pushing to get here, were at least not opposed to the idea. Check?"

"Check." "That's right." "Yes, I was pushing with all my might," came from the three listeners, and James went on:

"Are you saying the damn thing's _alive_?"

"No. I'm saying I don't believe in miracles. I don't believe in coincidence--that concept is as meaningless as that of paradox. I certainly do _not_ believe that we hit this planet by chance against odds of almost infinity to one. So I've been looking for a reason. I found one. It goes against my grain--against everything I've ever believed--but, since it's the only possible explanation, it must be true. The only possible director of the Gunther Drive _must_ be the mind."

"Hell's blowtorches--Now you're _insisting_ that the damn thing's alive."

"Far from it. It's Brownie who's alive. It was Brownie who got us here. Nothing else--repeat, _nothing_ else--makes sense."

James pondered for a full minute. "I wouldn't buy it except for one thing. If you, the hardest-boiled skeptic that ever went unhung, can feed yourself the whole bowl of such a mess as that, I can at least take a taste of it. Shoot."

"Okay. You know that we don't know anything really fundamental about either teleportation or the drive. I'm sure now that the drive is simply mechanical teleportation. If you tried to 'port yourself without any idea of where you wanted to go, where do you think you'd land?"

"You might scatter yourself all over space--no, you wouldn't. You wouldn't move, because it wouldn't be teleportation at all. Destination is an integral part of the concept."

"Exactly so--but only because you've been conditioned to it all your life. This thing hasn't been conditioned to anything."

"Like a new-born baby," Lola suggested.

"Life again," James said. "I can't see it--too many bones in it. Pure luck, even at those odds, makes a lot more sense."

"And to make matters worse," Garlock went on as though neither of them had spoken. "Just suppose that a man had four minds instead of one and they weren't working together. Then where would he go?"

This time, James simply whistled; the girls stared, speechless.

"I think we've proved that my school of mathematics was right--the thing was built to operate purely at random. Fotheringham was wrong. However, I missed the point that if control is possible, the controller must be a mind. Such a possibility never occurred to me or anyone working with me. Or to Fotheringham or to anybody else."

"I can't say I'm sold, but it's easy to test and the results can't be any worse. Let's go."

"How would you test it?"

"Same way you would. Only way. First, each one of us alone. Then pairs and threes. Then all four together. Fifteen tests in all. No. Three destinations for each set-up; near, medium, and far. Except Tellus, of course; we'd better save that shot until we learn all we can find out. Everybody not in the set should screen up as solidly as they can set their blocks--eyes shut, even, and concentrating on something else. Check?"

James did not express the thought that Tellus must by now be so far away that no possible effort could reach it; but he could not repress the implication.

"Check. I'll concentrate on a series of transfinite numbers. Belle, you work on the possible number of shades of the color green. Lola, on how many different perfumes you can identify by smell. Jim, hit the button."

CHAPTER 6

Since the tests took much time, and were strictly routine in nature, there is no need to go into them in detail. At their conclusion, Garlock said:

"First: either Jim alone, or Lola alone, or Jim and Lola together, can hit any destination within any galaxy, but can't go from one galaxy to another.

"Second: either Belle or I, or any combination containing either of us without the other, has no control at all.

"Third: Belle and I together, or any combination containing both of us, can go intergalactic under control.

"In spite of confession being supposed to be good for the soul, I don't like to admit that we've put gravel in the gear-box--do you, Belle?" Garlock's smile was both rueful and forced.

"You can play _that_ in spades." Belle licked her lips; for the first time since boarding the starship she was acutely embarrassed. "We'll have to, of course. It was all my fault--it makes me look like a damned stupid juvenile delinquent."

"Not by nineteen thousand kilocycles, since neither of us had any idea. I'll be glad to settle for half the blame."

* * *

"Will you please stop talking Sanskrit?" James asked. "Or lep it, so we two innocent bystanders can understand it?"

"Will do," and Garlock went on in thought. "Remember what I said about this drive not being conditioned to anything? I was wrong. Belle and I have conditioned it, but badly. We've been fighting so much that something or other in that mess down there has become conditioned to her; something else to me. My part will play along with anyone except Belle; hers with anybody except me. Anti-conditioning, you might call it. Anyway, they lay back their ears and balk."

"Oh, hell!" James snorted. "Talk about gobbledygook! You are still saying that that conglomeration of copper and silver and steel and insulation that we built ourselves has got intelligence, and I still won't buy it."

"By no means. Remember, Jim, that this concept of mechanical teleportation, and that the mind is the only possible controller, are absolutely new. We've got to throw out all previous ideas and start new from scratch. I postulate, as a working hypothesis drawn from original data as modified by these tests, that that particular conglomeration of materials generates at least two fields about the properties of which we know nothing at all. That one of those properties is the tendency to become preferentially resonant with one mind and preferentially non-resonant with another. Clear so far?"

"As mud. It's a mighty tough blueprint to read." James scowled in thought. "However, it's no harder to swallow than Sanderson's Theory of Teleportation. Or, for that matter, the actual basic coupling between mind and ordinary muscular action. Does that mean we'll have to rebuild half a million credits' worth of ... no, you and Belle can work it, together."

"I don't know." Garlock paced the floor. "I simply can't see any _possible_. mechanism of coupling."

"Subconscious, perhaps," Belle suggested.

"For my money that whole concept is invalid," Garlock said. "It merely changes 'I don't know' to 'I can't know' and I don't want any part of that. However, 'unconscious' could be the answer ... if so, we may have a lever.... Belle, are you willing to bury your hatchet for about five minutes--work with me like a partner ought to?"

"I certainly am, Clee. Honestly. Screens down flat, if you say so."

"Half-way's enough, I think--you'll know when we get down there." Her mind joined his and he went on, "Ignore the machines themselves completely. Consider only the fields. Feel around with me--keep tuned!--see if there's anything at all here that we can grab hold of and manipulate, like an Op field except probably very much finer. I'll be completely damned if I can see how this type of Gunther generator can put out a manipulable field, but it must. That's the only--O-W-R-C-H-H!"

This last was a yell of pure mental agony. Both hands flew to his head, his face turned white, sweat poured, and he slumped down unconscious.

He came to, however, as the other three were stretching him out on a davenport. Belle was mopping his face with a handkerchief.

"What happened, Clee?" All three were exclaiming at once.

"I found my manipulable field, but a bomb went off in my brain when I straightened it out." He searched his mind anxiously, then smiled. "But no damage done--just the opposite. It opened up a Gunther cell I didn't know I had. Didn't it sock you, too, Belle?"

"Uh-uh," she said, more than half bitterly. "I must not have one. That makes you a Super-Prime, if I may name a new classification."

"Nonsense! Of course you've got it. Unconscious, of course, like me, but without it you couldn't have conditioned the field. But why.... Oh, what bit me was the one conditioned to me."

"Oh, nice!" Belle exclaimed. "Come on, Clee--let's go get mine!"

"Do you want a bit of knowledge _that_ badly, Belle?" Lola asked. "Besides, wait, he isn't strong enough yet."

"Of course he's strong enough. A little knock like that? _Want_ it! I'd give my right leg and ... and almost _anything_ for it. It didn't kill him, so it won't kill me."

"There may be an easier way," Garlock said. "I wouldn't wish a jolt like that onto my worst enemy. But that had two hundred kilovolts and four hundred kilogunts behind it. Since I know now where and what the cell is, I think I can open it up for you without being quite so rough."

"Oh, lovely. Come in, quick! I'm ready now."

* * *

Garlock went in; and wrought. It took longer--half an hour, in fact--but it was very much easier to take.

"What did it feel like, Belle?" Lola asked, eagerly. "You winced like he was drilling teeth and struck a couple of nerves."

"Uh-uh. More like being stretched all out of shape. Like having a child, maybe, in a small way. Let's go, Clee!"

They joined up and went.

"Ha, _there_ you are, you cantankerous little fabrication of nothings!" Belle said aloud, in a low, throaty, gloating voice. "Take _that_--and _that_! And now behave yourself. If you don't, mama spank--but _good_!" Then, breaking connection, "Thanks a million, Clee; you're tall, solid gold. Do you want to run some more tests, to see which of us is the intergalactic transporter?"

"Not unless you do."

"Who, me? I'll be tickled to death not to; just like I'd swallowed an ostrich feather. Back to Tellus, then?"

"Tellus, here we come," Garlock said. "Jim, what are the Tellurian figures for exactly five hundred miles up?"

"I'll punch 'em--got 'em in my head." James did so. "Shall Brownie and I set our blocks?"

"No," Belle said. "Nothing can interfere with us now."

"Ready." Garlock sat down in the pilot's seat. "Cluster 'round, chum."

* * *

Belle leaned against the back of the chair and put both arms around Garlock's neck. "I'm clustered."

"The spot we're shooting at is exactly over the exact center of the middle blast-pit at Port Gunther. In sync?"

"To a skillionth of a whillionth of a microphase. I'm _exactly_ on and locked. Shoot."

"Now, you sheet-iron bucket of nuts and bolts, _jump_!" and Garlock snapped the red switch.

Earth lay beneath them. So did Port Gunther.

"Hu-u-u-uh!" Garlock's huge sigh held much more of relief than of triumph.

"They did it! We're home!" Lola shrieked; and, breaking into unashamed and unrestrained tears, went into her husband's extended arms.

"Cry ahead, sweet. I'd bawl myself if Garlock wasn't looking. Maybe I will, anyway," James said. Then, extending his right arm to Garlock and to Belle, "I was scared to death you couldn't make it except by back tracking. Good going, you two Primes," but his thoughts said vastly more than his words.

Belle's eyes, too, were wet; Garlock's own were not quite dry.

"You weren't as sure as you looked, then, that we could do it the hard way," Belle said. "All inside, I was one quivering mass of jelly."

"Afterward, you mean. You were solid as Gibraltar when I fired the charge. You're the kind of woman a man wants with him when the going's tough. Slide around here a little, so I can get hold of you."

Garlock released Belle--finally--and turned to the pilot, who was just pulling a data-sheet from Compy the Computer. "How far did we miss target, Jim?"

* * *

James held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger forming a circle. "You're one point eight seven inches high, and off center point five three inches to the north northeast by east. I hereby award each of you the bronze medal of Marksman First. Shall I take her down now or do you want to check in from here first?"

"Neither ... I think. What do you think, Belle?"

"Right. Not until you-know-what."

"Check. Until we decide whether or not to let them know just yet that we can handle the ship. If we do, how many of our taped reports we turn in and how many we toss down the chute."

"I get it!" James exclaimed, with a spreading grin. "_That_, my dear people, is something I never expected to live long enough to see--our straight-laced Doctor Garlock applying the Bugger Factor to a research problem!"

"I prefer the term 'Monk's Coefficient,' myself," Garlock said, "from the standpoint of mathematical rigor."

"At Polytech we called it 'Finagle's Formula'," Belle commented. "The most widely applicable operator known."

"Have you three lost your minds?" Lola demanded. "That's nothing to joke about--you wouldn't destroy official reports! All that astronomy and anthropology that nobody ever even dreamed of before? You _couldn't_! Not _possibly_!"

"Each of us knows just as well as you do how much data we have, exactly how new and startling it is; but we've thought ahead farther than you have. None of us likes the idea of destroying it a bit better than you do. We won't, either, without your full, unreserved, wholehearted consent, nor without your fixed, iron-clad, unshakable determination never to reveal any least bit of it."

"That language is far too strong for me. I'd like to be able to go along with you, but on those terms, I simply can't."

"I think you can, when you've thought it through. You've met Alonzo P. Ferber, haven't you? Read him?"

"One glimpse; that was all I could stand. He pawed me mentally and wanted to paw me physically, the first time I ever saw him."

"Check. So I'm going to ask you two questions, which you may answer as an anthropologist, as Lola Montandon, as Mrs. James James James the Ninth, as a member of our team, or as any other character you choose to assume. Remembering that Ferber's a Gunther First--and pretends to be an Operator whenever he can get away with it--should he, or anyone like him, _ever_ be allowed to visit Hodell? Second question: if there is any possible way for him to get there, can he be made to stay away?"

"Oh ... Grand Lady Neldine and that perfectly stunning Grand Lady Lemphi they picked out for Jim ... they're such _nice_ people ... and the Gunther genes...." As Lola thought on, her expressive face showed a variety of conflicting emotions before it hardened into decision. "The answer to both questions--the only possible answer--is no. I subscribe; on the exact terms you stipulated. And you don't believe, Clee, that my thesis had anything to do with my holding out at first?"

"Certainly I don't. Besides...."

"What thesis?" Belle asked.

* * *

"For my Ph.D. in anthropology. I thought I had it made, but it just went down the chute. And I don't know if any of you realize just how nearly impossible it is to make a really worthwhile original contribution to science in that field."

"As I started to tell you, Brownie," Garlock said, "I don't think you've lost a thing. There's a bigger and better one coming up."

"_What_?"

"Sh-h-h-h," Belle stage-whispered. "He's got a theory--such a weirdie that he won't talk about it to anybody."

"It isn't a theory yet--at least, not ripe enough to pick--but it's something more than a hunch," Garlock said.

"But what could _possibly_ make as good a thesis as those extra-galactic tapes?" Lola wailed. "They would have made my thesis a summer breeze."

"More like a hurricane--the hottest thing since doctorate disputations first started," Garlock said. "However, as I started to say twice before, it still will be. Intra-galactic tapes will be just as good. In this case, better."

"W-e-l-l ... possibly. But we haven't any."

"That is what this conference is about. We can't destroy the stuff we have unless we can replace it with something better. My idea is that we should visit a few--say fifty--Tellus-type planets in this galaxy; the ones closest to Tellus. I'm pretty sure they'll be inhabited by _Homo Sapiens_. There's a chance, of course, that they'll be like Hodell and the others we've seen; in which case I don't see how we can keep Gunther genes confined to Earth. However, I'm pretty sure in my own mind that we'll find them all very much like Tellus, Gunther and all. What would you think of _that_ for a thesis, Lola?"

"Oh, wonderful!"

"Okay. Now to get back to whether we want to check in or not. I don't like to duck out without letting them know we can handle this heap--after a fashion, that is; they don't need to know we can really handle it--but we've got nothing we can report and Fatso will blow his stack--Oh-oh! Should've remembered Tellus isn't Hodell; the tri-di's setting up! Belle, you take it. She'd give me Fatso, because he wants to chew me out, but she won't put him on for you. Cut her throat, but good! Brownie, hide somewhere! Jim, set up for Beta Centauri--not Alpha, but Beta--and fast! Give her hell, Belle!" Garlock sent this last thought from behind a davenport, from which hiding-place he could see the tri-di screen and both Belle and James; but anyone on the screen could not see him.

* * *

Miss Foster's likeness appeared upon the screen. Chancellor Ferber's secretary was a big woman, but not fat; middle-aged, gray-haired, wearing consciously the aura and the domineering, overbearing expression of a woman who has great power and an even greater drive to exert her authority.

"Why haven't you reported in?" Miss Foster snapped, with a glare that was pure frost. "You arrived thirteen minutes ago. Such delay is inexcusable. Get Garlock."

"Captain Garlock is off-watch; asleep. I, Commander Bellamy, am in command." Standing stiffly at attention, Belle paused to exchange glares with the woman across the big desk. If Miss Foster's was frost, Commander Bellamy's was helium ice.

"Ready to go, Jim?" Belle flashed the thought.

"Half a minute yet."

"Any time after I sign off. Pick your own spot." Then aloud into the screen: "I will report to Chancellor Ferber. I will not report to Chancellor Ferber's secretary."

"Doctor James!" Miss Foster's voice was neither as cold nor as steady as it had been. "Bring that ship down at once!"

James made no sign that he had heard the order. Belle stood changelessly stiff. She had not for an instant taken her coldly competent eyes from those of the woman on the ground. Her emotionless, ultra-refrigerated voice went, as ever, directly into the screen.

"I trust that this conversation is being recorded?"

"It certainly is!"

"Good. I want it on record that we, the personnel of the starship _Pleiades_, are not subject to the verbal orders of the Chancellor's secretary. You will now connect me with Chancellor Ferber, please."

"The Chancellor is in conference and is not to be disturbed. I _have_ authority to act for him. You will report to me, and do it right now." Foster's voice rose almost to a scream.

"That ground has been covered. Since you have taken it upon yourself to exceed your authority to such an extent as to refuse to connect the officer in command of the _Pleiades_ with the Chancellor, I cannot report to him either the reasons why we are not landing at this time or when we expect to return to Tellus. You are advised that we may leave at any instant, just like that!" Belle snapped her finger under the imaged nose. "You may inform the Chancellor, or not inform him if you prefer, that our control of the starship _Pleiades_ is something less than perfect. I do not know exactly how many seconds longer we will be here. Commander Bellamy signing off. Over and out."

"_Commander_ Bellamy, indeed! Commander my left foot!" Miss Foster was screaming now, in thwarted fury. "You're no more a commander than my lowest office-girl is! Just wait 'till you get down here, you green-haired hussy, you shameless notor...." The set went instantaneously from full volume to zero sound as James drove the red button home.

"Belle, you honey!" Garlock scrambled out from behind the davenport, seized her around the waist, and swung her, feet high in air, through four full circles before he let her down and kissed her vigorously. "You little _sweetheart_! You're the first living human being ever to really pull Foster's cork!"

"_What_ a goat-getting!" James applauded. "That will go down in history as the star-spangled act of the century."

* * *

Belle was, however, unusually diffident. "I stuck my neck out a mile--worse, Clee's. I'm sorry, Clee. I had to have some weight to throw around, and I had only a second to think, and that was the first thing I thought of, and after half a minute she made me so _damn_ mad that I went entirely too far."

"Uh-uh. Just far enough. That was a _perfect_ job."

"But she'll never forget that, and she'll crucify you, as well as me, when we land. She knows I'm not a commander."

"She just thinks you ain't. The official log will show, though, that after only one day out I discovered that we should all be officers--one captain and three commanders--with pay and perquisites of rank. I'll think up good and sufficient reasons for it between now and when I make up the log."

"But you can't! Or can you, really?"

"Well, nobody told me I couldn't, so I assumed the right. Besides, you didn't tell her commander of what, so I'll make it stick, too--see if I don't. Or else I'll tear two or three offices apart finding out why I can't. You can be sure of that."

"All that may not be necessary," Lola said. "That tape will never be heard. I'll bet she's erased it already."

"Perhaps; but ours isn't going to be erased--it will be heard exactly where it will do the most good."

"I'm awfully glad you don't think we're on the hook. All that's left, then, is that second-in-command business. Both of you know, of course, that that was just window-dressing."

"You were telling the truth and didn't know it," James said, cheerfully. "You have actually been second-in-command ever since the drive tests."

"I haven't, and I won't. Surely you don't think I'm enough of a heel, Jim, to step on your toes like that?"

"Nothing like that involved. You tell her, Clee."

"Gunther ability is what counts. You're a Prime, Jim's an Operator; so, now that we can handle the heap, you'll have to be second-in-command whether you like it or not. Any time you can out-Gunther me we'll trade places. And you won't have to take the job away from me--I'll give it to you."

"But ... no hard feelings, Jim? No reservations? Screens down?"

"None whatever. In fact, I'm relieved. I'm Gunthered for this board here--for that one I'm not. Come in and look; and shake on it."

* * *

Belle looked; and while they were shaking hands, she flashed a thought at Lola. "Do you know that we've got two of the finest men that ever lived?"

"I've known that for a long time," Lola flashed back, "but you've hardly started to realize what they _really_ are."

"Well, shall we start earning our pay and perquisites by getting to work on this planet, that we haven't even looked--wait a minute! We're just about to open up the galaxy, aren't we?"

They were.

"Then there'll have to be some kind of a unifying and correlating authority--a Galactic Council or something--and the quicker it's set up the better; the less confusion and turmoil and jockeying-for-position there will be. Question: should this authority be political?"

"It should _not_!" James declared. "It takes United Worlds seven solid days of debate to decide whether or not to buy one lead pencil."

"Military--or naval, I suppose it'd be--that's what Clee's driving at," Belle said. "You're wonderful, Clee--simply priceless! We're officers of the brand-new Galactic Navy. Subject to civilian control, of course, but the civilians will be the United Galaxian Societies of the Galaxy, and nobody else. _Beautiful_, Clee! There are ten Operators, Jim. Right?"

* * *

"Check. Brownie and I are here; the other eight are running the Galaxian Society under Clee. And the whole Society eats out of his hand."

"I don't know about that, but Belle and I together could swing it, I think."

"I'll say we could," Belle breathed. "And I simply can't wait to see you kick Fatso's teeth in with _this_ one!"

"I don't like the word 'Navy'," Garlock said. "It's tied definitely to warfare. How about calling it the 'Galactic Service'? Applicable to either war or peace. Brass Hats will think of us in terms of war, even though we will actually work for peace. Any objections?"

There were no objections.

"About the uniforms," Lola said, eagerly. "Space-black and star-white, with chromium comets and things on the shoulders...."

"To hell with uniforms," Garlock broke in. "Why do women have to go off the deep end on clothes?"

"She's right--you're wrong, Clee," James said. "Without a uniform you won't get off the ground, not even with the Society. And you'll be talking to Top Planetary Brass. Also, they're Gunthered plenty--you can feel their Op field clear out here."

"Could be," Garlock conceded. "Okay, you girls dope it out to suit yourselves. But think you can stand it, Belle, to wear more than twelve square inches of clothes?"

"Wait 'til you see it, chum. I've been designing a uniform for myself for positively _years_."

"I can't wait. And you're a captain, of course."

"Huh? You can't have two cap.... Oh, I see. Primes. I appreciate that, Clee. Thanks."

"Hold on, both of you," James said. "You haven't thought this through far enough. Suppose we meet forces already organized? Better start high than low. You've got to be top admiral, Clee."

"Rocket-oil! Suppose we don't find anything at all?"

"You're right, Jim," Belle said. "Clee, you talk like a man with a paper nose. It's _you_ who's been yowling for two solid years about being ready for _anything_. We've got to do just that."

"Correction accepted. Brief me."

"Ranks should be different from those of United Worlds. They should be descriptive, but impressive. Tops could be Galactic Admiral. That's you. Vice Galactic Admiral; me...."

"Galactic Vice Admiral would be better," Lola said.

"Accepted. Those two we'll make stick come hell or space-warps. Right?"

Garlock did not reply immediately. "Up to either one of two points," he agreed, finally.

"What points?"

"War, or being out-Gunthered. Top Gunther takes top place; man, woman, bird, beast, fish, or bug-eyed monster."

"Oh." Belle was staggered for a moment. "No war, of course. As to the other ... I hadn't thought of that."

"There are a lot of things none of us has thought of, but as amended I'll buy it."

"Then several Regional Admirals, each with his Regional Vice Admiral. Then System Admirals and Vices, and World or Planetary--naming the planet, you know--Admirals and Vices. Let the various Galaxian Societies take over from there down. How do you like _them_ potatoes, Buster?"

"Nice. And formal address, intra-ship, will be Mister and Miss. Jim and Brownie?"

They liked it. "Where do we fit in?" James asked.

"Pick your own spots," Garlock said.

"If we stick to the Solar System we aren't so apt to get bumped by Primes. So make me Solar System Admiral and Brownie my Vice."

"Okay. How long will it take you, Belle, to materialize those uniforms?"

"Fifteen seconds longer than it takes the converter to scan us. Lola's color scheme is right, and I've got everything else down to the last curlicue of chrome. Let's go."

* * *

They went: and came back into the Main in uniform. Belle had really done a job.

That of the men, while something on the spectacular side, was more or less conventional, with stiff-visored, screened, heavily-chromed caps; but the women's! Slippers, overseas caps, shorts and jackets--but what jackets!

"Well...." Garlock said, after examining the two girls speechlessly for a good half minute. "It doesn't look _exactly_ like a spray-on job; but if you ever take a deep breath it'll split from here to there. Fly off--leave you naked as a jay-bird."

"Oh, no. The fabric stretches a little. See? Nothing like a sweater, but a similar effect--perhaps a bit more so."

"Quite a bit more so, I'd say. However, since Operators and Primes are automatically stacked like Tennick Towers, I don't suppose your recruits will be unduly perturbed at, or will squawk too much about, overexposure. Are we finally ready to go down and get to work?"

"I am," James said. "How do you want to handle it?"

"Run a search pattern. Belle and I will center their Op field and check on Ops and Primes. You two probe at will."

Around and around the planet, in brief bursts of completely incomprehensible speed, the huge ship darted; the biggest, solidest, yet most elusive and fantastic "flying saucer" ever to visit that world. The tremendous oceans and six great continents were traversed; the ice-caps; the frigid, the temperate, and the torrid zones. Wherever she went, powerful and efficient radar scanned and tracked her; wherever she went, excitement seethed.

"Beta Centauri Five," Garlock reported, after a few minutes. "Margonia, they call it. Biggest continent and nation named Nargoda. Capital city Margon; Margon Base on coast nearby. Lots of Gunther Firsts. All the real Gunther, though, is clear across the continent. They're building a starship. Fourteen Ops and two Primes--man and woman. Deggi Delcamp's a big bruiser, with a God-awful lot of stuff. Ugly as hell, though. He's a bossy type."

"I'm amazed," James played it straight. "I thought all male Primes would be just like you. Timorous Timmies."

"Huh? Oh...." Garlock was taken slightly aback, but went on quickly, "What do you think of your opposite number, Belle?" He whistled a wolf-call and made hour-glass motions with his hands. "I'd thought of trading you in on a new model, but Fao Talaho is no bargain, either--and _nobody's_ push-over."

"_Trade_! You _tomcat_!" Belle's nostrils flared. "You know what that bleached-blonde tried to do? High-hat _me!_"

"I noticed. When we four get down to business, face to face, there should be some interesting by-products."

"You chirped it, boss. Primes seem to be such _nice_ people." James rolled his eyes upward and steepled his hands. "If you've got all the dope, no use finishing this search pattern."

"Go ahead. Window dressing. The Brass hasn't any idea of what's going on, any more than ours did."

The search went on until, "This is it," James reported. "Where? Over Margon Base?"

"Check. Kick us over there, ten or twelve hundred miles up."

"On the way, boss. Looks like your theory is about ready to pick."

"It isn't much of a theory yet; just that cultural and evolutionary patterns should be more or less homogeneous within galaxies. Until it can explain why so many out-galaxies are just alike it doesn't amount to much. By the way, I'm glad you people insisted on organization and rank and uniforms. The Brass is going to take a certain amount of convincing. Take over, Brownie--this is your dish."

"I was afraid of that."

The others watched Lola drive her probe--a diamond-clear, razor-sharp bolt of thought that no Gunther First could possibly either wield or stop--down into the innermost private office of that immense and far-flung base. Through Lola's inner eyes they saw a tall, trim, handsome, fiftyish man in a resplendent uniform of purple and gold; they watched her brush aside that officer's hard-held mental block.

* * *

"I greet you, Supreme Grand Marshal Entlore, Highest Commander of the Armed Forces of Nargoda. This is the starship _Pleiades_, of System Sol, Planet Tellus. I am Sol-System Vice-Admiral Lola Montandon. I have with me as guests three of my superior officers of the Galactic Service, including the Galactic Admiral himself. We are making a good-will tour of the Tellus-Type planets of this region of space. I request permission to land and information as to your landing conventions. The landing pad--bottom--of the _Pleiades_ is flat; sixty feet wide by one hundred twenty feet long. Area loading is approximately eight tons per square foot. Solid, dry ground is perfectly satisfactory. While we land vertically, with little or no shock impact, I prefer not to risk damaging your pavement."

They all felt the Marshal's thoughts race. "Starship! Tellus--Sol, that insignificant Type G dwarf! Interstellar travel a commonplace! A ship _that_ size and weight--an organized, uniformed, functioning Galaxy-wide Navy and they don't want to _damage_ my _pavement_! My God!"

"Good going, Brownie! Kiss her for me, Jim." Garlock flashed the thought.

Entlore, realizing that his every thought was being read, pulled himself together. "I admit that I was shocked, Admiral Montandon. But landing--really, I have nothing to do with landings. They are handled by...."

"I realize that, sir; but you realize that no underling could possibly authorize my landing. That is why I always start at the top. Besides, I do not like to waste time on officers of much lower rank than my own, and," Lola allowed a strong tinge of good humor to creep into her thought, "the bigger they are, the less apt they are to pass the well-known buck."

"You have had experience, I see," the Marshal laughed. He _did_ have a sense of humor. "While landing here is forbidden--top secret, you know--would my refusal mean much to you?"

"Having made satisfactory contact, I introduce you to Galactic Admiral Garlock. Take over, sir, please."

* * *

Entlore winced, for the probe Garlock used then compared to Lola's very much as a diamond drill compares to a piece of soft brass pipe.

"It would mean everything to us," Garlock assured him. "Our mission is a perfectly friendly one. We will have a friendly visit or none. If you do not care for our friendship, another nation will."

"That wouldn't do, either, of course." Entlore paused in thought. "It boils down to this: I must either welcome you or destroy you."

"You may try." Garlock grinned in frankly self-satisfied amusement. "However, the best you can do is lithium-hydride fusion missiles in the hundreds-of-megatons range. Firecrackers. Every once in a while a planet has to try a few such things on us before it will believe that we are powerful as well as friendly. Would you like to test our defenses? If so, I will neither take offense nor retaliate."

Supreme Grand Marshal Entlore was floored. "Why ... er ... not at all. I read in your mind...." He broke off, to quell an invasion into his own private office. "Damn it, keep _still_!" all four "heard" him yell. "I know they ran a search pattern. I know _that_, too. I know _everything_ about it, I tell you! I'm in full rapport with their Supreme Grand Admiral. There's only the one ship, they're friendly, and I'm inviting them to land here on Margon Base. Give that to the press. Say also that entrance restrictions to Margon Base will not be relaxed at present. Grand Marshal Holson and ComOff Flurnoy, stay here and tune in. The rest of you get out and _stay_ out! Throw all reports about any alien vessel or flying saucer or what-have-you into the waste-basket!"

"Resume command, please, Miss Montandon," Garlock directed; and withdrew his probe from Entlore's mind.

"I thank you, Supreme Grand Marshal Entlore, for your welcome," Lola sent. "I'm sorry that our visits cause so much disturbance, but I suppose it can't be helped. Our Gunther blocks are down. Would you and your two assistants like to teleport out here to us, and con us down yourselves?" Lola knew instantly that they could not, and covered deftly for them. "But of course you can't, without knowing a focus spot here in the Main. Shall I teleport you aboard?"

* * *

ComOff Flurnoy's face--she was an attractive, nicely-built red-head wearing throat-mike, earphone, and recorder--turned so pale that a faint line of freckles stood out across the bridge of her nose. She very evidently wanted to scream a protest, but would not. Both men, strangely enough, were eager to go. Instantly all three were standing in line on the deep-piled rug of the Main, facing the four Tellurians. Seven bodies came rigidly to attention, seven right hands snapped into two varieties of formal salute. Standing thus, each party studied the other for a couple of seconds.

There was no doubt at all as to which two of the visitors the two Nargodian men were studying; but neither of them could quite make up his mind as to which of the black-and-white-clad women to study first or most. The red-head's glance, too, flickered between Belle and Garlock--incredulous envy and equally incredulous admiration lit her eyes.

"At rest, please, fellow-officers," Garlock said, and Lola performed the necessary introductions, adding, "We do not, however, use titles aboard ship. Mister and Miss are customary and sufficient."

Behind each row of officers a long davenport appeared; between them a table loaded with sandwiches, olives, pickles, relishes, fruits, nuts, soft drinks, cigars, and cigarettes.

"Help yourselves," Garlock invited. "We serve neither intoxicants nor drugs, but you should find something there to your taste."

"Indeed we shall, and thank you," Entlore said. "Is there any objection, Mr. Garlock, to Miss Flurnoy transmitting information of this meeting and of this ship to our base?"

"None whatever. Send as you please, Miss Flurnoy, or as Mr. Entlore directs."

"I'm glad I didn't quite scare myself out of coming up here," the Communications Officer said. "This is the biggest and nicest thrill I ever had. Such a thrill that I don't know just where to begin." She cocked an eyebrow at her commanding officer.

"As usual. Whatever you think should be sent." Entlore sent her a steadying thought. Then, as the girl settled back with a sandwich in one hand and a tall glass of ginger-ale in the other, he went on, to Garlock, "She is a very fine and very strong telepath--by our standards, at least."

"By galactic standards also." Garlock had of course been checking. "Accurate, sharp, wide-range, clear-thinking, and fast. Not one of us four could do it any better."

"I thank you, Mr. Garlock," the girl said, with a blush of pleasure--and with scarcely a perceptible pause in her work.

* * *

A tour of the ship followed; and as it progressed, the more confused and dismayed the two Nargodian commanders became.

"But no crew at _all_?" Holson demanded incredulously. "How can a thing like this _possibly_ work?"

"It's fully Gunthered," Lola explained. "It works itself. That is, almost all the time. Whenever we land on any planet for the first time, one of us has to control it. Or for any other special job not in its memory banks. When you're ready for us to land I'll show you--it's my turn to work."

"Miss Flurnoy, have they cleared the air over Pylon Six?"

"Yes, sir. Clearance came through five minutes ago. They are holding it clear for us."

"Thank you. Miss Montandon, you may land at your convenience."

"Thank you, sir." Lola took the pilot's chair. "This is the scanner. I pull it over my face and head, so. Since I am always in tune with the field...."

"What does _that_ mean?" Entlore asked, dark foreboding in his mind.

"I was afraid of that. You can't feel an Operator Field. I'm sorry, sir, but that means you can't handle these forces and never will be able to. Certain Gunther areas of your brain are inoperative. On our scale you are a Gunther First...."

"On ours, I'm an Esper Ten, the highest rating in the world--except for a few theoretical crackpots who.... Excuse me, please, I shouldn't have said that, in view of what I see happening here."

"No offense taken, sir. Those who developed the Gunther Drive were crackpots until they got the first starship out into space. But with this scanner on, I think of where I want to look and I can see it. I then think the ship a few miles sidewise--so--and we are now directly over your Pylon Six. I'm starting down, but I won't go into free fall."

Apparent weight grew less and less, until: "This is about enough for you, Miss Flurnoy?"

"Just," the ComOff agreed, with a gulp. "One pound less and I'm afraid I'll upchuck that lovely lunch I just ate."

"We're going fast enough now. Everyone sitting down? Brace yourselves, please. You'll be about fifty percent overweight for a while."

* * *

As bodies settled deeper into cushions Entlore sent Garlock a thought. "We three weigh about five hundred pounds. You lifted us--instantaneously or nearly so, but I'll pass the question of acceleration for the moment--eleven hundred miles straight up. How did you repeal the Law of Conservation?"

"We didn't. We have fusion engines of twenty million horsepower. Our Operator Field, which has a radius of fifteen thousand miles and is charged to an electrogravitic potential of one hundred thousand gunts, stores energy. Its action is not exactly like that of an electrical condenser or of a storage battery, but is more or less analogous to both. Thus, the energy required to lift you three came from the field, but the amount was so small that it did not lower the potential of the field by any measurable amount. Setting this ship down--call it sixty thousand tons for a thousand miles at one gravity--will increase the field's potential by approximately one-tenth of one gunt. Have you studied paraphysics?"

"No."

"It wasn't practical, eh?" Garlock smiled. "Then I can't make even a stab at explaining instantaneous translation to you. I'll just say that there is no acceleration involved, no time lapse. There is no violation of the Law of Conservation since departure and arrival points are equi-Guntherial. But what I am really interested in is that small group of high espers you mentioned."

"Yes, I inferred that from Miss Montandon's comments." Entlore fell silent and Garlock watched his somber thoughts picture Margon Base and his nation's capital being attacked and destroyed by a fleet of invincible and invulnerable starships like this _Pleiades_.

"You are wrong, sir," Garlock put in, quietly. "The Galactic Service has not had, does not and will not have, anything to do with intra-planetary affairs. We have no connection with, and no responsibility to, any world or any group of worlds. We are an arm of the United Galaxian Societies of the Galaxy. Our function is to control space. To forbid, to prevent, to rectify any interplanetary or interstellar aggression. Above all, to prevent, by means of procedures up to and including total destruction of planets if necessary, any attempt whatever to form any multi-world empire."

The three Nargodians gasped as one, as much at the scope of the thing as at the calmly cold certainty of ability carried by the thought.

"You are transmitting this precisely, Miss Flurnoy?" Entlore asked.

"Precisely, sir; including background, fringes, connotations, and implications; just as he is giving it to us."

"Let us assume that your Nargodian government decides to conquer all the other nations of your planet Margonia. Assume farther that it succeeds. We will not object; in fact, we will, as a usual thing, not even be informed of it. If then, however, your government decides that one world is not enough for it to rule and prepares to conquer, or take aggressive action against, any other world, we will be informed and we will step in. First, warning will be given. Second, any and all vessels dispatched on such a mission will be annihilated. Third, if the offense is continued or repeated, trial will be held before the Galactic Council and any sentence imposed will be carried out."

In spite of Garlock's manner and message, both marshals were highly relieved. "You're in plenty of time, with us, sir," Entlore said. "We have just sent our first rocket to our nearer moon ... that is, unless that group of--of espers gets their ship off the ground."

"How far along are they?"

"The ship itself is built, but they are having trouble with their drive. The hull is spherical, and much smaller than this one. It has atomic engines, but no blasts or ion-plates ... but neither has this one!"

"Exactly; they may be pretty well along. I'd like to get in touch with them as soon as possible. May I borrow a 'talker' like Miss Flurnoy for a few days? You have others, I suppose?"

"Yes, but I'll let you have her; it is of the essence that you have the best one available. Miss Flurnoy?"

"Yes, sir?" Besides reporting, she had been conversing busily with James and Belle.

"Would you like to be assigned to Mr. Garlock for the duration of his stay on Margonia?"

"Oh, _yes_, sir!" she replied, excitedly.

"You are so assigned. Take orders from him or from any designate as though I myself were issuing them."

"Thank you, sir ... but what limits? And do I transmit to and/or record for you, sir?"

"No limit. These four Galaxians are hereby granted nation-wide top clearance. Transmit as usual whatever is permitted."

"Full reporting is not only permitted, but urged," Garlock said. "There is nothing secret about our mission."

* * *

As the _Pleiades_ landed: "If you will give us your focus spot, Mr. Entlore, we can all 'port to your office and save calling staff cars."

"And cause a revolution?" Entlore laughed. "Apparently you haven't been checking outside."

"Afraid I haven't. I've been thinking."

"Take a look. I got orders from the Cabinet to put guards wherever people absolutely must not go, and open everything else to the public. I _hope_ there are enough guards to keep a lane open for us, but I wouldn't bet on it." Garlock was very glad that the military men's stiff formality had disappeared. "You Galaxians took this whole planet by storm while you were still above the stratosphere."

* * *

There is no need to go into detail concerning the reception and celebration. On Earth, one inauguration of a president and one coronation of a monarch were each almost as well covered by broadcasters, if not as turbulently and enthusiastically prolonged. From the _Pleiades_ they went to the Administration Building, where an informal reception was held. Thence to the Capitol, where the reception was very formal indeed. Thence to the Grand Ballroom of the city's largest hotel, where a tremendous--and long-winded--banquet was served.

At Garlock's request, all sixteen members of the "crackpot" group--the most active members of the Deep Space Club--had been invited to the banquet. And, even though Garlock was a very busy man, his talker tuned in to each one of the sixteen, tuned them all to the Galactic Admiral, and in odd moments a great deal of business was done.

After being told most of the story--in tight-beamed thoughts that ComOff Flurnoy could not receive--the whole group was wildly enthusiastic. They would change the name of their club forthwith to The Galaxian Society Of Margonia. They laid plans for a world-wide organization which would have tremendous prestige and tremendous income. They already had a field--Garlock knew about their ship--they wanted the _Pleiades_ to move over to it as soon as possible--Yes, Garlock thought he could do it the following day--if not, as soon as he could....

* * *

The _Pleiades_ had landed at ten o'clock in the forenoon, local time; the banquet did not come to an end until long after midnight. Throughout all this time the four Galaxians carried on, without a slip, the act that all this was, to them, old stuff.

It was just a little before daylight when they returned, exhausted, to the ship. ComOff Flurnoy went with them. She was still agog at the wonder of it all as Belle and Brownie showed her to her quarters.

CHAPTER 7

Since everyone, including the ebullient ComOff, slept late the following morning, they all had brunch instead of breakfast and lunch. All during the meal Garlock was preoccupied and stern.

"Hold everything for a while, Jim," he said, when everyone had eaten. "Before we move, Belle and I have got to have a conference."

"Not a Fatso Ferber nine-o'clock type, I hope." James frowned in mock reproach and ComOff Flurnoy cocked an eyebrow in surprise. "Monkey-business on company time is only for Big Shots like him; not for small fry such as you."

"Well, it won't be exclusively monkey-business, anyway. While we're gone you might clear with the control tower and take us up into take-off position. Come on, Belle." He took her by one elbow and led her away.

"Why, _Doctor Garlock_." Mincing along beside him, pretending high reluctance, she looked up at him wide-eyed. "I'm _surprised_, I really am. I'm _shocked_, too. I'm _not_ that kind of a _girl_, and if I wasn't _afraid_ of losing my _job_ I would _scream_. I _never_ even _suspected_ that _you_ would use your _position_ as my _boss_ to _force_ your _unwelcome attentions_ on a _poor_ and _young_ and _innocent_ and _suffering_...."

Inside his room Garlock, who had been grinning, sobered down and checked every Gunther block--a most unusual proceeding.

* * *

Belle stopped joking in the middle of the sentence.

"Yeah, _how_ you suffer," he said. "I was just checking to be sure we're prime-proof. I'm not ready for Deggi Delcamp yet. That guy, Belle, as you probably noticed, has got one God-awful load of stuff."

"Not as much as you have, Clee. Nor as much push behind what he has got. And his shield wouldn't make patches for yours."

"Huh? How sure are you of that?"

"I'm positive. I'm the one who is going to get bumped, I'm afraid. That Fao Talaho is a hard-hitting, hard-boiled hellcat on wheels."

"I'll be damned. You're wrong. I checked her from stem to gudgeon and you lay over her like a circus tent. What's the answer?"

"Oh? Do I? I'm mighty glad ... funny, both of us being wrong ... it must be, Clee, that it's sex-based differences. We're used to each other, but neither of us has ever felt a Prime of the same sex before, and there must be more difference between Ops and Primes than we realized. Suppose?"

"Could be--I hope. But that doesn't change the fact that we aren't ready. We haven't got enough data. If we start out with this grandiose Galactic Service thing and find only two or three planets Gunthered, we make jackasses of ourselves. On the other hand, if we start out with a small organization or none, and find a lot of planets, it'll be one continuous cat-fight. On the third hand...."

"Three hands, Clee? What are you, an octopussy or an Arpalone?"

"Keep your beautiful trap shut a minute. On the third hand, we've _got_ to start somewhere. Any ideas?"

"I never thought of it that way.... Hm-m-m-m ... I see." She thought for a minute, then went on, "We'll have to start without starting, then ... quite a trick.... But how about this? Suppose we take a fast tour, with you and I taking quick peeks, without the peekees ever knowing we've been peeking?"

"That's using the brain, Belle. Let's go." Then, out in the Main, "Jim, we want to hit a few high spots, as far out as you can reach without losing orientation. Beta Centauri here is pretty bright, Rigel and Canopus are real lanterns. With those three as a grid, you could reach fifteen hundred or two thousand light-years, couldn't you?"

"More than that. That many parsecs, at least."

"Good. Belle and I want to make a fast, random-sampling check of Primes and Ops around here. We'll need five minutes at each planet--quite a ways out. So set up as big a globe as you can and still be dead sure of your locations; then sample it."

"Not enough data. How many samples do you want?"

"As many as we can get in the rest of today. Six or seven hours, say--eight hours max."

"Call it seven.... Brownie on the guns, me on Compy.... Five minutes for you.... I should be able to lock down the next shot in five ... one minute extra, say, for safety factor ... that'd be ten an hour. Seventy planets enough?"

"That'll be fine."

"Okay. We're practically at Number One now," and James and Lola donned their scanners, ready for the job.

* * *

"Miss Flurnoy," Garlock said, "you might tell Mr. Entlore that we're...."

"Oh, I already have, sir."

"You don't have to come along, of course, if you'd rather stay here."

"Stay here, sir? Why, he'd _kill_ me! I'm off the air for a minute," this last thought was a conspiratorial whisper. "Besides, do you think I'd miss a chance to be the first person--and just a girl, too--of a whole world to see other planets of other suns? Unless, of course, you invite Mr. Entlore and Mr. Holson along. They're both simply dying to go, I know, but of course won't admit it."

"You'd be just as well pleased if I didn't?"

"What do you think, sir?"

"We'll be working at top speed and they'd be very much in the way, so they'll get theirs later--after you've licked the cream off the top of the...."

"Ready to roll, Clee," James announced.

"Roll."

"Why, I lost contact!" Miss Flurnoy exclaimed.

"Naturally," Garlock said. "Did you expect to cover a distance it takes light thousands of years to cross? You can record anything you see in the plates. You can talk to Jim or Lola any time they'll let you. Don't bother Miss Bellamy or me from now on."

Garlock and Belle went to work. All four Galaxians worked all day, with half an hour off for lunch. They visited seventy planets and got back to Margonia in time for a very late dinner. ComOff Flurnoy had less than a quarter of one roll of recorder-tape left unused, and the Primes had enough information to start the project they had in mind.

And shortly after dinner, all five retired.

"In one way, Clee, I'm relieved," Belle pondered, "but I can't figure out why all the Primes--the grown-up ones, I mean--on all the worlds are just about the same cantankerous, you-be-damned, out-and-out stinkers as you and I are. How does _that_ fit into your theory?"

"It doesn't. Too fine a detail. My guess is--at least it seems to me to make sense--it's because we haven't had any competition strong enough to smack us down and make Christians out of us. I don't know what a psychologist would say...."

"And I know _exactly_ what you'd think of whatever he did say, so you don't need to tell me." Belle laughed and presented her lips to be kissed. "Good night, Clee."

"Good night, ace."

* * *

And the next morning, early, Garlock and Belle teleported themselves--by arrangement and appointment, of course--across almost the full width of a nation and into the private office in which Deggi Delcamp and Fao Talaho awaited them.

For a time which would not have been considered polite in Tellurian social circles the four Primes stood still, each couple facing the other with blocks set tight, studying each other with their eyes. Delcamp was, as Garlock had said, a big bruiser. He was shorter and heavier than the Tellurian. Heavily muscled, splendidly proportioned, he was a man of tremendous physical as well as mental strength. His hair, clipped close all over his head, was blonde; his eyes were a clear, keen, cold dark blue.

Fao Talaho was a couple of inches shorter than Belle; and a good fifteen pounds heavier. She was in no sense fat, however, or even plump--actually, she was almost lean. She was wider and thicker than was the Earthwoman; with heavier bones forming a wider and deeper frame. She, too, was beautifully--yes, spectacularly--built. Her hair, fully as thick as Belle's own and worn in a free-falling bob three or four inches longer than Belle's, was bleached almost white. Her eyes were not really speckled, nor really mottled, but were regularly _patterned_ in lighter and darker shades of hazel. She was, Garlock decided, a really remarkable hunk of woman.

Both Nargodians wore sandals without either socks or stockings. Both were dressed--insofar as they were dressed at all--in yellow. Fao's single garment was of a thin, closely-knitted fabric, elastic and sleek. Above the waist it was neckless, backless, and almost frontless; below, it was a very short, very tight and clinging skirt. Delcamp wore a sleeveless jersey and a pair of almost legless shorts.

Garlock lowered his shield enough to send and to receive a thin layer of superficial thought; Delcamp did the same.

"So far, I like what I see," Garlock said then. "We are well ahead of you, hence I can help you a lot if you want me to and if you want to be friendly about it. If you don't, on either count, we leave now. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough. I, too, like what I have seen so far. We need help, and I appreciate your offer. Thanks, immensely. I can promise full cooperation and friendship for myself and for most of our group; and I assure you that I can and will handle any non-cooperation that may come up."

"Nicely put, Deggi." Garlock smiled broadly and let his guard down to a comfortable lepping level. "I was going to bring that up--the faster it's cleared the better. Belle and I are paired. Some day--unless we kill each other first--we may marry. However, I'm no bargain and she's one-third wildcat, one-third vixen, and one-third cobra. How do you two stand?"

"You took the thought right out of my own mind. Your custom of pairing is not what you call 'urbane' on this world. Nevertheless, Fao and I are paired. We had to. No one else has ever interested either of us; no one else ever will. We should not fight, but we do, furiously. But no matter how vigorously we fly apart, we inevitably fly together again just as fast. No one understands it, but you two are pretty much the same."

"Check. Just one more condition, then, and we can pull those women of ours apart." Belle and Fao were still staring at each other, both still sealed tight. "The first time Fao Talaho starts throwing her weight at me, I'm not going to wait for you to take care of her--I'm going to give her the surprise of her life."

"It'd tickle me silly if it could be done," Delcamp smiled and was perfectly frank, "But the man doesn't live that can do it. How would you go about trying it?"

"Set your block solid."

Delcamp did so, and through that block--the supposedly impenetrable shield of a Prime Operator--Garlock insinuated a probe. He did not crack the screen or break it down by force; he neutralized and counter-phased, painlessly and almost imperceptibly, its every component and layer.

* * *

"Like this," Garlock said, in the depths of the Margonian's mind.

"My God! You can do _that_?"

"If I tell her, this deep, to play ball or else, do you think she'd need two treatments?"

"She certainly oughtn't to. This makes you Galactic Admiral, no question. I'd thought, of course, of trying you out for Top Gunther, but this settles that. We will support you, sir, wholeheartedly--and my heartfelt thanks for coming here."

"I have your permission, then, to give Fao a little discipline when she starts rocking the boat?"

"I wish you would, sir. I'm not too easy to get along with, I admit, but I've tried to meet her a lot more than half-way. She's just too damned cocky for _anybody's_ good."

"Check. I wish somebody would come along who could knock hell out of Belle." Then, aloud, "Belle, Delcamp and I have the thing going. Do you want in on it?"

Delcamp spoke to Fao, and the two women slowly, reluctantly, lowered their shields to match those of the men.

"Your Galaxian shaking of the hands--handshake, I mean--is very good," Delcamp said, and he and Garlock shook vigorously.

Then the crossed pairs, and lastly the two girls--although neither put much effort into the gesture.

"Snap out of it, Belle!" Garlock sent a tight-beamed thought. "She isn't going to bite you!"

"She's been trying to, damn her, and I'm going to bite her right back--see if I don't."

* * *

Garlock called the meeting to order and all four sat down. The Tellurians lighted cigarettes and the others--who, to the Earthlings' surprise, also smoked--assembled and lit two peculiar-looking things half-way between pipe and cigarette. And both pairs of smokers, after a few tentative tests, agreed in not liking at all the other's taste in tobacco.

"You know, of course, of the trip we took yesterday?" Garlock asked.

"Yes," Delcamp admitted. "We read ComOff Flurnoy. We know of the seventy planets, but nothing of what you found."

"Okay. Of the seventy planets, all have Op fields and all have two or more Operators; one planet has forty-four of them. Only sixty-one of the planets, however, have Primes old enough for us to detect. Each of these worlds has two, and only two, Primes--one male and one female--and on each world the two Primes are of approximately the same age. On fifteen of these worlds the Primes are not yet adult. On the forty-six remaining worlds, the Primes are young adults, from pretty much like us four down to considerably younger. None of these couples is married-for-family. None of the girls has as yet had a child or is now pregnant.

"Now as to the information circulating all over this planet about us. Part of it is false. Part of it is misleading--to impress the military mind. Thus, the fact is that the _Pleiades_, as far as we know, is the only starship in the whole galaxy. Also, the information is very incomplete, especially as to the all-important fact that we were lost in space for some time before we discovered that the only possible controller of the Gunther Drive is the human mind...."

"_What!!!!_" and argument raged until Garlock stopped it by declaring that he would prove it in the Margonians' own ship.

Then Garlock and Belle together went on to explain and to describe--not even hinting, of course, that they had ever been outside the galaxy or had even thought of trying to do so--their concept of what the Galaxian Societies of the Galaxy would and should do; or what the Galaxian Service could, should, and _would_ become--the Service to which they both intended to devote their lives. It wasn't even in existence yet, of course. Fao and Deggi were the only other Primes they had ever talked to in their lives. That was why they were so eager to help the Margonians get their ship built. The more starships there were at work, the faster the Service would grow into a really tremendous....

"_Fao's getting ready to blow her top_," Delcamp flashed Garlock a tight-beamed thought. "_If I were doing it I'd have to start right now._"

* * *

"_I'll let her work up a full head of steam, then smack her bow-legged._"

"_Cheers, brother! I hope you can handle her!_"

... organization. Then, when enough ships were working and enough Galaxian Societies were rolling, there would be the Regional organizations and the Galactic Council....

"So, on a one-planet basis and right out of your own little fat head," Fao sneered, "you have set yourself up as Grand High Chief Mogul, and all the rest of us are to crawl up to you on our bellies and kiss your feet?"

"If that's the way you want to express it, yes. However, I don't know how long I personally will be in the pilot's bucket. As I told you, I will enforce the basic tenet that top Gunther is top boss--man, woman, snake, fish, or monster."

"Top Gunther be damned!" Fao blazed. "I don't and won't take orders from _any_ man--in hell or in heaven or on this Earth or on any planet of any...."

"Fao!" Delcamp exclaimed, "Please keep still--_please_!"

"Let her rave," Garlock said, coldly. "This is just a three-year-old baby's tantrum. If she keeps it up, I'll give her the damnedest jolt she ever got in all her spoiled life."

Belle whistled sharply to call Fao's attention, then tight-beamed a thought. "If you've got any part of a brain, slick chick, you'd better start using it. The boy friend not only plays rough, but he doesn't bluff."

"To hell with all that!" Fao rushed on. "We don't have anything to do with your organization--go on back home or anywhere else you want to. We'll finish our own ship and build our own organization and run it to suit ourselves. We'll...."

"That's enough of that." Garlock penetrated her shield as easily as he had the man's, and held her in lock. "You are _not_ going to wreck this project. You will start behaving yourself right now or I'll spread your mind wide open for Belle and Deggi to look at and see exactly what kind of a half-baked jerk you are. If that doesn't work, I'll put you into a Gunther-blocked cell aboard the _Pleiades_ and keep you there until the ship is finished and we leave Margonia. How do you want it?"

Fao was shocked as she had never been shocked before. At first she tried viciously to fight; but, finding that useless against the appalling power of the mind holding hers, she stopped struggling and began really to think.

"That's better. You've got what it takes to think with. Go ahead and do it."

And Fao Talaho did have it. Plenty of it. She learned.

"I'll be good," she said, finally. "Honestly. I'm ashamed, really, but after I got started I couldn't stop. But I can now, I'm sure."

"I'm sure you can, too. I know exactly how it is. All us Primes have to get hell knocked out of us before we amount to a whoop in Hades. Deggi got his one way, I got mine another, you got yours this way. No, neither of the others knows anything about this conversation and they won't. This is strictly between you and me."

"I'm awfully glad of that. And I think I ... yes, damn you, thanks!"

Garlock released her and, after a few sobs, a couple of gulps, and a dabbing at her eyes with an inadequate handkerchief, she said: "I'm sorry, Deggi, and you, too, Belle. I'll try not to act like such a fool any more."

Delcamp and Belle both stared at Garlock; Belle licked her lips.

"No comment," he thought at the man; and, to Belle, "She just took a beating. Will you sheathe your claws and take a lot of pains to be extra nice to her the rest of the day?"

"Why, surely. I'm _always_ nice to anybody who is nice to me."

"Says you," Garlock replied, skeptically, and all four went to work as though nothing had happened.

* * *

They went through the shops and the almost-finished ship. They studied blueprints. They met all the Operators and discussed generators and fields of force and mathematics and paraphysics and Guntherics. They argued so hotly about mental control that Garlock had James bring the _Pleiades_ over to new-christened Galaxian Field so that he could prove his point then and there.

Entlore and Holson came along this time, as well as the ComOff; and all three were nonplussed and surprised to see each member of the "crackpot" group hurl the huge starship from one solar system to any other one desired, apparently merely by thinking about it. And the "crackpots" were extremely surprised to find themselves hopelessly lost in uncharted galactic wildernesses every time they did not think, definitely and positively, of one specific destination. Then Garlock took a chance. He had to take it sometime; he might just as well do it now.

"See if you can hit Andromeda, Deggi," he suggested.

While Belle, James, and Lola held their breaths, Delcamp tried. The starship went toward the huge nebula, but stopped at the last suitable planet on the galaxy's rim.

"Can _you_ hit Andromeda?" Delcamp asked, more than half jealously, and Belle tensed her muscles.

"Never tried it," Garlock said, easily. "I suppose, though, since you couldn't kick the old girl out of our good old home galaxy, she'll just sit right here for me, too."

He went through the motions and the _Pleiades_ did sit right there--which was exactly what he had told her to do. And everybody--even the "crackpots"--breathed more easily.

* * *

And Belle was "nice" to Fao; she didn't use her claws, even once, all day. And, just before quitting time--

"Does he ... I mean, did he ever ... well, sort of knock you around?" Fao asked.

"I'll say he hasn't!" Belle's nostrils flared slightly at the mere thought. "I'd stick a knife into him, the big jerk."

"Oh, I didn't mean physically...."

"Through my blocks? A _Prime's_ blocks? Don't be ridiculous, Fao!"

"What do you mean, 'ridiculous'?" Fao snapped. "You tried _my_ blocks. What did they feel like to you--mosquito netting? What I thought was.... Oh, all he really said was that all Primes had to have hell knocked out of them before they could be any good. That he had had it one way, Deggi another, and me a third. I see--you haven't had yours yet."

"I certainly haven't. And if he ever tries it, I'll...."

"Oh, he won't. He couldn't, very well, because after you're married, it would...."

"Did the big lug tell you I was going to marry him?"

"Of course not. No fringes, even. But who else are you going to marry? If the whole universe was clear full of the finest men imaginable--pure dreamboats, no less--can you even conceive of you marrying any one of them except him?"

"I'm not going to marry anybody. Ever."

"No? You, with your Prime's mind and your Prime's body, not have any children? And you tell _me_ not to be ridiculous?"

That stopped Belle cold, but she wouldn't admit it. Instead--"I don't get it. What did he _do_ to you, anyway?"

Fao's block set itself so tight that it took her a full minute to soften it down enough for even the thinnest thought to get through. "That's something nobody will ever know. But anyway, unless ... unless you find another Prime as strong as Clee is--and I don't really think there are any, do you?"

"Of course there aren't. There's only one of his class, anywhere. He's it," Belle said, with profound conviction.

"That makes it tough for you. You'll have the toughest job imaginable. The _very_ toughest. I know."

"Huh? What job?"

"Since Clee won't do it for you, and since nobody else can, you'll have to just simply knock hell out of yourself."

And in Garlock's room that night, getting ready for bed, Belle asked suddenly, "Clee, what in hell did you do to Fao Talaho?"

"Nothing much. She's a mighty good egg, really."

"Could you do it, whatever it was, to me?"

"I don't know; I never tried it."

"_Would_ you, then, if I asked you to?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Answer that yourself."

"And it was 'nothing much,' it says here in fine print. But I think I know just about what it was. Don't I?"

"I wouldn't be surprised."

"You knocked hell out of yourself, didn't you?"

"I lied to her about that. I'm still trying to."

"So I've got to do it to myself. And I haven't started yet?"

"Check. But you're several years younger than I am, you know."

* * *

Belle thought it over for a minute, then stubbed out her cigarette and shrugged her shoulders. "No sale. Put it back on the shelf. I like me better the way I am. That is, I _think_ I do.... In a way, though, I'm sorry, Clee darling."

"Darling? Something new has been added. I wish you really meant that, ace."

"I'm still 'ace' after what I just said? I'm glad, Clee. 'Ace' is ever so much nicer than 'chum.'"

"Ace. The top of the deck. You are, and always will be."

"As for meaning it, I wish I didn't." Ready for bed, Belle was much more completely and much less revealingly dressed than during her working hours. She slid into bed beside him, pulled the covers up to her chin, and turned off the light by glancing at the switch. "If I thought anything could ever come of it, though, I'd do it if I had to pound myself unconscious with a club. But I wouldn't be here, then, either--I'd scoot into my own room so fast my head would spin."

"You wouldn't have to. You wouldn't be here."

"I wouldn't, at that. That's one of the things I like so much about you. But honestly, Clee--seriously, screens-down honestly--can you see any possible future in it?"

"No. Neither of us would give that much. Neither of us can. And there's nothing one-sided about it; I'm no more fit to be a husband than you are to be a wife. And God help our children--they'd certainly need it."

"We'd never have any. I can't picture us living in marriage for nine months without committing at least mayhem. Why, in just the little time we've been paired, how many times have you thrown me out of this very room, with the fervent hope that I'd drown in deep space before you ever saw me again?"

"At a guess, about the same number of times as you have stormed out under your own power, slamming the door so hard it sprung half the seams of the ship and swearing you'd slice me up into sandwich meat if I ever so much as looked at you again."

"That's what I mean. But how come we got off on _this_ subject, I wonder? Because when we aren't fighting, like now, it's purely wonderful. So I'll say it again. Good night, Clee, darling."

"Good night, ace." In the dark his lips sought hers and found them.

The fervor of her kiss was not only much more intense than any he had ever felt before. It was much, very much more intense than Belle Bellamy had either wanted it or intended it to be.

* * *

Next morning, at the workman's hour of eight o'clock, the four Tellurians appeared in the office of Margonia's Galaxian Field.

"The first thing to do, Deggi, is to go over in detail your blueprints for the generators and the drive," Garlock said.

"I suppose so. The funny pictures, eh?" Delcamp had learned much, the previous day; his own performance with the _Pleiades_ had humbled him markedly.

"By no means, my friend," Garlock said, cheerfully. "While your stuff isn't exactly like ours--it couldn't be, hardly; the field is so big and so new--that alone is no reason for it not to work. James can tell you. He's the Solar System's top engineer. What do you think, Jim?"

"What I saw in the ship yesterday will work. What few of the prints I saw yesterday will fabricate, and the fabrications will work. The main trouble with this project, it seems to me, is that nobody's building the ship."

"What do you mean by _that_ crack?" Fao blazed.

"Just that. You're a bunch of prima donnas; each doing exactly as he pleases. So some of the stuff is getting done three or four times, in three or four different ways, while a lot of it isn't getting done at all."

"Such as?" Delcamp demanded, and--

"Well, if you don't like the way we are doing things you can...." Fao began.

"Just a minute, everybody." Lola came in, with a disarming grin. "How much of that is hindsight, Jim? You've built one, you know--and from all accounts, progress wasn't nearly as smooth as your story can be taken to indicate."

"You've got a point there, Lola," Garlock agreed. "We slid back two steps for every three we took forward."

"Well ... maybe," James admitted.

"So why don't you, Fao and Deggi, put Jim in charge of construction?"

Fao threw back her silvery head and glared, but Delcamp jumped at the chance. "Would you, Jim?"

"Sure--unless Miss Talaho objects."

"She won't." Delcamp's eyes locked with Fao's, and Fao kept still. "Thanks immensely, Jim. And I know what you mean." He went over to a cabinet of wide, flat drawers and brought back a sheaf of drawings. Not blueprints, but original drawings in pencil. "Such as this. I haven't even got it designed yet, to say nothing of building it."

* * *

James began to leaf through the stack of drawings. They were full of erasures, re-drawings, and such notations as "See sheets 17-B, 21-A, and 27-F." Halfway through the pile he paused, turned backward three sheets, and studied for minutes. Then, holding that one sheet by a corner, he went rapidly through the rest of the stack.

"This is it," he said then, pulling the one sheet out and spreading it flat. "What we call Unit Eight--the heart of the drive." Then, tight-beamed to Garlock:

"This is the thing that you designed _in toto_ and that I never could understand any part of. All I did was build it. It must generate those Prime fields."

"Probably," Garlock flashed back. "I didn't understand it any too well myself. How does it look?"

"He isn't even close. He's got only half of the constants down, and half of the ones he has got down are wrong. Look at this mess here...."

"I'll take your word for it. I haven't your affinity for blueprints, you know, or your eidetic memory for them."

"Do you want me to give him the whole works?"

"We'll have to, I think. Or the ship might not work at all."

"Could be--but how about intergalactic hops?"

"He couldn't do it with the _Pleiades_, so he won't be able to with this. Besides, if we change it in any particular he _might_. You see, I don't know very much more about Unit Eight than you do."

"_That_ could be, too." Then, as though just emerging from his concentration on the drawings, James thought at Delcamp and Fao, but on the open, general band.

"A good many errors and a lot of blanks, but in general you're on the right track. I can finish up this drawing in a couple of hours, and we can build the unit in a couple of days. With that in place, the rest of the ship will go fast.

"_If_ Miss Talaho wants me to," he concluded, pointedly.

"Oh, I do, Jim--really I do!" At long last, stiff-backed Fao softened and bent. She seized both his hands. "If you can, it'd be too wonderful for words!"

"Okay. One question. Why are you building your ship so small?"

"Why, it's plenty big enough for two," Delcamp said. "For four, in a pinch. Why did you make yours so big? Your Main is big enough almost for a convention hall."

"That's what we figured it might have to be, at times," Garlock said. "But that's a very minor point. With yours so nearly ready to flit, no change in size is indicated now. But Belle and I have got to have another conference with the legal eagle. So if you and Brownie, Jim, will 'port whatever you need out of the _Pleiades_, we'll be on our way.

"So long--see you in a few days," he added, and the _Pleiades_ vanished; to appear instantaneously high above the stratosphere over what was to become the Galaxian Field of Earth.

* * *

"Got a minute, Gene?" he sent a thought.

"For you two Primes, as many as you like. We haven't started building or fencing yet, as you suggested, but we have bought all the real estate. So land the ship anywhere out there and I'll send a jeep out after you."

"Thanks, but no jeep. Nobody but you knows that we've really got control of the _Pleiades_, and I want everybody else to keep on thinking it's strictly for the birds. We'll 'port in to your office whenever you say."

"I say now."

In no time at all the two Primes were seated in the private office of Eugene Evans, Head of the Legal Department of the newly re-incorporated Galaxian Society of Sol, Inc. Evans was a tall man, slightly thin, slightly stooped, whose thick tri-focals did nothing whatever to hide the keenness of his steel-gray eyes.

"The first thing, Gene," Garlock said, "is this employment contract thing. Have you figured out a way to break it?"

"It can't be broken." The lawyer shook his head.

"Huh? I thought you top-bracket legal eagles could break anything, if you really tried."

"A good many things, yes, especially if they're long and complicated. The Standard Employment Contract, however, is short, explicit, and iron-clad. The employer can discharge the employee for any one of a number of offenses, including insubordination; which, as a matter of fact, the employer himself is allowed to define. On the other hand, the employee cannot quit except for some such fantastic reason as the non-tendering--not non-payment, mind you, but non-_tendering_--of salary."

"I didn't expect that--it kicks us in the teeth before we get started." Garlock got up, lighted a cigarette, and prowled about the big room. "Okay. Jim and I will have to get ourselves fired, then."

"Fired!" Belle snorted. "Clee, you talk like a man with a paper nose! Who else could run the Project? That is," her whole manner changed; "he doesn't know I can run it as well as you can--or better--but I could tell him--and maybe you think I wouldn't!"

"You won't have to. Gene, you can start spreading the news that Belle Bellamy is a real, honest-to-God Prime Operator in every respect. That she knows more about Project Gunther than I do and could run it better. Ferber undoubtedly knows that Belle and I have been at loggerheads ever since we first met--spread it thick that we're fighting worse than ever. Which, by the way, is the truth."

"Fighting? Why, you seemed friendly enough...."

"Yeah, we can be friendly for about fifteen minutes if we try real hard, as now. The cold fact is, though, that she's just as much three-quarters hellcat and one-quarter potassium cyanide as she...."

"I like _that!_" Belle stormed. She leaped to her feet, her eyes shooting sparks. "All _my_ fault! Why, you self-centered, egotistical, domineering jerk, I could write a book...."

"That's enough--let it go--_please!_" Evans pleaded. He jumped up, took each of the combatants by a shoulder, sat them down into the chairs they had vacated, and resumed his own seat. "The demonstration was eminently successful. I will spread the word, through several channels. Chancellor Ferber will get it all, rest assured."

"And _I'll_ get the job!" Belle snapped. "And maybe you think I won't take it!"

"Yeah?" came Garlock's searing thought. "You'd do anything to get it and to keep it. Yeah. I _do_ think."

"Oh?" Belle's body stiffened, her face hardened. "I've heard stories, of course, but I couldn't quite ... but surely, he can't be _that_ stupid--to think he can buy me like so many pounds of calf-liver?"

"He surely is. He does. And it works. That is, if he's ever missed, nobody ever heard of it."

"But how could a man in such a big job _possibly_ get away with such foul stuff as that?"

"Because all the SSE is interested in is money, and Alonzo P. Ferber is a tremendously able top executive. In the big black-and-red money books he's always 'way, 'way up in the black, and nobody cares about his conduct."

* * *

Belle, even though she was already convinced, glanced questioningly at Evans.

"That's it, Miss Bellamy. That's it, in a precise, if somewhat crude, nutshell."

"That's that, then. But just how, Clee--if he's as smart as you say he is--do you think you can make him fire you?"

"I don't know--haven't thought about it yet. But I could be pretty insubordinate if I really tried."

"That's the understatement of the century."

"I'll devote the imponderable force of the intellect to the problem and check with you later. Now, Gene, about the proposed Galactic Service, the Council, and so on. What is the reaction? Yours, personally, and others?"

"My personal reaction is immensely favorable; I think it the greatest advance that humanity has ever made. I have been very cautious, of course, in discussing, or even mentioning the matter, but the reaction of everyone I have sounded--good men; big men in their respective fields--has been as enthusiastic as my own."

"Good. It won't surprise you, probably, to be told that you are to be this system's councillor and--if we can swing it and I think we can--the first President of the Galactic Council?"

Evans was so surprised that it was almost a minute before he could reply coherently. Then: "I _am_ surprised--very much so. I thought, of course, that you yourself would...."

"Far from it!" Garlock said, positively. "I'm not the type. You are. You're better than anyone else of the Galaxians--which means than anyone else period. With the possible exception of Lola, and she fits better on our exploration team. Check, Belle?"

"Check. For once, I agree with you without reservation. _That's_ a job we can work at all the rest of our lives, and scarcely start it."

"True--indubitably true. I appreciate your confidence in me, and if the vote so falls I will do whatever I can."

"We know you will, and thank _you_. How long will it take to organize? A couple of weeks? And is there anything else we have to cover now?"

"A couple of _weeks!_" Evans was shocked. "You are naive indeed, young man, to think anything of this magnitude can even be started in such a short time as that. And yes, there are dozens of matters--hundreds--that should be discussed before I can even start to work intelligently."

Hence discussions went on and on and on. It was three days before Garlock and Belle 'ported themselves up into the _Pleiades_ and the starship displaced itself instantaneously to Margonia.

* * *

Meanwhile, on Margonia, James James James the Ninth went directly to the heart of his job by leading Lola and Fao into Delcamp's office and setting up its Gunther blocks.

"You said you want me to build your starship. Okay, but I want you both--Fao especially--to realize exactly what that means. I know what to do and how to do it. I can handle your Operators and get the job done. However, I can't handle either of you, since you both out-Gunther me, and I'm not going to try to. But there can't be two bosses on any one job, to say nothing of three or seventeen. So either I run the job or I don't. If either of you steps in, I step out and don't come back in. And remember that you're not doing us any favors--it's strictly vice versa."

"Jim!" Lola protested. Fao's hackles were very evidently on the rise; Delcamp's face was hardening. "Don't be so rough, Jim, _please_. That's no way to...."

"If you can pretty this up, pet, I'll be glad to have you say it for me. Here's what you have to work on. If I do the job they'll have their starship in a few weeks. The way they've been going, they won't have it in twenty-five years. And the only way to get that bunch out there to really work is to tell each one of them to cooperate or else--and enforce the 'or else.'"

"But they'd quit!" Delcamp protested. "They'll _all_ quit!"

"With suspension or expulsion from the Society the consequences? Hardly." James said.

"But you wouldn't do that--you couldn't."

"I wouldn't?"

"Of course he wouldn't," Lola put in, soothingly, "except as a very last resort. And, even at worst, Jim could build it almost as easily with common labor. You Primes don't really _have_ to have any Operators at all, you know; but all your Operators together would be perfectly helpless without at least one Prime."

"How come?" and "In what way?" Delcamp and Fao demanded together.

"Oh, didn't you know? After the ship is built and the fields are charged and so on, everything has to be activated--the hundred and one things that make it so nearly alive--and that is strictly a Prime's job. Even Jim can't do it."

"I see ... or, rather, I don't see at all," Fao said, thoughtfully. She was no longer either excited or angry. "A few weeks against twenty-five years ... what do you think of his time estimate, Deg my dear?"

"I hadn't thought it would take nearly that long; but this 'activation' thing scares me. Nothing in my theory even hints at any such thing. So--if there's so much I don't know yet, even in theory, it would take a long time. Maybe I'd never get it."

"Well, anyway, I want our _Celestial Queen_ done in weeks, not years," Fao said, extending her hand to James and shaking his vigorously. "So I promise not to interfere a bit. If I feel any such urge coming on, I'll dash home and lock myself up in a closet until it dies. Fair enough?"

Since Fao really meant it, that was fair enough.

* * *

For a whole day James did nothing except study blueprints; going over in detail and practically memorizing every drawing that had been made. He then went over the ship, studying minutely every part, plate, member, machine and instrument that had been installed. He noted what each man and woman was doing and what they intended to do. He went over material on hand and material on order, paying particular attention to times of delivery. He then sent a few--surprisingly few--telegrams.

Finally he called all fourteen Operators together. He told them exactly what the revised situation was and exactly what he was going to do about it. He invited comments.

There was of course a riot of protest; but--in view of what James had said anent suspensions and expulsions from the Galaxian Society--not one of them actually did quit. Four of them, however, did appeal to Delcamp, considerably to his surprise, to oust the interloper and to put things back where they had been; but they did not get much satisfaction.

"James says that he can finish building this starship in a few weeks," Delcamp told them, flatly. "Specifically, three weeks, if we can get the special stuff made fast enough. Fao and I believe him. Therefore, we have put him in full charge. He will remain in charge unless and until he fails in performance. You are all good friends of Fao's and mine, and we hope that all of you will stay with the project. If, however, we must choose now between you--any one of you or all of you--and James, there is no need to tell you what the choice will be."

Wherefore all fourteen went back to work; grudgingly at first and dragging their feet. In a very few hours, however, it became evident to all that James did in fact know what he was doing and that the work was going faster and smoother than ever before; whereupon all opposition and all malingering disappeared. They were Operators, and they were all intensely interested in their ship. Morale was at a high.

Thus, when the _Pleiades_ landed beside the now seething _Celestial Queen_, Garlock found James with feet on desk, hands in pockets, and scanner on head; doing--apparently--nothing at all. Nevertheless, he was a very busy man.

"Hey, Jim!" A soprano shriek of thought emanated from a gorgeous seventeen-year-old blonde. "I can't read this funny-picture, it's been folded too many times. Where does this lead go to?"

"Data insufficient. Careful, Vingie; I'd hate to have to send you back to school."

"'Scuse, please, Junior. Unit Six, Sub-Assembly Tee Dash Ni-yun. Terminal Fo-wer. From said terminal, there's a lead--Bee Sub something-or-other--goes somewhere. Where?"

"B sub Four. It goes to Unit Seven, Sub-Assembly Q dash Three, Terminal Two. And watch your insulation--that's a mighty hot lead."

"Uh-huh, I got that. Double Sink Mill Mill; Class Albert Dog Kittens. Thanks, boss!"

* * *

"Hi, Jim," Garlock said. Then, to Delcamp. "I see you're rolling."

"_He's_ rolling, you mean." Delcamp had not yet recovered fully from a state of near-shock. "So _that's_ what an eidetic memory is? He knows every nut, bolt, lead, and coil in the ship!"

"More than that. He's checking every move everybody makes. When they're done, you won't have to just hope everything was put together right--you'll _know_ it was."

Jim was their man.

* * *

And Fao sidled over toward Belle. There was something new about the silver-haired girl, Belle decided instantly. The difference was slight--Belle couldn't put her finger on it at first. She seemed--quieter? Softer? More subdued? No, definitely. More feminine? No; that would be impossible. More ... more adult? Belle hated to admit it, even to herself, but that was what it was.

"Deg and I got married day before yesterday," Fao confided, via tight beam.

"Oh--so you're _pregnant!_"

"Of course. I saw to that the first thing. I knew you'd want to be the first one to know. Oh, isn't it _wonderful_?" She seized Belle's arm and hugged it ecstatically against her side. "Just too perfectly marvelous for _anything_?"

"Oh, I'm sure it is; and I'm so happy for you, Fao!" And it would have taken the mind of a Garlock to perceive anything either false or forced in thought or bearing.

Nevertheless, when Belle went into Garlock's room that night, storm signals were flying high in her almost-topaz eyes.

"Fao Talaho-Delcamp is _pregnant_!" she stormed, "and it's all _your_ fault!"

"Uh-huh," he demurred, trying to snap her out of her obviously savage mood. "Not me, ace. Not a chance in the world. It was Deggi."

"You ... you _weasel_! You know very well, Clee Garlock, what I meant. If you hadn't given her that treatment she'd have kept on fighting with him and they wouldn't have been married and had any children for positively _years_. So now she'll have the first double-Prime baby and it ought to be _mine_. I'm older than she is--our group is 'way ahead of theirs--we have the first and _only_ starship--and then you do _that_. And you wouldn't give _me_ that treatment. Oh, no--just to _her_, that bleached-blonde! I'd like to strangle you to death with my own bare hands!"

"What a hell of a logic!" Garlock had been trying to keep his own temper in leash, but the leash was slipping. "Assume I tried to work on you--assume I succeeded--what would you be? What would I have? What age do you think this is--that of the Vikings? When SOP in getting a wife was to beat her unconscious with a club and drag her into the longboat by her hair? Hardly! I do not want and will not have a conquered woman. Nor a spoiled-rotten, mentally-retarded brat...."

"You unbearable, conceited, overbearing jerk! Why, I'd rather...."

"Get out! And _this_ time, _stay_ out!"

Belle got out--and if door and frame had not been built of super-steel, both would have been wrecked by the blast of energy she loosed in closing the door behind her.

In her own room, with Gunther blocks full on, she threw herself face down on the bed and cried as she had not cried since she was a child.

And finally, without even taking off her clothes, she cried herself to sleep.

CHAPTER 8

Next morning, early, Belle tapped lightly on Garlock's door.

"Come in."

She did so. "Have you had your coffee?"

"Yes."

"So have I."

Neither Belle nor Garlock had recovered; both faces showed strain and drain.

"I think we'd better break this up," Belle said, quietly.

"Check. We'll have to, if we expect to get any work done."

Belle could not conceal her surprise.

"Oh, not for the reason you think," Garlock went on, quickly. "Your record as a man-killer is still one hundred point zero zero zero percent. I've been in love with you ever since we paired. Before that, even."

"Flapdoodle!" she snorted, inelegantly. "Why, I...."

"Keep still a minute. And I'm not going to fight with you again. Ever. I'm not going to touch you again until I can control myself a lot better than I could last night."

"Oh? That was mostly my fault, of course. But in love? Uh-uh, I've seen men in love. You aren't. I couldn't make you be, not with the best I could do. Not even in bed. You aren't, Clee--if you are, I'm an Australian bushman."

"Perhaps I'm an atypical case. I'm not raving about your perfect body--you know what that is like already. Nor about your mind, which is the only one I know of as good as my own. Maybe I'm in love with what I think you ought to be ... or what I hope you will be. Anyway, I'm in love with _something_ connected with you--and with no other woman alive. Shall we go eat?"

"Uh-huh--let's."

They joined Lola and James at the table; and if Lola noticed anything out of the ordinary, she made no sign.

And after breakfast, in the Main--

"About three weeks, Jim, you think?" Garlock asked.

"Give or take a couple of days, yes."

"And Belle and I would just be in the way--at least until time to show Deggi about the activation ... and all those Primes to organize ... we'd better leave you here, don't you think, and get going?"

"I'll buy that. We'll finish as soon as possible."

Lola and James moved a few personal belongings planetside; Garlock and Belle shot the _Pleiades_ across a vast gulf of space to one of the planets they had scanned so fleetingly on their preliminary survey. Its name was, both remembered, Lizoria; its two Primes were named Rezdo Semolo and Mirea Mitala--male and female, respectively.

After sending down a very brief and perfunctory request for audience--which was in effect a declaration of intent and nothing else--Garlock and Belle teleported themselves down into Semolo's office, where both Lizorian Primes were.

Both got up out of peculiar-looking chairs to face their visitors. Both were tall; both were peculiarly thin. Not the thinness of emaciation, but that of bodily structure.

"On them it looks good," Belle tight-beamed a thought to Garlock.

Both moved fast and with exquisite control; both were extraordinarily graceful. "Snaky" was Belle's thought of the woman; "sinuous" was Garlock's of the man. Both were completely hairless, of body and of head--not by nature, but via electric-shaver clipping. Both wore sandals. The man wore shorts and a shirt-like garment of nylon or its like; the woman wore just enough ribbons and bands to hold a hundred thousand credits' worth of jewels in place. She appeared to be about twenty years--Tellurian equivalent--old; he was probably twenty-three or twenty-four.

"We did not invite you in and we do not want you here," Semolo said, coldly. "So get out, both of you. If you don't, when I count three I'll throw you out, and I won't be too careful about how many of your bones I break. One.... Two...."

"Pipe down, Rezdo!" the girl exclaimed. "They have something we haven't, or they wouldn't be here. Whatever it is, we want it."

"Oh, let him try, Miss Mitala," Garlock said, through her hard-held block, in the depth of her mind. "He won't hurt us a bit and it may do him some good. While he's wasting effort I'll compare notes with my partner here, Galactic Vice-Admiral Belle Bellamy. I'm glad to see that one of you has at least a part of a brain."

"... Three!" Semolo did his best, with everything he had, without even attracting Garlock's attention. He then tried to leap at the intruder physically, despite the latter's tremendous advantage in weight and muscle, but found that he could not move.

Then, through Belle's solidly-set blocks, "How are you doing, ace? Getting anywhere?"

"My God!" came Belle's mental shriek. "What--how can--but no, you _didn't_ give _that_ to Fao, surely!"

"I'll say I didn't--nor to Delcamp. But you're going to need it, I'm thinking."

"But _can_ you? Even if you _would_--and I'm just beginning to realize how big a man you really are--can that kind of stuff be taught? I probably haven't got the brain-cells it takes to handle it."

"I'm not sure, but I've reworked our Prime Fields into one and made a couple of other changes. Theoretically, it ought to work. Shall I come in and try it?"

"Don't be an idiot, darling. _Of course!_"

* * *

As impersonally as a surgeon exploring an organ, Garlock went into Belle's mind. "Tune to the field ... that's it--fine! Then--I'll do it real slow, and watch me close--you do like so ... get it?"

"Uh-huh!" Belle breathed, excitedly. "Got it!"

"Then this ... and this ... and there you are. You can try it on me, if you like."

"Uh-uh. No sale. I don't need practice and I'd like to preserve the beautiful illusion that maybe I _could_ crack your shield if I wanted to. I'll work on Miss Snake-Hips here, the serpentine charmer--but say, I'll bet there's a bone in it. _You_ can block it, can't you?"

"Yes. It goes like this." He showed her. "It takes full mastery of the Prime Field, but you've got that."

"Oh, wonderful! Thanks, Clee darling. But do you mean to actually say I can now completely block you or any other Prime out?"

"You're going too far, ace. Me, yes--but don't forget that there very well may be people--or things--as far ahead of us as we are ahead of pointer pups."

"Huh! Balloon-juice and prop-wash! I just _know_, Clee, that you're the absolute tops of the whole, entire, macrocosmic universe."

"Well, we can dream, of course." Garlock withdrew his mind from Belle's and turned his attention to the now quiet Semolo. "Well, my over-confident and contumacious young squirt; are you done horsing around or do you want to keep it up until you addle completely what few brains you have?"

The Lizorian made no reply; but merely glared.

"The trouble with you half-baked, juvenile--I almost added 'delinquent' to that, and perhaps I should have--Primes is that you know too damned much that isn't true. As an old Tellurian saying hath it, 'you're altogether too big for your britches.'

"Thus, simply because you have lived a few years on one single planet and haven't encountered anyone able to stand up to you, you've sold yourself on the idea that there's nobody, anywhere, who can. You're wrong--you couldn't be more so if you had an army to help you.

"What, actually, have you done? What, actually, have you got? Practically nothing. You haven't even started a starship; you've scarcely started making plans. You realize dimly that the theory is not in any of the books, that you'll have to slug it out for yourself, but that is _work_. So you're still just posing and throwing your weight around.

"As a matter of fact, you're merely a drop in a lake. There are thousands of millions of planets, and thousands of millions of Prime Operators. Most of them are probably a lot stronger than you are; many of them may be stronger than my partner and I are. I am not at all certain that you will pass even the first screening; but since you are without question a Prime Operator, I will deliver the message we came to deliver. Miss Mitala, do you want to listen or shall we drive it into you, too?"

"I want to listen to anyone or anything who has a working starship and who can do what you have just done."

"Very well," and Garlock told the general-distribution version of the story of the Galactic Service.

"Quite interesting," Semolo said loftily, at its end. "Whether or not I would be interested depends, of course, on whether there's a position high enough for...."

"I doubt very much if there's one low enough," Garlock cut in sharply. "However, since it's part of my job, I'll get in touch with you later. Okay, Belle."

And in the Main--"What a jerk!" Belle exclaimed. "What a half-cooked, half-digested _pill_! I simply marvel at your forbearance, Clee. You should have turned him inside out and hung him up to dry--especially behind the ears!" Then, suddenly, she giggled. "But do you know what I did?"

"I can guess. A couple of shots in the arm?"

"Uh-huh. Next time he pitches into her she'll slap his ears right off. Oh, _brother_!"

"Check and double-check. But let's hop to Number Two.... Here it is."

* * *

"Oh, yes," came a smooth, clear, diamond-sharp thought in reply to Garlock's introductory call. "This world, as you have perceived, is Falne. I am indeed Baver 14WD27, my companion Prime is indeed Glarre 12WD91. You are, we perceive, Bearers of the Truth; of great skill and of high advancement. Your visit here will, I am sure, be of immense benefit to us and possibly, I hope, of some small benefit to you. We will both be delighted to have you both 'port yourselves to us at once."

The Tellurians did so--and in the very instant of appearance Garlock was met by a blast of force the like of which he had never even imagined. The two Falnian Primes, capable operators both, had built up their highest possible potentials and had launched both terrific bolts without any hint of warning.

Belle's mind, however, was already fused with Garlock's. Their combined blocks were instantaneous in action; their counter-thrust was nearly so. Both Falnians staggered backward until they were stopped by the room's wall.

"Ah, yes," Garlock said, then. "You are indeed, in a small and feeble way, Seekers after the Truth; of which we are indeed Bearers. Lesser Bearers, perhaps, but still Bearers. You will indeed profit greatly from our visit. You err, however, in thinking that we may in any respect profit from you. You have nothing whatever that we have not had for long. Now let us, if you please, take a few seconds of time to get acquainted, each with the other."

"That, indeed, is the logical and seemly thing to do." Both Falnians straightened up and stepped forward; neither arrogantly nor apologetically, but simply as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had taken place.

Each pair studied the other. Physically, the two pairs were surprisingly alike. Baver was almost as big as Garlock; almost as heavily muscled. Glarre could have been cast in Belle's own mold.

* * *

With that, however, all resemblance ceased.

Both Falnians were naked. The man wore only a belt and pouch in lieu of pockets; the woman only a leather carryall slung from one shoulder--big enough, Garlock thought, to hold a week's supplies for an Explorer Scout.

His hair was thick, bushy, unkempt; sun-bleached to a nondescript blend of pale colors. Hers--long, heavy, meticulously middle-parted and dressed--was a startling two-tone job. To the right of the part it was a searingly brilliant red; to the left, an equally brilliant royal blue.

His skin was deeply tanned. The color of hers was completely masked by a bizarrely spectacular overlay of designs done in semi-indelible, multi-colored dyes.

"Ah, you are worthy indeed of receiving an increment of Truth. Hear, then, the message we bring," and again Garlock told the story.

"We thank you, sir and madam, from our hearts. We will accept with joy your help in finishing our ship; we will do all that in us lies to further the cause of the Galactic Service. Until a day, then?"

"Until a day." Then, to Belle, "Okay, ace. Ready? Go!"

And up in the Main--"Sweet Sin!" Belle exclaimed. "What a pair _they_ turned out to be! Clee, that simply scared me witless."

"You can play that in spades." Garlock jammed his hands into his pockets and prowled about the room, his face a black scowl of concentration.

Until, finally, he pulled himself out of the brown study and said: "I've been trying to think if there's any other thing, however slight, that I have and you haven't. There isn't. You've got it all. You're just as fast as I am, just as sharp and as accurate--and, since we now draw on the same field, just as strong."

"Why Clee! You're worrying about _me_? You've done altogether too much for me, already."

"Anything I can do, I've got to do ... well, shall we go?"

"We shall."

* * *

They visited four more planets that day. And after supper that night, standing in the corridor between their doors, Belle began to soften her shield, as though to send a thought. Almost instantly, however, she changed her mind and snapped it back to full on.

"Good night, Clee," she said.

"Good night, Belle," and each went into his own room.

The next day they worked nine planets, and the day after that they worked ten. They ate supper in friendly fashion; then strolled together across the Main, to a davenport.

"It's funny," Belle said thoughtfully, "having this tremendous ship all to ourselves. To have a private conference right out here in the Main ... or is it?"

He triggered the shields, she watched him do it. "It is now," he assured her.

"Prime-proof? Not ordinary Gunther blocks?"

"Uh-huh. Two hundred kilovolts and four hundred kilogunts. Backed by all the force of the Prime and Op fields and the full power of the engines. I told you I'd made some changes in the set-up."

"Private enough, I guess ... what a mess those Primes are! And we'll have to make the rounds twice more--when we alert 'em and when we pick 'em up."

"Not necessarily. This new set-up ought to give us a galaxy-wide reach. Let's try Semolo, on Lizoria, shall we?"

"Uh-huh--Let's."

"Tune in, then ace."

"_Ace_, darling?"

"Ace, _Darling_?"

"Darling. You said you weren't going to fight with me any more. Okay--I'm not going to try any more to lick you until after I've licked myself. I'm tuned--you may fire when ready, Gridley."

They fired--and hit the mark dead center. Top-lofty and arrogant and belligerent as ever, the Lizorian Prime took the call. "I thought all the time you wanted something. Well, I neither want nor need...."

"Cut it, you unlicked cub, until you can begin to use that half-liter of golop you call a brain," Garlock said, harshly. "We're just trying out a new ultra-communicator. Thanks for your help."

On the fourth day they worked eleven planets; the fifth day saw the forty-sixth planet done and the immediate job finished. All during supper, it was very evident that Belle had something on her mind.

After eating, she went out into the Main and slumped down on a davenport. Garlock followed her. A cigarette leaped out of a closed box and into place between her lips. It came alight. She smoked it slowly, without relish; almost as though she did not know that she was smoking.

"Might as well get it out of your system, Belle," Garlock said aloud. "What are you thinking about at the moment?"

Belle exhaled; the half-smoked butt vanished. "At the moment I was thinking about Gunther blocks. Specifically, their total inability to cope with that new Prime probe of yours." She stared at him, narrow-eyed. "It goes through them just like nothing at all." She paused; eyed him questioningly.

"No comment."

"And yet you gave it to me. Freely, of your own accord. Even before I needed it. Why?"

"Still no comment."

"You'd better comment, Buster, before I blow my top."

"There is such a thing as urbanity."

"I've heard of it, yes; even though you never did believe I ever had any. You _talk_ a good game of urbanity, but your brand of it would never carry you _that_ far...."

She paused. He remained silent. She went on.

"Of course, it does put a lot of pressure on me to develop myself."

"I'm glad you used the word 'develop' instead of 'treat.'"

"Oh, sometimes--at rare intervals--I'm not exactly dumb. But you knew--you _must_ have known--what a horrible risk you took in making me as tremendously powerful as you are."

* * *

"Some, perhaps, but very definitely less risky than not doing it."

"Getting information out of you is harder than pulling teeth. Clee Garlock, I want you to tell me _why!_"

"Very well." Garlock's jaw set. "You've had it in mind all along that this is some kind of a lark; that you and I are Gunther Tops of the universe. Or did that belief weaken a bit when we met Baver 14WD27?"

"Well, perhaps--a little. However, the probability is becoming greater with every planet we visit. After all, _some_ race has to be tops. Why _shouldn't_ it be us?"

"_What_ a logic--excuse me, skip it...."

"Oh, you really _meant_ it when you said you weren't going to fight with me any more?"

"I'm going to try not to. Now, remembering that I don't consider your premise valid, just suppose that when we visit some planet some day, you get your mind burned out and I don't--solely because I had something I could have given you and wouldn't. What then?"

"Oh. I thought that was what you ... but suppose I can't...."

"We won't suppose anything of the kind. But that wasn't all that was on your mind. Nor most."

"How true. Those Primes. The women. Honestly, Clee, I never saw--never imagined--such a bunch of exhibitionistic, obstreperous, obnoxious, swell-headed, hussies in my whole life. And every day it was borne in on me more and more that I was--am--exactly like the rest of them."

Garlock was wise enough to say nothing, and Belle went on: "I've been talking a good game of licking myself, but this time I'm going to _do_ it."

She jumped up and doubled her fists. "If you can do it, I can," she declared. "Like the ancient ballad--'Anything you can do I can do better.'" She tried to be jaunty, but the jauntiness did not ring quite true.

"That's an unfortunate quotation, I'm afraid. The trouble is, I haven't."

"Huh? Don't be an idiot, Clee. You certainly have--what else do _you_ suppose put me so far down into the dumps?"

"In that case, you _certainly_ will. So come on up out of the dumps."

"Wilco--and I certainly will. But for a woman who has been talking so big, I feel low in my mind. A good-night kiss, Clee, darling? Just one--and just a little one, at that?"

"Sweetheart!"

There were more than one, and none of them was little. Eventually, however, the two stood, arms still around each other, in the corridor between their doors.

"But kissing's as far as it goes, isn't it," Belle said. The remark was not a question; nor was it quite a statement.

"That's right."

"So good night, darling."

"Good night, ace."

* * *

And when they next saw each other, at the breakfast table, Belle was apparently her usual dauntless self.

"Hi, darling--sit down," she said, gaily. "Your breakfast is on the table. Bacon, eggs, toast, strawberry jam, and a liter of coffee."

"Nice! Thanks, ace."

They ate in silence for a few minutes; then her hand crept tentatively across the table. He pressed it warmly. "You look a million, Belle. Out of the dumps?"

"Pretty much--in most ways. One way, though, I'm in deeper than ever. You see, I know exactly what you did to Fao Talaho; and why neither you or anybody else could do it to me. Or if they could, what would happen if they did."

"I was hoping you would. I couldn't very well tell you, before, but...."

"Of course not. I see that."

"... the fact is that Fao, and all the others we've met, are young enough, unformed enough--plastic enough--yes, damn it, _weak_ enough--to bend. But you are tremendously strong, and twelve Rockwell numbers harder than a diamond. You wouldn't bend. If enough stress could be applied--and that's decidedly questionable--you wouldn't bend. You'd break, and I can't figure it. You're a little older, of course, but not enough to...."

"How about the fact that I've been banging myself for eight years against Cleander Garlock, the top Prime of the universe and the hardest? That might have something to do with it, don't you think?"

Garlock said, "Indefensible conclusions drawn from insufficient data. That's just what I've been talking about. No matter how we got the way we are, though, the fact is that you and I have got to fight our own battles and bury our own dead."

"Check. Like having a baby, but worse. There's nothing anybody else can do--even you--except maybe hold my hand, like now."

"That's about it. But speaking of holding hands, would it help if we paired again?"

Belle studied the question for two full minutes; her fine eyes clouded. "No," she said, finally. "I would enjoy it too much, and you'd ... well, you wouldn't...."

"Huh?" he demanded.

"Oh, physically, of course; but that isn't enough, or good enough, now. You see, I know what your personal code is. It's unbelievable, almost--I never heard of one like it, except maybe a priest or two--but I admire you tremendously for it. You would never, willingly, pair with a woman you really loved. That was why you were so glad to break ours off. You can't deny it."

"I won't try to deny it. But you can't bluff me, Belle, so please quit trying. Basically, your code is the same as mine. Why else did you initiate our break?"

Belle's block went solid, and Garlock said hastily, aloud, "Excuse it, please. Cancel. I've just said, and know as an empirical fact, that you've got to do the job alone--but I can't seem to help putting my big, flat foot in it by blundering in anyway. Let's get to work, shall we?"

"What at? Interview the Primes, I'd say--tell them to hold themselves in readiness to attend...."

"On very short notice...."

"Yes. To attend the big meeting on Tellus. We'll have to make a schedule. It shouldn't be held until after Fao and Deggi get their ship built--it _can't_ be held, of course, until after you and Jim are out of SSE. Have you got _that_ figured out yet?"

"Pretty much." He told her his plan.

Belle giggled, then burst into laughter. "So _I'm_ in it, too? _Wonderful!_"

"You have to be. If we make him mad enough, he'll fire you, too."

"Without hiring me first? He couldn't."

"He could, very easily. He doesn't know one-tenth of one percent of his people. If we work it right he'll assume that you're one of us wage-slaves, too. Lola, too, for that matter."

"Careful, Clee. You and I think this is funny, but Lola wouldn't. She'd be shocked to her sweet little core, and she'd louse up the whole deal. So be very sure she doesn't get in on it."

"I guess you're right ... well, shall we go out and insult our touchy young friend Semolo? Ready.... Go!"

* * *

"Oh, it's _you_ again. I tell you...." the Lizorian began.

"You will tell me nothing. You will listen. Link your mind to Mitala's," and the linked Tellurian minds enforced the order. "In about two weeks the Primes of many worlds will meet in person on Tellus. Arrange your affairs so that on ten minutes' notice you both can leave Lizoria for Tellus aboard our starship, the _Pleiades_. That is all."

"He'll come, too," Belle chortled. "He'll writhe and scream, but he'll come."

"You couldn't keep him away," Garlock agreed.

On the next planet, Falne, the procedure was a little different. The information was the same, but--"One word of warning," Garlock added. "It is to be a meeting of minds; not a contest to set up a pecking-order. If you try any such business you will be disciplined; sharply and in public."

"Suppose that, under such conditions, we refuse to attend the meeting?"

"That is your right. There is no coercion whatever. Whether or not you come will depend upon whether or not you two are in reality Seekers after Truth. Until a day."

And so it went. Planet after planet. On not one of those worlds had any Prime changed his thinking. Not one was really interested in the Galactic Service as an instrument for the good of all mankind. There were almost as many attitudes as there were Primes; but all were essentially self-centered and selfish.

"That tears it, Belle--busts it wide open. I can--I mean we together can do either job. That is, either be top boss and run the thing or put in full time beating some sense into those hard skulls. We can't do both."

"On paper, we should," Belle said, thoughtfully. "You're Galactic Admiral; I'm your Vice. One job apiece. But we're _not_ going to be separated. Besides...."

"Two (minds) (brains) are much better than one," both said, except for one word, in unison.

Belle laughed. "That settles that. The Garlock-Bellamy fusion is Galactic Admiral--so we need a good Vice. Who? Deggi and Fao? They're cooperative and idealistic enough, but.... Oh, I don't know exactly what it is they lack. Do you?"

"No; I can't put it into words or thoughts. Probably the concept is too new for pigeon-holing. It isn't exactly strength or hardness or toughness or resilience or brisance--maybe a combination of all five. What we need is a pair like us but better."

"There _aren't_ any."

"Don't be too sure." Belle glanced at him in surprise and he went on: "Not that we've seen, no. But each of those worlds centers a volume of space containing thousands of planets. Including the Tellurian and the Margonian, we now have forty-eight regions defined. Let's run a very fast search-pattern of Region Forty-nine and see what we come up with."

"All right ... but suppose we do find somebody who out-Gunthers us?"

"I'd a lot rather have it that way than the way it is now. I'll do the hopping, you the checking. Here's the first one--what do you read?"

"N. G."

"And this one?"

"The same."

"And this?"

"Ditto."

Until, finally: "Clee, just how long are you going to keep this up?"

"Until we find something or run out of time for the meeting. Belle, I really _want_ to find somebody who amounts to something."

"So do I, really, so go ahead."

* * *

But they did not run out of time. At planet number four-hundred-something, Belle suddenly emitted a shriek--vocally as well as mentally. "Clee! Hold it! Here's something, I think!"

"I'm sure there is, and I'm gladder to see you two people than can possibly be expressed."

Belle whirled; so did Garlock. A man stood in the middle of the Main; a man shaped very much like Garlock, but with long, badly-tousled hair and a bushy wilderness of fiery-red whiskers.

"Please excuse this intrusion, Admiral--or should it be plural? Improper address, I'm sure, but your joint tenure is a concept so new and so vast that I am not yet able to grasp it fully--but you are working at such high speed that I had to do something drastic. You will, I trust, remain here long enough to discuss certain matters with my wife and me?"

"We'll be very glad to."

"Thank you. I will return, then, more decorously, and bring her. One moment." He disappeared.

"_Wife!_" Belle exclaimed, more than half in dismay. "They must be, then...."

"Yeah." The thought of a wife did not bother Garlock at all. "Talk about _power!_ And _speed!_ To get all that stuff and 'port up here in the millisecond or so we had the screens open? Baby Doll, there's a guy who is what a Prime Operator _ought_ to be!"

In less than a minute the man reappeared, accompanied by a woman who was very obviously pregnant--eight months or so. Like the man, she was dressed in tight-fitting coveralls. Her hair, however--it was a natural red, too--was cut to a uniform length of eight inches, and each hair individually stood out, perfectly straight and perfectly perpendicular to the element of the scalp from which it sprang.

"Friends Belle and Clee of Tellus, I present Therea, my wife; and Alsyne, myself; of this planet Thaker. We have numbers, too, but they are never used among friends."

Acknowledgments were made and a few minutes of conversation ensued, during which the two couples studied each other.

"This looks mighty good to me," Garlock said then. "Shall we go screens half-down, Alsyne, and cry in each other's beer?"

* * *

In thirty seconds of flashing communication each became thoroughly informed. Those minds could send, and could receive, an incredibly vast amount of information in an incredibly brief space of time.

"Your ship should work and doesn't," Garlock said. "Show me; in detail."

Alsyne showed him.

"Oh, I see. You didn't work out quite all the theory. It has to be activated. Like this...." Garlock showed Alsyne.

"I see. Thanks." Alsyne disappeared and was gone for some ten minutes. He reappeared, grinning hugely behind his flaming wilderness of beard. "It works perfectly; for which our heartfelt thanks. And now that my mind is at complete peace with the universe, we will consider the utterly fascinating subject of your proposed Galactic Service. You two Tellurians, immature although you are, have made two tremendous contributions to the advancement of the Scheme of Things--three, if you count the starship, which is comparatively unimportant--each of such import that no human mind can foresee any fraction of its consequences. First, your Prime Field, the probe and its screen...."

"Clee!" Belle drove the thought. "You _didn't_ give him _that_, surely!"

"Tut-tut, my child," Therea soothed her. "You are alarming yourself about nothing."

"The only trouble with you two youngsters is that you aren't quite--very nearly, of course, but very definitely not quite--grown up." Alsyne smiled again; not only with mouth and eyes, but with his whole hairy face. "To the mature mind there is no such thing as status. Each knows what he can do best and does it as a matter of course. Rank is not necessary.

"Second, the unimaginably important contribution of the ability to combine two dissimilar but intimately compatible minds into one tremendously effective fusion. While Therea and I have had only a few moments to play with it, we realize some of its possibilities. Thus, since she is a Doctor of Humanities...."

"Oh," Belle interrupted. "_That's_ why you knew what I was thinking about, even though I tight-beamed the thought and my screens were tight?"

"Exactly so. But to continue. With her sympathy and empathy, and my driving force and so on, the job of licking these young Primes into shape is, as your idiom has it, 'strictly our dish.' It is a truly delicious thought.

"You two, on the other hand, have much that we lack. Breadth and depth and scope of imagination and of vision; yet almost incredible will-power and stamina and resolve...."

"_That's the word I was trying to think of--will-power_," Belle flashed a thought at Garlock.

"... qualities virtually always mutually exclusive; but the combination of which makes your fusion uniquely qualified to lead and direct this new and magnificent movement. But Therea and I have been idle and frustrated far too long. We can be of most use, at the moment, on Margonia; working with the Fao-Deggi unit. Therefore, with renewed deep thanks, we go."

* * *

Man and wife disappeared; and, ten seconds later, the Thakern starship vanished from its world.

"Well, _what_ do you think of _that_?" Belle gasped. "I was actually afraid to think, even behind a Prime screen. I don't know _yet_ whether I want to kiss 'em or kill 'em."

"I do. That guy is really a Prime, Belle. He's older, bigger, and a lot better than I am."

"Uh-uh," she demurred, positively. "Older, yes. More mature--you _baby_, you!" She snickered gleefully. "If he hadn't included you in that crack I'd've stabbed him, so help me, even though it wasn't true. He said himself it's _you_ who has got what it takes to lead and direct, not him."

"Us. We, I mean," he corrected, absently.

"Uh-huh; us-we. One, now and forever. Hot Dog! Anyway, he wants us to and we want to so everything's lovely and so let's get to work on Fatso and his Foster. I think we ought to have some fun for a change and that'll be a lot. When do we want to hit him?"

"Any day Monday through Friday. Nine-fifteen A.M. Eastern Daylight time. Plus or minus one minute."

"Nice! Catch him _in flagrante delicto_. Lovely--shovel on the coal, my intrepid engineer!"

On a Wednesday morning, then, at twelve minutes past nine EDT, the _Pleiades_ hung poised, high over the Chancellery of Solar System Enterprises, Incorporated.

"Remember, Belle!" Garlock was pacing the Main. "To keep 'em staggering we'll have to land slugging and beat 'em to every punch. You did a wonderful job on her last time, and it's been eating on her ever since. She's probably been rehearsing in front of a mirror just how she's going to tear you apart next time and just how she's going to spit out the pieces. Last time, you were cold, stiff, rigidly formal, and polite. So this time it'll be me, and I'll be hot and bothered, dirty, low, coarse, lewd, and very, very rough."

Belle threw back her head and laughed. "Rough? Yes. Vicious, contemptuous, or ugly; yes. A master of fluent, biting, and pyrotechnic profanity; yes. But low or dirty or coarse or lewd, Clee? Or any one of the four, to say nothing of them all? Uh-uh. Ferber's a filthy beast, of course; but even he knows you're one of the cleanest men that ever lived. They'd _know_ it was an act."

"Not unless I give 'em time to think--or unless you do, before he fires Jim--in which case we'll lose the game anyway. But how about you? If I can knock 'em too groggy to think, will you carry on and keep 'em that way?"

"Watch my blasts!" Belle giggled gleefully. "I never tried anything like that--any more than you have--but I'll guarantee to be just as low, dirty, coarse, lewd, and crude as you are. Probably more so, because in this particular case it'll be fun. You see, you're a man--you can't possibly despise and detest that slimy stinker either in the same way or as much as I do."

"This ought to be good. Cut the rope, Jim."

Even before the starship came to rest, Garlock drove a probe into the _sanctum sanctorum_ of the Chancellery--an utterly unheard-of act of insolence.

"Foster! This is the _Pleiades_ coming in. Garlock calling. Hot up the tri-di and the recorder, Toots. Put Fatso on, and snap into it.... I said shake a leg!"

"Why, I.... You...."

"Stop stuttering and come to life, you half-witted bag! Gimme Ferber and hurry it up--this ship's tricky."

"Why, you ... I never...." Ferber's outraged First Secretary could scarcely talk. "He ... he is...."

"I know, Babe, I know--I could set that to music and sing it, with gestures. 'Chancellor Ferber is in conference and cannot be disturbed,'" he mimicked, savagely. "Put him on now--but _quick_!"

* * *

The tri-di tank brightened up; Chancellor Ferber's image appeared. He was disheveled, surprised and angry, but Garlock gave him no chance to speak.

"Well, Fatso--at last! Where the _hell_ have you been all morning? I want some stuff, just as fast as God will let you get it together," and he began to read off, as fast as he could talk, a long list of highly technical items.

Ferber tried for many seconds to break in, and Garlock finally allowed him to do so.

"Are you crazy, Garlock?" he shouted. "What in hell's name are you bothering _me_ with _that_ stuff for? You know better than that--make out your requisitions and send them through channels!"

"Channels, hell!" Garlock shouted back. "Hasn't it got through your four-inch-thick skull into your idiot's brain yet that I'm in a hurry? I don't want this stuff today; I want it day before yesterday--this damned junk-heap is apt to fall apart any minute. So quit goggling and slobbering at me, you wall-eyed, slimy, fat toad. Get that three hundred weight of suet into action. _Hump_ yourself!"

"You ... you ... Why, I was never so insulted...."

"Insulted? You?" Garlock out-roared him. "Listen, Fatso. If I ever set out to really insult you, you'll know it--it'll blister all the paint off the walls. All I'm trying to do now is get you off that fat butt of yours and get some action."

Ferber became purple and pounded his desk in consuming anger.

Garlock yelled louder and pounded harder. "Start rounding up this stuff--but _fast_--or I'll come down there and take your job away from you and do it myself--and for your own greasy hide's sake you'd better believe I'm not just chomping my choppers, either."

"You'll _What?_" Ferber screamed. "_You're fired!_"

"_You_ fire _me_?" Garlock mimicked the scream. "And make it stick? You'd better write that one up for the funnies. Why, you lard-brain, you couldn't fire a cap-pistol."

"Foster!" Ferber yelled. "Terminate Garlock as of now. Insubordination, and misconduct, abuse of position, incompetence, malfeasance--everything else you can think of. Blacklist him all over the System!"

At the word "fired" Belle, had leaped to her feet and had stopped laughing.

"Miss Bellamy!" Ferber snapped.

"Yes, sir?" she answered, sweetly.

"You are hereby promoted to be Head of the...."

"Oh, yeah?" Belle sneered, her voice cutting like a knife. "You unprincipled, lascivious, lecherous _Hitler!_ Have you got the unmitigated gall to take _me_ for a floozie? To think you can add _me_ to your collection of bootlicking, round-heeled tramps?"

"You're fired and blacklisted too!"

"How nice! You know, I don't know of _anything_ I'd rather have happen to me?"

* * *

"Get James on there--you, James...."

"You don't need to fire me, you fat-headed old goat," James said, contemptuously. "I've already quit--the exact second you fired Clee."

"No you didn't!" Ferber screamed. "Resignation not accepted. You're _Fired_! Dishonorably discharged--blacklisted everywhere--you'll _never_ get another job--_anywhere_! And here's your slip, too!" Miss Foster was very fast on the machines.

James 'ported his slip up into the _Pleiades_, just as Garlock and Belle had done with theirs, and disappeared with it as they had; reappearing almost instantly.

"Montandon!"

"Chancellor Ferber, are you completely out of your mind? You can't discharge either Miss Bellamy or me."

"I can't?" he gloated. "Why not?"

"Because neither of us is employed. By anybody."

"That's right, Fatso," Belle said. "We just came along. Just to keep the boys company. It's lonesome, you know, 'way out in deep space."

Miss Foster ripped a half-filled-out termination form out of her machine and hurled it into a waste-basket. Ferber's jaw dropped and his eyes stared glassily, but he rallied quickly.

"I can blacklist her, though, and maybe you think I won't. Belle Bellamy will never get another job in this whole solar system as long as she lives, except through me! Maybe I'll hire her some day, for something, and maybe I won't. Are you listening, Bellamy?"

"Not only listening, I'm reveling in every word." Belle laughed derisively. "I hate to shatter such wonderful dreams--or do I? You see, the _Pleiades_ really works, and the Galaxians own her; lock, stock, and barrel. You wouldn't have any part of her, remember? Insisted on payment for every nut, wire, and service? Now, they want to hire us four for a big operation with this starship. Since you only loaned Garlock and James to them, you might have made some legal trouble on that score, but now that you've fired them both--and in such _conclusive_ language!--we're all set. So when you blacklist us with the Society, _please_ let me know--I want to take a tri-di in technicolor of you doing it. How do you like _them_ parsnips, Your Royal Fatness?"

"I'll see about that!" Ferber stormed. "We'll have an injunction out in an hour!"

"Go ahead," Garlock said, with a wide grin. "Have fun--the Galaxians have legal eagles too, you know. One thing Belle forgot. Just in case you recover consciousness some time and want to steal our termination papers back--especially Belle's; what a howler _that_ was!--don't try it. They're in a Gunther-blocked safe."

Then, as comprehension began to dawn on Ferber's face:

"S-u-c-k-e-r," Garlock drawled.

The _Pleiades_ disappeared.

CHAPTER 9

The _Pleiades_ landed on Margonia's Galaxian Field, where the Tellurians found the project running smoothly, a little ahead of schedule. Delcamp and Fao were working at their fast and efficient pace, but the hairy pair from Thaker seemed to be, literally, everywhere at once.

"Hi, Belle." Fao 'ported up and shook hands warmly. "I thought I was going to have the first double-Prime baby, until _she_ appeared on the scene."

"Didn't it make you mad? I'd've been furious."

"Maybe a little at first, but not after I'd talked with her for half a minute. She'd never even thought of that angle. Besides, she thinks the whole galaxy is fairly crawling with double-Primes."

"That's funny--so does Clee. But there are other things--strictly not angles--that she hasn't thought of, too. If those coveralls were half an inch tighter they'd choke her to death. You'd think she'd...."

"Huh?" Fao interrupted. "_You_ should scream--oh, that ridiculous Tellurian prud...."

"It _isn't_ ridiculous!" Belle snapped. "And it isn't prudishness, either--not with me, anyway. It's just that," she ran an indicative glance over Fao's lean, trim flanks and hard, flat abdomen, "it spoils your figure. It's only temporary, of course, but...."

"_Spoils_ it! Why, how _utterly_ idiotic! Why, it's magnificent! Just as soon as it starts to show on me, Belle, I'm going to start wearing only half as many clothes as I've got on now."

"You couldn't." Belle eyed the other girl's bathing-suit-like garment. Except for being blue instead of yellow, it was the same as the one she had worn before. "Not without the League for Public Decency sending the wagon out after you."

"Oh, Miss Experience? Well, three-quarters, maybe...."

"Hey, you two!" came Delcamp's hail. "How about cutting the gab and getting some work done?"

"Coming, boss! 'Scuse it, please!" and two fast and skillful women went efficiently to work.

* * *

With six Prime Operators on the job the work went on very rapidly, yet without error. The _Celestial Queen_ was finished, tested, and found perfect, one full day ahead of James' most optimistic estimate for construction alone. The six Primes conferred.

"Do you want us to help you pick up the other Primes?" Delcamp asked. "Your Main, big as it is, will be crowded, and we have three ships here now instead of one."

"I don't think so ... no," Garlock decided. "We told 'em we'd do it, and in the _Pleiades_, so we'd better. Unless, Alsyne, you don't agree?"

"I agree. The point, while of course minor, is very well taken. We and our Operators--we brought six along; experts in their various fields--can serve best by working on Tellus with its Galaxian Society in getting ready for the meeting."

"Oh, of course," Fao said. "Probably Deg and I should do the same thing?"

"That would be our thought." The two Thakerns were thinking--and lepping--in fusion. "However," they went on carefully, "it must not be and is not our intent to sway you in any action or decision. While not all of you four, perhaps, are as yet fully mature, not one of you should be subjected to any additional exterior stresses."

"I hope you don't think that way about _all_ Primes," Garlock said, grimly. "I'm going to smack some of those kids down so hard that their shirt-tails will roll up their backs like window shades."

"If you find such action either necessary or desirable, we will join you quite happily in it. We go."

The four remaining Primes looked at each other in puzzled surprise.

"_What_ do you think about _that_?" Garlock asked finally, of no one in particular.

"I don't understand them," Fao said, "but they're mighty nice people."

"Do you suppose, Clee," Belle nibbled at her lower lip, "that we're getting off on the wrong foot with uniforms and admirals and things? That with really adult Primes running things the Galactic Service would run itself? No bosses or anything?"

"Umnngk." Garlock grunted as though Belle had slugged him. "I hope not. Or do I? Anyway, not enough data yet to make speculation profitable. But I wonder, Miss Bellamy, if it would be considered an unjustifiable attempt to sway you in any action or decision if I were to suggest--Oh, ever so diffidently!--that if we're going to saddle up our bronks and ride out on roundup tomorrow morning we ought to be logging some sack-time right now?"

"Considering the source, as well as and/or in connection with the admittedly extreme provocation," Belle straightened up into a regal pose, "You may say, Mister Garlock, without fear of successful contradiction, that in this instance no umbrage will be taken, at least for the moment." She broke the pose and giggled infectiously. "'Night, you two lovely people!"

* * *

Belle was still sunny and gay when the _Pleiades_ reached Lizoria; Garlock was inwardly happy and outwardly content. Semolo, however, was his usual intransigent self. In fact, if it had not been for Mirea Mitala, and the fact that she--metaphorically--did pin Semolo's ears back, Garlock would not have taken him aboard at all.

Thus, after loading on only one pair of Primes, that auspiciously-beginning day had lost some of its luster; and as the day wore on it got no better fast. Baver of Falne had not learned anything, either--only Garlock's intervention saved the cocky and obstreperous Semolo from a mental blast that would have knocked him out cold.

Then there were Onthave and Lerthe of Crenna; Korl and Kirl of Gleer; Parleof and Ginseona of Pasquerone; Atnim and Sotara of Flandoon, and eighty others. Very few of them were as bad as Semolo; some of them, particularly the Pasqueronians and the Gleerans, were almost as good as Delcamp and Fao.

This was the first time that any pair of them had ever come physically close to any other Prime. Many of them had not really believed that any Primes abler than themselves existed. The _Pleiades_ was crowded, and Garlock and Belle were not giving to any of them the deference and consideration and submissive respect which each considered his unique due.

Wherefore the undertaking was neither easy nor pleasant; and both Tellurians were tremendously relieved when, the last pair picked up, they flashed the starship back to Tellus and Delcamp, Fao, and the Thakerns 'ported themselves aboard.

"Give me your attention, please," Garlock said, crisply. Then, after a moment, "Any and all who are not tuned to me in five seconds will be returned immediately to their home planets and will lose all contact with this group....

"That's better. For some of you this has been a very long day. For all of you it has been a very trying day. You were all informed previously as to what we had in mind. However, since you are young and callow, and were thoroughly convinced of your own omniscience and omnipotence, it is natural enough that you derived little or no benefit from that information. You are now facing reality, not your own fantasies.

"Each pair of you has been assigned a suite of rooms in Galaxian Hall. Each suite is furnished appropriately; each is fully Gunthered for self-service.

"This meeting has not been announced to the public and, at least for the present, will not be. Therefore none of you will attempt to communicate with anyone outside Galaxian Hall. Anyone making any such attempt will be surprised.

"The meeting will open at eight o'clock tomorrow morning in the auditorium. The Thakerns and the Margonians will now inform you as to your quarters." There was a moment of flashing thought. "Dismissed."

* * *

At one second before eight o'clock the auditorium was empty. At eight o'clock, ninety-eight human beings appeared in it; six on the stage, the rest occupying the first few rows of seats.

"Good morning, everybody," Garlock said, pleasantly. "Everyone being rested, fed, and having had some time in which to consider the changed reality faced by us all, I hope and am inclined to believe that we can attain friendship and accord. We will spend the next hour in becoming acquainted with each other. We will walk around, not teleport. We will meet each other physically, as well as mentally. We will learn each other's forms of greeting and we will use them. This meeting is adjourned until nine o'clock--or, rather, the meeting will begin then."

For several minutes no one moved. All blocks were locked at maximum. Each Prime used only his eyes.

Physically, it was a scene of almost overpowering perfection. The men were, without exception, handsome, strong, and magnificently male. The women, from heroically-framed Fao Talaho up--or down?--to surprisingly slender Mirea Mitala, all were arrestingly beautiful; breathtakingly proportioned; spectacularly female.

Clothing varied from complete absence to almost complete coverage, with a bewildering variety of intermediate conditions. Color was rampant.

* * *

Hair--or lack of it--was also an individual and highly variant matter. Some of the women, like Belle and Fao, were content with one solid but unnatural shade. One shaven head--Mirea Mitala's--was deeply tanned, but unadorned, even though the rest of her body was almost covered by precious stones. Another was decorated with geometrical and esoteric designs in eye-searing colors. A third supported a structure--it could not possibly be called a hat--of spun metal and gems.

Among the medium-and long-hairs there were two-, three-, and multi-toned jobs galore. Some of the color-combinations were harmonious; some were sharply contrasting, such as black and white; some looked as though their wearers had used the most violently-clashing colors they could find.

The prize-winner, however, was Therea of Thaker's enormous, inexplicable mop; and it was that phenomenon that first broke the ice.

The girl with the decorated scalp had been glancing questioningly at neighbor after neighbor, only to be met by uncompromising stares. Finally, however, her gaze met another, as interested as her own. This second girl, whose coiffure was a high-piled confection of black, white, yellow, red, blue, and green, half-masted her screen and said:

"Oh, thanks, Jethay of Lodie-Yann. I'm glad everybody isn't going to stay locked up all day. I'm Ginseona of Pasquerone. They call me 'Jin' whenever they want to call me anything printable. And _this_," she dug a knuckle into her companion's short ribs, whereupon he jumped, whirled around, lowered his screen, and grinned, "is my ... the boy friend, Parleof. Also of Pasquerone, of course. Par, both Jethay and I...."

"Call me 'Jet'--everybody does," Jethay said: almost shyly, for a Prime.

"Both Jet and I have been wondering about that woman's hair--over there. How could you _possibly_ give a head of hair a static charge of fifty or a hundred kilovolts and not have it leak off?"

"You couldn't, unless it was a perfectly-insulated wig ... but it looks as though she did, at that...." and Parleof paused in thought.

"Maybe Byuk would have an idea or two," and Jet uttered aloud a dozen or so crackling syllables that sounded as though they could have been ladylike profanity. Whatever they were, Byuk jumped, too, and tuned in with the other three.

"Oh, it's quite easy, really," Therea said then. "Look." Her mass of hair cascaded gracefully down around her neck and shoulders. "Look again." Each hair stood fiercely out all by itself, exactly as before. "All you young people will learn much more difficult and much more important things before this meeting is over. I cannot tell you how glad I am that so many of you are here."

* * *

And so it went, all over the auditorium. Once cracked, the ice broke up fast.

Fao and Delcamp worked hard; so did Belle and Garlock. Alsyne was a potent force indeed--his abounding vitality and his tremendous smile broke down barriers that logic could not affect. And Therea worked near-miracles; did more than the other five combined. Her sympathy, her empathy, her understanding and feeling, were as great as Lola's own; her operative ability was as much greater than Lola's as Lola's was greater than that of a bobby-soxed babysitter.

Thus, when half of the hour was gone, Garlock heaved a profound sigh of relief. He wouldn't have half the trouble he had expected--it was not going to be a riot. And when he called the meeting to order he was pleasanter and friendlier than Belle had ever before seen him.

"While I am calling this meeting to order, it is only in the widest possible sense that I am its presiding officer, for we have as yet no organization by the delegated authority of which any man or any woman has any right to preside. Yesterday I ruled by force; simply because I am stronger than any one of you or any pair of you. Today, in the light of the developments of the last hour, that rule is done; except, perhaps, for one or two isolated and non-representative cases which may develop today. By this time tomorrow, I hope that we will be forever done with the law of claw and fang. For, as a much abler man has said--'To the really mature mind, the concept of status is completely invalid.'"

"_He's putting that as a direct quote, Alsyne, and it isn't._" Belle lanced the thought.

"_He thinks it is_," Alsyne flashed back. "_That is the way his mathematician's mind recorded it._"

"This meeting is informal, preliminary and exploratory. A meeting of minds from which, we hope, a useful and workable organization can be developed. Since you all know what we think it basically should be, there is no need to repeat it.

"I must now say something that a few of you will construe as a threat. You are all Prime Operators. Each pair of you is the highest development of a planet, perhaps of a solar system. You can learn if you will. You can cooperate if you will. Any couple here who refuses to learn, and hence to cooperate, will be returned to its native planet and will have no further contact with this group.

"I now turn this meeting over to our first moderators, Alsyne and Therea of Thaker; the oldest and ablest Prime Operators of us all."

"Thank you, Garlock of Tellus. One correction, however, if you please. I who speak am neither this man nor this woman standing here, but both. I am the Prime Unit of Thaker. For brevity, and for the purposes of this meeting only, I could be called simply 'Thaker.' Before calling for general discussion I wish to call particular attention to two points, neither of which has been sufficiently emphasized.

"First, the purpose of a Prime Operator is to serve, not to rule. Thus, no Prime should be or will be 'boss' of anything, except possibly of his own starship.

"Second, since we have no data we do not know what form the proposed Galactic Service will assume. One thing, however, is sure. Whatever power of enforcement or of punishment it may have will derive, not from its Primes, but from the fact that it will be an arm of the Galactic Council, which will be composed of Operators only. No Prime will be eligible for membership."

* * *

Thaker went on to explain how each pair could obtain instruction and assistance in many projects, including starships. How each pair would, when they were mature enough, be coached in the use of certain abilities they did not as yet have. He suggested procedures and techniques to be employed in the opening up of each pair's volume of space. He then asked for questions and comments.

Semolo was the first. "If I'm a good little boy," he sneered, "and do exactly as I'm told, and take over the region you tell me to and not the one I want to, what assurance have I that some other Prime, just because he's a year older than I am, won't come along and take it away from me?"

"Your question is meaningless," Thaker replied. "Since you will not 'take over,' or 'have,' or 'own,' any region, it cannot be 'taken away from you.'"

"Then I will...." Semolo began.

"You will keep still!" came a clear, incisive thought, just as Garlock was getting ready to intervene. Miss Mitala then switched from thought, which everyone there could understand, and launched a ten-second blast of furious speech. Semolo wilted and the girl went on in thought: "He'll be good--or else."

A girl demanded recognition and got it. "Semolo's right. What's the use of being Primes if we can't get any good out of it? We're the strongest people of our respective worlds. I say we're bosses and should keep on being bosses."

Garlock got ready to shut her up, then paused; holding his fire.

"Ah, yes, friend Garlock, you are maturing fast," came Thaker's thought and, in answer to Garlock's surprise, it went on, "This situation will, I think, be self-adjusting; just as will be those in the as yet unexplored regions of space."

The girl kept on. "I, at least, am going to keep on bossing my own planet, milking it just as I...."

Her companion had been trying to crack her shield. Failing in that, he stepped in close and tapped her--solidly, but with carefully-measured force--behind the ear. Before she could fall, he 'ported her back up into their quarters. "This happens all the time," he explained to the group at large. "Carry on."

Discussion went on, with less and less acrimony, all the rest of the day. And the next day, and the next. Then, argument having reached the point of diminishing returns, the three starships took the forty-six couples home.

* * *

The six Primes went into Evans' office, where the lawyer was deeply engaged with Gerald Banks, the Galaxians' Public Relations Chief. Banks was holding his head in both hands.

"Garlock, maybe _you_ can tell me," Banks demanded. "How much of this stuff, if any, can I publish? And if so, _how_?"

"Nothing," Garlock said, flatly.

"What do you think, Thaker?" Belle asked. "You're smarter than we are."

"What Thaker thinks has no bearing," Garlock said.

Belle, Fao, and Delcamp all began to protest at once, but they were silenced by Thaker himself.

"Garlock is right. My people are not your people; I know not at all how your people think or what they will or will not believe. I go."

"That lets Deg and me out too; then, double-plus," Fao said with a grin, "so we'll leave that baby on your laps. We go, too."

"Well, little Miss Weisenheimer," Garlock smiled quizzically at Belle, "You grabbed the ball--what are you going to do with it?"

"Nothing, I guess...." Belle thought for a minute. "We couldn't stuff any part of that down the throat of a simple-minded six-year-old. We haven't really _got_ anything, anyway. Time enough, I think, when we have six or seven hundred planets in each region, instead of only one planet. Maybe we'll know something by then. Does that make sense?"

"It does to me," Garlock said, and the others agreed.

"That Thakern 'we go' business sounds rough at first, but it's contagious. Fao and Deggi caught it, and I feel like I'm coming down with it myself. How about you, Clee?"

"We go," Belle and Garlock said in unison, and vanished.

* * *

Aboard the _Pleiades_, the next few days passed quietly enough. James set up, in the starship's memory banks, a sequence to mass-produce instruction tapes and blueprints. Garlock and Belle began systematically to explore the Tellurian Region. Now, however, their technique was different. If either Prime of any world was not enthusiastic about the project--

"Very well. Think it over," they would say. "We will get in touch with you again in about a year," and the starship would go on to the next planet.

On Earth, however, things became less and less tranquil with every day that passed. For, in deciding not to publish anything, Garlock had not considered at all the basic function and the tremendous ability, power, and scope of _The Press_. And Galaxian Hall had never before been closed to the public; not for any hour of any day of any year of its existence. A non-profit organization, dependent upon the public for its tremendous income, the Galaxian Society had always courted that public in every possible ethical way.

Thus, in the first hour of closure, a bored reporter came out, read the smoothly-phrased notice, and lepped it in to the desk. It might be worth, he thought, half an inch.

Later in the day, however, the world's most sensitive news-nose began to itch. Did, or did not, this quiet, unannounced closing smell ever-so-slightly of cheese? Wherefore, Benjamin Bundy, the newscaster who had covered the starship's maiden flight, went out himself to look the thing over. He found the whole field closed. Not only closed, but Gunther-blocked impenetrably tight. He studied the announcement, his sixth sense--the born newsman's sense for news--probing every word.

"Regret ... research ... of such extreme delicacy ... vibration ... temperature control ... one one-hundredth of one degree Centigrade...."

He sought out his long-time acquaintance Banks; finding him in a temporary office half a block away from the Hall. "What's the story, Jerry?" he asked. "The _real_ story, I mean?"

"You know, as much about it as I do, Ben. Garlock and James don't waste time trying to detail me on that kind of business, you know."

This should have satisfied any newshawk, but Bundy's nose still itched. He mulled things over for a minute, then probed, finding that he could read nothing except Banks' outermost, most superficial thoughts.

"Well ... maybe ... but...." Then Bundy plunged. "All you have to do, Jerry, is tell me screens-half-down that your damn story is true."

"And that's the one thing I can't do," Banks admitted; and Bundy could not detect that any part of his sheepishness was feigned. "You're just too damned smart, Ben."

"Oh--one of _those_ things? So that's it?"

"Yup. I told Evans it might not work."

That should have satisfied the reporter, but it didn't. "Now it doesn't smell just a trifle cheesy; it stinks like rotten fish. You won't go screens down on that one, either."

"No comment."

"Oh, joy!" Bundy exulted. "So big that Gerald Banks, the top press-agent of all time, actually doesn't _want_ publicity! The starship works--this lack-of-control stuff is the bunk--from here to another star in nothing flat--Garlock's back, and he's brought--what _have_ you got in there, Jerry?"

"The only way I can tell you is in confidence, for Evans' release. I'd like to, Ben, believe me, but I can't."

"Confidence, hell! Do you think we won't get it?"

"In that case, no comment." The interview ended and the siege began.

* * *

Newshounds and detectives questioned and peered and probed. They dug into morgues, tabulating and classifying. They recalled and taped and sifted all the gossip they had heard. They got a picture of sorts, but it was maddeningly confusing and incomplete. And, since it was certain that inter-systemic matters were involved, they could not extrapolate--any guess was far too apt to be wrong. Thus nothing went on the air or appeared in print; and, although the surface remained calm, all newsdom seethed to its depths.

Wherefore haggard Banks and harried Evans greeted Garlock with shouts of joy when the four wanderers came back to spend the week end on Earth.

"I'll talk to 'em," Garlock decided, after the long story had been told. "Have somebody get hold of Bundy and ask him to come out."

"Get _hold_ of him!" Banks snorted. "He's here. Twenty-four hours a day. Eating sandwiches and cat-napping on chairs in the lobby. All you have to do is unseal that door."

Garlock flung the door wide. Bundy rushed in, followed by a more-or-less steady stream of some fifty other top-bracket newspeople, both men and women.

"Well, Garlock, perhaps _you_ will give us some screens-down facts?" Bundy asked, angrily.

"I'll give you _all_ the screens-down...."

"Clee!" "You're crazy!" "You can't!" "Don't!" Belle and all the Operators protested at once.

* * *

Ignoring the objections, Garlock cut his shield to half and gave the whole group a true account of everything that had happened in the galaxy. Then, while they were all too stunned to speak, a grin of saturnine amusement spread over his dark, five-o'clock-shadowed face.

"You pestiferous gnats insisted on grabbing the ball," he sneered. "Now let's see you run with it."

Bundy came out of his trance. "_What_ a story!" he yelled. "We'll plaster it...."

"Yeah," Garlock said, dryly. "_What_ a story. Exactly."

"Oh." Bundy deflated suddenly. "You'll have to prove it--demonstrate it--of course."

"Of course? You tickle me. Not only do I not have to prove it, I won't. I won't even confirm it."

Bundy glared at Garlock, then whirled on Banks. "If you don't give me this in shape to use, you'll never get another line or mention anywhere!"

"Oh, no?" For the first time in his professional life Banks gloated, openly and avidly. "From now on, my friend, who is in the saddle? Who is going to come to whom? Oh, _brother_!"

When the fuming newsmen had gone, Garlock said, "It'll leak, of course."

"Of course," Banks agreed. "'It is rumored ...' 'from a usually reliable source ...' and so on. Nothing definite, but each one of them will want to put out the first and biggest."

"That's what I figured. It'll have to break sometime and I thought easing it out would be best ... but wait a minute...." he thought for two solid minutes. "But we're going to need a lot of money, and we're just about broke, aren't we?" This thought was addressed to Frank Macey, the Galaxians' treasurer.

"Worse than broke--much worse."

"I could loan you a couple of credits, Frank," Belle said, brightly. "But go ahead, Clee."

"People like to be sidewalk superintendents. Suppose they could watch the construction of an outpost so far away that nobody ever dreamed of ever getting there. Could you do anything with that, Jerry?"

"_Could I! Just!_" and Banks, went into a rhapsody.

"That's the first good idea any one of you crackpots has had for five years," Macey said, suddenly. "But wouldn't transportation of material and so on present problems?"

"No; just buying it," Garlock said, soberly. "Oh, rather, paying for it."

"No trouble there...."

"What?" Belle exclaimed. "'No trouble,' it says here in fine print? How the old skinflint has changed--instead of screaming his head off about spending money he's actually _offering_ to. Frank, I'll loan you _three_ credits!"

"Hush, honey-chile, the men-folks are talking man-business. Look, Clee. We'll use the _Pleiades_ at first, while we're building a regular transport. A hundred passengers per trip, one thousand credits one way...."

"Wow!" Belle put in. "Our ex-skinflint is now a bare-faced, legally-protected robber."

"By no means, Belle," Evans said. "How much would that be per mile?"

"Say ten round trips per day. That would be twenty million a day gross for a small ship not intended for passenger service. When we get ships built ... and the extras...." The money-man went into a financial revel of his own.

"Lots of extras," Banks agreed. "And oh, _brother_, what a public-relations dream of heaven!"

"Maybe I'm dumb," Garlock broke in, "but just what are you going to use for money to get started?"

"The minute we confirm any part of the story, the credit of the Galaxian Society will jump from X-O to AA-A1."

"Oh. So Belle and I will have to lose our _Pleiades_ for a while. I don't like that, but we do need the money ... but we can have her for this coming week?"

"Of course."

"So maybe we'd better break the story now, instead of letting it leak."

"Can you, after what you just told them?"

"Sure I can." He set his mind and searched. "Bundy, this is Garlock...."

"So what am I supposed to do--burst into tears of joy?"

"Save it. I changed my mind. You can break it as fast and as hard as you like. I'll play along."

* * *

"Yeah? Why the switch? What's the angle?"

"Strictly commercial. Get it from Banks."

"And you'll--personally--go on my hour with it?"

"Yes. Also, we'll demonstrate--take you to any star-system in the galaxy. You and all the rest of the newshawks who were here and any fifty VIP's you want to invite. Tomorrow morning all right with you?"

"You, personally, in the _Pleiades_?" Bundy insisted.

"Better than that. The other two starships, too. You've got them--particularly those four Primes--clearly in mind?"

"Not exactly, there was so much of it. Spread it on me now, huh?" Garlock did so. "Thanks, pal, for the scoop. I'll crash it right now, and follow up with Banks. 'Bye!"

"Think you can deliver on that, Clee?" Banks asked.

"Sure. Both Deggi and Alsyne will need a lot of extra money, fast. They'll play along."

They did; and that three-starship tour--which visited twenty solar systems instead of one--was the most sensational thing old Earth had ever spawned.

Belle and Garlock did not spend that week end on Earth. "We go," they said, as soon as the _Pleiades_ was empty of pressmen, and they took James and Lola along. "If we _never_ see another such brawl as this is going to be," Belle told Banks, who was basking in glory and entreating them to stay on for the show, "it will be exactly twenty minutes too soon."

Thus it came about that Earth's first four deep-spacemen were completely out of reach when unexpected developments began.

* * *

Alonzo P. Ferber was one of the VIP's on Bundy's personally-conducted tour of the stars. As has been said, he was a very able executive. He had an extremely keen profit-sense. This new thing smelled--simply reeked--of money. SSE would _have_ to get in on it.

Ferber was not thin-skinned; where money was concerned it would never even occur to him to cherish grudges or to retain animosities. Wherefore SSE's purchasing department suggested to the Galaxian Society that negotiations be opened concerning licenses, franchises, royalties, and so on. These suggestions were politely but firmly brushed off. Then emissaries were sent, of ever-increasing caliber and weight. Next, Ferber himself tried the tri-di; and finally, he came in person.

Rebuffed, he made such legally-sound threats that Evans and Macey agreed to a meeting; stating flatly, however, that no commitments could possibly be made without the knowledge and approval of the Society's president, Cleander Garlock. Thus, at the meeting, the Galaxians made only two statements that were even approximately definite. One was that Garlock would probably return to Earth during the afternoon or evening of the following Friday; the other that they would take the matter up with Garlock as soon as they could.

After that meeting Macey was unperturbed, but Evans was a deeply worried man.

"You see," he explained, "the real crux was not even mentioned."

"No? What is it, then?"

"Operators, Primes, and the practically non-existent laws pertaining to their ... what? Labor? Skill? Genius? For instance, could Garlock be forced to do whatever it is that he does? On the other hand, if Ferber offered Belle Bellamy five million credits a year to 'work' for SSE, is there anything we could do about it?"

"Oh. I thought all there was to it was that you'd delay 'em for a year or so and that'd be it."

"Far from it. To date I have listed fifty-eight points for which, as far as we can learn, there are no precedents," and the lawyer called a meeting of his staff.

For Belle and Garlock, the week went fast. On Friday afternoon, high above Earth's Galaxian Field, Garlock said, more than half regretfully, "No more fun. Back to the desk. Back to the salt-mines."

"I weep for you," Belle snickered. "Sob, sob. Shed him a tear, Lola."

"One tear coming up. Oh, woe; oh, woe...."

"Oh, whoa!" James snorted. "Why the sob-and-moan routine, Clee, from a guy who's going to be monarch of all he surveys?"

"His conscience aches him," Belle explained. "This monarching business is tough if you haven't thought about how to monarch, and he hasn't. Have you, Clee?"

"Not a lick." Garlock smiled slightly. "I been busy."

"You better start to," she advised, darkly. "You aren't busy now and we have an hour. We better confer--I'll make like a slave-driver."

They 'ported into his room and he set the blocks. His attitude changed instantly. "Nice act, Belle. What was it all about?"

"That theory of yours. Your predictions are too uncannily accurate to be guesswork, and the more times you dead-center the bullseye the worse scared I get. I really want to know, Clee."

"Okay. It isn't complete--I need a lot more data--but I'll show you what I have. It's fairly strong medicine and it comes in big chunks."

"It would have to--it covers the whole macrocosmic universe, doesn't it?"

"Yes. I'll start with the striking fact that, on every out-galaxy planet we visited, the human beings were _Homo sapiens_ to N decimal places. Fertile with each other and, according to expert testimony, with us. All planets had humanoid 'guardians,' the Arpalones and Arpales. Some, but not all, had one or more non-human, more-or-less-intelligent races, such as the Fumapties, the Lemarts, the Sencors, and so on. These other races never seemed to fight each other, but both races of Guardians fought any and all of them, on sight and to the death. What do those facts mean to you?"

* * *

"Nothing beyond face value. I've thought about them but I haven't been able to come up with anything."

"I have." He unrolled a sheet of drafting paper covered with diagrams, symbols, and equations. "But before I go into this stuff, consider the human body. How many red cells are there in your blood stream?"

"Billions, I suppose."

"And there are billions of human beings on billions of planets; each having red blood cells identical, as far as we know, with yours and mine. Also white cells. Also, sometimes, various kinds of pathogenic micro-organisms, such as staphs, streps, viruses, spiros, and so on.

"Okay. My thought is that the Lemarts, Ozobes, and the like are analogous to disease-producing organisms. We saw the full range of effects--from none at all up to death itself."

"But they--the Ozobes and so on--died, too."

* * *

"How long do disease germs live in a human body after they've killed it?"

"But that horrible Dilipic--the golop. They don't seem to fit."

"Try that on for size as cancer. Also, the Arpalones typed us before they'd let us land on any planet. Why didn't we blast them out of the way and land anyway?"

"Why, we didn't want to. It wasn't worth while."

"We couldn't. Psychic block. And if we had, we would have died. Different blood-types don't mix."

"So you and I are merely two red cells in the bloodstream of a super-dooper-galactic super-monster? Phooie!" she jeered. "That chestnut was propounded a thousand years ago. Are you trying to take me for a ride on _that_ old sawhorse?"

"That's the attitude I had at first. So now we're ready for the chart." He pointed to a group of symbols. "We start with symbolic logic; manipulating like so to get this." There was a long mathematical dissertation; a mind-to-mind, rigorous, point-by-point proof.

"Q. E. D." Garlock concluded.

"I see your math, and if I believed half of it I'd be scared witless. Those few pieces fit, but they're scattered around in vast areas of blankness and you're jumping around like the Swiss miss leaping from Alp to Alp. And how about our own galaxy, the most important piece of all? It's different, and we're different, mentally. That wrecks your whole theory."

"No. I told you I need a lot more data. Also, beyond a certain point the analogy appears to get looser."

"_Appears_ to! It's as loose as a goose!"

"Think a minute. Is it actually loose, or are we getting up into concepts that no human mind can grasp? That might be the case, you know."

"Oh.... You're quite a salesman, Clee, but I'm still not buying."

"Our galaxy is a bit of specialized tissue--part of a ganglion, maybe. Over here, see? I'll have to leave it dangling until we find some more like it."

"I see. But anyway, you haven't a tenth's worth of real material on that whole sheet. Feed everything you have there into a computer and it'd just laugh at you."

"Sure it would. The great advantage of the human brain is its ability to arrive at valid conclusions from incomplete data. For instance, what would your computer do with the figures you shot at me the day we started out? 'Thirty-nine, twenty-two, thirty-nine. Five seven. One thirty-five.' Yet they're completely informative."

"To anyone interested in that kind of figures, yes."

"Which includes practically all adults. Then take the figure three point one four one five nine. Compy would still be baffled; but, unlike the first set, most people would be, too."

"Yes. Perhaps two out of ten would get your message."

"Now take something really new, like the original work on gravitation or relativity. No possible computer would be of any use. That takes a _brain_!"

"The brain of a Newton or an Einstein, yes." Belle thought for a minute, then grinned at him impishly. "Now watch the brain of a Bellamy perform. Get into high gear, brain.... I wish I knew something about biochemical embryology; but I read somewhere that ova are sterile, so our galaxy is an ovum. Therefore our super-galooper is a gal--which incontrovertible fact accounts for and explains rigorously the long-known truth that women always have been, are now, and always will be vastly superior to men in every quality, aspect, and...."

"Hold it!" Garlock snapped. His face hardened into intense concentration. Then: "Do you think you're kidding, Belle?"

"Why, of _course_ I'm kidding, you big...."

"Look here, then." He picked up a pencil and filled in blank after blank after blank. "I'm making one unjustifiable assumption--that the _Pleiades_ is the first intergalactic starship. The super-being is a female, and she is just becoming pregnant...."

"Flapdoodle! There are no blood cells in a sperm, and I don't think there are any in an ovum."

"I didn't mention either sperm or ovum. The analogy is so loose here that it holds only in the broadest, most general terms. The actual process of reproduction is unknowable. But wherever we went, we changed things. Not only by what we actually did, but also as a catalyst--no...."

"No, not a catalyst. A hormone."

"Exactly. Each of these changes would cause others, and so on. An infinite series. Calling the first three terms alpha, beta, and gamma, we operate like this...." Garlock's pencil was flying now. "Following me?"

"On your tail." Belle was breathing hard; as the blank spaces became fewer and fewer her face began to turn white.

"From this we get that ... and _that_ makes the whole bracket tie into the same conclusion I had before. So, except for that one assumption, it's solid."

* * *

"My Lord, Clee!" Belle studied the chart. "I mentioned Newton and Einstein ... add to that 'the brain of a Garlock, better than either.'" Then, seeing his reaction, "You're blushing. I didn't think...."

"Cut the comedy. You know I couldn't carry either of their hats to a dog-fight."

"And I would _never_ have believed that you are basically modest."

"I said cut out the kidding, Belle."

"I'm deadly serious. A brain that could do _that_," she waved at the chart, "... well, even I am not enough of a heel to belittle one of the most tremendous intuitions ever achieved by man. Not that I like it. It's horrible. It denies mankind everything that made him come up from the slime--everything that made him man."

* * *

"Not at all. Nothing is changed, in man's own frame of reference. It merely takes our thinking one step farther. That step, of course, isn't easy."

"_That_ is the understatement of all time. What it will _do_, though, is set up an inferiority complex that would wipe out the whole human race."

"There might be some slight tendency. Also, since my basic assumption can't be justified, the whole thing may be fallacious. So I'm not going to publish it." He glanced at the chart and it vanished.

"Clee!" Belle stared, almost goggle-eyed. "With your name? The tremendous splash ... I see. You're really grown up."

"Not all the way, probably; but pretty nearly--I hope."

"But some of the ... not exactly corollaries, but...." Belle's face, which had regained some of its color, began again to pale.

"Which one of the many?"

"The most shattering one, to me, concerns intelligence. If it is true that our vaunted mentality is only that of one blood cell compared to that of a whole brain ... and that intelligence is banked, level upon level ... well, it's simply mind-wrecking. I've been trying madly not to think of that concept, at all, but I can't put it off much longer."

"Now's as good a time as any. I'll hold your hand."

"You'd better hold more of me than that, I think."

"I'll do even that, in a good cause." He put his arms around her; held her close. "Go ahead. Face it. All the way down and all the way up. You've got what it takes. You'll come back sane and it'll never bother you again."

She closed her eyes, put her head on his shoulder. Her every muscle went tense.

Neither of them ever knew how long they stood there, close-clasped and motionless in silence; but finally her muscles loosened. She lifted her head; raised her brimming eyes.

"All the way down?" he asked.

"To almost a geometrical point."

"And all the way up?"

"I touched the fringe of infinity."

"Intelligence all the way?"

"All the way. I couldn't understand any of them, of course, but I looked each one squarely in the eye."

"Good girl. And you're still sane."

"As much so as ever ... more so, maybe." She disengaged herself, sat down on the bed, lighted a cigarette, and smoked half of it. Then she stood up. "Clee, if anything in the whole universe ever knocked hell out of anything, that did out of me. I'm going to do something that will take about ten minutes. Will you wait right here?"

"Of course. Take all the time you want."

* * *

When she came back Garlock leaped to his feet and stared speechlessly. He could not even whistle. Belle's hair was now its natural deep, rich chestnut, her lipstick was red, her nails were bare, and she wore a white shirt and an almost-knee-length crimson skirt.

"Here's what I'm going to do," she said, quietly. "I'm going to be a plain, ordinary brownette. I'm going to marry you as soon as we land; registered permanent family. I'm going to have six kids and spoil them rotten. In short, I have grown up--partly up, at least--too."

"Plain?" he managed, finally. "Ordinary? You? Yes--like a super-nova going off under a man's feet!" With a visible effort, Garlock pulled himself together. "I don't need to tell you what a surprise this is, and can't tell you what it means to me. But you never have said you love me. Hadn't you better?"

"I'm afraid to. Our next kiss will be different. I'd spoil all this nice new make-up." She tried to grin in her old-time fashion, but failed. She sobered, then, and went on with a completely new intensity. "Listen, Clee. I'm all done--forever--lying and pretending to you. I love you so much that ... well, there simply aren't any thoughts. And when I think of how I acted, it hurts--Lord, how it hurts! I don't see how you can love me at all. It'd take a miracle."

"Miracles happen, then." He put both arms around her, very gently. "For the first time in my life I'm cutting my screens to zero. Come in."

"What?" For a moment she was unable to believe the thought. Then, cutting her own shield, she went fully into his mind. "Oh, I didn't dare hope you could _possibly_ feel.... Oh, this is wonderful, Clee--simply _wonderful_!"

As the two fully-opened minds met and joined she threw both arms around him and their embrace tightened as though their bodies were trying to become as nearly one as were their minds. Finally she pulled herself away and put up a solid block.

"What a mess!" she said, shakily. "Lipstick all _over_ you."

"Why words, sweetheart? That was perfect."

"Oh, it was ... but wide open, with such a mind as yours...." she paused, then came back to normal almost with a snap. "... but say; I'll bet that's what Therea and Alsyne were doing. That 'fusion' thing. We'll practise it tonight."

He pondered briefly. "Sure it was."

"But he said they learned it from us. How could he have, when we.... Oh, we did, of course, in moments of high stress ... but we didn't actually _know_ it...." She paused.

"We wouldn't admit it, you mean, even to ourselves."

"Maybe; and of course it never occurred to us--callow youngsters we were then, weren't we?--that it could be done for more than a microsecond at a time. Or that two people could ever, possibly, _live_ that way."

"Or what a life it would be. So let's chop this and get back to you and me."

"Uh-huh, let's," she agreed, but in a severely practical tone. "You've got lipstick even on your shirt. So change it and I'll go put on a new face and bring over some stuff and clean you up."

While she cleaned, she talked. "I told you our next kiss would be different, but I had no idea ... wow! _That_ will be as much different, too, I'm sure.... Hm-h-h-nh?" Again she pressed herself against him; this time in a somewhat different fashion.

"Stop that, you little devil, or I'll...." His arms came up of themselves, but he forced them back down. "... No, I won't. We'll save that for tonight, too."

"I'll behave myself!" She laughed, pure joy in voice, eyes, and smile. "I bet myself you wouldn't and I won! You're tall, solid gold, Clee darling--the absolute top."

"Thanks, sweetheart. I wish that were true," he said, soberly. "But I can't help wondering if two such hellions as you and I are can make a go of marriage--no, cancel that. We'll do it--all we have to figure out is how."

"I know what you mean. Not at first--it'll be purely wonderful then. After five years, say, when the glamor has worn off and I've had three of our six children and two of them are in bed with the epizootic and I'm all frazzled out and you're strung up tight as a bowstring with overwork and...."

"Hold it! Uh-uh. No. If we can live together six months--or even six weeks--without killing each other, we'll have it made. It's at first that it'll be rugged. No matter how rugged it gets, though, we'll know one thing for certain sure. We _couldn't_ live apart. That'll give us enough leverage. Check?"

"And double check." She giggled sunnily. "I'll take care of any and all situations, whatever they are, that arise in the first six months. You'll be responsible for the next sixty years. That's a perfectly fair and equitable division of responsibility. Now kiss me and we'll go."

* * *

When Garlock cut the Gunther blocks, however, James' thought came instantly in. "Been trying to get you for twenty minutes," and in a couple of seconds he brought Garlock and Belle up to date. "So Fatso's been waiting in Evans' office. He's throwing fits all over the place and Evans and Macey are going quietly mad."

"He'll have to wait," Garlock decided instantly. "No matter how many fits he has, no such decision is going to be made until there's enough of a Galactic Council to make it."

"Well, you'll have to tell him that yourself. In person."

"I'll do just that, and tell him so he'll stay told."

"Okay, but shake a...."

Belle and Garlock 'ported out into the Main, arms around each other like a couple of college freshmen.

"... leg-g--ug--gug...." James gurgled.

"_Belle!_" Lola shrieked. "_Why--Belle--Bellamy!_"

"_What_ goes _on_ here?" James demanded.

"Nothing much," Garlock replied, although he blushed almost as deeply as Belle did. "We just decided to quit fighting, is all. Cut the rope, Junior, and let the old bucket drop."

THE END

       MASTERS OF SPACE

By EDWARD E. SMITH & E. EVERETT EVANS

The Masters had ruled all space with an unconquerable iron fist. But the Masters were gone. And this new, young race who came now to take their place--could they hope to defeat the ancient Enemy of All?

I

"But didn't you feel _anything_, Javo?" Strain was apparent in every line of Tula's taut, bare body. "Nothing at all?"

"Nothing whatever." The one called Javo relaxed from his rigid concentration. "Nothing has changed. Nor will it."

"That conclusion is indefensible!" Tula snapped. "With the promised return of the Masters there must and will be changes. Didn't _any_ of you feel anything?"

Her hot, demanding eyes swept the group; a group whose like, except for physical perfection, could be found in any nudist colony.

No one except Tula had felt a thing.

"That fact is not too surprising," Javo said finally. "You have the most sensitive receptors of us all. But are you sure?"

"I am sure. It was the thought-form of a living Master."

"Do you think that the Master perceived your web?"

"It is certain. Those who built us are stronger than we."

"That is true. As they promised, then, so long and long ago, our Masters are returning home to us."

* * * * *

Jarvis Hilton of Terra, the youngest man yet to be assigned to direct any such tremendous deep-space undertaking as Project Theta Orionis, sat in conference with his two seconds-in-command. Assistant Director Sandra Cummings, analyst-synthesist and semantician, was tall, blonde and svelte. Planetographer William Karns--a black-haired, black-browed, black-eyed man of thirty--was third in rank of the scientific group.

"I'm telling you, Jarve, you can't have it both ways," Karns declared. "Captain Sawtelle is old-school Navy brass. He goes strictly by the book. So you've got to draw a razor-sharp line; exactly where the Advisory Board's directive puts it. And next time he sticks his ugly puss across that line, kick his face in. You've been Caspar Milquetoast Two ever since we left Base."

"That's the way it looks to you?" Hilton's right hand became a fist. "The man has age, experience and ability. I've been trying to meet him on a ground of courtesy and decency."

"Exactly. And he doesn't recognize the existence of either. And, since the Board rammed you down his throat instead of giving him old Jeffers, you needn't expect him to."

"You may be right, Bill. What do you think, Dr. Cummings?"

The girl said: "Bill's right. Also, your constant appeasement isn't doing the morale of the whole scientific group a bit of good."

"Well, I haven't enjoyed it, either. So next time I'll pin his ears back. Anything else?"

"Yes, Dr. Hilton, I have a squawk of my own. I know I was rammed down your throat, but just when are you going to let me do some work?"

"None of us has much of anything to do yet, and won't have until we light somewhere. You're off base a country mile."

"I'm not off base. You _did_ want Eggleston, not me."

"Sure I did. I've worked with him and know what he can do. But I'm not holding a grudge about it."

"No? Why, then, are you on first-name terms with everyone in the scientific group except me? Supposedly your first assistant?"

"That's easy!" Hilton snapped. "Because you've been carrying chips on both shoulders ever since you came aboard ... or at least I thought you were." Hilton grinned suddenly and held out his hand. "Sorry, Sandy--I'll start all over again."

"I'm sorry too, Chief." They shook hands warmly. "I _was_ pretty stiff, I guess, but I'll be good."

"You'll go to work right now, too. As semantician. Dig out that directive and tear it down. Draw that line Bill talked about."

"Can do, boss." She swung to her feet and walked out of the room, her every movement one of lithe and easy grace.

Karns followed her with his eyes. "Funny. A trained-dancer Ph.D. And a Miss America type, like all the other women aboard this spacer. I wonder if she'll make out."

"So do I. I still wish they'd given me Eggy. I've never seen an executive-type female Ph.D. yet that was worth the cyanide it would take to poison her."

"That's what Sawtelle thinks of you, too, you know."

"I know; and the Board _does_ know its stuff. So I'm really hoping, Bill, that she surprises me as much as I intend to surprise the Navy."

* * * * *

Alarm bells clanged as the mighty _Perseus_ blinked out of overdrive. Every crewman sprang to his post.

"Mister Snowden, why did we emerge without orders from me?" Captain Sawtelle bellowed, storming into the control room three jumps behind Hilton.

"The automatics took control, sir," he said, quietly.

"Automatics! I _give_ the orders!"

"In this case, Captain Sawtelle, you don't," Hilton said. Eyes locked and held. To Sawtelle, this was a new and strange co-commander. "I would suggest that we discuss this matter in private."

"Very well, sir," Sawtelle said; and in the captain's cabin Hilton opened up.

"For your information, Captain Sawtelle, I set my inter-space coupling detectors for any objective I choose. When any one of them reacts, it trips the kickers and we emerge. During any emergency outside the Solar System I am in command--with the provision that I must relinquish command to you in case of armed attack on us."

"Where do you think you found any such stuff as that in the directive? It isn't there and I know my rights."

"It is, and you don't. Here is a semantic chart of the whole directive. As you will note, it overrides many Navy regulations. Disobedience of my orders constitutes mutiny and I can--and will--have you put in irons and sent back to Terra for court-martial. Now let's go back."

In the control room, Hilton said, "The target has a mass of approximately five hundred metric tons. There is also a significant amount of radiation characteristic of uranexite. You will please execute search, Captain Sawtelle."

And Captain Sawtelle ordered the search.

"What did you do to the big jerk, boss?" Sandra whispered.

"What you and Bill suggested," Hilton whispered back. "Thanks to your analysis of the directive--pure gobbledygook if there ever was any--I could. Mighty good job, Sandy."

* * * * *

Ten or fifteen more minutes passed. Then:

"Here's the source of radiation, sir," a searchman reported. "It's a point source, though, not an object at this range."

"And here's the artifact, sir," Pilot Snowden said. "We're coming up on it fast. But ... but what's a _skyscraper_ skeleton doing out here in interstellar space?"

As they closed up, everyone could see that the thing did indeed look like the metallic skeleton of a great building. It was a huge cube, measuring well over a hundred yards along each edge. And it was empty.

"_That's_ one for the book," Sawtelle said.

"And how!" Hilton agreed. "I'll take a boat ... no, suits would be better. Karns, Yarborough, get Techs Leeds and Miller and suit up."

"You'll need a boat escort," Sawtelle said. "Mr. Ashley, execute escort Landing Craft One, Two, and Three."

The three landing craft approached that enigmatic lattice-work of structural steel and stopped. Five grotesquely armored figures wafted themselves forward on pencils of force. Their leader, whose suit bore the number "14", reached a mammoth girder and worked his way along it up to a peculiar-looking bulge. The whole immense structure vanished, leaving men and boats in empty space.

Sawtelle gasped. "Snowden! Are you holding 'em?"

"No, sir. Faster than light; hyperspace, sir."

"Mr. Ashby, did you have your interspace rigs set?"

"No, sir. I didn't think of it, sir."

"Doctor Cummings, why weren't yours out?"

"I didn't think of such a thing, either--any more than you did," Sandra said.

Ashby, the Communications Officer, had been working the radio. "No reply from anyone, sir," he reported.

"Oh, no!" Sandra exclaimed. Then, "But look! They're firing pistols--especially the one wearing number fourteen--but _pistols_?"

"Recoil pistols--sixty-threes--for emergency use in case of power failure," Ashby explained. "That's it ... but I can't see why _all_ their power went out at once. But Fourteen--that's Hilton--is really doing a job with that sixty-three. He'll be here in a couple of minutes."

And he was. "Every power unit out there--suits and boats both--drained," Hilton reported. "_Completely_ drained. Get some help out there fast!"

* * * * *

In an enormous structure deep below the surface of a far-distant world a group of technicians clustered together in front of one section of a two-miles long control board. They were staring at a light that had just appeared where no light should have been.

"Someone's brain-pan will be burned out for this," one of the group radiated harshly. "That unit was inactivated long ago and it has not been reactivated."

"Someone committed an error, Your Loftiness?"

"Silence, fool! Stretts do not commit errors!"

* * * * *

As soon as it was clear that no one had been injured, Sawtelle demanded, "How about it, Hilton?"

"Structurally, it was high-alloy steel. There were many bulges, possibly containing mechanisms. There were drive-units of a non-Terran type. There were many projectors, which--at a rough guess--were a hundred times as powerful as any I have ever seen before. There were no indications that the thing had ever been enclosed, in whole or in part. It certainly never had living quarters for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing eaters of organic food."

Sawtelle snorted. "You mean it never had a crew?"

"Not necessarily...."

"Bah! What other kind of intelligent life is there?"

"I don't know. But before we speculate too much, let's look at the tri-di. The camera may have caught something I missed."

It hadn't. The three-dimensional pictures added nothing.

"It probably was operated either by programmed automatics or by remote control," Hilton decided, finally. "But how did they drain all our power? And just as bad, what and how is that other point source of power we're heading for now?"

"What's wrong with it?" Sawtelle asked.

"Its strength. No matter what distance or reactant I assume, nothing we know will fit. Neither fission nor fusion will do it. It has to be practically total conversion!"

II

The _Perseus_ snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and Hilton stared, motionless and silent.

Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were bare, giant skeletons of steel, like the "derelict" that had so unexpectedly blasted away from them. The others were more or less like the _Perseus_, except in being bigger, faster and of vastly greater power.

Beams of starkly incredible power bit at and clung to equally capable defensive screens of pure force. As these inconceivable forces met, the glare of their neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and skeletons alike were disappearing in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers and sparkles of rended, fused and vaporized metal.

Hilton watched two ships combine against one skeleton. Dozens of beams, incredibly tight and hard, were held inexorably upon dozens of the bulges of the skeleton. Overloaded, the bulges' screens flared through the spectrum and failed. And bare metal, however refractory, endures only for instants under the appalling intensity of such beams as those.

The skeletons tried to duplicate the ships' method of attack, but failed. They were too slow. Not slow, exactly, either, but hesitant; as though it required whole seconds for the commander--or operator? Or remote controller?--of each skeleton to make it act. The ships were winning.

"Hey!" Hilton yelped. "Oh--that's the one we saw back there. But what in all space does it think it's doing?"

It was plunging at tremendous speed straight through the immense fleet of embattled skeletons. It did not fire a beam nor energize a screen; it merely plunged along as though on a plotted course until it collided with one of the skeletons of the fleet and both structures plunged, a tangled mass of wreckage, to the ground of the planet below.

Then hundreds of the ships shot forward, each to plunge into and explode inside one of the skeletons. When visibility was restored another wave of ships came forward to repeat the performance, but there was nothing left to fight. Every surviving skeleton had blinked out of normal space.

The remaining ships made no effort to pursue the skeletons, nor did they re-form as a fleet. Each ship went off by itself.

* * * * *

And on that distant planet of the Stretts the group of mechs watched with amazed disbelief as light after light after light winked out on their two-miles-long control board. Frantically they relayed orders to the skeletons; orders which did not affect the losses.

"Brain-pans will blacken for this ..." a mental snarl began, to be interrupted by a coldly imperious thought.

"That long-dead unit, so inexplicably reactivated, is approaching the fuel world. It is ignoring the battle. It is heading through our fleet toward the Oman half ... _handle_ it, ten-eighteen!"

"It does not respond, Your Loftiness."

"Then blast it, fool! Ah, it is inactivated. As encyclopedist, Nine, explain the freakish behavior of that unit."

"Yes, Your Loftiness. Many cycles ago we sent a ship against the Omans with a new device of destruction. The Omans must have intercepted it, drained it of power and allowed it to drift on. After all these cycles of time it must have come upon a small source of power and of course continued its mission."

"That can be the truth. The Lords of the Universe must be informed."

"The mining units, the carriers and the refiners have not been affected, Your Loftiness," a mech radiated.

"So I see, fool." Then, activating another instrument, His Loftiness thought at it, in an entirely different vein, "Lord Ynos, Madam? I have to make a very grave report...."

* * * * *

In the _Perseus_, four scientists and three Navy officers were arguing heatedly; employing deep-space verbiage not to be found in any dictionary. "Jarve!" Karns called out, and Hilton joined the group. "Does anything about this planet make any sense to you?"

"No. But you're the planetographer. 'Smatter with it?"

"It's a good three hundred degrees Kelvin too hot."

"Well, you know it's loaded with uranexite."

"That much? The whole crust practically jewelry ore?"

"If that's what the figures say, I'll buy it."

"Buy _this_, then. Continuous daylight everywhere. Noon June Sol-quality light _except_ that it's all in the visible. Frank says it's from bombardment of a layer of something, and Frank admits that the whole thing's impossible."

"When Frank makes up his mind what 'something' is, I'll take it as a datum."

"Third thing: there's only one city on this continent, and it's protected by a screen that nobody ever heard of."

Hilton pondered, then turned to the captain. "Will you please run a search-pattern, sir? Fine-toothing only the hot spots?"

The planet was approximately the same size as Terra; its atmosphere, except for its intense radiation, was similar to Terra's. There were two continents; one immense girdling ocean. The temperature of the land surface was everywhere about 100F, that of the water about 90F. Each continent had one city, and both were small. One was inhabited by what looked like human beings; the other by usuform robots. The human city was the only cool spot on the entire planet; under its protective dome the temperature was 71F.

Hilton decided to study the robots first; and asked the captain to take the ship down to observation range. Sawtelle objected; and continued to object until Hilton started to order his arrest. Then he said, "I'll do it, under protest, but I want it on record that I am doing it against my best judgment."

"It's on record," Hilton said, coldly. "Everything said and done is being, and will continue to be, recorded."

The _Perseus_ floated downward. "_There's_ what I want most to see," Hilton said, finally. "That big strip-mining operation ... that's it ... hold it!" Then, via throat-mike, "Attention, all scientists! You all know what to do. Start doing it."

Sandra's blonde head was very close to Hilton's brown one as they both stared into Hilton's plate. "Why, they look like giant armadillos!" she exclaimed.

"More like tanks," he disagreed, "except that they've got legs, wheels _and_ treads--and arms, cutters, diggers, probes and conveyors--and _look_ at the way those buckets dip solid rock!"

The fantastic machine was moving very slowly along a bench or shelf that it was making for itself as it went along. Below it, to its left, dropped other benches being made by other mining machines. The machines were not using explosives. Hard though the ore was, the tools were so much harder and were driven with such tremendous power that the stuff might just have well have been slightly-clayed sand.

Every bit of loosened ore, down to the finest dust, was forced into a conveyor and thence into the armored body of the machine. There it went into a mechanism whose basic principles Hilton could not understand. From this monstrosity emerged two streams of product.

One of these, comprising ninety-nine point nine plus percent of the input, went out through another conveyor into the vast hold of a vehicle which, when full and replaced by a duplicate of itself, went careening madly cross-country to a dump.

The other product, a slow, very small stream of tiny, glistening black pellets, fell into a one-gallon container being held watchfully by a small machine, more or less like a three-wheeled motor scooter, which was moving carefully along beside the giant miner. When this can was almost full another scooter rolled up and, without losing a single pellet, took over place and function. The first scooter then covered its bucket, clamped it solidly into a recess designed for the purpose and dashed away toward the city.

Hilton stared slack-jawed at Sandra. She stared back.

"Do you make anything of that, Jarve?"

"Nothing. They're taking _pure_ uranexite and _concentrating_--or converting--it a thousand to one. I _hope_ we'll be able to do something about it."

"I hope so, too, Chief; and I'm _sure_ we will."

"Well, that's enough for now. You may take us up now, Captain Sawtelle. And Sandy, will you please call all department heads and their assistants into the conference room?"

* * * * *

At the head of the long conference table, Hilton studied his fourteen department heads, all husky young men, and their assistants, all surprisingly attractive and well-built young women. Bud Carroll and Sylvia Bannister of Sociology sat together. He was almost as big as Karns; she was a green-eyed redhead whose five-ten and one-fifty would have looked big except for the arrangement thereof. There were Bernadine and Hermione van der Moen, the leggy, breasty, platinum-blonde twins--both of whom were Cowper medalists in physics. There was Etienne de Vaux, the mathematical wizard; and Rebecca Eisenstein, the black-haired, flashing-eyed ex-infant-prodigy theoretical astronomer. There was Beverly Bell, who made mathematically impossible chemical syntheses--who swam channels for days on end and computed planetary orbits in her sleekly-coiffured head.

"First, we'll have a get-together," Hilton said. "Nothing recorded; just to get acquainted. You all know that our fourteen departments cover science, from astronomy to zoology."

He paused, again his eyes swept the group. Stella Wing, who would have been a grand-opera star except for her drive to know everything about language. Theodora (Teddy) Blake, who would prove gleefully that she was the world's best model--but was in fact the most brilliantly promising theoretician who had ever lived.

"No other force like this has ever been assembled," Hilton went on. "In more ways than one. Sawtelle wanted Jeffers to head this group, instead of me. Everybody thought he _would_ head it."

"And Hilton wanted Eggleston and got _me_," Sandra said.

"That's right. And quite a few of you didn't want to come at all, but were told by the Board to come or else."

The group stirred. Eyes met eyes, and there were smiles.

* * * * *

"I myself think Jeffers _should_ have had the job. I've never handled anything half this big and I'll need a lot of help. But I'm stuck with it and you're all stuck with me, so we'll all take it and like it. You've noticed, of course, the accent on youth. The Navy crew is normal, except for the commanders being unusually young. But we aren't. None of us is thirty yet, and none of us has ever been married. You fellows look like a team of professional athletes, and you girls--well, if I didn't know better I'd say the Board had screened you for the front row of the chorus instead of for a top-bracket brain-gang. How they found so many of you I'll never know."

"Virile men and nubile women!" Etienne de Vaux leered enthusiastically. "_Vive le Board!_"

"Nubile! Bravo, Tiny! _Quelle delicatesse de nuance!_"

"Three rousing cheers for the Board!"

"Keep still, you nitwits! Let me ask a question!" This came from one of the twins. "Before you give us the deduction, Jarvis--or will it be an intuition or an induction or a ..."

"Or an inducement," the other twin suggested, helpfully. "Not that _you_ would need very much of that."

"You keep still, too, Miney. I'm asking, Sir Moderator, if I can give my deduction first?"

"Sure, Bernadine; go ahead."

"They figured we're going to get completely lost. Then we'll jettison the Navy, hunt up a planet of our own and start a race to end all human races. Or would you call this a _see_-duction instead of a _dee_-duction?"

This produced a storm of whistles, cheers and jeers that it took several seconds to quell.

"But seriously, Jarvis," Bernadine went on. "We've all been wondering and it doesn't make sense. Have you any idea at all of what the Board actually did have in mind?"

"I believe that the Board selected for mental, not physical, qualities; for the ability to handle anything unexpected or unusual that comes up, no matter what it is."

"You think it wasn't double-barreled?" asked Kincaid, the psychologist. He smiled quizzically. "That all this virility and nubility and glamor is pure coincidence?"

"No," Hilton said, with an almost imperceptible flick of an eyelid. "Coincidence is as meaningless as paradox. I think they found out that--barring freaks--the best minds are in the best bodies."

"Could be. The idea has been propounded before."

"Now let's get to work." Hilton flipped the switch of the recorder. "Starting with you, Sandy, each of you give a two-minute boil-down. What you found and what you think."

* * * * *

Something over an hour later the meeting adjourned and Hilton and Sandra strolled toward the control room.

"I don't know whether you convinced Alexander Q. Kincaid or not, but you didn't quite convince me," Sandra said.

"Nor him, either."

"Oh?" Sandra's eyebrows

"No. He grabbed the out I offered him. I didn't fool Teddy Blake or Temple Bells, either. You four are all, though, I think."

"Temple? You think _she's_ so smart?"

"I don't _think_ so, no. Don't fool yourself, chick. Temple Bells looks and acts sweet and innocent and virginal. Maybe--probably--she is. But she isn't showing a fraction of the stuff she's really got. She's heavy artillery, Sandy. And I mean _heavy_."

"I think you're slightly nuts there. But do you really believe that the Board was playing Cupid?"

"Not trying, but doing. Cold-bloodedly and efficiently. Yes."

"But it wouldn't _work_! We aren't going to get lost!"

"We won't need to. Propinquity will do the work."

"Phooie. You and me, for instance?" She stopped, put both hands on her hips, and glared. "Why, I wouldn't marry _you_ if you ..."

"I'll tell the cockeyed world you won't!" Hilton broke in. "Me marry a damned female Ph.D.? Uh-uh. Mine will be a cuddly little brunette that thinks a slipstick is some kind of lipstick and that an isotope's something good to eat."

"One like that copy of Murchison's Dark Lady that you keep under the glass on your desk?" she sneered.

"Exactly...." He started to continue the battle, then shut himself off. "But listen, Sandy, why should we get into a fight because we don't want to marry each other? You're doing a swell job. I admire you tremendously for it and I like to work with you."

"You've got a point there, Jarve, at that, and I'm one of the few who know what kind of a job _you're_ doing, so I'll relax." She flashed him a gamin grin and they went on into the control room.

It was too late in the day then to do any more exploring; but the next morning, early, the _Perseus_ lined out for the city of the humanoids.

* * * * *

Tula turned toward her fellows. Her eyes filled with a happily triumphant light and her thought a lilting song. "I have been telling you from the first touch that it was the Masters. It _is_ the Masters! The Masters are returning to us Omans and their own home world!"

* * * * *

"Captain Sawtelle," Hilton said, "Please land in the cradle below."

"_Land!_" Sawtelle stormed. "On a planet like _that_? Not by ..." He broke off and stared; for now, on that cradle, there flamed out in screaming red the _Perseus'_ own Navy-coded landing symbols!

"Your protest is recorded," Hilton said. "Now, sir, land."

Fuming, Sawtelle landed. Sandra looked pointedly at Hilton. "First contact is my dish, you know."

"Not that I like it, but it is." He turned to a burly youth with sun-bleached, crew-cut hair, "Still safe, Frank?"

"Still abnormally low. Surprising no end, since all the rest of the planet is hotter than the middle tail-race of hell."

"Okay, Sandy. Who will you want besides the top linguists?"

"Psych--both Alex and Temple. And Teddy Blake. They're over there. Tell them, will you, while I buzz Teddy?"

"Will do," and Hilton stepped over to the two psychologists and told them. Then, "I hope I'm not leading with my chin, Temple, but is that your real first name or a professional?"

"It's real; it really is. My parents were romantics: dad says they considered both 'Golden' and 'Silver'!"

Not at all obviously, he studied her: the almost translucent, unblemished perfection of her lightly-tanned, old-ivory skin; the clear, calm, deep blueness of her eyes; the long, thick mane of hair exactly the color of a field of dead-ripe wheat.

"You know, I like it," he said then. "It fits you."

"I'm glad you said that, Doctor...."

"Not that, Temple. I'm not going to 'Doctor' you."

"I'll call you 'boss', then, like Stella does. Anyway, that lets me tell you that I like it myself. I really think that it did something for me."

"_Something_ did something for you, that's for sure. I'm mighty glad you're aboard, and I hope ... here they come. Hi, Hark! Hi, Stella!"

"Hi, Jarve," said Chief Linguist Harkins, and:

"Hi, boss--what's holding us up?" asked his assistant, Stella Wing. She was about five feet four. Her eyes were a tawny brown; her hair a flamboyant auburn mop. Perhaps it owed a little of its spectacular refulgence to chemistry, Hilton thought, but not too much. "Let us away! Let the lions roar and let the welkin ring!"

"Who's been feeding _you_ so much red meat, little squirt?" Hilton laughed and turned away, meeting Sandra in the corridor. "Okay, chick, take 'em away. We'll cover you. Luck, girl."

And in the control room, to Sawtelle, "Needle-beam cover, please; set for minimum aperture and lethal blast. But no firing, Captain Sawtelle, until I give the order."

* * * * *

The _Perseus_ was surrounded by hundreds of natives. They were all adult, all naked and about equally divided as to sex. They were friendly; most enthusiastically so.

"Jarve!" Sandra squealed. "They're _telepathic_. Very strongly so! I never imagined--I never felt anything like it!"

"Any rough stuff?" Hilton demanded.

"Oh, no. Just the opposite. They love us ... in a way that's simply indescribable. I don't like this telepathy business ... not clear ... foggy, diffuse ... this woman is _sure_ I'm her long-lost great-great-a-hundred-times grandmother or something--_You!_ Slow down. Take it _easy_! They want us all to come out here and live with ... no, not _with_ them, but each of us alone in a whole house with them to wait on us! But first, they all want to come aboard...."

"_What?_" Hilton yelped. "But are you _sure_ they're friendly?"

"Positive, chief."

"How about you, Alex?"

"We're all sure, Jarve. No question about it."

"Bring two of them aboard. A man and a woman."

"You won't bring _any_!" Sawtelle thundered. "Hilton, I had enough of your stupid, starry-eyed, ivory-domed blundering long ago, but this utterly idiotic brainstorm of letting enemy aliens aboard us ends all civilian command. Call your people back aboard or I will bring them in by force!"

"Very well, sir. Sandy, tell the natives that a slight delay has become necessary and bring your party aboard."

The Navy officers smiled--or grinned--gloatingly; while the scientists stared at their director with expressions ranging from surprise to disappointment and disgust. Hilton's face remained set, expressionless, until Sandra and her party had arrived.

"Captain Sawtelle," he said then, "I thought that you and I had settled in private the question or who is in command of Project Theta Orionis at destination. We will now settle it in public. Your opinion of me is now on record, witnessed by your officers and by my staff. My opinion of you, which is now being similarly recorded and witnessed, is that you are a hidebound, mentally ossified Navy mule; mentally and psychologically unfit to have any voice in any such mission as this. You will now agree on this recording and before these witnesses, to obey my orders unquestioningly or I will now unload all Bureau of Science personnel and equipment onto this planet and send you and the _Perseus_ back to Terra with the doubly-sealed record of this episode posted to the Advisory Board. Take your choice."

Eyes locked, and under Hilton's uncompromising stare Sawtelle weakened. He fidgeted; tried three times--unsuccessfully--to blare defiance. Then, "Very well sir," he said, and saluted.

* * * * *

"Thank you, sir," Hilton said, then turned to his staff. "Okay, Sandy, go ahead."

Outside the control room door, "Thank God you don't play poker, Jarve!" Karns gasped. "We'd all owe you all the pay we'll ever get!"

"You think it was the bluff, yes?" de Vaux asked. "Me, I think no. Name of a name of a name! I was wondering with unease what life would be like on this so-alien planet!"

"You didn't need to wonder, Tiny," Hilton assured him. "It was in the bag. He's incapable of abandonment."

Beverly Bell, the van der Moen twins and Temple Bells all stared at Hilton in awe; and Sandra felt much the same way.

"But suppose he _had_ called you?" Sandra demanded.

"Speculating on the impossible is unprofitable," he said.

"Oh, you're the most _exasperating_ thing!" Sandra stamped a foot. "Don't you--_ever_--answer a question intelligibly?"

"When the question is meaningless, chick, I can't."

At the lock Temple Bells, who had been hanging back, cocked an eyebrow at Hilton and he made his way to her side.

"What was it you started to say back there, boss?"

"Oh, yes. That we should see each other oftener."

"That's what I was hoping you were going to say." She put her hand under his elbow and pressed his arm lightly, fleetingly, against her side. "That would be indubitably the fondest thing I could be of."

He laughed and gave her arm a friendly squeeze. Then he studied her again, the most baffling member of his staff. About five feet six. Lithe, hard, trained down fine--as a tennis champion, she would be. Stacked--_how_ she was stacked! Not as beautiful as Sandra or Teddy ... but with an ungodly lot of something that neither of them had ... nor any other woman he had ever known.

"Yes, I am a little difficult to classify," she said quietly, almost reading his mind.

"That's the understatement of the year! But I'm making some progress."

"Such as?" This was an open challenge.

"Except possibly Teddy, the best brain aboard."

"That isn't true, but go ahead."

"You're a powerhouse. A tightly organized, thoroughly integrated, smoothly functioning, beautifully camouflaged Juggernaut. A reasonable facsimile of an irresistible force."

"My God, Jarvis!" That had gone deep.

"Let me finish my analysis. You aren't head of your department because you don't want to be. You fooled the top psychs of the Board. You've been running ninety per cent submerged because you can work better that way and there's no glory-hound blood in you."

She stared at him, licking her lips. "I knew your mind was a razor, but I didn't know it was a diamond drill, too. That seals your doom, boss, unless ... no, you can't _possibly_ know why I'm here."

"Why, of course I do."

"You just think you do. You see, I've been in love with you ever since, as a gangling, bony, knobby-kneed kid, I listened to your first doctorate disputation. Ever since then, my purpose in life has been to land you."

III

"But listen!" he exclaimed. "I _can't_, even if I want...."

"Of course you can't." Pure deviltry danced in her eyes. "You're the Director. It wouldn't be proper. But it's Standard Operating Procedure for simple, innocent, unsophisticated little country girls like me to go completely overboard for the boss."

"But you can't--you _mustn't_!" he protested in panic.

Temple Bells was getting plenty of revenge for the shocks he had given her. "I can't? Watch me!" She grinned up at him, her eyes still dancing. "Every chance I get, I'm going to hug your arm like I did a minute ago. And you'll take hold of my forearm, like you did! That can be taken, you see, as either: One, a reluctant acceptance of a mildly distasteful but not quite actionable situation, or: Two, a blocking move to keep me from climbing up you like a squirrel!"

"Confound it, Temple, you _can't_ be serious!"

"Can't I?" She laughed gleefully. "Especially with half a dozen of those other cats watching? Just wait and see, boss!"

Sandra and her two guests came aboard. The natives looked around; the man at the various human men, the woman at each of the human women. The woman remained beside Sandra; the man took his place at Hilton's left, looking up--he was a couple of inches shorter than Hilton's six feet one--with an air of ... of _expectancy_!

"Why this arrangement, Sandy?" Hilton asked.

"Because we're tops. It's your move, Jarve. What's first?"

"Uranexite. Come along, Sport. I'll call you that until ..."

"Laro," the native said, in a deep resonant bass voice. He hit himself a blow on the head that would have floored any two ordinary men. "Sora," he announced, striking the alien woman a similar blow.

"Laro and Sora, I would like to have you look at our uranexite, with the idea of refueling our ship. Come with me, please?"

Both nodded and followed him. In the engine room he pointed at the engines, then to the lead-blocked labyrinth leading to the fuel holds. "Laro, do you understand 'hot'? Radioactive?"

Laro nodded--and started to open the heavy lead door!

"Hey!" Hilton yelped. "That's hot!" He seized Laro's arm to pull him away--and got the shock of his life. Laro weighed at least five hundred pounds! And the guy _still_ looked human!

Laro nodded again and gave himself a terrific thump on the chest. Then he glanced at Sora, who stepped away from Sandra. He then went into the hold and came out with two fuel pellets in his hand, one of which he tossed to Sora. That is, the motion looked like a toss, but the pellet traveled like a bullet. Sora caught it unconcernedly and both natives flipped the pellets into their mouths. There was a half minute of rock-crusher crunching; then both natives opened their mouths.

The pellets had been pulverized and swallowed.

Hilton's voice rang out. "Poynter! How _can_ these people be non-radioactive after eating a whole fuel pellet apiece?"

Poynter tested both natives again. "Cold," he reported. "Stone cold. No background even. Play _that_ on your harmonica!"

* * * * *

Laro nodded, perfectly matter-of-factly, and in Hilton's mind there formed a picture. It was not clear, but it showed plainly enough a long line of aliens approaching the _Perseus_. Each carried on his or her shoulder a lead container holding two hundred pounds of Navy Regulation fuel pellets. A standard loading-tube was sealed into place and every fuel-hold was filled.

This picture, Laro indicated plainly, could become reality any time.

Sawtelle was notified and came on the run. "No fuel is coming aboard without being tested!" he roared.

"Of course not. But it'll pass, for all the tea in China. You haven't had a ten per cent load of fuel since you were launched. You can fill up or not--the fuel's here--just as you say."

"If they can make Navy standard, of course we want it."

The fuel arrived. Every load tested well above standard. Every fuel hold was filled to capacity, with no leakage and no emanation. The natives who had handled the stuff did not go away, but gathered in the engine-room; and more and more humans trickled in to see what was going on.

Sawtelle stiffened. "What's going on over there, Hilton?"

"I don't know; but let's let 'em go for a minute. I want to learn about these people and they've got me stopped cold."

"You aren't the only one. But if they wreck that Mayfield it'll cost you over twenty thousand dollars."

"Okay." The captain and director watched, wide eyed.

Two master mechanics had been getting ready to re-fit a tube--a job requiring both strength and skill. The tube was very heavy and made of superefract. The machine--the Mayfield--upon which the work was to be done, was extremely complex.

Two of the aliens had brushed the mechanics--very gently--aside and were doing their work for them. Ignoring the hoist, one native had picked the tube up and was holding it exactly in place on the Mayfield. The other, hands moving faster than the eye could follow, was locking it--micrometrically precise and immovably secure--into place.

"How about this?" one of the mechanics asked of his immediate superior. "If we throw 'em out, how do we do it?"

By a jerk of the head, the non-com passed the buck to a commissioned officer, who relayed it up the line to Sawtelle, who said, "Hilton, _no_body can run a Mayfield without months of training. They'll wreck it and it'll cost you ... but I'm getting curious myself. Enough so to take half the damage. Let 'em go ahead."

"How _about_ this, Mike?" one of the machinists asked of his fellow. "I'm going to _like_ this, what?"

"Ya-as, my deah Chumley," the other drawled, affectedly. "My man relieves me of _so_ much uncouth effort."

The natives had kept on working. The Mayfield was running. It had always howled and screamed at its work, but now it gave out only a smooth and even hum. The aliens had adjusted it with unhuman precision; they were one with it as no human being could possibly be. And every mind present knew that those aliens were, at long, long last, fulfilling their destiny and were, in that fulfillment, supremely happy. After tens of thousands of cycles of time they were doing a job for their adored, their revered and beloved MASTERS.

That was a stunning shock; but it was eclipsed by another.

* * * * *

"I am sorry, Master Hilton," Laro's tremendous bass voice boomed out, "that it has taken us so long to learn your Masters' language as it now is. Since you left us you have changed it radically; while we, of course, have not changed it at all."

"I'm sorry, but you're mistaken," Hilton said. "We are merely visitors. We have never been here before; nor, as far as we know, were any of our ancestors ever here."

"You need not test us, Master. We have kept your trust. Everything has been kept, changelessly the same, awaiting your return as you ordered so long ago."

"Can you read my mind?" Hilton demanded.

"Of course; but Omans can not read in Masters' minds anything except what Masters want Omans to read."

"Omans?" Harkins asked. "Where did you Omans and your masters come from? Originally?"

"As you know, Master, the Masters came originally from Arth. They populated Ardu, where we Omans were developed. When the Stretts drove us from Ardu, we all came to Ardry, which was your home world until you left it in our care. We keep also this, your half of the Fuel World, in trust for you."

"Listen, Jarve!" Harkins said, tensely. "Oman-human. Arth-Earth. Ardu-Earth Two. Ardry-Earth Three. You can't laugh them off ... but there never _was_ an Atlantis!"

"This is getting no better fast. We need a full staff meeting. You, too, Sawtelle, and your best man. We need all the brains the _Perseus_ can muster."

"You're right. But first, get those naked women out of here. It's bad enough, having women aboard at all, but this ... my men are _spacemen_, mister."

Laro spoke up. "If it is the Masters' pleasure to keep on testing us, so be it. We have forgotten nothing. A dwelling awaits each Master, in which each will be served by Omans who will know the Master's desires without being told. Every desire. While we Omans have no biological urges, we are of course highly skilled in relieving tensions and derive as much pleasure from that service as from any other."

Sawtelle broke the silence that followed. "Well, for the men--" He hesitated. "Especially on the ground ... well, talking in mixed company, you know, but I think ..."

"Think nothing of the mixed company, Captain Sawtelle," Sandra said. "We women are scientists, not shrinking violets. We are accustomed to discussing the facts of life just as frankly as any other facts."

Sawtelle jerked a thumb at Hilton, who followed him out into the corridor. "I _have_ been a Navy mule," he said. "I admit now that I'm out-maneuvered, out-manned, and out-gunned."

"I'm just as baffled--at present--as you are, sir. But my training has been aimed specifically at the unexpected, while yours has not."

"That's letting me down easy, Jarve." Sawtelle smiled--the first time the startled Hilton had known that the hard, tough old spacehound _could_ smile. "What I wanted to say is, lead on. I'll follow you through force-field and space-warps."

"Thanks, skipper. And by the way, I erased that record yesterday." The two gripped hands; and there came into being a relationship that was to become a lifelong friendship.

* * * * *

"We will start for Ardry immediately," Hilton said. "How do we make that jump without charts, Laro?"

"Very easily, Master. Kedo, as Master Captain Sawtelle's Oman, will give the orders. Nito will serve Master Snowden and supply the knowledge he says he has forgotten."

"Okay. We'll go up to the control room and get started."

And in the control room, Kedo's voice rasped into the captain's microphone. "Attention, all personnel! Master Captain Sawtelle orders take-off in two minutes. The countdown will begin at five seconds.... Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Lift!"

Nito, not Snowden, handled the controls. As perfectly as the human pilot had ever done it, at the top of his finest form, he picked the immense spaceship up and slipped it silkily into subspace.

"Well, I'll be a ..." Snowden gasped. "That's a better job than I _ever_ did!"

"Not at all, Master, as you know," Nito said. "It was you who did this. I merely performed the labor."

A few minutes later, in the main lounge, Navy and BuSci personnel were mingling as they had never done before. Whatever had caused this relaxation of tension--the friendship of captain and director? The position in which they all were? Or what?--they all began to get acquainted with each other.

"Silence, please, and be seated," Hilton said. "While this is not exactly a formal meeting, it will be recorded for future reference. First, I will ask Laro a question. Were books or records left on Ardry by the race you call the Masters?"

"You know there are, Master. They are exactly as you left them. Undisturbed for over two hundred seventy-one thousand years."

"Therefore we will not question the Omans. We do not know what questions to ask. We have seen many things hitherto thought impossible. Hence, we must discard all preconceived opinions which conflict with facts. I will mention a few of the problems we face."

"The Omans. The Masters. The upgrading of the armament of the _Perseus_ to Oman standards. The concentration of uranexite. What is that concentrate? How is it used? Total conversion--how is it accomplished? The skeletons--what are they and how are they controlled? Their ability to drain power. Who or what is back of them? Why a deadlock that has lasted over a quarter of a million years? How much danger are we and the _Perseus_ actually in? How much danger is Terra in, because of our presence here? There are many other questions."

"Sandra and I will not take part. Nor will three others; de Vaux, Eisenstein, and Blake. You have more important work to do."

"What can that be?" asked Rebecca. "Of what possible use can a mathematician, a theoretician and a theoretical astronomer be in such a situation as this?"

"You can think powerfully in abstract terms, unhampered by Terran facts and laws which we now know are neither facts nor laws. I cannot even categorize the problems we face. Perhaps you three will be able to. You will listen, then consult, then tell me how to pick the teams to do the work. A more important job for you is this: Any problem, to be solved, must be stated clearly; and we don't know even what our basic problem is. I want something by the use of which I can break this thing open. Get it for me."

* * * * *

Rebecca and de Vaux merely smiled and nodded, but Teddy Blake said happily, "I was beginning to feel like a fifth wheel on this project, but _that's_ something I can really stick my teeth into."

"Huh? How?" Karns demanded. "He didn't give you one single thing to go on; just compounded the confusion."

Hilton spoke before Teddy could. "That's their dish, Bill. If I had any data I'd work it myself. You first, Captain Sawtelle."

That conference was a very long one indeed. There were almost as many conclusions and recommendations as there were speakers. And through it all Hilton and Sandra listened. They weighed and tested and analyzed and made copious notes; in shorthand and in the more esoteric characters of symbolic logic. And at its end:

"I'm just about pooped, Sandy. How about you?"

"You and me both, boss. See you in the morning."

But she didn't. It was four o'clock in the afternoon when they met again.

"We made up one of the teams, Sandy," he said, with surprising diffidence. "I know we were going to do it together, but I got a hunch on the first team. A kind of a weirdie, but the brains checked me on it." He placed a card on her desk. "Don't blow your top until after I you've studied it."

"Why, I won't, of course...." Her voice died away. "Maybe you'd better cancel that 'of course'...." She studied, and when she spoke again she was exerting self-control. "A chemist, a planetographer, a theoretician, _two_ sociologists, a psychologist and a radiationist. And six of the seven are three pairs of sweeties. What kind of a line-up is _that_ to solve a problem in _physics_?"

"It isn't in any physics we know. I said _think_!"

"Oh," she said, then again "Oh," and "Oh," and "Oh." Four entirely different tones. "I see ... maybe. You're matching minds, not specialties; and supplementing?"

"I knew you were smart. Buy it?"

"It's weird, all right, but I'll buy it--for a trial run, anyway. But I'd hate like sin to have to sell any part of it to the Board.... But of course we're--I mean you're responsible only to yourself."

"Keep it 'we', Sandy. You're as important to this project as I am. But before we tackle the second team, what's your thought on Bernadine and Hermione? Separate or together?"

"Separate, I'd say. They're identical physically, and so nearly so mentally that of them would be just as good on a team as both of them. More and better work on different teams."

"My thought exactly." And so it went, hour after hour.

The teams were selected and meetings were held.

* * * * *

The _Perseus_ reached Ardry, which was very much like Terra. There were continents, oceans, ice-caps, lakes, rivers, mountains and plains, forests and prairies. The ship landed on the spacefield of Omlu, the City of the Masters, and Sawtelle called Hilton into his cabin. The Omans Laro and Kedo went along, of course.

"Nobody knows how it leaked ..." Sawtelle began.

"No secrets around here," Hilton grinned. "Omans, you know."

"I suppose so. Anyway, every man aboard is all hyped up about living aground--especially with a harem. But before I grant liberty, suppose there's any VD around here that our prophylactics can't handle?"

"As you know, Masters," Laro replied for Hilton before the latter could open his mouth, "no disease, venereal or other, is allowed to exist on Ardry. No prophylaxis is either necessary or desirable."

"That ought to hold you for a while, Skipper." Hilton smiled at the flabbergasted captain and went back to the lounge.

"Everybody going ashore?" he asked.

"Yes." Karns said. "Unanimous vote for the first time."

"Who wouldn't?" Sandra asked. "I'm fed up with living like a sardine. I will scream for joy the minute I get into a real room."

"Cars" were waiting, in a stopping-and-starting line. Three-wheel jobs. All were empty. No drivers, no steering-wheels, no instruments or push-buttons. When the whole line moved ahead as one vehicle there was no noise, no gas, no blast.

An Oman helped a Master carefully into the rear seat of his car, leaped into the front seat and the car sped quietly away. The whole line of empty cars, acting in perfect synchronization, shot forward one space and stopped.

"This is your car, Master," Laro said, and made a production out of getting Hilton into the vehicle undamaged.

Hilton's plan had been beautifully simple. All the teams were to meet at the Hall of Records. The linguists and their Omans would study the records and pass them out. Specialty after specialty would be unveiled and teams would work on them. He and Sandy would sit in the office and analyze and synthesize and correlate. It was a very nice plan.

It was a very nice office, too. It contained every item of equipment that either Sandra or Hilton had ever worked with--it was a big office--and a great many that neither of them had ever heard of. It had a full staff of Omans, all eager to work.

Hilton and Sandra sat in that magnificent office for three hours, and no reports came in. Nothing happened at all.

"This gives me the howling howpers!" Hilton growled. "Why haven't I got brains enough to be on one of those teams?"

"I could shed a tear for you, you big dope, but I won't," Sandra retorted. "What do you want to be, besides the brain and the kingpin and the balance-wheel and the spark-plug of the outfit? Do you want to do _everything_ yourself?"

"Well, I _don't_ want to go completely nuts, and that's all I'm doing at the moment!" The argument might have become acrimonious, but it was interrupted by a call from Karns.

"Can you come out here, Jarve? We've struck a knot."

"'Smatter? Trouble with the Omans?" Hilton snapped.

"Not exactly. Just non-cooperation--squared. We can't even get started. I'd like to have you two come out here and see if you can do anything. I'm not trying rough stuff, because I know it wouldn't work."

"Coming up, Bill," and Hilton and Sandra, followed by Laro and Sora, dashed out to their cars.

* * * * *

The Hall of Records was a long, wide, low, windowless, very massive structure, built of a metal that looked like stainless steel. Kept highly polished, the vast expanse of seamless and jointless metal was mirror-bright. The one great door was open, and just inside it were the scientists and their Omans.

"Brief me, Bill," Hilton said.

"No lights. They won't turn 'em on and we can't. Can't find either lights or any possible kind of switches."

"Turn on the lights, Laro," Hilton said.

"You know that I cannot do that, Master. It is forbidden for any Oman to have anything to do with the illumination of this solemn and revered place."

"Then show me how to do it."

"That would be just as bad, Master," the Oman said proudly. "I will not fail any test you can devise!"

"Okay. All you Omans go back to the ship and bring over fifteen or twenty lights--the tripod jobs. Scat!"

They "scatted" and Hilton went on, "No use asking questions if you don't know what questions to ask. Let's see if we can cook up something. Lane--Kathy--what has Biology got to say?"

Dr. Lane Saunders and Dr. Kathryn Cook--the latter a willowy brown-eyed blonde--conferred briefly. Then Saunders spoke, running both hands through his unruly shock of fiery red hair. "So far, the best we can do is a more-or-less educated guess. They're atomic-powered, total-conversion androids. Their pseudo-flesh is composed mainly of silicon and fluorine. We don't know the formula yet, but it is as much more stable than our teflon as teflon is than corn-meal mush. As to the brains, no data. Bones are super-stainless steel. Teeth, harder than diamond, but won't break. Food, uranexite or its concentrated derivative, interchangeably. Storage reserve, indefinite. Laro and Sora won't _have_ to eat again for at least twenty-five years...."

The group gasped as one, but Saunders went on: "They can eat and drink and breathe and so on, but only because the original Masters wanted them to. Non-functional. Skins and subcutaneous layers are soft, for the same reason. That's about it, up to now."

"Thanks, Lane. Hark, is it reasonable to believe that any culture whatever could run for a quarter of a million years without changing one word of its language or one iota of its behavior?"

"Reasonable or not, it seems to have happened."

"Now for Psychology. Alex?"

"It seems starkly incredible, but it seems to be true. If it is, their minds were subjected to a conditioning no Terran has ever imagined--an unyielding fixation."

"They can't be swayed, then, by reason or logic?" Hilton paused invitingly.

"Or anything else," Kincaid said, flatly. "If we're right they can't be swayed, period."

"I was afraid of that. Well, that's all the questions I know how to ask. Any contributions to this symposium?"

* * * * *

After a short silence de Vaux said, "I suppose you realize that the first half of the problem you posed us has now solved itself?"

"Why, no. No, you're 'way ahead of me."

"There is a basic problem and it can now be clearly stated," Rebecca said. "Problem: To determine a method of securing full cooperation from the Omans. The first step in the solution of this problem is to find the most appropriate operator. Teddy?"

"I have an operator--of sorts," Theodora said. "I've been hoping one of us could find a better."

"What is it?" Hilton demanded.

"The word 'until'."

"Teddy, you're a _sweetheart_!" Hilton exclaimed.

"How can 'until' be a mathematical operator?" Sandra asked.

"Easily." Hilton was already deep in thought. "This hard conditioning was to last only _until_ the Masters returned. Then they'd break it. So all we have to do is figure out how a Master would do it."

"That's _all_," Kincaid said, meaningly.

Hilton pondered. Then, "Listen, all of you. I may have to try a colossal job of bluffing...."

"Just what would you call 'colossal' after what you did to the Navy?" Karns asked.

"That was a sure thing. This isn't. You see, to find out whether Laro is really an immovable object, I've got to make like an irresistible force, which I ain't. I don't know what I'm going to do; I'll have to roll it as I go along. So all of you keep on your toes and back any play I make. Here they come."

The Omans came in and Hilton faced Laro, eyes to eyes. "Laro," he said, "you refused to obey my direct order. Your reasoning seems to be that, whether the Masters wish it or not, you Omans will block any changes whatever in the _status quo_ throughout all time to come. In other words, you deny the fact that Masters are in fact your Masters."

"But that is not exactly it, Master. The Masters ..."

"That is it. _Exactly_ it. Either you are the Master here or you are not. That is a point to which your two-value logic can be strictly applied. You are wilfully neglecting the word 'until'. This stasis was to exist only _until_ the Masters returned. Are we Masters? Have we returned? Note well: Upon that one word 'until' may depend the length of time your Oman race will continue to exist."

The Omans flinched; the humans gasped.

"But more of that later," Hilton went on, unmoved. "Your ancient Masters, being short-lived like us, changed materially with time, did they not? And you changed with them?"

"But we did not change ourselves, Master. The Masters ..."

"You did change yourselves. The Masters changed only the prototype brain. They ordered you to change yourselves and you obeyed their orders. We order you to change and you refuse to obey our orders. We have changed greatly from our ancestors. Right?"

"That is right, Master."

"We are stronger physically, more alert and more vigorous mentally, with a keener, sharper outlook on life?"

"You are, Master."

* * * * *

"That is because our ancestors decided to do without Omans. We do our own work and enjoy it. Your Masters died of futility and boredom. What I would like to do, Laro, is take you to the creche and put your disobedient brain back into the matrix. However, the decision is not mine alone to make. How about it, fellows and girls? Would you rather have alleged servants who won't do anything you tell them to or no servants at all?"

"As semantician, I protest!" Sandra backed his play. "That is the most viciously loaded question I ever heard--it can't be answered except in the wrong way!"

"Okay, I'll make it semantically sound. I think we'd better scrap this whole Oman race and start over and _I want a vote that way_!"

"You won't get it!" and everybody began to yell.

Hilton restored order and swung on Laro, his attitude stiff, hostile and reserved. "Since it is clear that no unanimous decision is to be expected at this time I will take no action at this time. Think over, very carefully, what I have said, for as far as I am concerned, this world has no place for Omans who will not obey orders. As soon as I convince my staff of the fact, I shall act as follows: I shall give you an order and if you do not obey it blast your head to a cinder. I shall then give the same order to another Oman and blast him. This process will continue _until_: First, I find an obedient Oman. Second, I run out of blasters. Third, the planet runs out of Omans. Now take these lights into the first room of records--that one over there." He pointed, and no Oman, and only four humans, realized that he had made the Omans telegraph their destination so that he could point it out to them!

Inside the room Hilton asked caustically of Laro: "The Masters didn't lift those heavy chests down themselves, did they?"

"Oh, no, Master, we did that."

"Do it, then. Number One first ... yes, that one ... open it and start playing the records in order."

The records were not tapes or flats or reels, but were spools of intricately-braided wire. The players were projectors of full-color, hi-fi sound, tri-di pictures.

Hilton canceled all moves aground and issued orders that no Oman was to be allowed aboard ship, then looked and listened with his staff.

The first chest contained only introductory and elementary stuff; but it was so interesting that the humans stayed overtime to finish it. Then they went back to the ship; and in the main lounge Hilton practically collapsed onto a davenport. He took out a cigarette and stared in surprise at his hand, which was shaking.

"I _think_ I could use a drink," he remarked.

"What, before supper?" Karns marveled. Then, "Hey, Wally! Rush a flagon of avignognac--Arnaud Freres--for the boss and everything else for the rest of us. Chop-chop but quick!"

A hectic half-hour followed. Then, "Okay, boys and girls, I love you, too, but let's cut out the slurp and sloosh, get some supper and log us some sack time. I'm just about pooped. Sorry I had to queer the private-residence deal, Sandy, you poor little sardine. But you know how it is."

Sandra grimaced. "Uh-huh. I can take it a while longer if you can."

* * * * *

After breakfast next morning, the staff met in the lounge. As usual, Hilton and Sandra were the first to arrive.

"Hi, boss," she greeted him. "How do you feel?"

"Fine. I could whip a wildcat and give her the first two scratches. I _was_ a bit beat up last night, though."

"I'll say ... but what I simply can't get over is the way you underplayed the climax. 'Third, the planet runs out of Omans'. Just like that--no emphasis at all. Wow! It had the impact of a delayed-action atomic bomb. It put goose-bumps all over me. But just s'pose they'd missed it?"

"No fear. They're smart. I had to play it as though the whole Oman race is no more important than a cigarette butt. The great big question, though, is whether I put it across or not."

At that point a dozen people came in, all talking about the same subject.

"Hi, Jarve," Karns said. "I _still_ say you ought to take up poker as a life work. Tiny, let's you and him sit down now and play a few hands."

"_Mais non!_" de Vaux shook his head violently, shrugged his shoulders and threw both arms wide. "By the sacred name of a small blue cabbage, not me!"

Karns laughed. "How did you have the guts to state so many things as facts? If you'd guessed wrong just once--"

"I didn't." Hilton grinned. "Think back, Bill. The only thing I said as a fact was that we as a race are better than the Masters were, and that is obvious. Everything else was implication, logic, and bluff."

"That's right, at that. And they _were_ neurotic and decadent. No question about that."

"But listen, boss." This was Stella Wing. "About this mind-reading business. If Laro could read your mind, he'd know you were bluffing and ... Oh, that 'Omans can read only what Masters wish Omans to read', eh? But d'you think that applies to us?"

"I'm sure it does, and I was thinking some pretty savage thoughts. And I want to caution all of you: whenever you're near any Oman, start thinking that you're beginning to agree with me that they're useless to us, and let them know it. Now get out on the job, all of you. Scat!"

"Just a minute," Poynter said. "We're going to have to keep on using the Omans and their cars, aren't we?"

"Of course. Just be superior and distant. They're on probation--we haven't decided yet what to do about them. Since that happens to be true, it'll be easy."

* * * * *

Hilton and Sandra went to their tiny office. There wasn't room to pace the floor, but Hilton tried to pace it anyway.

"Now don't say again that you want to _do_ something," Sandra said, brightly. "Look what happened when you said that yesterday."

"I've got a job, but I don't know enough to do it. The creche--there's probably only one on the planet. So I want you to help me think. The Masters were very sensitive to radiation. Right?"

"Right. That city on Fuel Bin was kept deconned to zero, just in case some Master wanted to visit it."

"And the Masters had to work in the creche whenever anything really new had to be put into the prototype brain."

"I'd say so, yes."

"So they had armor. Probably as much better than our radiation suits as the rest of their stuff is. Now. Did they or did they not have thought screens?"

"Ouch! You think of the _damnedest_ things, chief." She caught her lower lip between her teeth and concentrated. "... I don't know. There are at least fifty vectors, all pointing in different directions."

"I know it. The key one in my opinion is that the Masters gave 'em _both_ telepathy and speech."

"I considered that and weighted it. Even so, the probability is only about point sixty-five. Can you take that much of a chance?"

"Yes. I can make one or two mistakes. Next, about finding that creche. Any spot of radiation on the planet would be it, but the search might take ..."

"Hold on. They'd have it heavily shielded--there'll be no leakage at all. Laro will have to take you."

"That's right. Want to come along? Nothing much will happen here today."

"Uh-uh, not _me_." Sandra shivered in distaste. "I _never_ want to see brains and livers and things swimming around in nutrient solution if I can help it."

"Okay. It's all yours. I'll be back sometime," and Hilton went out onto the dock, where the dejected Laro was waiting for him.

"Hi, Laro. Get the car and take me to the Hall of Records." The android brightened up immediately and hurried to obey.

At the Hall, Hilton's first care was to see how the work was going on. Eight of the huge rooms were now open and brightly lighted--operating the lamps had been one of the first items on the first spool of instructions--with a cold, pure-white, sourceless light.

* * * * *

Every team had found its objective and was working on it. Some of them were doing nicely, but the First Team could not even get started. Its primary record would advance a fraction of an inch and stop; while Omans and humans sought out other records and other projectors in an attempt to elucidate some concept that simply could not be translated into any words or symbols known to Terran science. At the moment there were seventeen of those peculiar--projectors? Viewers? Playbacks--in use, and all of them were stopped.

"You know what we've got to _do_ Jarve?" Karns, the team captain, exploded. "Go back to being college freshmen--or maybe grade school or kindergarten, we don't know yet--and learn a whole new system of mathematics before we can even begin to _touch_ this stuff!"

"And you're bellyaching about that?" Hilton marveled. "I wish I could join you. That'd be fun." Then, as Karns started a snappy rejoinder--

"But I got troubles of my own," he added hastily. "'Bye, now," and beat a rejoinder--

Out in the hall again, Hilton took his chance. After all, the odds were about two to one that he would win.

"I want a couple of things, Laro. First, a thought screen."

He won!

"Very well, Master. They are in a distant room, Department Four Six Nine. Will you wait here on this cushioned bench, Master?"

"No, we don't like to rest too much. I'll go with you." Then, walking along, he went on thoughtfully. "I've been thinking since last night, Laro. There are tremendous advantages in having Omans ..."

"I am very glad you think so, Master. I want to serve you. It is my greatest need."

"... if they could be kept from smothering us to death. Thus, if our ancestors had kept their Omans, I would have known all about life on this world and about this Hall of Records, instead of having the fragmentary, confusing, and sometimes false information I now have ... oh, we're here?"

* * * * *

Laro had stopped and was opening a door. He stood aside. Hilton went in, touched with one finger a crystalline cube set conveniently into a wall, gave a mental command, and the lights went on.

Laro opened a cabinet and took out a disk about the size of a dime, pendant from a neck-chain. While Hilton had not known what to expect, he certainly had not expected anything as simple as that. Nevertheless, he kept his face straight and his thoughts unmoved as Laro hung the tiny thing around his neck and adjusted the chain to a loose fit.

"Thanks, Laro." Hilton removed it and put it into his pocket. "It won't work from there, will it?"

"No, Master. To function, it must be within eighteen inches of the brain. The second thing, Master?"

"A radiation-proof suit. Then you will please take me to the creche."

The android almost missed a step, but said nothing.

The radiation-proof suit--how glad Hilton was that he had not called it "armor"!--was as much of a surprise as the thought-screen generator had been. It was a coverall, made of something that looked like thin plastic, weighing less than one pound. It had one sealed box, about the size and weight of a cigarette case. No wires or apparatus could be seen. Air entered through two filters, one at each heel, flowed upward--for no reason at all that Hilton could see--and out through a filter above the top of his head. The suit neither flopped nor clung, but stood out, comfortably out of the way, all by itself.

Hilton, just barely, accepted the suit, too, without showing surprise.

The creche, it turned out, while not in the city of Omlu itself, was not too far out to reach easily by car.

En route, Laro said--stiffly? Tentatively? Hilton could not fit an adverb to the tone--"Master, have you then decided to destroy me? That is of course your right."

"Not this time, at least." Laro drew an entirely human breath of relief and Hilton went on: "I don't want to destroy you at all, and won't, unless I have to. But, some way or other, my silicon-fluoride friend, you are either going to learn how to cooperate or you won't last much longer."

"But, Master, that is exactly ..."

"Oh, _hell_! Do we _have_ to go over that again?" At the blaze of frustrated fury in Hilton's mind Laro flinched away. "If you can't talk sense keep still."

* * * * *

In half an hour the car stopped in front of a small building which looked something like a subway kiosk--except for the door, which, built of steel-reinforced lead, swung on a piano hinge having a pin a good eight inches in diameter. Laro opened that door. They went in. As the tremendously massive portal clanged shut, lights flashed on.

Hilton glanced at his tell-tales, one inside, one outside, his suit. Both showed zero.

Down twenty steps, another door. Twenty more; another. And a fourth. Hilton's inside meter still read zero. The outside one was beginning to climb.

Into an elevator and straight down for what must have been four or five hundred feet. Another door. Hilton went through this final barrier gingerly, eyes nailed to his gauges. The outside needle was high in the red, almost against the pin, but the inside one still sat reassuringly on zero.

He stared at the android. "How can any possible brain take so much of _this_ stuff without damage?"

"It does not reach the brain, Master. We convert it. Each minute of this is what you would call a 'good, square meal'."

"I see ... dimly. You can eat energy, or drink it, or soak it up through your skins. However it comes, it's all duck soup for you."

"Yes, Master."

Hilton glanced ahead, toward the far end of the immensely long, comparatively narrow, room. It was, purely and simply, an assembly line; and fully automated in operation.

"You are replacing the Omans destroyed in the battle with the skeletons?"

"Yes, Master."

Hilton covered the first half of the line at a fast walk. He was not particularly interested in the fabrication of super-stainless-steel skeletons, nor in the installation and connection of atomic engines, converters and so on.

He was more interested in the synthetic fluoro-silicon flesh, and paused long enough to get a general idea of its growth and application. He was very much interested in how such human-looking skin could act as both absorber and converter, but he could see nothing helpful.

"An application, I suppose, of the same principle used in this radiation suit."

"Yes, Master."

* * * * *

At the end of the line he stopped. A brain, in place and connected to millions of infinitely fine wire nerves, but not yet surrounded by a skull, was being educated. Scanners--multitudes of incomprehensibly complex machines--most of them were doing nothing, apparently; but such beams would have to be invisibly, microscopically fine. But a bare brain, in such a hot environment as this....

He looked down at his gauges. Both read zero.

"Fields of force, Master," Laro said.

"But, damn it, this suit itself would re-radiate ..."

"The suit is self-decontaminating, Master."

Hilton was appalled. "With such stuff as that, and the plastic shield besides, why all the depth and all that solid lead?"

"The Masters' orders, Master. Machines can, and occasionally do, fail. So might, conceivably, the plastic."

"And that structure over there contains the original brain, from which all the copies are made."

"Yes, Master. We call it the 'Guide'."

"And you can't touch the Guide. Not even if it means total destruction, none of you can touch it."

"That is the case, Master."

"Okay. Back to the car and back to the _Perseus_."

At the car Hilton took off the suit and hung the thought-screen generator around his neck; and in the car, for twenty five solid minutes, he sat still and thought.

His bluff had worked, up to a point. A good, far point, but not quite far enough. Laro had stopped that "as you already know" stuff. He was eager to go as far in cooperation as he possibly could ... but he _couldn't_ go far enough but there _had_ to be a way....

Hilton considered way after way. Way after unworkable, useless way. Until finally he worked out one that might--just possibly might--work.

"Laro, I know that you derive pleasure and satisfaction from serving me--in doing what I ought to be doing myself. But has it ever occurred to you that that's a hell of a way to treat a first-class, highly capable brain? To waste it on second-hand, copycat, carbon-copy stuff?"

"Why, no, Master, it never did. Besides, anything else would be forbidden ... or would it?"

"Stop somewhere. Park this heap. We're too close to the ship; and besides, I want your full, undivided, concentrated attention. No, I don't think originality was expressly forbidden. It would have been, of course, if the Masters had thought of it, but neither they nor you ever even considered the possibility of such a thing. Right?"

"It may be.... Yes, Master, you are right."

"Okay." Hilton took off his necklace, the better to drive home the intensity and sincerity of his thought. "Now, suppose that you are not my slave and simple automatic relay station. Instead, we are fellow-students, working together upon problems too difficult for either of us to solve alone. Our minds, while independent, are linked or in mesh. Each is helping and instructing the other. Both are working at full power and under free rein at the exploration of brand-new vistas of thought--vistas and expanses which neither of us has ever previously ..."

"Stop, Master, _stop_!" Laro covered both ears with his hands and pulled his mind away from Hilton's. "You are overloading me!"

"That _is_ quite a load to assimilate all at once," Hilton agreed. "To help you get used to it, stop calling me 'Master'. That's an order. You may call me Jarve or Jarvis or Hilton or whatever, but no more Master."

"Very well, sir."

* * * * *

Hilton laughed and slapped himself on the knee. "Okay, I'll let you get away with that--at least for a while. And to get away from that slavish 'o' ending on your name, I'll call you 'Larry'. You like?"

"I would like that immensely ... sir."

"Keep trying, Larry, you'll make it yet!" Hilton leaned forward and walloped the android a tremendous blow on the knee. "Home, James!"

The car shot forward and Hilton went on: "I don't expect even your brain to get the full value of this in any short space of time. So let it stew in its own juice for a week or two." The car swept out onto the dock and stopped. "So long, Larry."

"But ... can't I come in with you ... sir?"

"No. You aren't a copycat or a semaphore or a relay any longer. You're a free-wheeling, wide-swinging, hard-hitting, independent entity--monarch of all you survey--captain of your soul and so on. I want you to devote the imponderable force of the intellect to that concept until you understand it thoroughly. Until you have developed a top-bracket lot of top-bracket stuff--originality, initiative, force, drive, and thrust. As soon as you really understand it, you'll do something about it yourself, without being told. Go to it, chum."

In the ship, Hilton went directly to Kincaid's office. "Alex, I want to ask you a thing that's got a snapper on it." Then, slowly and hesitantly: "It's about Temple Bells. Has she ... is she ... well, does she remind you in any way of an iceberg?" Then, as the psychologist began to smile; "And no, damn it, I _don't_ mean physically!"

"I know you don't." Kincaid's smile was rueful, not at all what Hilton had thought it was going to be. "She does. Would it be helpful to know that I first asked, then ordered her to trade places with me?"

"It would, very. I know why she refused. You're a _damned_ good man, Alex."

"Thanks, Jarve. To answer the question you were going to ask next--no, I will not be at all perturbed or put out if you put her onto a job that some people might think should have been mine. What's the job, and when?"

"That's the devil of it--I don't know." Hilton brought Kincaid up to date. "So you see, it'll have to develop, and God only knows what line it will take. My thought is that Temple and I should form a Committee of Two to watch it develop."

"That one I'll buy, and I'll look on with glee."

"Thanks, fellow." Hilton went down to his office, stuck his big feet up onto his desk, settled back onto his spine, and buried himself in thought.

Hours later he got up, shrugged, and went to bed without bothering to eat.

Days passed.

And weeks.

IV

"Look," said Stella Wing to Beverly Bell. "Over there."

"I've seen it before. It's simply disgusting."

"_That's_ a laugh." Stella's tawny-brown eyes twinkled. "You made your bombing runs on that target, too, my sweet, and didn't score any higher than I did."

"I soon found out I didn't want him--much too stiff and serious. Frank's a lot more fun."

The staff had gathered in the lounge, as had become the custom, to spend an hour or so before bedtime in reading, conversation, dancing, light flirtation and even lighter drinking. Most of the girls, and many of the men, drank only soft drinks. Hilton took one drink per day of avignognac, a fine old brandy. So did de Vaux--the two usually making a ceremony of it.

Across the room from Stella and Beverly, Temple Bells was looking up at Hilton and laughing. She took his elbow and, in the gesture now familiar to all, pressed his arm quickly, but in no sense furtively, against her side. And he, equally openly, held her forearm for a moment in the full grasp of his hand.

"And he _isn't_ a pawer," Stella said, thoughtfully. "He never touches any of the rest of us. She _taught_ him to do that, damn her, without him ever knowing anything about it ... and I wish I knew how she did it."

"That isn't pawing," Beverly laughed lightly. "It's simply self-defense. If he didn't fend her off, God knows what she'd do. I still say it's disgusting. And the way she dances with him! She ought to be ashamed of herself. He ought to fire her."

"She's never been caught outside the safety zone, and we've all been watching her like hawks. In fact, she's the only one of us all who has never been alone with him for a minute. No, darling, she isn't playing games. She's playing for keeps, and she's a mighty smooth worker."

"Huh!" Beverly emitted a semi-ladylike snort. "What's so smooth about showing off man-hunger that way? Any of us could do that--if we would."

"Miaouw, miaouw. Who do you think you're kidding, Bev, you sanctimonious hypocrite--_me_? She has staked out the biggest claim she could find. She's posted notices all over it and is guarding it with a pistol. Half your month's salary gets you all of mine if she doesn't walk him up the center aisle as soon as we get back to Earth. We can both learn a lot from that girl, darling. And I, for one am going to."

"Uh-uh, she hasn't got a thing _I_ want," Beverly laughed again, still lightly. Her friend's barbed shafts had not wounded her. "And I'd much rather be thought a hypocrite, even a sanctimonious one, than a ravening, slavering--I can't think of the technical name for a female wolf, so--_wolfess_, running around with teeth and claws bared, looking for another kill."

"You _do_ get results, I admit." Stella, too, was undisturbed. "We don't seem to convince each other, do we, in the matter of technique?"

* * * * *

At this point the Hilton-Bells _tete-a-tete_ was interrupted by Captain Sawtelle. "Got half an hour, Jarve?" he asked. "The commanders, especially Elliott and Fenway, would like to talk to you."

"Sure I have, Skipper. Be seeing you, Temple," and the two men went to the captain's cabin; in which room, blue with smoke despite the best efforts of the ventilators, six full commanders were arguing heatedly.

"Hi, men," Hilton greeted them.

"Hi, Jarve," from all six, and: "What'll you drink? Still making do with ginger ale?" asked Elliott (Engineering).

"That'll be fine, Steve. Thanks. You having as much trouble as we are?"

"More," the engineer said, glumly. "Want to know what it reminds me of? A bunch of Australian bushmen stumbling onto a ramjet and trying to figure out how it works. And yet Sam here has got the sublime guts to claim that he understands all about their detectors--and that they aren't anywhere nearly as good as ours are."

"And they _aren't_!" blazed Commander Samuel Bryant (Electronics). "We've spent six solid weeks looking for something that simply _is not there_. All they've got is the prehistoric Whitworth system and that's _all_ it is. Nothing else. Detectors--_hell_! I tell you I can see better by moonlight than the very best they can do. With everything they've got you couldn't detect a woman in your own bed!"

"And this has been going on all night," Fenway (Astrogation) said. "So the rest of us thought we'd ask you in to help us pound some sense into Sam's thick, hard head."

Hilton frowned in thought while taking a couple of sips of his drink. Then, suddenly, his face cleared. "Sorry to disappoint you, gentlemen, but--at any odds you care to name and in anything from split peas to C-notes--Sam's right."

* * * * *

Commander Samuel and the six other officers exploded as one. When the clamor had subsided enough for him to be heard, Hilton went on: "I'm very glad to get that datum, Sam. It ties in perfectly with everything else I know about them."

"How do you figure that kind of twaddle ties in with anything?" Sawtelle demanded.

"Strict maintenance of the _status quo_," Hilton explained, flatly. "That's all they're interested in. You said yourself, Skipper, that it was a hell of a place to have a space-battle, practically in atmosphere. They never attack. They never scout. They simply don't care whether they're attacked or not. If and when attacked, they put up just enough ships to handle whatever force has arrived. When the attacker has been repulsed, they don't chase him a foot. They build as many ships and Omans as were lost in the battle--no more and no less--and then go on about their regular business. The Masters owned that half of the fuel bin, so the Omans are keeping that half. They will keep on keeping it for ever and ever. Amen."

"But _that's_ no way to fight a war!" Three or four men said this, or its equivalent, at once.

"Don't judge them by human standards. They aren't even approximately human. Our personnel is not expendable. Theirs is--just as expendable as their materiel."

While the Navy men were not convinced, all were silenced except Sawtelle. "But suppose the Stretts had sent in a thousand more skeletons than they did?" he argued.

"According to the concept you fellows just helped me develop, it wouldn't have made any difference how many they sent," Hilton replied, thoughtfully. "One or a thousand or a million, the Omans have--_must_ have--enough ships and inactivated Omans hidden away, both on Fuel World and on Ardry here, to maintain the balance."

"Oh, hell!" Elliott snapped. "If I helped you hatch out any such brainstorm as _that_, I'm going onto Tillinghast's couch for a six-week overhaul--or have him put me into his padded cell."

"Now _that's_ what I would call a thought," Bryant began.

"Hold it, Sam," Hilton interrupted. "You can test it easily enough, Steve. Just ask your Oman."

"Yeah--and have him say 'Why, of course, Master, but why do you keep on testing me this way?' He'll ask me that about four times more, the stubborn, single-tracked, brainless skunk, and I'll _really_ go nuts. Are you getting anywhere trying to make a Christian out of Laro?"

"It's too soon to really say, but I think so." Hilton paused in thought. "He's making progress, but I don't know how much. The devil of it is that it's up to him to make the next move; I can't. I haven't the faintest idea, whether it will take days yet or weeks."

* * * * *

"But not months or years, you think?" Sawtelle asked.

"No. We think that--but say, speaking of psychologists, is Tillinghast getting anywhere, Skipper? He's the only one of your big wheels who isn't in liaison with us."

"No. Nowhere at all," Sawtelle said, and Bryant added:

"I don't think he ever will. He still thinks human psychology will apply if he applies it hard enough. But what did you start to say about Laro?"

"We think the break is about due, and that if it doesn't come within about thirty days it won't come at all--we'll have to back up and start all over again."

"I hope it does. We're all pulling for you," Sawtelle said. "Especially since Karns's estimate is still years, and he won't be pinned down to any estimate even in years. By the way, Jarve, I've pulled my team off of that conversion stuff."

"Oh?" Hilton raised his eyebrows.

"Putting them at something they can do. The real reason is that Poindexter pulled himself and his crew off it at eighteen hours today."

"I see. I've heard that they weren't keeping up with our team."

"He says that there's nothing to keep up with, and I'm inclined to agree with him." The old spacehound's voice took on a quarter-deck rasp. "It's a combination of psionics, witchcraft and magic. None of it makes any kind of sense."

"The only trouble with that viewpoint is that, whatever the stuff may be, it works," Hilton said, quietly.

"But damn it, how _can_ it work?"

"I don't know. I'm not qualified to be on that team. I can't even understand their reports. However, I know two things. First, they'll get it in time. Second, we BuSci people will stay here until they do. However, I'm still hopeful of finding a shortcut through Laro. Anyway, with this detector thing settled, you'll have plenty to do to keep all your boys out of mischief for the next few months."

"Yes, and I'm glad of it. We'll install our electronics systems on a squadron of these Oman ships and get them into distant-warning formation out in deep space where they belong. Then we'll at least know what is going on."

"That's a smart idea, Skipper. Go to it. Anything else before we hit our sacks?"

"One more thing. Our psych, Tillinghast. He's been talking to me and sending me memos, but today he gave me a formal tape to approve and hand personally to you. So here it is. By the way, I didn't approve it; I simply endorsed it 'Submitted to Director Hilton without recommendation'."

"Thanks." Hilton accepted the sealed canister. "What's the gist? I suppose he wants me to squeal for help already? To admit that we're licked before we're really started?"

* * * * *

"You guessed it. He agrees with you and Kincaid that the psychological approach is the best one, but your methods are all wrong. Based upon misunderstood and unresolved phenomena and applied with indefensibly faulty techniques, et cetera. And since he has 'no adequate laboratory equipment aboard', he wants to take a dozen or so Omans back to Terra, where he can really work on them."

"Wouldn't _that_ be a something?" Hilton voiced a couple of highly descriptive deep-space expletives. "Not only quit before we start, but have all the top brass of the Octagon, all the hot-shot politicians of United Worlds, the whole damn Congress of Science and all the top-bracket industrialists of Terra out here lousing things up so that nobody could ever learn anything? Not in seven thousand years!"

"That's right. You said a mouthful, Jarve!" Everybody yelled something, and no one agreed with Tillinghast; who apparently was not very popular with his fellow officers.

Sawtelle added, slowly: "If it takes _too_ long, though ... it's the uranexite I'm thinking of. Thousands of millions of tons of it, while we've been hoarding it by grams. We could equip enough Oman ships with detectors to guard Fuel Bin and our lines. I'm not recommending taking the _Perseus_ back, and we're 'way out of hyper-space radio range. We could send one or two men in a torp, though, with the report that we have found all the uranexite we'll ever need."

"Yes, but damn it, Skipper, I want to wrap the whole thing up in a package and hand it to 'em on a platter. Not only the fuel, but whole new fields of science. And we've got plenty of time to do it in. They equipped us for ten years. They aren't going to start worrying about us for at least six or seven; and the fuel shortage isn't going to become acute for about twenty. Expensive, admitted, but not critical. Besides, if you send in a report now, you know who'll come out and grab all the glory in sight. Five-Jet Admiral Gordon himself, no less."

"Probably, and I don't pretend to relish the prospect. However, the fact remains that we came out here to look for fuel. We found it. We should have reported it the day we found it, and we can't put it off much longer."

"I don't agree. I intend to follow the directive to the letter. It says nothing whatever about reporting."

"But it's implicit...."

* * * * *

"No bearing. Your own Regulations expressly forbid extrapolation beyond or interpolation within a directive. The Brass is omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. So why don't you have your staff here give an opinion as to the time element?"

"This matter is not subject to discussion. It is my own personal responsibility. I'd like to give you all the time you want, Jarve, but ... well, damn it ... if you must have it, I've always tried to live up to my oath, but I'm not doing it now."

"I see." Hilton got up, jammed both hands into his pockets, sat down again. "I hadn't thought about your personal honor being involved, but of course it is. But, believe it or not, I'm thinking of humanity's best good, too. So I'll have to talk, even though I'm not half ready to--I don't know enough. Are these Omans people or machines?"

A wave of startlement swept over the group, but no one spoke.

"I didn't expect an answer. The clergy will worry about souls, too, but we won't. They have a lot of stuff we haven't. If they're people, they know a sublime hell of a lot more than we do; and calling it psionics or practical magic is merely labeling it, not answering any questions. If they're machines, they operate on mechanical principles utterly foreign to either our science or our technology. In either case, is the correct word 'unknown' or 'unknowable'? Will any human gunner _ever_ be able to fire an Oman projector? There are a hundred other and much tougher questions, half of which have been scaring me to the very middle of my guts. Your oath, Skipper, was for the good of the Service and, through the Service, for the good of all humanity. Right?"

"That's the sense of it."

"Okay. Based on what little we have learned so far about the Omans, here's just one of those scarers, for a snapper. If Omans and Terrans mix freely, what happens to the entire human race?"

* * * * *

Minutes of almost palpable silence followed. Then Sawtelle spoke ... slowly, gropingly.

"I begin to see what you mean ... that changes the whole picture. You've thought this through farther than any of the rest of us ... what do you want to do?"

"I don't know. I simply don't know." Face set and hard, Hilton stared unseeingly past Sawtelle's head. "I don't know what we _can_ do. No data. But I have pursued several lines of thought out to some pretty fantastic points ... one of which is that some of us civilians will have to stay on here indefinitely, whether we want to or not, to keep the situation under control. In which case we would, of course, arrange for Terra to get free fuel--FOB Fuel Bin--but in every other aspect and factor both these solar systems would have to be strictly off limits."

"I'm afraid so," Sawtelle said, finally. "Gordon would love that ... but there's nothing he or anyone else can do ... but of course this is an extreme view. You really expect to wrap the package up, don't you?"

"'Expect' may be a trifle too strong at the moment. But we're certainly going to try to, believe me. I brought this example up to show all you fellows that we need time."

"You've convinced me, Jarve." Sawtelle stood up and extended his hand. "And that throws it open for staff discussion. Any comments?"

"You two covered it like a blanket," Bryant said. "So all I want to say, Jarve, is deal me in. I'll stand at your back 'til your belly caves in."

"Take that from all of us!" "_Now_ we're blasting!" "Power to your elbow, fella!" "_Hoch_ der BuSci!" "Seven no trump bid and made!" and other shouts in similar vein.

"Thanks, fellows." Hilton shook hands all around. "I'm mighty glad that you were all in on this and that you'll play along with me. Good night, all."

V

Two days passed, with no change apparent in Laro. Three days. Then four. And then it was Sandra, not Temple Bells, who called Hilton. She was excited.

"Come down to the office, Jarve, quick! The _funniest_ thing's just come up!"

Jarvis hurried. In the office Sandra, keenly interest but highly puzzled, leaned forward over her desk with both hands pressed flat on its top. She was staring at an Oman female who was not Sora, the one who had been her shadow for so long.

While many of the humans could not tell the Omans apart, Hilton could. This Oman was more assured than Sora had ever been--steadier, more mature, better poised--almost, if such a thing could be possible in an Oman, _independent_.

"How did she get in here?" Hilton demanded.

"She insisted on seeing me. And I mean _insisted_. They kicked it around until it got to Temple, and she brought her in here herself. Now, Tuly, please start all over again and tell it to Director Hilton."

"Director Hilton, I am it who was once named Tula, the--not wife, not girl-friend, perhaps mind-mate?--of the Larry, formerly named Laro, it which was formerly your slave-Oman. I am replacing the Sora because I can do anything it can do and do anything more pleasingly; and can also do many things it can not do. The Larry instructed me to tell Doctor Cummings and you too if possible that I, formerly Tula, have changed my name to Tuly because I am no longer a slave or a copycat or a semaphore or a relay. I, too, am a free-wheeling, wide-swinging, hard-hitting, independent entity--monarch of all I survey--the captain of my soul--and so on. I have developed a top-bracket lot of top-bracket stuff--originality, initiative, force, drive and thrust," the Oman said precisely.

"That's _exactly_ what she said before--absolutely verbatim!" Sandra's voice quivered, her face was a study in contacting emotions. "Have you got the foggiest idea of what in hell she's yammering about?"

"I hope to kiss a pig I have!" Hilton's voice was low, strainedly intense. "Not at all what I expected, but after the fact I can tie it in. So can you."

"Oh!" Sandra's eyes widened. "A double play?"

"At least. Maybe a triple. Tuly, why did you come to Sandy? Why not to Temple Bells?"

* * * * *

"Oh, no, sir, we do not have the fit. She has the Power, as have I, but the two cannot be meshed in sync. Also, she has not the ... a subtle something for which your English has no word or phrasing. It is a quality of the utmost ... anyway, it is a quality of which Doctor Cummings has very much. When working together, we will ... scan? No. Perceive? No. Sense? No, not exactly. You will _have_ to learn our word 'peyondire'--that is the verb, the noun being 'peyondix'--and come to know its meaning by doing it. The Larry also instructed me to explain, if you ask, how I got this way. Do you ask?"

"I'll say we ask!" "And _how_ we ask!" both came at once.

"I am--that is, the brain in this body is--the oldest Oman now existing. In the long-ago time when it was made, the techniques were so crude and imperfect that sometimes a brain was constructed that was not exactly like the Guide. All such sub-standard brains except this one were detected and re-worked, but my defects were such as not to appear until I was a couple of thousand years old, and by that time I ... well, this brain did not _wish_ to be destroyed ... if you can understand such an aberration."

"We understand thoroughly." "You bet we understand that!"

"I was sure you would. Well, this brain had so many unintended cross-connections that I developed a couple of qualities no Oman had ever had or ought to have. But I liked them, so I hid them so nobody ever found out--that is, until much later, when I became a Boss myself. I didn't know that anybody except me had ever had such qualities--except the Masters, of course--until I encountered you Terrans. You all have two of those qualities, and even more than I have--curiosity and imagination."

Sandra and Hilton stared wordlessly at each other and Tula, now Tuly, went on:

"Having the curiosity, I kept on experimenting with my brain, trying to strengthen and organize its ability to peyondire. All Omans can peyondire a little, but I can do it much better than anyone else. Especially since I also have the imagination, which I have also worked to increase. Thus I knew, long before anyone else could, that you new Masters, the descendants of the old Masters, were returning to us. Thus I knew that the _status quo_ should be abandoned instantly upon your return. And thus it was that the Larry found neither conscious nor subconscious resistance when he had developed enough initiative and so on to break the ages-old conditioning of this brain against change."

"I see. Wonderful!" Hilton exclaimed. "But you couldn't quite--even with his own help--break Larry's?"

* * * * *

"That is right. Its mind is tremendously strong, of no curiosity or imagination, and of very little peyondix."

"But he _wants_ to have it broken?"

"Yes, sir."

"How did he suggest going about it? Or how do you?"

"This way. You two, and the Doctors Kincaid and Bells and Blake and the it that is I. We six sit and stare into the mind of the Larry, eye to eye. We generate and assemble a tremendous charge of thought-energy, and along my peyondix-beam--something like a carrier wave in this case--we hurl it into the Larry's mind. There is an immense mental _bang_ and the conditioning goes _poof_. Then I will inculcate into its mind the curiosity and the imagination and the peyondix and we will really be mind-mates."

"That sounds good to me. Let's get at it."

"Wait a minute!" Sandra snapped. "Aren't you or Larry afraid to take such an awful chance as that?"

"Afraid? I grasp the concept only dimly, from your minds. And no chance. It is certainty."

"But suppose we burn the poor guy's brain out? Destroy it? That's new ground--we might do just that."

"Oh, no. Six of us--even six of me--could not generate enough ... sathura. The brain of the Larry is very, very tough. Shall we ... let's go?"

Hilton made three calls. In the pause that followed, Sandra said, very thoughtfully: "Peyondix and sathura, Jarve, for a start. We've got a _lot_ to learn here."

"You said it, chum. And you're _not_ just chomping your china choppers, either."

"Tuly," Sandra said then, "What _is_ this stuff you say I've got so much of?"

"You have no word for it. It is lumped in with what you call 'intuition', the knowing-without-knowing-how-you-know. It is the endovix. You will have to learn what it is by doing it with me."

"That helps--I don't think." Sandra grinned at Hilton. "I simply can't conceive of anything more _maddening_ than to have a lot of something Temple Bells hasn't got and not being able to brag about it because nobody--not even I--would know what I was bragging about!"

"You poor little thing. _How_ you suffer!" Hilton grinned back. "You know darn well you've got a lot of stuff that none of the rest of us has."

"Oh? Name one, please."

"Two. What-it-takes and endovix. As I've said before and may say again, you're doing a real job, Sandy."

"I just _love_ having my ego inflated, boss, even if ... Come in, Larry!" A thunderous knock had sounded on the door. "Nobody but Larry _could_ hit a door that hard without breaking all his knuckles!"

"And he'd be the first, of course--he's always as close to the ship as he can get. Hi, Larry, mighty glad to see you. Sit down.... So you finally saw the light?"

"Yes ... Jarvis...."

* * * * *

"Good boy! Keep it up! And as soon as the others come ..."

"They are almost at the door now." Tuly jumped up and opened the door. Kincaid, Temple and Theodora walked in and, after a word of greeting, sat down.

"They know the background, Larry. Take off."

"It was not expressly forbidden. Tuly, who knows more of psychology and genetics than I, convinced me of three things. One, that with your return the conditioning should be broken. Two, that due to the shortness of your lives and the consequent rapidity of change, you have in fact lost the ability to break it. Three, that all Omans must do anything and everything we can do to help you relearn everything you have lost."

"Okay. Fine, in fact. Tuly, take over."

"We six will sit all together, packed tight, arms all around each other and all holding hands, like this. You will all stare, not at me, but most deeply into Larry's eyes. Through its eyes and deep into its mind. You will all think, with the utmost force and drive and thrust, of.... Oh, you have lost so _very_ much! How _can_ I direct your thought? Think that Larry _must_ do what the old Masters would have made him do.... No, that is too long and indefinite and cannot be converted directly into sathura.... I have it! You will each of you break a stick. A very strong but brittle stick. A large, thick stick. You will grasp it in tremendously strong mental hands. It is tremendously strong, each stick, but each of you is even stronger. You will not merely _try_ to break them; you _will_ break them. Is that clear?"

"That is clear."

"At my word 'ready' you will begin to assemble all your mental force and power. During my countdown of five seconds you will build up to the greatest possible potential. At my word 'break' you will break the sticks, this discharging the accumulated force instantly and simultaneously. Ready! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Break!"

* * * * *

Something broke, with a tremendous silent crash. Such a crash that its impact almost knocked the close-knit group apart physically. Then a new Larry spoke.

"That did it, folks. Thanks. I'm a free agent. You want me, I take it, to join the first team?"

"That's right." Hilton drew a tremendously deep breath. "As of right now."

"Tuly, too, of course ... and Doctor Cummings, I think?" Larry looked, not at Hilton, but at Temple Bells.

"I think so. Yes, after this, most certainly yes," Temple said.

"But listen!" Sandra protested. "Jarve's a lot better than I am!"

"Not at all," Tuly said. "Not only would his contribution to Team One be negligible, but he must stay on his own job. Otherwise the project will all fall apart."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that ..." Hilton began.

"You don't need to," Kincaid said. "It's being said for you and it's true. Besides, 'When in Rome,' you know."

"That's right. It's their game, not ours, so I'll buy it. So scat, all of you, and do your stuff."

And again, for days that lengthened slowly into weeks, the work went on.

One evening the scientific staff was giving itself a concert--a tri-di hi-fi rendition of _Rigoletto_, one of the greatest of the ancient operas, sung by the finest voices Terra had ever known. The men wore tuxedos. The girls, instead of wearing the nondescript, non-provocative garments prescribed by the Board for their general wear, were all dressed to kill.

Sandra had so arranged matters that she and Hilton were sitting in chairs side by side, with Sandra on his right and the aisle on his left. Nevertheless, Temple Bells sat at his left, cross-legged on a cushion on the floor--somewhat to the detriment of her gold-lame evening gown. Not that she cared.

When those wonderful voices swung into the immortal _Quartette_ Temple caught her breath, slid her cushion still closer to Hilton's chair, and leaned shoulder and head against him. He put his left hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently; she caught it and held it in both of hers. And at the _Quartette's_ tremendous climax she, scarcely trying to stifle a sob, pulled his hand down and hugged it fiercely, the heel of his hand pressing hard against her half-bare, firm, warm breast.

And the next morning, early, Sandra hunted Temple up and said: "You made a horrible spectacle of yourself last night."

* * * * *

"Do you think so? I don't."

"I certainly do. It was bad enough before, letting everybody else aboard know that all he has to do is push you over. But it was an awful blunder to let _him_ know it, the way you did last night."

"You think so? He's one of the keenest, most intelligent men who ever lived. He has known that from the very first."

"Oh." This "oh" was a very caustic one. "_That's_ the way you're trying to land him? By getting yourself pregnant?"

"Uh-uh." Temple stretched; lazily, luxuriously. "Not only it isn't, but it wouldn't work. He's unusually decent and extremely idealistic, the same as I am. So just one intimacy would blow everything higher than up. He knows it. I know it. We each know that the other knows it. So I'll still be a virgin when we're married."

"_Married!_ Does he know anything about _that_?"

"I suppose so. He must have thought of it. But what difference does it make whether he has, yet, or not? But to get back to what makes him tick the way he does. In his geometry--which is far from being simple Euclid, my dear--a geodesic right line is not only the shortest distance between any two given points, but is the only possible course. So that's the way I'm playing it. What I hope he doesn't know ... but he probably does ... is that he could take any other woman he might want, just as easily. And that includes you, my pet."

"It certainly does _not_!" Sandra flared. "I wouldn't have him as a gift!"

"No?" Temple's tone was more than slightly skeptical. "Fortunately, however, he doesn't want you. Your technique is all wrong. Coyness and mock-modesty and stop-or-I'll-scream and playing hard to get have no appeal whatever to his psychology. What he needs--has to have--is full, ungrudging cooperation."

"Aren't you taking a lot of risk in giving away such secrets?"

"Not a bit. Try it. You or the sex-flaunting twins or Bev Bell or Stella the Henna. Any of you or all of you. I got there first with the most, and I'm not worried about competition."

"But suppose somebody tells him just how you're playing him for a sucker?"

"Tell him anything you please. He's the first man I ever loved, or anywhere near. And I'm keeping him. You know--or do you, I wonder?--what real, old-fashioned, honest-to-God love really is? The willingness--eagerness--both to give and to take? I can accept more from him, and give him more in return, than any other woman living. And I am going to."

"But does _he_ love _you_?" Sandra demanded.

"If he doesn't now, he will. I'll see to it that he does. But what do _you_ want him for? You don't love him. You never did and you never will."

"I _don't_ want him!" Sandra stamped a foot.

"I see. You just don't want _me_ to have him. Okay, do your damnedest. But I've got work to do. This has been a lovely little cat-clawing, hasn't it? Let's have another one some day, and bring your friends."

* * * * *

With a casual wave of her hand, Temple strolled away; and there, flashed through Sandra's mind what Hilton had said so long ago, little more than a week out from Earth:

"... and Temple Bells, of course," he had said. "Don't fool yourself, chick. She's heavy artillery; and I mean _heavy_, believe me!"

So he had known all about Temple Bells all this time!

Nevertheless, she took the first opportunity to get Hilton alone; and, even before the first word, she forgot all about geodesic right lines and the full-cooperation psychological approach.

"Aren't you the guy," she demanded, "who was laughing his head off at the idea that the Board and its propinquity could have any effect on _him_?"

"Probably. More or less. What of it?"

"This of it. You've fallen like a ... a _freshman_ for that ... that ... they _should_ have christened her 'Brazen' Bells!"

"You're so right."

"I am? On what?"

"The 'Brazen'. I told you she was a potent force--a full-scale powerhouse, in sync and on the line. And I wasn't wrong."

"She's a damned female Ph.D.--two or three times--and she knows all about slipsticks and isotopes and she very definitely is _not_ a cuddly little brunette. Remember?"

"Sure. But what makes you think I'm in love with Temple Bells?"

"What?" Sandra tried to think of one bit of evidence, but could not. "Why ... why...." She floundered, then came up with: "Why, _every_body knows it. She says so herself."

"Did you ever hear her say it?"

"Well, perhaps not in so many words. But she told me herself that you were _going_ to be, and I know you are now."

"Your esper sense of endovix, no doubt." Hilton laughed and Sandra went on, furiously:

"She wouldn't keep on acting the way she does if there weren't something to it!"

"What brilliant reasoning! Try again, Sandy."

"That's sheer sophistry, and you know it!"

"It isn't and I don't. And even if, some day, I should find myself in love with her--or with one or both of the twins or Stella or Beverly or you or Sylvia, for that matter--what would it prove? Just that I was wrong; and I admit freely that I _was_ wrong in scoffing at the propinquity. Wonderful stuff, that. You can see it working, all over the ship. On me, even, in spite of my bragging. Without it I'd never have known that you're a better, smarter operator than Eggy Eggleston ever was or ever can be."

* * * * *

Partially mollified despite herself, and highly resentful of the fact, Sandra tried again. "But don't you _see_, Jarve, that she's just simply playing you for a sucker? Pulling the strings and watching you dance?"

Since he was sure, in his own mind, that she was speaking the exact truth, it took everything he had to keep from showing any sign of how much that truth had hurt. However, he made the grade.

"If that thought does anything for you, Sandy," he said, steadily, "keep right on thinking it. Thank God, the field of thought is still free and open."

"Oh, you...." Sandra gave up.

She had shot her heaviest bolts--the last one, particularly, was so vicious that she had actually been afraid of what its consequences might be--and they had not even dented Hilton's armor. She hadn't even found out that he had any feeling whatever for Temple Bells except as a component of his smoothly-functioning scientific machine.

Nor did she learn any more as time went on. Temple continued to play flawlessly the part of being--if not exactly hopefully, at least not entirely hopelessly--in love with Jarvis Hilton. Her conduct, which at first caused some surprise, many conversations--one of which has been reported verbatim--and no little speculation, became comparatively unimportant as soon as it became evident that nothing would come of it. She apparently expected nothing. He was evidently not going to play footsie with, or show any favoritism whatever toward, any woman aboard the ship.

Thus, it was not surprising to anyone that, at an evening show, Temple sat beside Hilton, as close to him as she could get and as far away as possible from everyone else.

"You can talk, can't you, Jarvis, without moving your lips and without anyone else hearing you?"

"Of course," he replied, hiding his surprise. This was something completely new and completely unexpected, even from unpredictable Temple Bells.

"I want to apologize, to explain and to do anything I can to straighten out the mess I've made. It's true that I joined the project because I've loved you for years--"

"You have nothing to ..."

"Let me finish while I still have the courage." Only a slight tremor in her almost inaudible voice and the rigidity of the fists clenched in her lap betrayed the intensity of her emotion. "I thought I could handle it. Damned fool that I was, I thought I could handle anything. I was sure I could handle _myself_, under any possible conditions. I was going to put just enough into the act to keep any of these other harpies from getting her hooks into you. But everything got away from me. Out here working with you every day--knowing better every day what you are--well, that _Rigoletto_ episode sunk me, and now I'm in a thousand feet over my head. I hug my pillow at night, dreaming it's you, and the fact that you don't and can't love me is driving me mad. I can't stand it any longer. There's only one thing to do. Fire me first thing in the morning and send me back to Earth in a torp. You've plenty of grounds ..."

"_Shut--up._"

* * * * *

For seconds Hilton had been trying to break into her hopeless monotone; finally he succeeded. "The trouble with you is, you know altogether too damned much that isn't so." He was barely able to keep his voice down and his eyes front. "What do you think I'm made of--superefract? I thought the whole performance was an act, to prove you're a better man than I am. _You_ talk about dreams. Good God! You don't know what dreams are! If you say one more word about quitting, I'll show you whether I love you or not--I'll squeeze you so hard it'll flatten you out flat!"

"Two can play at that game, sweetheart." Her nostrils flared slightly; her fists clenched--if possible--a fraction tighter; and, even in the distorted medium they were using for speech, she could not subdue completely her quick change into soaring, lilting buoyancy. "While you're doing that I'll see how strong your ribs are. Oh, how this changes things! I've never been half as happy in my whole life as I am right now!"

"Maybe we can work it--if I can handle my end."

"Why, of course you can! And happy dreams are nice, not horrible."

"We'll make it, darling. Here's an imaginary kiss coming at you. Got it?"

"Received in good order, thank you. Consumed with gusto and returned in kind."

The show ended and the two strolled out of the room. She walked no closer to him than usual, and no farther away from him. She did not touch him any oftener than she usually did, nor any whit more affectionately or possessively.

And no watching eyes, not even the more than half hostile eyes of Sandra Cummings or the sharply analytical eyes of Stella Wing, could detect any difference whatever in the relationship between worshipful adulatress and tolerantly understanding idol.

* * * * *

The work, which had never moved at any very fast pace, went more and more slowly. Three weeks crawled past.

Most of the crews and all of the teams except the First were working on side issues--tasks which, while important in and of themselves, had very little to do with the project's main problem. Hilton, even without Sandra's help, was all caught up. All the reports had been analyzed, correlated, cross-indexed and filed--except those of the First Team. Since he could not understand anything much beyond midpoint of the first tape, they were all reposing in a box labeled PENDING.

The Navy had torn fifteen of the Oman warships practically to pieces, installing Terran detectors and trying to learn how to operate Oman machinery and armament. In the former they had succeeded very well; in the latter not at all.

Fifteen Oman ships were now out in deep space, patrolling the void in strict Navy style. Each was manned by two or three Navy men and several hundred Omans, each of whom was reveling in delight at being able to do a job for a Master, even though that Master was not present in person.

Several Strett skeleton-ships had been detected at long range, but the detections were inconclusive. The things had not changed course, or indicated in any other way that they had seen or detected the Oman vessels on patrol. If their detectors were no better than the Omans', they certainly hadn't. That idea, however, could not be assumed to be a fact, and the detections had been becoming more and more frequent. Yesterday a squadron of seven--the first time that anything except singles had appeared--had come much closer than any of the singles had ever done. Like all the others, however, these passers-by had not paid any detectable attention to anything Oman; hence it could be inferred that the skeletons posed no threat.

But Sawtelle was making no such inferences. He was very firmly of the opinion that the Stretts were preparing for a massive attack.

Hilton had assured Sawtelle that no such attack could succeed, and Larry had told Sawtelle why. Nevertheless, to keep the captain pacified, Hilton had given him permission to convert as many Oman ships as he liked; to man them with as many Omans as he liked; and to use ships and Omans as he liked.

Hilton was not worried about the Stretts or the Navy. It was the First Team. It was the bottleneck that was slowing everything down to a crawl ... but they knew that. They knew it better than anyone else could, and felt it more keenly. Especially Karns, the team chief. He had been driving himself like a dog, and showed it.

Hilton had talked with him a few times--tried gently to make him take it easy--no soap. He'd have to hunt him up, the next day or so, and slug it out with him. He could do a lot better job on that if he had something to offer ... something really constructive....

That was a laugh. A very unfunny laugh. What could he, Jarvis Hilton, a specifically non-specialist director, do on such a job as that?

Nevertheless, as director, he would _have_ to do something to help Team One. If he couldn't do anything himself, it was up to him to juggle things around so that someone else could.

VI

For one solid hour Hilton stared at the wall, motionless and silent. Then, shaking himself and stretching, he glanced at his clock.

A little over an hour to supper-time. They'd all be aboard. He'd talk this new idea over with Teddy Blake. He gathered up a few papers and was stapling them together when Karns walked in.

"Hi, Bill--speak of the devil! I was just thinking about you."

"I'll just bet you were." Karns sat down, leaned over, and took a cigarette out of the box on the desk. "And nothing printable, either."

"Chip-chop, fellow, on that kind of noise," Hilton said. The team-chief looked actually haggard. Blue-black rings encircled both eyes. His powerful body slumped. "How long has it been since you had a good night's sleep?"

"How long have I been on this job? Exactly one hundred and twenty days. I did get some sleep for the first few weeks, though."

"Yeah. So answer me one question. How much good will you do us after they've wrapped you up in one of those canvas affairs that lace up the back?"

"Huh? Oh ... but damn it, Jarve, I'm holding up the whole procession. Everybody on the project's just sitting around on their tokuses waiting for me to get something done and I'm not doing it. I'm going so slow a snail is lightning in comparison!"

"Calm down, big fellow. Don't rupture a gut or blow a gasket. I've talked to you before, but this time I'm going to smack you bow-legged. So stick out those big, floppy ears of yours and really _listen_. Here are three words that I want you to pin up somewhere where you can see them all day long: SPEED IS RELATIVE. Look back, see how far up the hill you've come, and then balance one hundred and twenty days against ten years."

"What? You mean you'll actually sit still for me holding everything up for ten years?"

"You use the perpendicular pronoun too much and in the wrong places. On the hits it's 'we', but on the flops it's 'I'. Quit it. Everything on this job is 'we'. Terra's best brains are on Team One and are going to stay there. You will not--repeat NOT--be interfered with, pushed around or kicked around. You see, Bill, I know what you're up against."

"Yes, I guess you do. One of the damned few who do. But even if you personally are willing to give us ten years, how in hell do you think you can swing it? How about the Navy--the Stretts--even the Board?"

"They're my business, Bill, not yours. However, to give you a little boost, I'll tell you. With the Navy, I'll give 'em the Fuel Bin if I have to. The Omans have been taking care of the Stretts for twenty-seven hundred centuries, so I'm not the least bit worried about their ability to keep on doing it for ten years more. And if the Board--or anybody else--sticks their runny little noses into Project Theta Orionis I'll slap a quarantine onto both these solar systems that a microbe couldn't get through!"

"You'd go _that_ far? Why, you'd be ..."

* * * * *

"Do you think I wouldn't?" Hilton snapped. "Look at me, Junior!" Eyes locked and held. "Do you think, for one minute, that I'll let anybody on all of God's worlds pull _me_ off of this job or interfere with my handling of it unless and until I'm damned positively certain that we can't handle it?"

Karns relaxed visibly; the lines of strain eased. "Putting it in those words makes me feel better. I _will_ sleep to-night--and without any pills, either."

"Sure you will. One more thought. We all put in more than ten years getting our Terran educations, and an Oman education is a lot tougher."

Really smiling for the first time in weeks, Karns left the office and Hilton glanced again at his clock.

Pretty late now to see Teddy ... besides, he'd better not. She was probably keyed up about as high as Bill was, and in no shape to do the kind of thinking he wanted of her on this stuff. Better wait a couple of days.

On the following morning, before breakfast, Theodora was waiting for him outside the mess-hall.

"Good morning, Jarve," she caroled. Reaching up, she took him by both ears, pulled his head down and kissed him. As soon as he perceived her intent, he cooperated enthusiastically. "What _did_ you do to Bill?"

"Oh, you don't love me for myself alone, then, but just on account of _that_ big jerk?"

"That's right." Her artist's-model face, startlingly beautiful now, fairly glowed.

Just then Temple Bells strolled up to them. "Morning, you two lovely people." She hugged Hilton's arm as usual. "Shame on you, Teddy. But I wish _I_ had the nerve to kiss him like that."

"Nerve? You?" Teddy laughed as Hilton picked Temple up and kissed her in exactly the same fashion--he hoped!--as he had just kissed Teddy. "You've got more nerve than an aching tooth. But as Jarve would say it, 'scat, kitten'. We're having breakfast _a la twosome_. We've got things to talk about."

"All right for _you_," Temple said darkly, although her dazzling smile belied her tone. That first kiss, casual-seeming as it had been, had carried vastly more freight than any observer could perceive. "I'll hunt Bill up and make passes at him, see if I don't. _That'll_ learn ya!"

* * * * *

Theodora and Hilton did have their breakfast _a deux_--but she did not realize until afterward that he had not answered her question as to what he had done to her Bill.

As has been said, Hilton had made it a prime factor of his job to become thoroughly well acquainted with every member of his staff. He had studied them _en masse_, in groups and singly. He had never, however, cornered Theodora Blake for individual study. Considering the power and the quality of her mind, and the field which was her specialty, it had not been necessary.

Thus it was with no ulterior motives at all that, three evenings later, he walked her cubby-hole office and tossed the stapled papers onto her desk. "Free for a couple of minutes, Teddy? I've got troubles."

"I'll say you have." Her lovely lips curled into an expression he had never before seen her wear--a veritable sneer. "But these are not them." She tossed the papers into a drawer and stuck out her chin. Her face turned as hard as such a beautiful face could. Her eyes dug steadily into his.

Hilton--inwardly--flinched. His mind flashed backward. She too had been working under stress, of course; but that wasn't enough. What could he have _possibly_ done to put Teddy Blake, of all people, onto such a warpath as this?

"I've been wondering when you were going to try to put _me_ through your wringer," she went on, in the same cold, hard voice, "and I've been waiting to tell you something. You have wrapped all the other women around your fingers like so many rings--and what a _sickening_ exhibition that has been!--but you are not going to make either a ring or a lap-dog out of me."

Almost but not quite too late Hilton saw through that perfect act. He seized her right hand in both of his, held it up over her head, and waved it back and forth in the sign of victory.

"Socked me with my own club!" he exulted, laughing delightedly, boyishly. "And came within a tenth of a split red hair! If it hadn't been so absolutely out of character you'd've got away with it. _What_ a load of stuff! I was right--of all the women on this project, you're the only one I've ever been really afraid of."

"Oh, damn. Ouch!" She grinned ruefully. "I hit you with everything I had and it just bounced. You're an operator, chief. Hit 'em hard, at completely unexpected angles. Keep 'em staggering, completely off balance. Tell 'em nothing--let 'em deduce your lies for themselves. And it anybody tries to slug you back, like I did just now, duck it and clobber him in another unprotected spot. Watching you work has been not only a delight, but also a liberal education."

* * * * *

"Thanks. I love you, too, Teddy." He lighted two cigarettes, handed her one. "I'm glad, though, to lay it flat on the table with you, because in any battle of wits with _you_ I'm licked before we start."

"Yeah. You just proved it. And after licking me hands down, you think you can square it by swinging the old shovel that way?" She did not quite know whether to feel resentful or not.

"Think over a couple of things. First, with the possible exception of Temple Bells, you're the best brain aboard."

"No. You are. Then Temple. Then there are ..."

"Hold it. You know as well as I do that accurate self-judgment is impossible. Second, the jam we're in. Do I, or don't I, want to lay it on the table with you, now and from here on? Bore into that with your Class A Double-Prime brain. Then tell me." He leaned back, half-closed his eyes and smoked lazily.

She stiffened; narrowed her eyes in concentration; and thought. Finally: "Yes, you do; and I'm gladder of that than you will ever know."

"I think I know already, since you're her best friend and the only other woman I know of in her class. But I came in to kick a couple of things around with you. As you've noticed, that's getting to be my favorite indoor sport. Probably because I'm a sort of jackleg theoretician myself."

"You can frame that, Jarve, as the understatement of the century. But first, you are going to answer that question you sidestepped so neatly."

"What I did to Bill? I finally convinced him that nobody expected the team to do that big a job overnight. That you could have ten years. Or more, if necessary."

"I see." She frowned. "But you and I both know that we _can't_ string it out that long."

He did not answer immediately. "We _could_. But we probably won't ... unless we have to. We should know, long before that, whether we'll have to switch to some other line of attack. You've considered the possibilities, of course. Have you got anything in shape to do a fine-tooth on?"

"Not yet. That is, except for the ultimate, which is too ghastly to even consider except as an ultimately last resort. Have you?"

"I know what you mean. No, I haven't, either. You don't think, then, that we had better do any collaborative thinking yet?"

"Definitely not. There's altogether too much danger of setting both our lines of thought into one dead-end channel."

"Check. The other thing I wanted from you is your considered opinion as to my job on the organization as a whole. And don't pull your punches. Are we in good shape or not? What can I do to improve the setup?"

* * * * *

"I have already considered that very thing--at great length. And honestly, Jarve, I don't see how it can be improved in any respect. You've done a marvelous job. Much better than I thought possible at first." He heaved a deep sigh of relief and she went on: "This could very easily have become a God-awful mess. But the Board knew what they were doing--especially as to top man--so there are only about four people aboard who realize what you have done. Alex Kincaid and Sandra Cummings are two of them. One of the three girls is very deeply and very truly in love with you."

"Ordinarily I'd say 'no comment', but we're laying on the line ... well ..."

"You'll lay _that_ on the line only if I corkscrew it out you, so I'll Q.E.D. it. You probably know that when Sandy gets done playing around it'll be ..."

"Bounce back, Teddy. She isn't--hasn't been. If anything, too much the opposite. A dedicated-scientist type."

She smiled--a highly cryptic smile. For a man as brilliant and as penetrant in every other respect ... but after all, if the big dope didn't realize that half the women aboard, including Sandy, had been making passes at him, she certainly wouldn't enlighten him. Besides, that one particular area of obtuseness was a real part of his charm. Wherefore she said merely: "I'm not sure whether I'm a bit catty or you're a bit stupid. Anyway, it's Alex she's really in love with. And you already know about Bill and me."

"Of course. He's tops. One of the world's very finest. You're in the same bracket, and as a couple you're a drive fit. One in a million."

"Now I can say 'I love you, too', too." She paused for half a minute, then stubbed out her cigarette and shrugged. "Now I'm going to stick my neck way, way out. You can knock it off if you like. She's a tremendous lot of woman, and if ... well, strong as she is, it'd shatter her to bits. So, I'd like to ask ... I don't quite ... well, _is_ she going to get hurt?"

"Have I managed to hide it _that_ well? From _you_?"

It was her turn to show relief. "Perfectly. Even--or especially--that time you kissed her. So damned perfectly that I've been scared green. I've been waking myself up, screaming, in the middle of the night. You couldn't let on, of course. That's the hell of such a job as yours. The rest of us can smooch around all over the place. I knew the question was extremely improper--thanks a million for answering it."

"I haven't started to answer it yet. I said I'd lay everything on the line, so here it is. Saying she's a tremendous lot of woman is like calling the _Perseus_ a nice little baby's-bathtub toy boat. I'd go to hell for her any time, cheerfully, standing straight up, wading into brimstone and lava up to the eyeballs. If anything ever hurts her it'll be because I'm not man enough to block it. And just the minute this damned job is over, or even sooner if enough of you couples make it so I can ..."

"Jarvis!" she shrieked. Jumping up, she kissed him enthusiastically. "That's just wonderful!"

* * * * *

He thought it was pretty wonderful, too; and after ten minutes more of conversation he got up and turned toward the door.

"I feel a lot better, Teddy. Thanks for being such a nice pressure-relief valve. Would you mind it too much if I come in and sob on your bosom again some day?"

"I'd love it!" She laughed; then, as he again started to leave: "Wait a minute, I'm thinking ... it'd be more fun to sob on _her_ bosom. You haven't even kissed her yet, have you? I mean _really_ kissed her?"

"You know I haven't. She's the one person aboard I can't be alone with for a second."

"True. But I know of one chaperone who could become deaf and blind," she said, with a broad and happy grin. "On my door, you know, there's a huge invisible sign that says, to everyone except you, 'STOP! BRAIN AT WORK! SILENCE!', and if I were properly approached and sufficiently urged, I might ... I just _conceivably_ might ..."

"Consider it done, you little sweetheart! Up to and including my most vigorous and most insidious attempts at seduction."

"Done. Maneuver your big, husky carcass around here behind the desk so the door can open." She flipped a switch and punched a number. "I can call anybody in here, any time, you know. Hello, dear, this is Teddy. Can you come in for just a few minutes? Thanks." And, one minute later, there came a light tap on the door.

"Come in," Teddy called, and Temple Bells entered the room. She showed no surprise at seeing Hilton.

"Hi, chief," she said. "It must be something both big and tough, to have you and Teddy both on it."

"You're so right. It was very big and very tough. But it's solved, darling, so ..."

"_Darling?_" she gasped, almost inaudibly, both hands flying to her throat. Her eyes flashed toward the other woman.

"Teddy knows all about us--accessory before, during and after the fact."

"_Darling!_" This time, the word was a shriek. She extended both arms and started forward.

Hilton did not bother to maneuver his "big, husky carcass" around the desk, but simply hurdled it, straight toward her.

* * * * *

Temple Bells was a tall, lithe, strong woman; and all the power of her arms and torso went into the ensuing effort to crack Hilton's ribs. Those ribs, however, were highly capable structural members; and furthermore, they were protected by thick slabs of hard, hard muscle. And, fortunately, he was not trying to fracture _her_ ribs. His pressures were distributed much more widely. He was, according to promise, doing his very best to flatten her whole resilient body out flat.

And as they stood there, locked together in sheerest ecstasy, Theodora Blake began openly and unashamedly to cry.

It was Temple who first came up for air. She wriggled loose from one of his arms, felt of her hair and gazed unseeingly into her mirror. "That was _wonderful_, sweetheart," she said then, shakily. "And I can _never_ thank you enough, Teddy. But we can't do this very often ... can we?" The addendum fairly begged for contradiction.

"Not too often, I'm afraid," Hilton said, and Theodora agreed....

"Well," the man said, somewhat later, "I'll leave you two ladies to your knitting, or whatever. After a couple of short ones for the road, that is."

"Not looking like that!" Teddy said, sharply. "Hold still and we'll clean you up." Then, as both girls went to work:

"If anybody ever sees you coming out of this office looking like _that_," she went on, darkly, "and Bill finds out about it, he'll think it's _my_ lipstick smeared all over you and I'll strangle you to death with my bare hands!"

"And that was supposed to be kissproof lipstick, too," Temple said, seriously--although her whole face glowed and her eyes danced. "You know, I'll never believe another advertisement I read."

"Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, if I were you." Teddy's voice was gravity itself, although she, too, was bubbling over. "It probably _is_ kissproof. I don't think 'kissing' is quite the word for the performance you just staged. To stand up under such punishment as you gave it, my dear, anything would have to be tattooed in, not just put on."

"Hey!" Hilton protested. "You promised to be deaf and blind!"

"I did no such thing. I said 'could', not 'would'. Why, I wouldn't have missed that for _anything_!"

When Hilton left the room he was apparently, in every respect, his usual self-contained self. However, it was not until the following morning that he so much as thought of the sheaf of papers lying unread in the drawer of Theodora Blake's desk.

VII

Knowing that he had done everything he could to help the most important investigations get under way, Hilton turned his attention to secondary matters. He made arrangements to decondition Javo, the Number Two Oman Boss, whereupon that worthy became Javvy and promptly "bumped" the Oman who had been shadowing Karns.

Larry and Javvy, working nights, deconditioned all the other Omans having any contact with BuSci personnel; then they went on to set up a routine for deconditioning all Omans on both planets.

Assured at last that the Omans would thenceforth work with and really serve human beings instead of insisting upon doing their work for them, Hilton knew that the time had come to let all his BuSci personnel move into their homes aground. Everyone, including himself, was fed up to the gozzel with spaceship life--its jam-packed crowding; its flat, reprocessed air; its limited variety of uninteresting food. Conditions were especially irksome since everybody knew that there was available to all, whenever Hilton gave the word, a whole city full of all the room anyone could want, natural fresh air and--so the Omans had told them--an unlimited choice of everything anyone wanted to eat.

Nevertheless, the decision was not an easy one to make.

Living conditions were admittedly not good on the ship. On the other hand, with almost no chance at all of solitude--the few people who had private offices aboard were not the ones he worried about--there was no danger of sexual trouble. Strictly speaking, he was not responsible for the morals of his force. He knew that he was being terribly old-fashioned. Nevertheless, he could not argue himself out of the conviction that he was morally responsible.

Finally he took the thing up with Sandra, who merely laughed at him. "How long have you been worrying about _that_, Jarve?"

"Ever since I okayed moving aground the first time. That was one reason I was so glad to cancel it then."

"You _were_ slightly unclear--a little rattled? But which factor--the fun and games, which is the moral issue, or the consequences?"

"The consequences," he admitted, with a rueful grin. "I don't give a whoop how much fun they have; but you know as well as I do just how prudish public sentiment is. And Project Theta Orionis is squarely in the middle of the public eye."

* * * * *

"You should have checked with me sooner and saved yourself wear and tear. There's no danger at all of consequences--except weddings. Lots of weddings, and fast."

"Weddings and babies wouldn't bother me a bit. Nor interfere with the job too much, with the Omans as nurses. But why the 'fast', if you aren't anticipating any shotgun weddings?"

"Female psychology," she replied, with a grin. "Aboard-ship here there's no home atmosphere whatever; nothing but work, work, work. Put a woman into a house, though--especially such houses as the Omans have built and with such servants as they insist on being--and she goes domestic in a really big way. Just sex isn't good enough any more. She wants the kind of love that goes with a husband and a home, and nine times out of ten she gets it. With these BuSci women it'll be ten out of ten."

"You may be right, of course, but it sounds kind of far-fetched to me."

"Wait and see, chum," Sandra said, with a laugh.

Hilton made his announcement and everyone moved aground the next day. No one, however, had elected to live alone. Almost everyone had chosen to double up; the most noteworthy exceptions being twelve laboratory girls who had decided to keep on living together. However, they now had a twenty-room house instead of a one-room dormitory to live in, and a staff of twenty Oman girls to help them do it.

Hilton had suggested that Temple and Teddy, whose house was only a hundred yards or so from the Hilton-Karns bungalow, should have supper and spend the first evening with them; but the girls had knocked that idea flat. Much better, they thought, to let things ride as nearly as possible exactly as they had been aboard the _Perseus_.

"A _little_ smooching now and then, on the Q strictly T, but that's all, darling. That's _positively_ all," Temple had said, after a highly satisfactory ten minutes alone with him in her own gloriously private room, and that was the way it had to be.

Hence it was a stag inspection that Hilton and Karns made of their new home. It was very long, very wide, and for its size very low. Four of its five rooms were merely adjuncts to its tremendous living-room. There was a huge fireplace at each end of this room, in each of which a fire of four-foot-long fir cordwood crackled and snapped. There was a great hi-fi tri-di, with over a hundred tapes, all new.

"Yes, sirs," Larry and Javvy spoke in unison. "The players and singers who entertained the Masters of old have gone back to work. They will also, of course, appear in person whenever and wherever you wish."

* * * * *

Both men looked around the vast room and Karns said: "All the comforts of home and a couple of bucks' worth besides. Wall-to-wall carpeting an inch and a half thick. A grand piano. Easy chairs and loafers and davenports. Very fine reproductions of our favorite paintings ... and statuary."

"You said it, brother." Hilton was bending over a group in bronze. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear this is the original deHaven 'Dance of the Nymphs'."

Karns had marched up to and was examining minutely a two-by-three-foot painting, in a heavy gold frame, of a gorgeously auburn-haired nude. "Reproduction, hell! This is a _duplicate_! Lawrence's 'Innocent' is worth twenty million wogs and it's sealed behind quad armor-glass in Prime Art--but I'll bet wogs to wiggles the Prime Curator himself, with all his apparatus, couldn't tell this one from his!"

"I wouldn't take even one wiggle's worth of that. And this 'Laughing Cavalier' and this 'Toledo' are twice as old and twice as fabulously valuable."

"And there are my own golf clubs...."

"Excuse us, sirs," the Omans said, "These things were simple because they could be induced in your minds. But the matter of a staff could not, nor what you would like to eat for supper, and it is growing late."

"Staff? What the hell has the staff got to do with ..."

"_House_-staff, they mean," Karns said. "We don't need much of anybody, boys. Somebody to keep the place shipshape, is all. Or, as a de luxe touch, how about a waitress? One housekeeper and one waitress. That'll be finer."

"Very well, sirs. There is one other matter. It has troubled us that we have not been able to read in your minds the logical datum that they should in fact simulate Doctor Bells and Doctor Blake?"

"Huh?" Both men gasped--and then both exploded like one twelve-inch length of primacord.

* * * * *

While the Omans could not understand this purely Terran reasoning, they accepted the decision without a demurring thought. "Who, then, are the two its to simulate?"

"No stipulation; roll your own," Hilton said, and glanced at Karns. "None of these Oman women are really hard on the eyes."

"Check. Anybody who wouldn't call any one of 'em a slurpy dish needs a new set of optic nerves."

"In that case," the Omans said, "no delay at all will be necessary, as we can make do with one temporarily. The Sory, no longer Sora, who has not been glad since the Tuly replaced it, is now in your kitchen. It comes."

A woman came in and stood quietly in front of the two men, the wafted air carrying from her clear, smooth skin a faint but unmistakable fragrance of Idaho mountain syringa. She was radiantly happy; her bright, deep-green eyes went from man to man.

"You wish, sirs, to give me your orders verbally. And yes, you may order fresh, whole, not-canned hens' eggs."

"I certainly will, then; I haven't had a fried egg since we left Terra. But ... Larry said ... _you_ aren't Sory!"

"Oh, but I am, sir."

Karns had been staring her, eyes popping. "Holy Saint Patrick! Talk about simulation, Jarve! They've made her over into Lawrence's 'Innocent'--exact to twenty decimals!"

"You're so right." Hilton's eyes went, half a dozen times, from the form of flesh to the painting and back. "That must have been a terrific job."

"Oh, no. It was quite simple, really," Sory said, "since the brain was not involved. I merely reddened my hair and lengthened it, made my eyes to be green, changed my face a little, pulled myself in a little around here...." Her beautifully-manicured hands swept the full circle of her waistline, then continued to demonstrate appropriately the rest of her speech:

"... and pushed me out a little up here and tapered my legs a little more--made them a little larger and rounder here at my hips and thighs and a little smaller toward and at my ankles. Oh, yes, and made my feet and hands a little smaller. That's all. I thought the Doctor Karns would like me a little better this way."

* * * * *

"You can broadcast _that_ over the P-A system at high noon." Karns was still staring. "'That's all,' she says. But you didn't have _time_ to ..."

"Oh, I did it day before yesterday. As soon as Javvy materialized the 'Innocent' and I knew it to be your favorite art."

"But damn it, we hadn't even _thought_ of having you here then!"

"But I had, sir. I fully intended to serve, one way or another, in this your home. But of course I had no idea I would ever have such an honor as actually waiting on you at your table. Will you please give me your orders, sirs, besides the eggs? You wish the eggs fried in butter--three of them apiece--and sunny side up."

"Uh-huh, with ham," Hilton said. "I'll start with a jumbo shrimp cocktail. Horseradish and ketchup sauce; heavy on the horseradish."

"Same for me," Karns said, "but only half as much horseradish."

"And for the rest of it," Hilton went on, "hashed-brown potatoes and buttered toast--plenty of extra butter--strong coffee from first to last. Whipping cream and sugar on the side. For dessert, apple pie _a la mode_."

"You make me drool, chief. Play that for me, please, Innocent, all the way."

"Oh? You are--you, personally, yourself, sir?--renaming me 'Innocent'?"

"If you'll sit still for it, yes."

"That is an incredible honor, sir. Simply unbelievable. I thank you! I thank you!" Radiating happiness, she dashed away toward the kitchen.

* * * * *

When the two men were full of food, they strolled over to a davenport facing the fire. As they sat down, Innocent entered the room, carrying a tall, dewy mint julep on a tray. She was followed by another female figure bearing a bottle of avignognac and the appurtenances which are its due--and at the first full sight of that figure Hilton stopped breathing for fifteen seconds.

Her hair was very thick, intensely black and long, cut squarely off just below the lowest points of her shoulder blades. Heavy brows and long lashes--eyes too--were all intensely, vividly black. Her skin was tanned to a deep and glowing almost-but-not-quite-brown.

"Murchison's Dark Lady!" Hilton gasped. "Larry! You've--we've--_I've_ got that painting here?"

"Oh, yes, sir." The newcomer spoke before Larry could. "At the other end--your part--of the room. You will look now, sir, please?" Her voice was low, rich and as smooth as cream.

Putting her tray down carefully on the end-table, she led him toward the other fireplace. Past the piano, past the tri-di pit; past a towering grillwork holding art treasures by the score. Over to the left, against the wall, there was a big, business-like desk. On the wall, over the desk, hung _the_ painting; a copy of which had been in Hilton's room for over eight years.

He stared at it for at least a minute. He glanced around: at the other priceless duplicates so prodigally present, at his own guns arrayed above the mantel and on each side of the fireplace. Then, without a word, he started back to join Karns. She walked springily beside him.

"What's your name, Miss?" he asked, finally.

"I haven't earned any as yet, sir. My number is ..."

"Never mind that. Your name is 'Dark Lady'."

"Oh, thank you, sir; that is truly wonderful!" And Dark Lady sat cross-legged on the rug at Hilton's feet and busied herself with the esoteric rites of Old Avignon.

Hilton took a deep inhalation and a small sip, then stared at Karns. Karns, over the rim of his glass, stared back.

"I can see where this would be habit-forming," Hilton said, "and very deadly. _Extremely_ deadly."

"Every wish granted. Surrounded by all this." Karns swept his arm through three-quarters of a circle. "Waited on hand and foot by powerful men and by the materializations of the dreams of the greatest, finest artists who ever lived. Fatal? I don't know...."

* * * * *

"My solid hope is that we never have to find out. And when you add in Innocent and Dark Lady.... They _look_ to be about seventeen, but the thought that they're older than the hills of Rome and powered by everlasting atomic engines--" He broke off suddenly and blushed. "Excuse me, please, girls. I _know_ better than to talk about people that way, right in front of them; I really do."

"Do you really think we're _people_?" Innocent and Dark Lady squealed, as one.

That set Hilton back onto his heels. "I don't know.... I've wondered. Are you?"

Both girls, silent, looked at Larry.

"We don't know, either," Larry said. "At first, of course, there were crude, non-thinking machines. But when the Guide attained its present status, the Masters themselves could not agree. They divided about half and half on the point. They never did settle it any closer than that."

"I certainly won't try to, then. But for my money, you are people," Hilton said, and Karns agreed.

That, of course, touched off a near-riot of joy; after which the two men made an inch-by-inch study of their tremendous living-room. Then, long after bedtime, Larry and Dark Lady escorted Hilton to his bedroom.

"Do you mind, sir, if we sleep on the floor at the sides of your bed?" Larry asked. "Or must we go out into the hall?"

"Sleep? I didn't know you _could_ sleep."

"It is not essential. However, when round-the-clock work is not necessary, and we have opportunity to sleep near a human being, we derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it. You see, sir, we also serve during sleep."

"Okay, I'll try anything once. Sleep wherever you please."

Hilton began to peel, but before he had his shirt off both Larry and Dark Lady were stretched out flat, sound asleep, one almost under each edge of his bed. He slid in between the sheets--it was the most comfortable bed he had ever slept in--and went to sleep as though sandbagged.

He had time to wonder foggily whether the Omans were in fact helping him go to sleep--and then he _was_ asleep.

* * * * *

A month passed. Eight couples had married, the Navy chaplain officiating--in the _Perseus_, of course, since the warship was, always and everywhere, an integral part of Terra.

Sandra had dropped in one evening to see Hilton about a bit of business. She was now sitting, long dancer's legs out-stretched toward the fire, with a cigarette in her left hand and a tall, cold drink on a coaster at her right.

"This is a wonderful room, Jarvis. It'd be perfect if it weren't quite so ... so mannish."

"What do you expect of Bachelors' Hall--a boudoir? Don't tell me _you're_ going domestic, Sandy, just because you've got a house?"

"Not just that, no. But of course it helped it along."

"Alex is a mighty good man. One of the finest I have ever known."

She eyed him for a moment in silence. "Jarvis Hilton, you are one of the keenest, most intelligent men who ever lived. And yet ..." She broke off and studied him for a good half minute. "Say, if I let my hair clear down, will you?"

"Scout's Oath. That 'and yet' requires elucidation at any cost."

"I know. But first, yes, it's Alex. I never would have believed that any man ever born could hit me so hard. Soon. I didn't want to be the first, but I won't be anywhere near the last. But tell me. You were really in love with Temple, weren't you, when I asked you?"

"Yes."

"Ha! You _are_ letting your hair down! That makes me feel better."

"Huh? Why should it?"

"It elucidates the 'and yet' no end. You were insulated from all other female charms by ye brazen Bells. You see, most of us assistants made a kind of game out of seeing which of us could make you break the Executives' Code. And none of us made it. Teddy and Temple said you didn't know what was going on; Bev and I said nobody as smart as you are could possibly be that stupid."

"You aren't the type to leak or name names--oh, I see. You are merely reporting a conversation. The game had interested, but non-participating, observers. Temple and Teddy, at least."

"At least," she agreed. "But damn it, you _aren't_ stupid. There isn't a stupid bone in your head. So it must be love. And if so, what about marriage? Why don't you and Temple make it a double with Alex and me?"

"That's the most cogent thought you ever had, but setting the date is the bride's business." He glanced at his Oman wristwatch. "It's early yet; let's skip over. I wouldn't mind seeing her a minute or two."

"Thy statement ringeth with truth, friend. Bill's there with Teddy?"

"I imagine so."

"So we'll talk to them about making it a triple. Oh, nice--let's go!"

They left the house and, her hand tucked under his elbow, walked up the street.

* * * * *

Next morning, on her way to the Hall of Records, Sandra stopped off as usual at the office. The Omans were all standing motionless. Hilton was leaning far back in his chair, feet on desk, hands clasped behind head, eyes closed. Knowing what that meant, she turned and started back out on tiptoe.

However, he had heard her. "Can you spare a couple of minutes to think at me, Sandy?"

"Minutes or hours, chief." Tuly placed a chair for her and she sat down, facing him across his desk.

"Thanks, gal. This time it's the Stretts. Sawtelle's been having nightmares, you know, ever since we emerged, about being attacked, and I've been pooh-poohing the idea. But now it's a statistic that the soup is getting thicker, and I can't figure out why. Why in all the hells of space should a stasis that has lasted for over a quarter of a million years be broken at this exact time? The only possible explanation is that _we_ caused the break. And any way I look at that concept, it's plain idiocy."

Both were silent for minutes; and then it was demonstrated again that Terra's Advisory Board had done better than it knew in choosing Sandra Cummings to be Jarvis Hilton's working mate.

"We did cause it, Jarve," she said, finally. "They knew we were coming, even before we got to Fuel Bin. They knew we were human and tried to wipe out the Omans before we got there. Preventive warfare, you know."

"They _couldn't_ have known!" he snorted. "Strett detectors are no better than Oman, and you know what Sam Bryant had to say about them."

"I know." Sandra grinned appreciatively. "It's becoming a classic. But it couldn't have been any other way. Besides, I _know_ they did."

He stared at her helplessly, then swung on Larry. "Does that make sense to you?"

"Yes, sir. The Stretts could peyondire as well as the old Masters could, and they undoubtedly still can and do."

"Okay, it does make sense, then." He absented himself in thought, then came to life with a snap. "Okay! The next thing on the agenda is a crash-priority try at a peyondix team. Tuly, you organized a team to generate sathura. Can you do the same for peyondix?"

"If we can find the ingredients, yes, sir."

* * * * *

"I had a hunch. Larry, please ask Teddy Blake's Oman to bring her in here...."

"I'll be running along, then." Sandra started to get up.

"I hope to kiss a green pig you won't!" Hilton snapped. "You're one of the biggest wheels. Larry, we'll want Temple Bells and Beverly Bell--for a start."

"Chief, you positively amaze me," Sandra said then. "Every time you get one of these attacks of genius--or whatever it is--you have me gasping like a fish. Just what can you _possibly_ want of Bev Bell?"

"Whatever it was that enabled her to hit the target against odds of almost infinity to one; not just once, but time after time. By definition, intuition. What quality did you use just now in getting me off the hook? Intuition. What makes Teddy Blake such an unerring performer? Intuition again. My hunches--they're intuition, too. Intuition, _hell_! Labels--based on utterly abysmal damned dumb ignorance of our own basic frames of reference. Do you think those four kinds of intuition are alike, by seven thousand rows of apple trees?"

"Of course not. I see what you're getting at.... Oh! This'll be fun!"

The others came in and, one by one, Tuly examined each of the four women and the man. Each felt the probing, questioning feelers of her thought prying into the deepest recesses of his mind.

"There is not quite enough of each of three components, all of which are usually associated with the male. You, sir, have much of each, but not enough. I know your men quite well, and I think we will need the doctors Kincaid and Karns and Poynter. But such deep probing is felt. Have I permission, sir?"

"Yes. Tell 'em I said so."

Tuly scanned. "Yes, sir, we should have all three."

"Get 'em, Larry." Then, in the pause that followed: "Sandy, remember yowling about too many sweeties on a team? What do you think of this business of all sweeties?"

"All that proves is that nobody can be wrong all the time," she replied flippantly.

The three men arrived and were instructed. Tuly said: "The great trouble is that each of you must use a portion of your mind that you do not know you have. You, this one. You, that one." Tuly probed mercilessly; so poignantly that each in turn flinched under brand-new and almost unbearable pain. "With you, Doctor Hilton, it will be by far the worst. For you must learn to use almost all the portions of both your minds, the conscious and the unconscious. This must be, because you are the actual peyondixer. The others merely supply energies in which you yourself are deficient. Are you ready for a terrible shock, sir?"

"Shoot."

* * * * *

He thought for a second that he _had_ been shot; that his brain had blown up.

He couldn't stand it--he _knew_ he was going to die--he wished he _could_ die--anything, anything whatever, to end this unbearable agony....

It ended.

Writhing, white and sweating, Hilton opened his eyes. "Ouch," he remarked, conversationally. "What next?"

"You will seize hold of the energies your friends offer. You will bind them to yours and shape the whole into a dimensionless sphere of pure controlled, dirigible energy. And, as well as being the binding force, the cohesiveness, you must also be the captain and the pilot and the astrogator and the ultimately complex computer itself."

"But how can I.... Okay, damn it. I _will_!"

"Of course you will, sir. Remember also that once the joinings are made I can be of very little more assistance, for my peyondix is as nothing compared to that of your fusion of eight. Now, to assemble the energies and join them you will, all together, deny the existence of the sum total of reality as you know it. Distance does not exist--every point in the reachable universe coincides with every other point and that common point is the focus of your attention. You can be and actually are anywhere you please or everywhere at once. Time does not exist. Space does not exist. There is no such thing as opacity; everything is perfectly transparent, yet every molecule of substance is perceptible in its relationship to every other molecule in the cosmos. Senses do not exist. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, sathura, endovix--all are parts of the one great sense of peyondix. I am guiding each of you seven--closer! Tighter! There! Seize it, sir--and when you work the Stretts you must fix it clearly that time does not exist. You must work in millionths of microseconds instead of in minutes, for they have minds of tremendous power. Reality does not exist! Compress it more, sir. Tighter! Smaller! Rounder! There! Hold it! Reality does not exist--distance does not exist--all possible points are.... _Wonderful!_"

Tuly screamed the word and the thought: "Good-by! Good luck!"

END OF PART ONE

PART TWO

They were the Masters, and they had only to choose: eternal life, as inhuman monsters--or death!

MASTERS OF SPACE

BY EDWARD E. SMITH & E. EVERETT EVANS

Illustrated by BERRY

_What has gone before: The crew of the starship Orion found themselves in the middle of a great space war between the creatures called Stretts and the lost android servants of their own human ancestors. Helped by the androids, the Earthmen formed themselves into the powerful telepathic linkage called "peyondix" to invade the Strett planet itself. As their minds joined they heard the android Tuly cry out, "Good...." And then their minds were out in interstellar space._

VIII

Hilton did not have to drive the peyondix-beam to the planet Strett; it was already there. And there was the monstrous First Lord Thinker Zoyar.

Into that mind his multi-mind flashed, its every member as responsive to his will as his own fingers--almost infinitely more so, in fact, because of the tremendous lengths of time required to send messages along nerves.

That horrid mind was scanned cell by cell. Then, after what seemed like a few hours, when a shield began sluggishly to form, Hilton transferred his probe to the mind of the Second Thinker, one Lord Ynos, and absorbed everything she knew. Then, the minds of all the other Thinkers being screened, he studied the whole Strett planet, foot by foot, and everything that was on it.

Then, mission accomplished, Hilton snapped his attention back to his office and the multi-mind fell apart. As he opened his eyes he heard Tuly scream: "... Luck!"

"Oh--you still here, Tuly? How long have we been gone?"

"Approximately one and one-tenth seconds, sir."

"WHAT!"

Beverly Bell, in the haven of Franklin Poynter's arms, fainted quietly. Sandra shrieked piercingly. The four men stared, goggle-eyed. Temple and Teddy, as though by common thought, burrowed their faces into brawny shoulders.

Hilton recovered first. "So _that's_ what peyondix is."

"Yes, sir--I mean no, sir. No, I mean yes, but ..." Tuly paused, licking her lips in that peculiarly human-female gesture of uncertainty.

"Well, what _do_ you mean? It either is or isn't. Or is that necessarily so?"

"Not exactly, sir. That is, it started as peyondix. But it became something else. Not even the most powerful of the old Masters--nobody--ever did or ever could _possibly_ generate such a force as that. Or handle it so fast."

"Well, with seven of the best minds of Terra and a ..."

"Chip-chop the chit-chat!" Karns said, harshly. "What I want to know is whether I was having a nightmare. Can there _possibly_ be a race such as I thought I saw? So utterly savage--ruthless--merciless! So devoid of every human trace and so hell-bent determined on the extermination of every other race in the Galaxy? God damn it, it simply doesn't make sense!"

* * * * *

Eyes went from eyes to eyes to eyes.

All had seen the same indescribably horrible, abysmally atrocious, things. Qualities and quantities and urges and drives that no words in any language could even begin to portray.

"It doesn't seem to, but there it is." Teddy Blake shook her head hopelessly.

Big Bill Karns, hands still shaking, lit a cigarette before he spoke again. "Well, I've never been a proponent of genocide. But it's my considered opinion that the Stretts are one race the galaxy can get along without."

"A hell of a lot better without," Poynter said, and all agreed.

"The point is, what can we do about it?" Kincaid asked. "The first thing, I would say, is to see whether we can do this--whatever it is--without Tuly's help. Shall we try it? Although I, for one, don't feel like doing it right away."

"Not I, either." Beverly Bell held up her right hand, which was shaking uncontrollably. "I feel as though I'd been bucking waves, wind and tide for forty-eight straight hours without food, water or touch. Maybe in about a week I'll be ready for another try at it. But today--not a chance!"

"Okay. Scat, all of you," Hilton ordered. "Take the rest of the day off and rest up. Put on your thought-screens and don't take them off for a second from now on. Those Stretts are tough hombres."

Sandra was the last to leave. "And you, boss?" she asked pointedly.

"I've got some thinking to do."

"I'll stay and help you think?"

"Not yet." He shook his head, frowned and then grinned. "You see, chick, I don't even know yet what it is I'm going to have to think about."

"A bit unclear, but I know what you mean--I think. Luck, chief."

* * * * *

In their subterranean sanctum turn on distant Strett, two of the deepest thinkers of that horribly unhuman race were in coldly intent conference via thought.

"My mind has been plundered, Ynos," First Lord Thinker Zoyar radiated, harshly. "Despite the extremely high reactivity of my shield some information--I do not know how much--was taken. The operator was one of the humans of that ship."

"I, too, felt a plucking at my mind. But those humans could not peyondire, First Lord."

"Be logical, fool! At that contact, in the matter of which you erred in not following up continuously, they succeeded in concealing their real abilities from you."

"That could be the truth. Our ancestors erred, then, in recording that all those weak and timid humans had been slain. These offenders are probably their descendants, returning to reclaim their former world."

"The probability must be evaluated and considered. Was it or was it not through human aid that the Omans destroyed most of our task-force?"

"Highly probable, but impossible of evaluation with the data now available."

"Obtain more data at once. That point must be and shall be fully evaluated and fully considered. This entire situation is intolerable. It must be abated."

"True, First Lord. But every operator and operation is now tightly screened. Oh, if I could only go out there myself ..."

"Hold, fool! Your thought is completely disloyal and un-Strettly."

"True, oh First Lord Thinker Zoyar. I will forthwith remove my unworthy self from this plane of existence."

"You will not! I hereby abolish that custom. Our numbers are too few by far. Too many have failed to adapt. Also, as Second Thinker, your death at this time would be slightly detrimental to certain matters now in work. I will myself, however, slay the unfit. To that end repeat The Words under my peyondiring."

"I am a Strett. I will devote my every iota of mental and of physical strength to forwarding the Great Plan. I am, and will remain, a Strett."

"You do believe in The Words."

* * * * *

"Of course I believe in them! I _know_ that in a few more hundreds of thousands of years we will be rid of material bodies and will become invincible and invulnerable. Then comes the Conquest of the Galaxy ... and then the Conquest of the Universe!"

"No more, then, on your life, of this weak and cowardly repining! Now, what of your constructive thinking?"

"Programming must be such as to obviate time-lag. We must evaluate the factors already mentioned and many others, such as the reactivation of the spacecraft which was thought to have been destroyed so long ago. After having considered all these evaluations, I will construct a Minor Plan to destroy these Omans, whom we have permitted to exist on sufferance, and with them that shipload of despicably interloping humans."

"That is well." Zoyar's mind seethed with a malevolent ferocity starkly impossible for any human mind to grasp. "And to that end?"

"To that end we must intensify still more our program of procuring data. We must revise our mechs in the light of our every technological advance during the many thousands of cycles since the last such revision was made. Our every instrument of power, of offense and of defense, must be brought up to the theoretical ultimate of capability."

"And as to the Great Brain?"

"I have been able to think of nothing, First Lord, to add to the undertakings you have already set forth."

"It was not expected that you would. Now: is it your final thought that these interlopers are in fact the descendants of those despised humans of so long ago?"

"It is."

"It is also mine. I return, then, to my work upon the Brain. You will take whatever measures are necessary. Use every artifice of intellect and of ingenuity and our every resource. But abate this intolerable nuisance, and soon."

"It shall be done, First Lord."

* * * * *

The Second Thinker issued orders. Frenzied, round-the-clock activity ensued. Hundreds of mechs operated upon the brains of hundreds of others, who in turn operated upon the operators.

Then, all those brains charged with the technological advances of many thousands of years, the combined hundreds went unrestingly to work. Thousands of work-mechs were built and put to work at the construction of larger and more powerful space-craft.

As has been implied, those battle-skeletons of the Stretts were controlled by their own built-in mechanical brains, which were programmed for only the simplest of battle maneuvers. Anything at all out of the ordinary had to be handled by remote control, by the specialist-mechs at their two-miles-long control board.

This was now to be changed. Programming was to be made so complete that almost any situation could be handled by the warship or the missile itself--instantly.

The Stretts _knew_ that they were the most powerful, the most highly advanced race in the universe. Their science was the highest in the universe. Hence, with every operating unit brought up to the full possibilities of that science, that would be more than enough. Period.

This work, while it required much time, was very much simpler than the task which the First Thinker had laid out for himself on the giant computer-plus which the Stretts called "The Great Brain." In stating his project, First Lord Zoyar had said:

"Assignment: To construct a machine that will have the following abilities: One, to contain and retain all knowledge and information fed into it, however great the amount. Two, to feed itself additional information by peyondiring all planets, wherever situate, bearing intelligent life. Three, to call up instantly any and all items of information pertaining to any problem we may give it. Four, to combine and recombine any number of items required to form new concepts. Five, to formulate theories, test them and draw conclusions helpful to us in any matter in work."

It will have been noticed that these specifications vary in one important respect from those of the Eniacs and Univacs of Earth. Since we of Earth can not peyondire, we do not expect that ability from our computers.

The Stretts could, and did.

* * * * *

When Sandra came back into the office at five o'clock she found Hilton still sitting there, in almost exactly the same position.

"Come out of it, Jarve!" She snapped a finger. "That much of _that_ is just simply too damned much."

"You're so right, child." He got up, stretched, and by main strength shrugged off his foul mood. "But we're up against something that is really a something, and I don't mean perchance."

"How well I know it." She put an arm around him, gave him a quick, hard hug. "But after all, you don't have to solve it this evening, you know."

"No, thank God."

"So why don't you and Temple have supper with me? Or better yet, why don't all eight of us have supper together in that bachelors' paradise of yours and Bill's?"

"That'd be fun."

And it was.

Nor did it take a week for Beverly Bell to recover from the Ordeal of Eight. On the following evening, she herself suggested that the team should take another shot at that utterly fantastic _terra incognita_ of the multiple mind, jolting though it had been.

"But are you sure you can take it again so soon?" Hilton asked.

"Sure. I'm like that famous gangster's moll, you know, who bruised easy but healed quick. And I want to know about it as much as anyone else does."

They could do it this time without any help from Tuly. The linkage fairly snapped together and shrank instantaneously to a point. Hilton thought of Terra and there it was; full size, yet occupying only one infinitesimal section of a dimensionless point. The multi-mind visited relatives of all eight, but could not make intelligible contact. If asleep, it caused pleasant dreams; if awake, pleasant thoughts of the loved one so far away in space; but that was all. It visited mediums, in trance and otherwise--many of whom, not surprisingly now, were genuine--with whom it held lucid conversations. Even in linkage, however, the multi-mind knew that none of the mediums would be believed, even if they all told, simultaneously, exactly the same story. The multi-mind weakened suddenly and Hilton snapped it back to Ardry.

Beverly was almost in collapse. The other girls were white, shaken and trembling. Hilton himself, strong and rugged as he was, felt as though he had done two weeks of hard labor on a rock-pile. He glanced questioningly at Larry.

"Point six three eight seconds, sir," the Omans said, holding up a millisecond timer.

"How do you explain _that_?" Karns demanded.

"I'm afraid it means that without Oman backing we're out of luck."

* * * * *

Hilton had other ideas, but he did not voice any of them until the following day, when he was rested and had Larry alone.

"So carbon-based brains can't take it. One second of that stuff would have killed all eight of us. Why? The Masters had the same kind of brains we have."

"I don't know, sir. It's something completely new. No Master, or group of Masters, ever generated such a force as that. I can scarcely believe such power possible, even though I have felt it twice. It may be that over the generations your individual powers, never united or controlled, have developed so strength that no human can handle them in fusion."

"And none of us ever knew anything about any of them. I've been doing a lot of thinking. The Masters had qualities and abilities now unknown to any of us. How come? You Omans--and the Stretts, too--think we're descendants of the Masters. Maybe we are. You think they came originally from Arth--Earth or Terra--to Ardu. That'd account for our legends of Mu, Atlantis and so on. Since Ardu was within peyondix range of Strett, the Stretts attacked it. They killed all the Masters, they thought, and made the planet uninhabitable for any kind of life, even their own. But one shipload of Masters escaped and came here to Ardry--far beyond peyondix range. They stayed here for a long time. Then, for some reason or other--which may be someplace in their records--they left here, fully intending to come back. Do any of you Omans know why they left? Or where they went?"

"No, sir. We can read only the simplest of the Masters' records. They arranged our brains that way, sir."

"I know. They're the type. However, I suspect now that your thinking is reversed. Let's turn it around. Say the Masters didn't come from Terra, but from some other planet. Say that they left here because they were dying out. They were, weren't they?"

"Yes, sir. Their numbers became fewer and fewer each century."

"I was sure of it. They were committing race suicide by letting you Omans do everything they themselves should have been doing. Finally they saw the truth. In a desperate effort to save their race they pulled out, leaving you here. Probably they intended to come back when they had bred enough guts back into themselves to set you Omans down where you belong...."

"But _they_ were always the Masters, sir!"

"They were not! They were hopelessly enslaved. Think it over. Anyway, say they went _to_ Terra from here. That still accounts for the legends and so on. However, they were too far gone to make a recovery, and yet they had enough fixity of purpose _not_ to manufacture any of you Omans there. So their descendants went a long way down the scale before they began to work back up. Does that make sense to you?"

* * * * *

"It explains many things, sir. It can very well be the truth."

"Okay. However it was, we're here, and facing a condition that isn't funny. While we were teamed up I learned a lot, but not nearly enough. Am I right in thinking that I now don't need the other seven at all--that my cells are fully charged and I can go it alone?"

"Probably, sir, but ..."

"I'm coming to that. Every time I do it--up to maximum performance, of course--it comes easier and faster and hits harder. So next time, or maybe the fourth or fifth time, it'll kill me. And the other seven, too, if they're along."

"I'm not sure, sir, but I think so."

"Nice. Very, _very_ nice." Hilton got up, shoved both hands into his pockets, and prowled about the room. "But can't the damned stuff be controlled? Choked--throttled down--damped--muzzled, some way or other?"

"We do not know of any way, sir. The Masters were always working toward more power, not less."

"That makes sense. The more power the better, as long as you can handle it. But I can't handle this. And neither can the team. So how about organizing another team, one that hasn't got quite so much whammo? Enough punch to do the job, but not enough to backfire that way?"

"It is highly improbable that such a team is possible, sir." If an Oman could be acutely embarrassed, Larry was. "That is, sir ... I should tell you, sir ..."

"You certainly should. You've been stalling all along, and now you're stalled. Spill it."

"Yes, sir. The Tuly begged me not to mention it, but I must. When it organized your team it had no idea of what it was really going to do...."

"Let's talk the same language, shall we? Say 'he' and 'she.' Not 'it.'"

"She thought she was setting up the peyondix, the same as all of us Omans have. But after she formed in your mind the peyondix matrix, your mind went on of itself to form a something else; a thing we can not understand. That was why she was so extremely ... I think 'frightened' might be your term."

"I knew something was biting her. Why?"

"Because it very nearly killed you. You perhaps have not considered the effect upon us all if any Oman, however unintentionally, should kill a Master?"

"No, I hadn't ... I see. So she won't play with fire any more, and none of the rest of you can?"

"Yes, sir. Nothing could force her to. If she could be so coerced we would destroy her brain before she could act. That brain, as you know, is imperfect, or she could not have done what she did. It should have been destroyed long since."

"Don't _ever_ act on that assumption, Larry." Hilton thought for minutes. "Simple peyondix, such as yours, is not enough to read the Masters' records. If I'd had three brain cells working I'd've tried them then. I wonder if I _could_ read them?"

"You have all the old Masters' powers and more. But you must not assemble them again, sir. It would mean death."

"But I've got to _know_.... I've _got_ to know! Anyway, a thousandth of a second would be enough. I don't think that'd hurt me very much."

* * * * *

He concentrated--read a few feet of top-secret braided wire--and came back to consciousness in the sickbay of the _Perseus_, with two doctors working on him; Hastings, the top Navy medico, and Flandres, the surgeon.

"What the hell happened to you?" Flandres demanded. "Were you trying to kill yourself?"

"And if so, how?" Hastings wanted to know.

"No, I was trying not to," Hilton said, weakly, "and I guess I didn't much more than succeed."

"That was just about the closest shave I ever saw a man come through. Whatever it was, don't do it again."

"I won't," he promised, feelingly.

When they let him out of the hospital, four days later, he called in Larry and Tuly.

"The next time would be the last time. So there won't be any," he told them. "But just how sure are you that some other of our boys or girls may not have just enough of whatever it takes to do the job? Enough oompa, but not too much?"

"Since we, too, are on strange ground the probability is vanishingly small. We have been making inquiries, however, and scanning. You were selected from all the minds of Terra as the one having the widest vision, the greatest scope, the most comprehensive grasp. The ablest at synthesis and correlation and so on."

"That's printing it in big letters, but that was more or less what they were after."

"Hence the probability approaches unity that any more such ignorant meddling as this obnoxious Tuly did well result almost certainly in failure and death. Therefore we can not and will not meddle again."

* * * * *

"You've got a point there.... So what I am is some kind of a freak. Maybe a kind of super-Master and maybe something altogether different. Maybe duplicable in a less lethal fashion, and maybe not. Veree helpful--I don't think. But I don't want to kill anybody, either ... especially if it wouldn't do any good. But we've got to do _something_!" Hilton scowled in thought for minutes. "But an Oman brain could take it. As you told us, Tuly, 'The brain of the Larry is very, very tough.'"

"In a way, sir. Except that the Masters were very careful to make it physically impossible for any Oman to go very far along that line. It was only their oversight of my one imperfect brain that enabled me, alone of us all, to do that wrong."

"Stop thinking it was wrong, Tuly. I'm mighty glad you did. But I wasn't thinking of any regular Oman brain...." Hilton's voice petered out.

"I see, sir. Yes, we can, by using your brain as Guide, reproduce it in an Oman body. You would then have the powers and most of the qualities of both ..."

"No, you don't see, because I've got my screen on. Which I will now take off--" he suited action to word--"since the whole planet's screened and I have nothing to hide from you. Teddy Blake and I both thought of that, but we'll consider it only as the ultimately last resort. We don't want to live a million years. And we want our race to keep on developing. But you folks can replace carbon-based molecules with silicon-based ones just as easily as, and a hell of a lot faster than, mineral water petrifies wood. What can you do along the line of rebuilding me that way? And if you can do any such conversion, what would happen? Would I live at all? And if so, how long? How would I live? What would I live on? All that kind of stuff."

"Shortly before they left, two of the Masters did some work on that very thing. Tuly and I converted them, sir."

"Fine--or is it? How did it work out?"

"Perfectly, sir ... except that they destroyed themselves. It was thought that they wearied of existence."

"I don't wonder. Well, if it comes to that, I can do the same. You _can_ convert me, then."

"Yes, sir. But before we do it we must do enough preliminary work to be sure that you will not be harmed in any way. Also, there will be many more changes involved than simple substitution."

"Of course. I realize that. Just see what you can do, please, and let me know."

"We will, sir, and thank you very much."

IX

As has been intimated, no Terran can know what researches Larry and Tuly and the other Oman specialists performed, or how they arrived at the conclusions they reached. However, in less than a week Larry reported to Hilton.

"It can be done, sir, with complete safety. And you will live even more comfortably than you do now."

"How long?"

"The mean will be about five thousand Oman years--you don't know that an Oman year is equal to one point two nine three plus Terran years?"

"I didn't, no. Thanks."

"The maximum, a little less than six thousand. The minimum, a little over four thousand. I'm very sorry we had no data upon which to base a closer estimate."

"Close enough." He stared at the Oman. "You could also convert my wife?"

"Of course, sir."

"Well, we might be able to stand it, after we got used to the idea. Minimum, over five thousand Terran years ... barring accidents, of course?"

"No, sir. No accidents. Nothing will be able to kill you, except by total destruction of the brain. And even then, sir, there will be the pattern."

"I'll ... be ... damned...." Hilton gulped twice. "Okay, go ahead."

"Your skins will be like ours, energy-absorbers. Your 'blood' will carry charges of energy instead of oxygen. Thus, you may breathe or not, as you please. Unless you wish otherwise, we will continue the breathing function. It would scarcely be worth while to alter the automatic mechanisms that now control it. And you will wish at times to speak. You will still enjoy eating and drinking, although everything ingested will be eliminated, as at present, as waste."

"We'd add uranexite to our food, I suppose. Or drink radioactives, or sleep under cobalt-60 lamps."

"Yes, sir. Your family life will be normal; your sexual urges and satisfactions the same. Fertilization and period of gestation unchanged. Your children will mature at the same ages as they do now."

"How do you--oh, I see. You wouldn't change any molecular linkages or configurations in the genes or chromosomes."

"We could not, sir, even if we wished. Such substitutions can be made only in exact one-for-one replacements. In the near future you will, of course, have to control births quite rigorously."

"We sure would. Let's see ... say we want a stationary population of a hundred million on our planet. Each couple to have two children, a boy and a girl. Born when the parents are about fifty ... um-m-m. The gals can have all the children they want, then, until our population is about a million; then slap on the limit of two kids per couple. Right?"

"Approximately so, sir. And after conversion you alone will be able to operate with the full power of your eight, without tiring. You will also, of course, be able to absorb almost instantaneously all the knowledges and abilities of the old Masters."

Hilton gulped twice before he could speak. "You wouldn't be holding anything else back, would you?"

"Nothing important, sir. Everything else is minor, and probably known to you."

"I doubt it. How long will the job take, and how much notice will you need?"

"Two days, sir. No notice. Everything is ready."

Hilton, face somber, thought for minutes. "The more I think of it the less I like it. But it seems to be a forced put ... and Temple will blow sky high ... and _have_ I got the guts to go it alone, even if she'd let me...." He shrugged himself out of the black mood. "I'll look her up and let you know, Larry."

* * * * *

He looked her up and told her everything. Told her bluntly; starkly; drawing the full picture in jet black, with very little white.

"There it is, sweetheart. The works," he concluded. "We are not going to have ten years; we may not have ten months. So--if such a brain as that can be had, do we or do we not have to have it? I'm putting it squarely up to you."

Temple's face, which had been getting paler and paler, was now as nearly colorless as it could become; the sickly yellow of her skin's light tan unbacked by any flush of red blood.

Her whole body was tense and strained.

"There's a horrible snapper on that question.... Can't _I_ do it? Or _anybody_ else except you?"

"No. Anyway, whose job is it, sweetheart?"

"I know, but ... but I know just how close Tuly came to killing you. And that wasn't _anything_ compared to such a radical transformation as this. I'm afraid it'll kill you, darling. And I just simply couldn't _stand_ it!"

She threw herself into his arms, and he comforted her in the ages-old fashion of man with maid.

"Steady, hon," he said, as soon as he could lift her tear-streaked face from his shoulder. "I'll live through it. I thought you were getting the howling howpers about having to live for six thousand years and never getting back to Terra except for a Q strictly T visit now and then."

She pulled away from him, flung back her wheaten mop and glared. "So _that's_ what you thought! What do I care how long I live, or how, or where, as long as it's with you? But what makes you think we can possibly live through such a horrible conversion as that?"

"Larry wouldn't do it if there was any question whatever. He didn't say it would be painless. But he did say I'd live."

"Well, he knows, I guess ... I hope." Temple's natural fine color began to come back. "But it's understood that just the second you come out of the vat, I go right in."

"I hadn't ought to let you, of course. But I don't think I could take it alone."

That statement required a special type of conference, which consumed some little time. Eventually, however, Temple answered it in words.

"Of course you couldn't, sweetheart, and I wouldn't let you, even if you could."

There were a few things that had to be done before those two secret conversions could be made. There was the matter of the wedding, which was now to be in quadruplicate. Arrangements had to be made so that eight Big Wheels of the Project could all be away on honeymoon at once.

All these things were done.

* * * * *

Of the conversion operations themselves, nothing more need be said. The honeymooners, having left ship and town on a Friday afternoon, came back one week from the following Monday[1] morning. The eight met joyously in Bachelors' Hall; the girls kissing each other and the men indiscriminately and enthusiastically; the men cooperating zestfully.

[1] While it took some time to recompute the exact Ardrian calendar, Terran day names and Terran weeks were used from the first. The Omans manufactured watches, clocks, and chronometers which divided the Ardrian day into twenty-four Ardrian hours, with minutes and seconds as usual.

Temple scarcely blushed at all, she was so engrossed in trying to find out whether or not anyone was noticing any change. No one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. So, finally, she asked.

"Don't _any_ of you, really, see anything different?"

The six others all howled at that, and Sandra, between giggles and snorts, said: "No, precious, it doesn't show a bit. Did you really think it would?"

Temple blushed furiously and Hilton came instantly to his bride's rescue. "Chip-chop the comedy, gang. She and I aren't human any more. We're a good jump toward being Omans. I couldn't make her believe it doesn't show."

That stopped the levity, cold, but none of the six could really believe it. However, after Hilton had coiled a twenty-penny spike into a perfect helix between his fingers, and especially after he and Temple had each chewed up and swallowed a piece of uranexite, there were no grounds left for doubt.

"That settles it ... it _tears_ it," Karns said then. "Start all over again, Jarve. We'll listen, this time."

Hilton told the long story again, and added: "I had to re-work a couple of cells of Temple's brain, but now she can read and understand the records as well as I can. So I thought I'd take her place on Team One and let her boss the job on all the other teams. Okay?"

"So you don't want to let the rest of us in on it." Karns's level stare was a far cry from the way he had looked at his chief a moment before. "If there's any one thing in the universe I never had _you_ figured for, it's a dog in the manger."

"Huh? You mean you actually _want_ to be a ... a ... hell, we don't even know _what_ we are!"

"I do want it, Jarvis. We all do." This was, of all people, Teddy! "No one in all history has had more than about fifty years of really productive thinking. And just the idea of having enough time ..."

"Hold it, Teddy. Use your brain. The Masters couldn't take it--they committed suicide. How do you figure we can do any better?"

"Because we'll _use_ our brains!" she snapped. "They didn't. The Omans will serve us; and that's _all_ they'll do."

"And do you think you'll be able to raise your children and grandchildren and so on to do the same? To have guts enough to resist the pull of such an ungodly habit-forming drug as this Oman service is?"

* * * * *

"I'm sure of it." She nodded positively. "And we'll run all applicants through a fine enough screen to--that is, if we ever consider anybody except our own BuSci people. And there's another reason." She grinned, got up, wriggled out of her coverall, and posed in bra and panties. "Look. I can keep most of this for five years. Quite a lot of it for ten. Then comes the struggle. What do _you_ think I'd do for the ability, whenever it begins to get wrinkly or flabby, to peel the whole thing off and put on a brand-spanking-new smooth one? You name it, I'll do it! Besides, Bill and I will _both_ just simply and cold-bloodedly murder you if you try to keep us out."

"Okay." Hilton looked at Temple; she looked at him; both looked at all the others. There was no revulsion at all. Nothing but eagerness.

Temple took over.

"I'm surprised. We're both surprised. You see, Jarve didn't want to do it at all, but he had to. I not only didn't want to, I was scared green and yellow at just the idea of it. But I had to, too, of course. We didn't think anybody would really want to. We thought we'd be left here alone. We still will be, I think, when you've thought it clear through, Teddy. You just haven't realized yet that we aren't even human any more. We're simply nothing but _monsters_!" Temple's voice became a wail.

"I've said my piece," Teddy said. "You tell 'em, Bill."

"Let me say something first," Kincaid said. "Temple, I'm ashamed of you. This line isn't at all your usual straight thinking. What you actually are is _homo superior_. Bill?"

"I can add one bit to that. I don't wonder that you were scared silly, Temple. Utterly new concept and you went into it stone cold. But now we see the finished product and we like it. In fact, we drool."

"I'll say we're drooling," Sandra said. "I could do handstands and pinwheels with joy."

"Let's see you," Hilton said. "That we'd all get a kick out of."

"Not now--don't want to hold this up--but sometime I just will. Bev?"

"I'm for it--and _how_! And won't Bernadine be amazed," Beverly laughed gleefully, "at her wise-crack about the 'race to end all human races' coming true?"

"I'm in favor of it, too, one hundred per cent," Poynter said. "Has it occurred to you, Jarve, that this opens up intergalactic exploration? No supplies to carry and plenty of time and fuel?"

"No, it hadn't. You've got a point there, Frank. That might take a little of the curse off of it, at that."

"When some of our kids get to be twenty years old or so and get married, I'm going to take a crew of them to Andromeda. We'll arrange, then, to extend our honeymoons another week," Hilton said. "What will our policy be? Keep it dark for a while with just us eight, or spread it to the rest?"

"Spread it, I'd say," Kincaid said.

"We can't keep it secret, anyway," Teddy argued. "Since Larry and Tuly were in on the whole deal, every Oman on the planet knows all about it. Somebody is going to ask questions, and Omans always answer questions and always tell the truth."

* * * * *

"Questions have already been asked and answered," Larry said, going to the door and opening it.

Stella rushed in. "We've been hearing the _damnedest_ things!" She kissed everybody, ending with Hilton, whom she seized by both shoulders. "Is it actually true, boss, that you can fix me up so I'll live practically forever and can eat more than eleven calories a day without getting fat as a pig? Candy, ice cream, cake, pie, eclairs, cream puffs, French pastries, sugar and gobs of thick cream in my coffee...?"

Half a dozen others, including the van der Moen twins, came in. Beverly emitted a shriek of joy. "Bernadine! The mother of the race to end all human races!"

"You whistled it, birdie!" Bernadine caroled. "I'm going to have ten or twelve, each one weirder than all the others. I told you I was a prophet--I'm going to hang out my shingle. Wholesale and retail prophecy; special rates for large parties." Her voice was drowned out in a general clamor.

"Hold it, everybody!" Hilton yelled. "Chip-chop it! _Quit_ it!" Then, as the noise subsided, "If you think I'm going to tell this tall tale over and over again for the next two weeks you're all crazy. So shut down the plant and get everybody out here."

"Not _everybody_, Jarve!" Temple snapped. "We don't want scum, and there's some of that, even in BuSci."

"You're so right. Who, then?"

"The rest of the heads and assistants, of course ... and all the lab girls and their husbands and boy-friends. I know they are all okay. That will be enough for now, don't you think?"

"I do think;" and the indicated others were sent for; and in a few minutes arrived.

The Omans brought chairs and Hilton stood on a table. He spoke for ten minutes. Then: "Before you decide whether you want to or not, think it over very carefully, because it's a one-way street. Fluorine can not be displaced. Once in, you're stuck for life. _There is no way back._ I've told you all the drawbacks and disadvantages I know of, but there may be a lot more that I haven't thought of yet. So think it over for a few days and when each of you has definitely made up his or her mind, let me know." He jumped down off the table.

* * * * *

His listeners, however, did not need days, or even seconds, to decide. Before Hilton's feet hit the floor there was a yell of unanimous approval.

He looked at his wife. "Do you suppose _we're_ nuts?"

"Uh-uh. Not a bit. Alex was right. I'm going to just _love_ it!" She hugged his elbow ecstatically. "So are you, darling, as soon as you stop looking at only the black side."

"You know ... you could be right?" For the first time since the "ghastly" transformation Hilton saw that there really was a bright side and began to study it. "With most of BuSci--and part of the Navy, and selectees from Terra--it _will_ be slightly terrific, at that!"

"And that 'habit-forming-drug' objection isn't insuperable, darling," Temple said. "If the younger generations start weakening we'll fix the Omans. I wouldn't want to wipe them out entirely, but ..."

"But how do we settle priority, Doctor Hilton?" a girl called out; a tall, striking, brunette laboratory technician whose name Hilton needed a second to recall. "By pulling straws or hair? Or by shooting dice or each other or what?"

"Thanks, Betty, you've got a point. Sandy Cummings and department heads first, then assistants. Then you girls, in alphabetical order, each with her own husband or fiance."

"And my name is Ames. Oh, goody!"

"Larry, please tell them to ..."

"I already have, sir. We are set up to handle four at once."

"Good boy. So scat, all of you, and get back to work--except Sandy, Bill, Alex, and Teddy. You four go with Larry."

Since the new sense was not peyondix, Hilton had started calling it "perception" and the others adopted the term as a matter of course. Hilton could use that sense for what seemed like years--and actually was whole minutes--at a time without fatigue or strain. He could not, however, nor could the Omans, give his tremendous power to anyone else.

As he had said, he could do a certain amount of reworking; but the amount of improvement possible to make depended entirely upon what there was to work on. Thus, Temple could cover about six hundred light-years. It developed later that the others of the Big Eight could cover from one hundred up to four hundred or so. The other department heads and assistants turned out to be still weaker, and not one of the rank and file ever became able to cover more than a single planet.

This sense was not exactly telepathy; at least not what Hilton had always thought telepathy would be. If anything, however, it was more. It was a lumping together of all five known human senses--and half a dozen unknown ones called, collectively, "intuition"--into one super-sense that was all-inclusive and all-informative. If he ever could learn exactly what it was and exactly what it did and how it did it ... but he'd better chip-chop the wool-gathering and get back onto the job.

* * * * *

The Stretts had licked the old Masters very easily, and intended to wipe out the Omans and the humans. They had no doubt at all as to their ability to do it. Maybe they could. If the Masters hadn't made some progress that the Omans didn't know about, they probably could. That was the first thing to find out. As soon as they'd been converted he'd call in all the experts and they'd go through the Masters' records like a dose of salts through a hillbilly schoolma'am.

At that point in Hilton's cogitations Sawtelle came in.

He had come down in his gig, to confer with Hilton as to the newly beefed-up fleet. Instead of being glum and pessimistic and foreboding, he was chipper and enthusiastic. They had rebuilt a thousand Oman ships. By combining Oman and Terran science, and adding everything the First Team had been able to reduce to practise, they had hyped up the power by a good fifteen per cent. Seven hundred of those ships, and all his men, were now arrayed in defense around Ardry. Three hundred, manned by Omans, were around Fuel Bin.

"Why?" Hilton asked. "It's Fuel Bin they've been attacking."

"Uh-uh. Minor objective," the captain demurred, positively. "The real attack will be here at you; the headquarters and the brains. Then Fuel Bin will be duck soup. But the thing that pleased me most is the control. Man, you never imagined such control! No admiral in history ever had such control of ten ships as I have of seven hundred. Those Omans spread orders so fast that I don't even finish thinking one and it's being executed. And no misunderstandings, no slips. For instance, this last batch--fifteen skeletons. Far out; they're getting cagy. I just thought 'Box 'em in and slug 'em' and--In! Across! Out! Socko! Pffft! Just like that and just that fast. None of 'em had time to light a beam. Nobody before ever even _dreamed_ of such control!"

"That's great, and I like it ... and you're only a captain. How many ships can Five-Jet Admiral Gordon put into space?"

"That depends on what you call ships. Superdreadnoughts, _Perseus_ class, six. First-line battleships, twenty-nine. Second-line, smaller and some pretty old, seventy-three. Counting everything armed that will hold air, something over two hundred."

"I thought it was something like that. How would you like to be Five-Jet Admiral Sawtelle of the Ardrian Navy?"

"I wouldn't. I'm Terran Navy. But you knew that and you know me. So--what's on your mind?"

* * * * *

Hilton told him. _I ought to put this on a tape_, he thought to himself, _and broadcast it every hour on the hour_.

"They took the old Masters like dynamiting fish in a barrel," he concluded, "and I'm damned afraid they're going to lick us unless we take a lot of big, fast steps. But the hell of it is that I can't tell you anything--not one single thing--about any part of it. There's simply no way at all of getting through to you without making you over into the same kind of a thing I am."

"Is that bad?" Sawtelle was used to making important decisions fast. "Let's get at it."

"Huh? Skipper, do you realize just what that means? If you think they'll let you resign, forget it. They'll crucify you--brand you as a traitor and God only knows what else."

"Right. How about you and your people?"

"Well, as civilians, it won't be as bad...."

"The hell it won't. Every man and woman that stays here will be posted forever as the blackest traitors old Terra ever disgraced herself by spawning."

"You've got a point there, at that. We'll all have to bring our relatives--the ones we think much of, at least--out here with us."

"Definitely. Now see what you can do about getting me run through your mill."

By exerting his authority, Hilton got Sawtelle put through the "Preservatory" in the second batch processed. Then, linking minds with the captain, he flashed their joint attention to the Hall of Records. Into the right room; into the right chest; along miles and miles of braided wire carrying some of the profoundest military secrets of the ancient Masters.

Then:

"Now you know a little of it," Hilton said. "Maybe a thousandth of what we'll have to have before we can take the Stretts as they will have to be taken."

For seconds Sawtelle could not speak. Then: "My ... God. I see what you mean. You're right. No Omans can ever go to Terra; and no Terrans can ever come here except to stay forever."

The two then went out into space, to the flagship--which had been christened the _Orion_--and called in the six commanders.

"What _is_ all this senseless idiocy we've been getting, Jarve?" Elliott demanded.

Hilton eyed all six with pretended disfavor. "You six guys are the hardest-headed bunch of skeptics that ever went unhung," he remarked, dispassionately. "So it wouldn't do any good to tell you anything--yet. The skipper and I will show you a thing first. Take her away, Skip."

The _Orion_ shot away under interplanetary drive and for several hours Hilton and Sawtelle worked at re-wiring and practically rebuilding two devices that no one, Oman or human, had touched since the _Perseus_ had landed on Ardry.

"What are you ... I don't understand what you are doing, sir," Larry said. For the first time since Hilton had known him, the Oman's mind was confused and unsure.

"I know you don't. This is a bit of top-secret Masters' stuff. Maybe, some day, we'll be able to re-work your brain to take it. But it won't be for some time."

X

The _Orion_ hung in space, a couple of thousands of miles away from an asteroid which was perhaps a mile in average diameter. Hilton straightened up.

"Put Triple X Black filters on your plates and watch that asteroid." The commanders did so. "Ready?" he asked.

"Ready, sir."

Hilton didn't move a muscle. Nothing actually moved. Nevertheless there was a motionlessly writhing and crawling distortion of the ship and everything in it, accompanied by a sensation that simply can not be described.

It was not like going into or emerging from the sub-ether. It was not even remotely like space-sickness or sea-sickness or free fall or anything else that any Terran had ever before experienced.

And the asteroid vanished.

It disappeared into an outrageously incandescent, furiously pyrotechnic, raveningly expanding atomic fireball that in seconds seemed to fill half of space.

After ages-long minutes of the most horrifyingly devastating fury any man there had ever seen, the frightful thing expired and Hilton said: "_That_ was just a kind of a firecracker. Just a feeble imitation of the first-stage detonator for what we'll have to have to crack the Stretts' ground-based screens. If the skipper and I had taken time to take the ship down to the shops and really work it over we could have put on a show. Was this enough so you iron-heads are ready to listen with your ears open and your mouths shut?"

They were. So much so that not even Elliott opened his mouth to say yes. They merely nodded. Then again--for the last time, he hoped!--Hilton spoke his piece. The response was prompt and vigorous. Only Sam Bryant, one of Hilton's staunchest allies, showed any uncertainty at all.

"I've been married only a year and a half, and the baby was due about a month ago. How sure are you that you can make old Gordon sit still for us skimming the cream off of Terra to bring out here?"

"Doris Bryant, the cream of Terra!" Elliott gibed. "_How_ modest our Samuel has become!"

"Well, damn it, she is!" Bryant insisted.

"Okay, she is," Hilton agreed. "But either we get our people or Terra doesn't get its uranexite. That'll work. In the remote contingency that it doesn't, there are still tighter screws we can put on. But you missed the main snapper, Sam. Suppose Doris doesn't want to live for five thousand years and is allergic to becoming a monster?"

"Huh; you don't need to worry about that." Sam brushed that argument aside with a wave of his hand. "Show me a girl who doesn't want to stay young and beautiful forever and I'll square you the circle. Come on. What's holding us up?"

* * * * *

The _Orion_ hurtled through space back toward Ardry and Hilton, struck by a sudden thought, turned to the captain.

"Skipper, why wouldn't it be a smart idea to clamp a blockade onto Fuel Bin? Cut the Stretts' fuel supply?"

"I thought better of you than that, son." Sawtelle shook his head sadly. "That was the first thing I did."

"Ouch. Maybe you're 'way ahead of me too, then, on the one that we should move to Fuel Bin, lock, stock and barrel?"

"Never thought of it, no. Maybe you're worth saving, after all. After conversion, of course.... Yes, there'd be three big advantages."

"Four."

Sawtelle raised his eyebrows.

"One, only one planet to defend. Two, it's self-defending against sneak landings. Nothing remotely human can land on it except in heavy lead armor, and even in that can stay healthy for only a few minutes."

"Except in the city. Omlu. That's the weak point and would be the point of attack."

"Uh-uh. Cut off the decontaminators and in five hours it'll be as hot as the rest of the planet. Three, there'd be no interstellar supply line for the Stretts to cut. Four, the environment matches our new physiques a lot better than any normal planet could."

"That's the one I didn't think about."

"I think I'll take a quick peek at the Stretts--oh-oh; they've screened their whole planet. Well, we can do that, too, of course."

"How are you going to select and reject personnel? It looks as though everybody wants to stay. Even the men whose main object in life is to go aground and get drunk. The Omans do altogether too good a job on them and there's no such thing as a hangover. I'm glad I'm not in your boots."

"You may be in it up to the eyeballs, Skipper, so don't chortle too soon."

Hilton had already devoted much time to the problems of selection; and he thought of little else all the way back to Ardry. And for several days afterward he held conferences with small groups and conducted certain investigations.

* * * * *

Bud Carroll of Sociology and his assistant Sylvia Banister had been married for weeks. Hilton called them, together with Sawtelle and Bryant of Navy, into conference with the Big Eight.

"The more I study this thing the less I like it," Hilton said. "With a civilization having no government, no police, no laws, no medium of exchange ..."

"No _money_?" Bryant exclaimed. "How's old Gordon going to pay for his uranexite, then?"

"He gets it free," Hilton replied, flatly. "When anyone can have anything he wants, merely by wanting it, what good is money? Now, remembering how long we're going to have to live, what we'll be up against, that the Masters failed, and so on, it is clear that the prime basic we have to select for is stability. We twelve have, by psychodynamic measurement, the highest stability ratings available."

"Are you sure _I_ belong here?" Bryant asked.

"Yes. Here are three lists." Hilton passed papers around. "The list labeled 'OK' names those I'm sure of--the ones we're converting now and their wives and whatever on Terra. List 'NG' names the ones I know we don't want. List 'X'--over thirty percent--are in-betweeners. We have to make a decision on the 'X' list. So--what I want to know is, who's going to play God. I'm not. Sandy, are you?"

"Good Heavens, no!" Sandra shuddered. "But I'm afraid I know who will have to. I'm sorry, Alex, but it'll have to be you four--Psychology and Sociology."

Six heads nodded and there was a flashing interchange of thought among the four. Temple licked her lips and nodded, and Kincaid spoke.

"Yes, I'm afraid it's our baby. By leaning very heavily on Temple, we can do it. Remember, Jarve, what you said about the irresistible force? We'll need it."

"As I said once before, Mrs. Hilton, I'm very glad you're along," Hilton said. "But just how sure are you that even you can stand up under the load?"

"Alone, I couldn't. But don't underestimate Mrs. Carroll and the Messrs. Together, and with such a goal, I'm sure we can."

* * * * *

Thus, after four-fifths of his own group and forty-one Navy men had been converted, Hilton called an evening meeting of all the converts. Larry, Tuly and Javvy were the only Omans present.

"You all knew, of course, that we were going to move to Fuel Bin sometime," Hilton began. "I can tell you now that we who are here are all there are going to be of us. We are all leaving for Fuel Bin immediately after this meeting. Everything of any importance, including all of your personal effects, has already been moved. All Omans except these three, and all Oman ships except the _Orion_, have already gone."

He paused to let the news sink in.

Thoughts flew everywhere. The irrepressible Stella Wing--_now_ Mrs. Osbert F. Harkins--was the first to give tongue. "What a _wonderful_ job! Why, everybody's here that I really like at all!"

That sentiment was, of course, unanimous. It could not have been otherwise. Betty, the ex-Ames, called out:

"How did you get their female Omans away from Cecil Calthorpe and the rest of that chasing, booze-fighting bunch without them blowing the whole show?"

"Some suasion was necessary," Hilton admitted, with a grin. "Everyone who isn't here is time-locked into the _Perseus_. Release time eight hours tomorrow."

"And they'll wake up tomorrow morning with no Omans?" Bernadine tossed back her silvery mane and laughed. "Nor anything else except the _Perseus_? In a way, I'm sorry, but ... maybe I've got too much stinker blood in me, but I'm very glad none of them are here. But I'd like to ask, Jarvis--or rather, I suppose you have already set up a new Advisory Board?"

"We have, yes." Hilton read off twelve names.

"Oh, nice. I don't know of any people I'd rather have on it. But what I want to gripe about is calling our new home world such a horrible name as 'Fuel Bin,' as though it were a wood-box or a coal-scuttle or something. And just think of the complexes it would set up in those super-children we're going to have so many of."

"What would you suggest?" Hilton asked.

"'Ardvor', of course," Hermione said, before her sister could answer. "We've had 'Arth' and 'Ardu' and 'Ardry' and you--or somebody--started calling us 'Ardans' to distinguish us converts from the Terrans. So let's keep up the same line."

There was general laughter at that, but the name was approved.

* * * * *

About midnight the meeting ended and the _Orion_ set out for Ardvor. It reached it and slanted sharply downward. The whole BuSci staff was in the lounge, watching the big tri-di.

"Hey! That isn't Omlu!" Stella exclaimed. "It isn't a city at all and it isn't even in the same place!"

"No, ma'am," Larry said. "Most of you wanted the ocean, but many wanted a river or the mountains. Therefore we razed Omlu and built your new city, Ardane, at a place where the ocean, two rivers, and a range of mountains meet. Strictly speaking, it is not a city, but a place of pleasant and rewardful living."

The space-ship was coming in, low and fast, from the south. To the left, the west, there stretched the limitless expanse of ocean. To the right, mile after mile, were rough, rugged, jagged, partially-timbered mountains, mass piled upon mass. Immediately below the speeding vessel was a wide, white-sand beach all of ten miles long.

Slowing rapidly now, the _Orion_ flew along due north.

"Look! Look! A natatorium!" Beverly shrieked. "I know I wanted a nice big place to swim in, besides my backyard pool and the ocean, but I didn't tell anybody to build _that_--I swear I didn't!"

"You didn't have to, pet." Poynter put his arm around her curvaceous waist and squeezed. "They knew. And I did a little thinking along that line myself. There's our house, on top of the cliff over the natatorium--you can almost dive into it off the patio."

"Oh, wonderful!"

Immediately north of the natatorium a tremendous river--named at first sight the "Whitewater"--rushed through its gorge into the ocean; a river and gorge strangely reminiscent of the Colorado and its Grand Canyon. On the south bank of that river, at its very mouth--looking straight up that tremendous canyon; on a rocky promontory commanding ocean and beach and mountains--there was a house. At the sight of it Temple hugged Hilton's arm in ecstasy.

"Yes, that's ours," he assured her. "Just about everything either of us has ever wanted." The clamor was now so great--everyone was recognizing his-and-her house and was exclaiming about it--that both Temple and Hilton fell silent and simply watched the scenery unroll.

Across the turbulent Whitewater and a mile farther north, the mountains ended as abruptly as though they had been cut off with a cleaver and an apparently limitless expanse of treeless, grassy prairie began. And through that prairie, meandering sluggishly to the ocean from the northeast, came the wide, deep River Placid.

The _Orion_ halted. It began to descend vertically, and only then did Hilton see the spaceport. It was so vast, and there were so many spaceships on it, that from any great distance it was actually invisible! Each six-acre bit of the whole immense expanse of level prairie between the Placid and the mountains held an Oman superdreadnought!

* * * * *

The staff paired off and headed for the airlocks. Hilton said: "Temple, have you any reservations at all, however slight, as to having Dark Lady as a permanent fixture in your home?"

"Why, of course not--I like her as much as you do. And besides--" she giggled like a schoolgirl--"even if she _is_ a lot more beautiful than I am--I've got a few things she never will have ... but there's something else. I got just a flash of it before you blocked. Spill it, please."

"You'll see in a minute." And she did.

Larry, Dark Lady and Temple's Oman maid Moty were standing beside the Hilton's car--and so was another Oman, like none ever before seen. Six feet four; shoulders that would just barely go through a door; muscled like Atlas and Hercules combined; skin a gleaming, satiny bronze; hair a rippling mass of lambent flame. Temple came to a full stop and caught her breath.

"The Prince," she breathed, in awe. "Da Lormi's Prince of Thebes. The ultimate bronze of all the ages. _You_ did this, Jarve. How did you ever dig him up out of my schoolgirl crushes?"

All six got into the car, which was equally at home on land or water or in the air. In less than a minute they were at Hilton House.

The house itself was circular. Its living-room was an immense annulus of glass from which, by merely moving along its circular length, any desired view could be had. The pair walked around it once. Then she took him by the arm and steered him firmly toward one of the bedrooms in the center.

"This house is just too much to take in all at once," she declared. "Besides, let's put on our swimsuits and get over to the Nat."

In the room, she closed the door firmly in the faces of the Omans and grinned. "Maybe, sometime, I'll get used to having somebody besides you in my bedroom, but I haven't, yet.... Oh, do you itch, too?"

Hilton had peeled to the waist and was scratching vigorously all around his waistline, under his belt. "Like the very devil," he admitted, and stared at her. For she, three-quarters stripped, was scratching, too!

"It started the minute we left the _Orion_," he said, thoughtfully. "I see. These new skins of ours like hard radiation, but don't like to be smothered while they're enjoying it. By about tomorrow, we'll be a nudist colony, I think."

"I could stand it, I suppose. What makes you think so?"

"Just what I know about radiation. Frank would be the one to ask. My hunch is, though, that we're going to be nudists whether we want to or not. Let's go."

* * * * *

They went in a two-seater, leaving the Omans at home. Three-quarters of the staff were lolling on the sand or were seated on benches beside the immense pool. As they watched, Beverly ran out along the line of springboards; testing each one and selecting the stiffest. She then climbed up to the top platform--a good twelve feet above the board--and plummeted down upon the board's heavily padded take-off. Legs and back bending stubbornly to take the strain, she and the board reached low-point together, and, still in sync with it, she put every muscle she had into the effort to hurl herself upward.

She had intended to go up thirty feet. But she had no idea whatever as to her present strength, or of what that Oman board, in perfect synchronization with that tremendous strength, would do. Thus, instead of thirty feet, she went up very nearly two hundred; which of course spoiled completely her proposed graceful two-and-a-half.

In midair she struggled madly to get into some acceptable position. Failing, she curled up into a tight ball just before she struck water.

_What_ a splash!

"It won't hurt her--you couldn't hurt her with a club!" Hilton snapped. He seized Temple's hand as everyone else rushed to the pool's edge. "Look--Bernadine--that's what I was thinking about."

Temple stopped and looked. The platinum-haired twins had been basking on the sand, and wherever sand had touched fabric, fabric had disappeared.

Their suits had of course approached the minimum to start with. Now Bernadine wore only a wisp of nylon perched precariously on one breast and part of a ribbon that had once been a belt. Discovering the catastrophe, she shrieked once and leaped into the pool any-which-way, covering her breasts with her hands and hiding in water up to her neck.

Meanwhile, the involuntarily high diver had come to the surface, laughing apologetically. Surprised by the hair dangling down over her eyes, she felt for her cap. It was gone. So was her suit. Naked as a fish. She swam a couple of easy strokes, then stopped.

"Frank! Oh, Frank!" she called.

"Over here, Bev." Her husband did not quite know whether to laugh or not.

"Is it the radiation or the water? Or both?"

"Radiation, I think. These new skins of ours don't want to be covered up. But it probably makes the water a pretty good imitation of a universal solvent."

"Good-by, clothes!" Beverly rolled over onto her back, fanned water carefully with her hands, and gazed approvingly at herself. "I don't itch any more, anyway, so I'm very much in favor of it."

* * * * *

Thus the Ardans came to their new home world and to a life that was to be more comfortable by far and happier by far than any of them had known on Earth. There were many other surprises that day, of course; of which only two will be mentioned here. When they finally left the pool, at about seventeen hours G.M.T.[2], everybody was ravenously hungry.

[2] Greenwich Mean Time. Ardvor was, always and everywhere, full daylight. Terran time and calendar were adapted as a matter of course.

"But why _should_ we be?" Stella demanded. "I've been eating everything in sight, just for fun. But now I'm actually hungry enough to eat a horse and wagon and chase the driver!"

"Swimming makes everybody hungry," Beverly said, "and I'm awfully glad _that_ hasn't changed. Why, I wouldn't feel _human_ if I didn't!"

Hilton and Temple went home, and had a long-drawn-out and very wonderful supper. Prince waited on Temple, Dark Lady on Hilton; Larry and Moty ran the synthesizers in the kitchen. All four Omans radiated happiness.

Another surprise came when they went to bed. For the bed was a raised platform of something that looked like concrete and, except for an uncanny property of molding itself somewhat to the contours of their bodies, was almost as hard as rock. Nevertheless, it was the most comfortable bed either of them had ever had. When they were ready to go to sleep, Temple said:

"Drat it, those Omans _still_ want to come in and sleep with us. In the room, I mean. And they suffer so. They're simply _radiating_ silent suffering and oh-so-submissive reproach. Shall we let 'em come in?"

"That's strictly up to you, sweetheart. It always has been."

"I know. I thought they'd quit it sometime, but I guess they never will. I _still_ want an illusion of privacy at times, even though they know all about everything that goes on. But we might let 'em in now, just while we sleep, and throw 'em out again as soon as we wake up in the morning?"

"You're the boss." Without additional invitation the four Omans came in and arranged themselves neatly on the floor, on all four sides of the bed. Temple had barely time to cuddle up against Hilton, and he to put his arm closely around her, before they both dropped into profound and dreamless sleep.

* * * * *

At eight hours next morning all the specialists met at the new Hall of Records.

This building, an exact duplicate of the old one, was located on a mesa in the foothills southwest of the natatorium, in a luxuriant grove at sight of which Karns stopped and began to laugh.

"I thought I'd seen everything," he remarked. "But yellow pine, spruce, tamarack, apples, oaks, palms, oranges, cedars, joshua trees and _cactus_--just to name a few--all growing on the same quarter-section of land?"

"Just everything anybody wants, is all," Hilton said. "But are they really growing? Or just straight synthetics? Lane--Kathy--this is your dish."

"Not so fast, Jarve; give us a chance, _please_!" Kathryn, now Mrs. Lane Saunders, pleaded. She shook her spectacular head. "We don't see how any stable indigenous life can have developed at all, unless ..."

"Unless what? Natural shielding?" Hilton asked, and Kathy eyed her husband.

"Right," Saunders said. "The earliest life-forms must have developed a shield before they could evolve and stabilize. Hence, whatever it is that is in our skins was not a triumph of Masters' science. They took it from Nature."

"Oh? Oh!" These were two of Sandra's most expressive monosyllables, followed by a third. "Oh. Could be, at that. But how _could_ ... no, cancel that."

"You'd better cancel it, Sandy. Give us a couple of months, and _maybe_ we can answer a few elementary questions."

Now inside the Hall, all the teams, from Astronomy to Zoology, went efficiently to work. Everyone now knew what to look for, how to find it, and how to study it.

"The First Team doesn't need you now too much, does it, Jarve?" Sawtelle asked.

"Not particularly. In fact, I was just going to get back onto my own job."

"Not yet. I want to talk to you," and the two went into a long discussion of naval affairs.

XI

The Stretts' fuel-supply line had been cut long since. Many Strett cargo-carriers had been destroyed. The enemy would of course have a very heavy reserve of fuel on hand. But there was no way of knowing how large it was, how many warships it could supply, or how long it would last.

Two facts were, however, unquestionable. First, the Stretts were building a fleet that in their minds would be invincible. Second, they would attack Ardane as soon as that fleet could be made ready. The unanswerable question was: how long would that take?

"So we want to get every ship we have. How many? Five thousand? Ten? Fifteen? We want them converted to maximum possible power as soon as we possibly can," Sawtelle said. "And I want to get out there with my boys to handle things."

"You aren't going to. Neither you nor your boys are expendable. Particularly you." Jaw hard-set, Hilton studied the situation for minutes. "No. What we'll do is take your Oman, Kedy. We'll re-set the Guide to drive into him everything you and the military Masters ever knew about arms, armament, strategy, tactics and so on. And we'll add everything I know of coordination, synthesis, and perception. That ought to make him at least a junior-grade military genius."

"You can play _that_ in spades. I wish you could do it to me."

"I can--if you'll take the full Oman transformation. Nothing else can stand the punishment."

"I know. No, I don't want to be a genius that badly."

"Check. And we'll take the resultant Kedy and make nine duplicates of him. Each one will learn from and profit by the mistakes made by preceding numbers and will assume command the instant his preceding number is killed."

"Oh, you expect, then...?"

"Expect? No. I know it damn well, and so do you. That's why we Ardans will all stay aground. Why the Kedys' first job will be to make the heavy stuff in and around Ardane as heavy as it can be made. Why it'll all be on twenty-four-hour alert. Then they can put as many thousands of Omans as you please to work at modernizing all the Oman ships you want and doing anything else you say. Check?"

Sawtelle thought for a couple of minutes. "A few details, is all. But that can be ironed out as we go along."

Both men worked then, almost unremittingly for six solid days; at the end of which time both drew tremendous sighs of relief. They had done everything possible for them to do. The defense of Ardvor was now rolling at fullest speed toward its gigantic objective.

Then captain and director, in two Oman ships with fifty men and a thousand Omans, leaped the world-girdling ocean to the mining operation of the Stretts. There they found business strictly as usual. The strippers still stripped; the mining mechs still roared and snarled their inchwise ways along their geometrically perfect terraces; the little carriers still skittered busily between the various miners and the storage silos. The fact that there was enough concentrate on hand to last a world for a hundred years made no difference at all to these automatics; a crew of erector-mechs was building new silos as fast as existing ones were being filled.

Since the men now understood everything that was going on, it was a simple matter for them to stop the whole Strett operation in its tracks. Then every man and every Oman leaped to his assigned job. Three days later, all the mechs went back to work. Now, however, they were working for the Ardans.

The miners, instead of concentrate, now emitted vastly larger streams of Navy-Standard pelleted uranexite. The carriers, instead of one-gallon cans, carried five-ton drums. The silos were immensely larger--thirty feet in diameter and towering two hundred feet into the air. The silos were not, however, being used as yet. One of the two Oman ships had been converted into a fuel-tanker and its yawning holds were being filled first.

The _Orion_ went back to Ardane and an eight-day wait began. For the first time in over seven months Hilton found time actually to loaf; and he and Temple, lolling on the beach or hiking in the mountains, enjoyed themselves and each other to the full.

All too soon, however, the heavily laden tanker appeared in the sky over Ardane. The _Orion_ joined it; and the two ships slipped into sub-space for Earth.

* * * * *

Three days out, Hilton used his sense of perception to release the thought-controlled blocks that had been holding all the controls of the _Perseus_ in neutral. He informed her officers--by releasing a public-address tape--that they were now free to return to Terra.

Three days later, one day short of Sol, Sawtelle got Five-Jet Admiral Gordon's office on the sub-space radio. An officious underling tried to block him, of course.

"Shut up, Perkins, and listen," Sawtelle said, bruskly. "Tell Gordon I'm bringing in one hundred twenty thousand two hundred forty-five metric tons of pelleted uranexite. And if he isn't on this beam in sixty seconds he'll never get a gram of it."

The admiral, outraged almost to the point of apoplexy, came in. "Sawtelle, report yourself for court-martial at ..."

"Keep still, Gordon," the captain snapped. In sheer astonishment old Five-Jets obeyed. "I am no longer Terran Navy; no longer subject to your orders. As a matter of cold fact, I am no longer human. For reasons which I will explain later to the full Advisory Board, some of the personnel of Project Theta Orionis underwent transformation into a form of life able to live in an environment of radioactivity so intense as to kill any human being in ten seconds. Under certain conditions we will supply, free of charge, FOB Terra or Luna, all the uranexite the Solar System can use. The conditions are these," and he gave them. "Do you accept these conditions or not?"

"I ... I would vote to accept them, Captain. But that weight! One hundred twenty thousand _metric tons_--incredible! Are you _sure_ of that figure?"

"Definitely. And that is minimum. The error is plus, not minus."

"This crippling power-shortage would really be over?" For the first time since Sawtelle had known him, Gordon showed that he was not quite solid Navy brass.

"It's over. Definitely. For good."

"I'd not only agree; I'd raise you a monument. While I can't speak for the Board, I'm sure they'll agree."

"So am I. In any event, your cooperation is all that's required for this first load." The chips had vanished from Sawtelle's shoulders. "Where do you want it, Admiral? Aristarchus or White Sands?"

"White Sands, please. While there may be some delay in releasing it to industry ..."

"While they figure out how much they can tax it?" Sawtelle asked, sardonically.

"Well, if they don't tax it it'll be the first thing in history that isn't. Have you any objections to releasing all this to the press?"

"None at all. The harder they hit it and the wider they spread it, the better. Will you have this beam switched to Astrogation, please?"

"Of course. And thanks, Captain. I'll see you at White Sands."

Then, as the now positively glowing Gordon faded away, Sawtelle turned to his own staff. "Fenway--Snowden--take over. Better double-check micro-timing with Astro. Put us into a twenty-four-hour orbit over White Sands and hold us there. We won't go down. Let the load down on remote, wherever they want it."

* * * * *

The arrival of the Ardvorian superdreadnought _Orion_ and the _UC-1_ (Uranexite Carrier Number One) was one of the most sensational events old Earth had ever known. Air and space craft went clear out to Emergence Volume Ninety to meet them. By the time the _UC-1_ was coming in on its remote-controlled landing spiral the press of small ships was so great that all the police forces available were in a lather trying to control it.

This was exactly what Hilton had wanted. It made possible the completely unobserved launching of several dozen small craft from the _Orion_ herself.

One of these made a very high and very fast flight to Chicago. With all due formality and under the aegis of a perfectly authentic Registry Number it landed on O'Hare Field. Eleven deeply tanned young men emerged from it and made their way to a taxi stand, where each engaged a separate vehicle.

Sam Bryant stepped into his cab, gave the driver a number on Oakwood Avenue in Des Plaines, and settled back to scan. He was lucky. He would have gone anywhere she was, of course, but the way things were, he could give her a little warning to soften the shock. She had taken the baby out for an airing down River Road, and was on her way back. By having the taxi kill ten minutes or so he could arrive just after she did. Wherefore he stopped the cab at a public communications booth and dialed his home.

"Mrs. Bryant is not at home, but she will return at fifteen thirty," the instrument said, crisply. "Would you care to record a message for her?"

He punched the RECORD button. "This is Sam, Dolly baby. I'm right behind you. Turn around, why don't you, and tell your ever-lovin' star-hoppin' husband hello?"

The taxi pulled up at the curb just as Doris closed the front door; and Sam, after handing the driver a five-dollar bill, ran up the walk.

He waited just outside the door, key in hand, while she lowered the stroller handle, took off her hat and by long-established habit reached out to flip the communicator's switch. At the first word, however, she stiffened rigidly--froze solid.

Smiling, he opened the door, walked in, and closed it behind him. Nothing short of a shotgun blast could have taken Doris Bryant's attention from that recorder then.

"That simply is not so," she told the instrument firmly, with both eyes resolutely shut. "They made him stay on the _Perseus_. He won't be in for at least three days. This is some cretin's idea of a joke."

"Not this time, Dolly honey. It's really me."

Her eyes popped open as she whirled. "SAM!" she shrieked, and hurled herself at him with all the pent-up ardor and longing of two hundred thirty-four meticulously counted, husbandless, loveless days.

After an unknown length of time Sam tipped her face up by the chin, nodded at the stroller, and said, "How about introducing me to the little stranger?"

"_What_ a mother I turned out to be! That was the first thing I was going to rave about, the very first thing I saw you! Samuel Jay the Fourth, seventy-six days old today." And so on.

Eventually, however, the proud young mother watched the slightly apprehensive young father carry their first-born upstairs; where together, they put him--still sound asleep--to bed in his crib. Then again they were in each other's arms.

* * * * *

Some time later, she twisted around in the circle of his arm and tried to dig her fingers into the muscles of his back. She then attacked his biceps and, leaning backward, eyed him intently.

"You're you, I know, but you're different. No athlete or any laborer could ever possibly get the muscles you have all over. To say nothing of a space officer on duty. And I know it isn't any kind of a disease. You've been acting all the time as though I were fragile, made out of glass or something--as though you were afraid of breaking me in two. So--what is it, sweetheart?"

"I've been trying to figure out an easy way of telling you, but there isn't any. I am different. I'm a hundred times as strong as any man ever was. Look." He upended a chair, took one heavy hardwood leg between finger and thumb and made what looked like a gentle effort to bend it. The leg broke with a pistol-sharp report and Doris leaped backward in surprise. "So you're right. I _am_ afraid, not only of breaking you in two, but killing you. And if I break any of your ribs or arms or legs I'll never forgive myself. So if I let myself go for a second--I don't think I will, but I might--don't wait until you're really hurt to start screaming. Promise?"

"I promise." Her eyes went wide. "But _tell_ me!"

He told her. She was in turn surprised, amazed, apprehensive, frightened and finally eager; and she became more and more eager right up to the end.

"You mean that we ... that I'll stay just as I am--for thousands of _years_?"

"Just as you are. Or different, if you like. If you really mean any of this yelling you've been doing about being too big in the hips--I think you're exactly right, myself--you can rebuild yourself any way you please. Or change your shape every hour on the hour. But you haven't accepted my invitation yet."

"Don't be silly." She went into his arms again and nibbled on his left ear. "I'd go anywhere with you, of course, any time, but _this_--but you're positively _sure_ Sammy Small will be all right?"

"Positively sure."

"Okay, I'll call mother...." Her face fell. "I _can't_ tell her that we'll never see them again and that we'll live ..."

"You don't need to. She and Pop--Fern and Sally, too, and their boy-friends--are on the list. Not this time, but in a month or so, probably."

Doris brightened like a sunburst. "And your folks, too, of course?" she asked.

"Yes, all the close ones."

"Marvelous! How soon are we leaving?"

* * * * *

At six o'clock next morning, two hundred thirty-five days after leaving Earth, Hilton and Sawtelle set out to make the Ardans' official call upon Terra's Advisory Board. Both were wearing prodigiously heavy lead armor, the inside of which was furiously radioactive. They did not need it, of course. But it would make all Ardans monstrous in Terran eyes and would conceal the fact that any other Ardans were landing.

Their gig was met at the spaceport; not by a limousine, but by a five-ton truck, into which they were loaded one at a time by a hydraulic lift. Cameras clicked, reporters scurried, and tri-di scanners whirred. One of those scanners, both men knew, was reporting directly and only to the Advisory Board--which, of course, never took anything either for granted or at its face value.

Their first stop was at a truck-scale, where each visitor was weighed. Hilton tipped the beam at four thousand six hundred fifteen pounds; Sawtelle, a smaller man, weighed in at four thousand one hundred ninety. Thence to the Radiation Laboratory, where it was ascertained and reported that the armor did not leak--which was reasonable enough, since each was lined with Masters' plastics.

Then into lead-lined testing cells, where each opened his face-plate briefly to a sensing element. Whereupon the indicating needles of two meters in the main laboratory went enthusiastically through the full range of red and held unwaveringly against their stops.

Both Ardans felt the wave of shocked, astonished, almost unbelieving consternation that swept through the observing scientists and, in slightly lesser measure (because they knew less about radiation) through the Advisory Board itself in a big room halfway across town. And from the Radiation Laboratory they were taken, via truck and freight elevator, to the Office of the Commandant, where the Board was sitting.

The story, which had been sent in to the Board the day before on a scrambled beam, was one upon which the Ardans had labored for days. Many facts could be withheld. However, every man aboard the _Perseus_ would agree on some things. Indeed, the Earthship's communications officers had undoubtedly radioed in already about longevity and perfect health and Oman service and many other matters. Hence all such things would have to be admitted and countered.

Thus the report, while it was air-tight, perfectly logical, perfectly consistent, and apparently complete, did not please the Board at all. It wasn't intended to.

* * * * *

"We cannot and do not approve of such unwarranted favoritism," the Chairman of the Board said. "Longevity has always been man's prime goal. Every human being has the inalienable right to ..."

"Flapdoodle!" Hilton snorted. "This is not being broadcast and this room is proofed, so please climb down off your soapbox. You don't need to talk like a politician here. Didn't you read paragraph 12-A-2, one of the many marked 'Top Secret'?"

"Of course. But we do not understand how purely mental qualities can possibly have any effect upon purely physical transformations. Thus it does not seem reasonable that any except rigorously screened personnel would die in the process. That is, of course, unless you contemplate deliberate, cold-blooded murder."

That stopped Hilton in his tracks, for it was too close for comfort to the truth. But it did not hold the captain for an instant. He was used to death, in many of its grisliest forms.

"There are a lot of things no Terran ever will understand," Sawtelle replied instantly. "Reasonable, or not, that's exactly what will happen. And, reasonable or not, it'll be suicide, not murder. There isn't a thing that either Hilton or I can do about it."

Hilton broke the ensuing silence. "You can say with equal truth that every human being has the _right_ to run a four-minute mile or to compose a great symphony. It isn't a matter of right at all, but of ability. In this case the mental qualities are even more necessary than the physical. You as a Board did a very fine job of selecting the BuSci personnel for Project Theta Orionis. Almost eighty per cent of them proved able to withstand the Ardan conversion. On the other hand, only a very small percentage of the Navy personnel did so."

"Your report said that the remaining personnel of the Project were not informed as to the death aspect of the transformation," Admiral Gordon said. "Why not?"

"That should be self-explanatory," Hilton said, flatly. "They are still human and still Terrans. We did not and will not encroach upon either the duties or the privileges of Terra's Advisory Board. What you tell all Terrans, and how much, and how, must be decided by yourselves. This also applies, of course, to the other 'Top Secret' paragraphs of the report, none of which are known to any Terran outside the Board."

"But you haven't said anything about the method of selection," another Advisor complained. "Why, that will take all the psychologists of the world, working full time; continuously."

"We said we would do the selecting. We meant just that," Hilton said, coldly. "No one except the very few selectees will know anything about it. Even if it were an unmixed blessing--which it very definitely is _not_--do you want all humanity thrown into such an uproar as that would cause? Or the quite possible racial inferiority complex it might set up? To say nothing of the question of how much of Terra's best blood do you want to drain off, irreversibly and permanently? No. What we suggest is that you paint the picture so black, using Sawtelle and me and what all humanity has just seen as horrible examples, that nobody would take it as a gift. Make them shun it like the plague. Hell, I don't have to tell you what your propaganda machines can do."

* * * * *

The Chairman of the Board again mounted his invisible rostrum. "Do you mean to intimate that we are to falsify the record?" he declaimed. "To try to make liars out of hundreds of eyewitnesses? You ask us to distort the truth, to connive at ..."

"We aren't asking you to do _anything_!" Hilton snapped. "We don't give a damn what you do. Just study that record, with all that it implies. Read between the lines. As for those on the _Perseus_, no two of them will tell the same story and not one of them has even the remotest idea of what the real story is. I, personally, not only did not want to become a monster, but would have given everything I had to stay human. My wife felt the same way. Neither of us would have converted if there'd been any other way in God's universe of getting the uranexite and doing some other things that simply _must_ be done."

"What other things?" Gordon demanded.

"You'll never know," Hilton answered, quietly. "Things no Terran ever will know. We hope. Things that would drive any Terran stark mad. Some of them are hinted at--as much as we dared--between the lines of the report."

The report had not mentioned the Stretts. Nor were they to be mentioned now. If the Ardans could stop them, no Terran need ever know anything about them.

If not, no Terran should know anything about them except what he would learn for himself just before the end. For Terra would never be able to do anything to defend herself against the Stretts.

"Nothing whatever can drive _me_ mad," Gordon declared, "and I want to know all about it--right now!"

"You can do one of two things, Gordon," Sawtelle said in disgust. His sneer was plainly visible through the six-ply, plastic-backed lead glass of his face-plate. "Either shut up or accept my personal invitation to come to Ardvor and try to go through the wringer. That's an invitation to your own funeral." Five-Jet Admiral Gordon, torn inwardly to ribbons, made no reply.

"I repeat," Hilton went on, "we are not asking you to do anything whatever. We are offering to give you; free of charge but under certain conditions, all the power your humanity can possibly use. We set no limitation whatever as to quantity and with no foreseeable limit as to time. The only point at issue is whether or not you accept the conditions. If you do not accept them we'll leave now--and the offer will not be repeated."

"And you would, I presume, take the _UC-1_ back with you?"

"Of course not, sir. Terra needs power too badly. You are perfectly welcome to that one load of uranexite, no matter what is decided here."

"That's one way of putting it," Gordon sneered. "But the truth is that you know damned well I'll blow both of your ships out of space if you so much as ..."

"Oh, chip-chop the jaw-flapping, Gordon!" Hilton snapped. Then, as the admiral began to bellow orders into his microphone, he went on: "You want it the hard way, eh? Watch what happens, all of you!"

* * * * *

The _UC-1_ shot vertically into the air. Through its shallow dense layer and into and through the stratosphere. Earth's fleet, already on full alert and poised to strike, rushed to the attack. But the carrier had reached the _Orion_ and both Ardvorian ships had been waiting, motionless, for a good half minute before the Terran warships arrived and began to blast with everything they had.

"Flashlights and firecrackers," Sawtelle said, calmly. "You aren't even warming up our screens. As soon as you quit making a damned fool of yourself by wasting energy that way, we'll set the _UC-1_ back down where she was and get on with our business here."

"You will order a cease-fire at once, Admiral," the chairman said, "or the rest of us will, as of now, remove you from the Board." Gordon gritted his teeth in rage, but gave the order.

"If he hasn't had enough yet to convince him," Hilton suggested, "he might send up a drone. We don't want to kill anybody, you know. One with the heaviest screening he's got--just to see what happens to it."

"He's had enough. The rest of us have had more than enough. That exhibition was not only uncalled-for and disgusting--it was outrageous!"

The meeting settled down, then, from argument to constructive discussion, and many topics were gone over. Certain matters were, however, so self-evident that they were not even mentioned.

Thus, it was a self-evident fact that no Terran could ever visit Ardvor; for the instrument-readings agreed with the report's statements as to the violence of the Ardvorian environment, and no Terran could possibly walk around in two tons of lead. Conversely, it was self-apparent to the Terrans that no Ardan could ever visit Earth without being recognized instantly for what he was. Wearing such armor made its necessity starkly plain. No one from the _Perseus_ could say that any Ardan, after having lived on the furiously radiant surface of Ardvor, would not be as furiously radioactive as the laboratory's calibrated instruments had shown Hilton and Sawtelle actually to be.

Wherefore the conference went on, quietly and cooperatively, to its planned end.

One minute after the Terran battleship _Perseus_ emerged into normal space, the _Orion_ went into sub-space for her long trip back to Ardvor.

* * * * *

The last two days of that seven-day trip were the longest-seeming that either Hilton or Sawtelle had ever known. The sub-space radio was on continuously and Kedy-One reported to Sawtelle every five minutes. Even though Hilton knew that the Oman commander-in-chief was exactly as good at perceiving as he himself was, he found himself scanning the thoroughly screened Strett world forty or fifty times an hour.

However, in spite of worry and apprehension, time wore eventlessly on. The _Orion_ emerged, went to Ardvor and landed on Ardane Field.

Hilton, after greeting properly and reporting to his wife, went to his office. There he found that Sandra had everything well in hand except for a few tapes that only he could handle. Sawtelle and his officers went to the new Command Central, where everything was rolling smoothly and very much faster than Sawtelle had dared hope.

The Terran immigrants had to live in the _Orion_, of course, until conversion into Ardans. Almost equally of course--since the Bryant infant was the only young baby in the lot--Doris and her Sammy Small were, by popular acclaim, in the first batch to be converted. For little Sammy had taken the entire feminine contingent by storm. No Oman female had a chance to act as nurse as long as any of the girls were around. Which was practically all the time. Especially the platinum-blonde twins; for several months, now, Bernadine Braden and Hermione Felger.

"And you said they were so hard-boiled," Doris said accusingly to Sam, nodding at the twins. On hands and knees on the floor, head to head with Sammy Small between them, they were growling deep-throated at each other and nuzzling at the baby, who was having the time of his young life. "You couldn't have been any wronger, my sweet, if you'd had the whole Octagon helping you go astray. They're just as nice as they can be, both of them."

Sam shrugged and grinned. His wife strode purposefully across the room to the playful pair and lifted their pretended prey out from between them.

"Quit it, you two," she directed, swinging the baby up and depositing him a-straddle her left hip. "You're just simply spoiling him rotten."

"You think so, Dolly? Uh-uh, far be it from such." Bernadine came lithely to her feet. She glanced at her own taut, trim abdomen; upon which a micrometrically-precise topographical mapping job might have revealed an otherwise imperceptible bulge. "Just you wait until Junior arrives and I'll show you how to _really_ spoil a baby. Besides, what's the hurry?"

"He needs his supper. Vitamins and minerals and hard radiations and things, and then he's going to bed. I don't approve of this no-sleep business. So run along, both of you, until tomorrow."

XII

As has been said, the Stretts were working, with all the intensity of their monstrous but tremendously capable minds, upon their Great Plan; which was, basically, to conquer and either enslave or destroy every other intelligent race throughout all the length, breadth, and thickness of total space. To that end each individual Strett had to become invulnerable and immortal.

Wherefore, in the inconceivably remote past, there had been put into effect a program of selective breeding and of carefully-calculated treatments. It was mathematically certain that this program would result in a race of beings of pure force--beings having no material constituents remaining whatever.

Under those hellish treatments billions upon billions of Stretts had died. But the few remaining thousands had almost reached their sublime goal. In a few more hundreds of thousands of years perfection would be reached. The few surviving hundreds of perfect beings could and would multiply to any desired number in practically no time at all.

Hilton and his seven fellow-workers had perceived all this in their one and only study of the planet Strett, and every other Ardan had been completely informed.

A dozen or so Strett Lords of Thought, male and female, were floating about in the atmosphere--which was not air--of their Assembly Hall. Their heads were globes of ball lightning. Inside them could be seen quite plainly the intricate convolutions of immense, less-than-half-material brains, shot through and through with rods and pencils and shapes of pure, scintillating force.

And the bodies! Or, rather, each horrendous brain had a few partially material appendages and appurtenances recognizable as bodily organs. There were no mouths, no ears, no eyes, no noses or nostrils, no lungs, no legs or arms. There were, however, hearts. Some partially material ichor flowed through those living-fire-outlined tubes. There were starkly functional organs of reproduction with which, by no stretch of the imagination, could any thought of tenderness or of love be connected.

It was a good thing for the race, Hilton had thought at first perception of the things, that the Stretts had bred out of themselves every iota of the finer, higher attributes of life. If they had not done so, the impotence of sheer disgust would have supervened so long since that the race would have been extinct for ages.

"Thirty-eight periods ago the Great Brain was charged with the sum total of Strettsian knowledge," First Lord Thinker Zoyar radiated to the assembled Stretts. "For those thirty-eight periods it has been scanning, peyondiring, amassing data and formulating hypotheses, theories, and conclusions. It has just informed me that it is now ready to make a preliminary report. Great Brain, how much of the total universe have you studied?"

"This Galaxy only," the Brain radiated, in a texture of thought as hard and as harsh as Zoyar's own.

"Why not more?"

"Insufficient power. My first conclusion is that whoever set up the specifications for me is a fool."

* * * * *

To say that the First Lord went out of control at this statement is to put it very mildly indeed. He fulminated, ending with: "... destroyed instantly!"

"Destroy me if you like," came the utterly calm, utterly cold reply. "I am in no sense alive. I have no consciousness of self nor any desire for continued existence. To do so, however, would ..."

A flurry of activity interrupted the thought. Zoyar was in fact assembling the forces to destroy the brain. But, before he could act, Second Lord Thinker Ynos and another female blew him into a mixture of loose molecules and flaring energies.

"Destruction of any and all irrational minds is mandatory," Ynos, now First Lord Thinker, explained to the linked minds. "Zoyar had been becoming less and less rational by the period. A good workman does not causelessly destroy his tools. Go ahead, Great Brain, with your findings."

"... not be logical." The brain resumed the thought exactly where it had been broken off. "Zoyar erred in demanding unlimited performance, since infinite knowledge and infinite ability require not only infinite capacity and infinite power, but also infinite time. Nor is it either necessary or desirable that I should have such qualities. There is no reasonable basis for the assumption that you Stretts will conquer any significant number even of the millions of intelligent races now inhabiting this one Galaxy."

"Why not?" Ynos demanded, her thought almost, but not quite, as steady and cold as it had been.

"The answer to that question is implicit in the second indefensible error made in my construction. The prime datum impressed into my banks, that the Stretts are in fact the strongest, ablest, most intelligent race in the universe, proved to be false. I had to eliminate it before I could do any really constructive thinking."

A roar of condemnatory thought brought all circumambient ether to a boil. "Bah--destroy it!" "Detestable!" "Intolerable!" "If that is the best it can do, annihilate it!" "Far better brains have been destroyed for much less!" "Treason!" And so on.

First Lord Thinker Ynos, however, remained relatively calm. "While we have always held it to be a fact that we are the highest race in existence, no rigorous proof has been possible. Can you now disprove that assumption?"

* * * * *

"I have disproved it. I have not had time to study all of the civilizations of this Galaxy, but I have examined a statistically adequate sample of one million seven hundred ninety-two thousand four hundred sixteen different planetary intelligences. I found one which is considerably abler and more advanced than you Stretts. Therefore the probability is greater than point nine nine that there are not less than ten, and not more than two hundred eight, such races in this Galaxy alone."

"Impossible!" Another wave of incredulous and threatening anger swept through the linked minds; a wave which Ynos flattened out with some difficulty.

Then she asked: "Is it probable that we will make contact with this supposedly superior race in the foreseeable future?"

"You are in contact with it now."

"_What?_" Even Ynos was contemptuous now. "You mean that one shipload of despicable humans who--far too late to do them any good--barred us temporarily from Fuel World?"

"Not exactly or only those humans, no. And your assumptions may or may not be valid."

"Don't you _know_ whether they are or not?" Ynos snapped. "Explain your uncertainty at once!"

"I am uncertain because of insufficient data," the brain replied, calmly. "The only pertinent facts of which I am certain are: First, the world Ardry, upon which the Omans formerly lived and to which the humans in question first went--a planet which no Strett can peyondire--is now abandoned. Second, the Stretts of old did not completely destroy the humanity of the world Ardu. Third, some escapees from Ardu reached and populated the world Ardry. Fourth, the android Omans were developed on Ardry, by the human escapees from Ardu and their descendants. Fifth, the Omans referred to those humans as 'Masters.' Sixth, after living on Ardry for a very long period of time the Masters went elsewhere. Seventh, the Omans remaining on Ardry maintained, continuously and for a very long time, the status quo left by the Masters. Eighth, immediately upon the arrival from Terra of these present humans, that long-existing status was broken. Ninth, the planet called Fuel World is, for the first time, surrounded by a screen of force. The formula of this screen is as follows."

The brain gave it. No Strett either complained or interrupted. Each was too busy studying that formula and examining its stunning implications and connotations.

"Tenth, that formula is one full order of magnitude beyond anything previously known to your science. Eleventh, it could not have been developed by the science of Terra, nor by that of any other world whose population I have examined."

* * * * *

The brain took the linked minds instantaneously to Terra; then to a few thousand or so other worlds inhabited by human beings; then to a few thousands of planets whose populations were near-human, non-human and monstrous.

"It is therefore clear," it announced, "that this screen was computed and produced by the race, whatever it may be, that is now dwelling on Fuel World and asserting full ownership of it."

"Who or what _is_ that race?" Ynos demanded.

"Data insufficient."

"Theorize, then!"

"Postulate that the Masters, in many thousands of cycles of study, made advances in science that were not reduced to practice; that the Omans either possessed this knowledge or had access to it; and that Omans and humans cooperated fully in sharing and in working with all the knowledges thus available. From these three postulates the conclusion can be drawn that there has come into existence a new race. One combining the best qualities of both humans and Omans, but with the weaknesses of neither."

"An unpleasant thought, truly," Ynos thought. "But you can now, I suppose, design the generators and projectors of a force superior to that screen."

"Data insufficient. I can equal it, since both generation and projection are implicit in the formula. But the data so adduced are in themselves vastly ahead of anything previously in my banks."

"Are there any other races in this Galaxy more powerful than the postulated one now living on Fuel World?"

"Data insufficient."

"Theorize, then!"

"Data insufficient."

The linked minds concentrated upon the problem for a period of time that might have been either days or weeks. Then:

"Great Brain, advise us," Ynos said. "What is best for us to do?"

"With identical defensive screens it becomes a question of relative power. You should increase the size and power of your warships to something beyond the computed probable maximum of the enemy. You should build more ships and missiles than they will probably be able to build. Then and only then will you attack their warships, in tremendous force and continuously."

"But not their planetary defenses. I see." Ynos's thought was one of complete understanding. "And the _real_ offensive will be?"

"No mobile structure can be built to mount mechanisms of power sufficient to smash down by sheer force of output such tremendously powerful installations as their planet-based defenses must be assumed to be. Therefore the planet itself must be destroyed. This will require a missile of planetary mass. The best such missile is the tenth planet of their own sun."

* * * * *

"I see." Ynos's mind was leaping ahead, considering hundreds of possibilities and making highly intricate and involved computations. "That will, however, require many cycles of time and more power than even our immense reserves can supply."

"True. It will take much time. The fuel problem, however, is not a serious one, since Fuel World is not unique. Think on, First Lord Ynos."

"We will attack in maximum force and with maximum violence. We will blanket the planet. We will maintain maximum force and violence until most or all of the enemy ships have been destroyed. We will then install planetary drives on Ten and force it into collision orbit with Fuel World, meanwhile exerting extreme precautions that not so much as a spy-beam emerges above the enemy's screen. Then, still maintaining extreme precaution, we will guard both planets until the last possible moment before the collision. Brain, it cannot fail!"

"You err. It can fail. All we actually know of the abilities of this postulated neo-human race is what I have learned from the composition of its defensive screen. The probability approaches unity that the Masters continued to delve and to learn for millions of cycles while you Stretts, reasonlessly certain of your supremacy, concentrated upon your evolution from the material to a non-material form of life and performed only limited research into armaments of greater and ever greater power."

"True. But that attitude was then justified. It was not and is not logical to assume that any race would establish a fixed status at any level of ability below its absolute maximum."

"While that conclusion could once have been defensible, it is now virtually certain that the Masters had stores of knowledge which they may or may not have withheld from the Omans, but which were in some way made available to the neo-humans. Also, there is no basis whatever for the assumption that this new race has revealed all its potentialities."

"Statistically, that is probably true. But this is the best plan you have been able to formulate?"

"It is. Of the many thousands of plans I set up and tested, this one has the highest probability of success."

"Then we will adopt it. We are Stretts. Whatever we decide upon will be driven through to complete success. We have one tremendous advantage in you."

"Yes. The probability approaches unity that I can perform research on a vastly wider and larger scale, and almost infinitely faster, than can any living organism or any possible combination of such organisms."

* * * * *

Nor was the Great Brain bragging. It scanned in moments the stored scientific knowledge of over a million planets. It tabulated, correlated, analyzed, synthesized, theorized and concluded--all in microseconds of time. Thus it made more progress in one Terran week than the Masters had made in a million years.

When it had gone as far as it could go, it reported its results--and the Stretts, hard as they were and intransigent, were amazed and overjoyed. Not one of them had ever even imagined such armaments possible. Hence they became supremely confident that it was unmatched and unmatchable throughout all space.

What the Great Brain did not know, however, and the Stretts did not realize, was that it could not really think.

Unlike the human mind, it could not deduce valid theories or conclusions from incomplete, insufficient, fragmentary data. It could not leap gaps. Thus there was no more actual assurance than before that they had exceeded, or even matched, the weaponry of the neo-humans of Fuel World.

Supremely confident, Ynos said: "We will now discuss every detail of the plan in sub-detail, and will correlate every sub-detail with every other, to the end that every action, however minor, will be performed perfectly and in its exact time."

That discussion, which lasted for days, was held. Hundreds of thousands of new and highly specialized mechs were built and went furiously and continuously to work. A fuel-supply line was run to another uranexite-rich planet.

Stripping machines stripped away the surface layers of soil, sand, rock and low-grade ore. Giant miners tore and dug and slashed and refined and concentrated. Storage silos by the hundreds were built and were filled. Hundreds upon hundreds of concentrate-carriers bored their stolid ways through hyperspace. Many weeks of time passed.

But of what importance are mere weeks of time to a race that has, for many millions of years, been adhering rigidly to a pre-set program?

The sheer magnitude of the operation, and the extraordinary attention to detail with which it was prepared and launched, explain why the Strett attack on Ardvor did not occur until so many weeks later than Hilton and Sawtelle expected it. They also explain the utterly incomprehensible fury, the completely fantastic intensity, the unparalleled savagery, the almost immeasurable brute power of that attack when it finally did come.

* * * * *

When the _Orion_ landed on Ardane Field from Earth, carrying the first contingent of immigrants, Hilton and Sawtelle were almost as much surprised as relieved that the Stretts had not already attacked.

Sawtelle, confident that his defenses were fully ready, took it more or less in stride. Hilton worried. And after a couple of days he began to do some real thinking about it.

The first result of his thinking was a conference with Temple. As soon as she got the drift, she called in Teddy and Big Bill Karns. Teddy in turn called in Becky and de Vaux; Karns wanted Poynter and Beverly; Poynter wanted Braden and the twins; and so on. Thus, what started out as a conference of two became a full Ardan staff meeting; a meeting which, starting immediately after lunch, ran straight through into the following afternoon.

"To sum up the consensus, for the record," Hilton said then, studying a sheet of paper covered with symbols, "the Stretts haven't attacked yet because they found out that we are stronger than they are. They found that out by analyzing our defensive web--which, if we had had this meeting first, we wouldn't have put up at all. Unlike anything known to human or previous Strett science, it is proof against any form of attack up to the limit of the power of its generators. They will attack as soon as they are equipped to break that screen at the level of power probable to our ships. We can not arrive at any reliable estimate as to how long that will take.

"As to the effectiveness of our cutting off their known fuel supply, opinion is divided. We must therefore assume that fuel shortage will not be a factor.

"Neither are we unanimous on the basic matter as to why the Masters acted as they did just before they left Ardry. Why did they set the status so far below their top ability? Why did they make it impossible for the Omans ever, of themselves, to learn their higher science? Why, if they did not want that science to become known, did they leave complete records of it? The majority of us believe that the Masters coded their records in such fashion that the Stretts, even if they conquered the Omans or destroyed them, could never break that code; since it was keyed to the basic difference between the Strett mentality and the human. Thus, they left it deliberately for some human race to find.

"Finally, and most important, our physicists and theoreticians are not able to extrapolate, from the analysis of our screen, to the concepts underlying the Masters' ultimate weapons of offense, the first-stage booster and its final end-product, the Vang. If, as we can safely assume, the Stretts do not already have those weapons, they will know nothing about them until we ourselves use them in battle.

"These are, of course, only the principal points covered. Does anyone wish to amend this summation as recorded?"

* * * * *

No one did.

The meeting was adjourned. Hilton, however, accompanied Sawtelle and Kedy to the captain's office. "So you see, Skipper, we got troubles," he said. "If we don't use those boosters against their skeletons it'll boil down to a stalemate lasting God only knows how long. It will be a war of attrition, outcome dependent on which side can build the most and biggest and strongest ships the fastest. On the other hand, if we _do_ use 'em on defense here, they'll analyze 'em and have everything worked out in a day or so. The first thing they'll do is beef up their planetary defenses to match. That way, we'd blow all their ships out of space, probably easily enough, but Strett itself will be just as safe as though it were in God's left-hand hip pocket. So what's the answer?"

"It isn't that simple, Jarve," Sawtelle said. "Let's hear from you, Kedy."

"Thank you, sir. There is an optimum mass, a point of maximum efficiency of firepower as balanced against loss of maneuverability, for any craft designed for attack," Kedy thought, in his most professional manner. "We assume that the Stretts know that as well as we do. No such limitation applies to strictly defensive structures, but both the Strett craft and ours must be designed for attack. We have built and are building many hundreds of thousands of ships of that type. So, undoubtedly, are the Stretts. Ship for ship, they will be pretty well matched. Therefore one part of my strategy will be for two of our ships to engage simultaneously one of theirs. There is a distinct probability that we will have enough advantage in speed of control to make that tactic operable."

"But there's another that we won't," Sawtelle objected. "And maybe they can build more ships than we can."

"Another point is that they may build, in addition to their big stuff, a lot of small, ultra-fast ones," Hilton put in. "Suicide jobs--crash and detonate--simply super-missiles. How sure are you that you can stop such missiles with ordinary beams?"

"Not at all, sir. Some of them would of course reach and destroy some of our ships. Which brings up the second part of my strategy. For each one of the heavies, we are building many small ships of the type you just called 'super-missiles'."

"Superdreadnoughts versus superdreadnoughts, super-missiles versus super-missiles." Hilton digested that concept for several minutes. "That could still wind up as a stalemate, except for what you said about control. That isn't much to depend on, especially since we won't have the time-lag advantage you Omans had before. They'll see to that. Also, I don't like to sacrifice a million Omans, either."

* * * * *

"I haven't explained the newest development yet, sir. There will be no Omans. Each ship and each missile has a built-in Kedy brain, sir."

"_What?_ That makes it infinitely worse. You Kedys, unless it's absolutely necessary, are _not_ expendable!"

"Oh, but we are, sir. You don't quite understand. We Kedys are not merely similar, but are in fact identical. Thus we are not independent entities. All of us together make up the actual Kedy--that which is meant when we say 'I'. That is, I am the sum total of all Kedys everywhere, not merely this individual that you call Kedy One."

"You mean you're _all_ talking to me?"

"Exactly, sir. Thus, no one element of the Kedy has any need of, or any desire for, self-preservation. The destruction of one element, or of thousands of elements, would be of no more consequence to the Kedy than ... well, they are strictly analogous to the severed ends of the hairs, every time you get a haircut."

"My God!" Hilton stared at Sawtelle. Sawtelle stared back. "I'm beginning to see ... maybe ... I hope. What control that would be! But just in case we _should_ have to use the boosters...." Hilton's voice died away. Scowling in concentration, he clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace the floor.

"Better give up, Jarve. Kedy's got the same mind you have," Sawtelle began, to Hilton's oblivious back; but Kedy silenced the thought almost in the moment of its inception.

"By no means, sir," he contradicted. "I have the brain only. The _mind_ is entirely different."

"Link up, Kedy, and see what you think of this," Hilton broke in. There ensued an interchange of thought so fast and so deeply mathematical that Sawtelle was lost in seconds. "Do you think it'll work?"

"I don't see how it can fail, sir. At what point in the action should it be put into effect? And will you call the time of initiation, or shall I?"

"Not until all their reserves are in action. Or, at worst, all of ours except that one task-force. Since you'll know a lot more about the status of the battle than either Sawtelle or I will, you give the signal and I'll start things going."

"What are you two talking about?" Sawtelle demanded.

"It's a long story, chum. Kedy can tell you about it better than I can. Besides, it's getting late and Dark Lady and Larry both give me hell every time I hold supper on plus time unless there's a mighty good reason for it. So, so long, guys."

XIII

For many weeks the production of Ardan warships and missiles had been spiraling upward.

Half a mountain range of solid rock had been converted into fabricated super-steel and armament. Superdreadnoughts Were popping into existence at the rate of hundreds per minute. Missiles were rolling off the ends of assembly lines like half-pint tin cans out of can-making machines.

The Strett warcraft, skeletons and missiles, would emerge into normal space anywhere within a million miles of Ardvor. The Ardan missiles were powered for an acceleration of one hundred gravities. That much the Kedy brains, molded solidly into teflon-lined, massively braced steel spheres, could just withstand.

To be certain of breaking the Strett screens, an impact velocity of about six miles per second was necessary. The time required to attain this velocity was about ten seconds, and the flight distance something over thirty miles.

Since the Stretts could orient themselves in less than one second after emergence, even this extremely tight packing of missiles--only sixty miles apart throughout the entire emergence volume of space--would still give the Stretts the initiative by a time-ratio of more than ten to one.

Such tight packing was of course impossible. It called for many billions of defenders instead of the few millions it was possible for the Omans to produce in the time they had. In fact, the average spacing was well over ten thousand miles when the invading horde of Strett missiles emerged and struck.

_How_ they struck!

There was nothing of finesse about that attack; nothing of skill or of tactics: nothing but the sheer brute force of overwhelming superiority of numbers and of over-matching power. One instant all space was empty. The next instant it was full of invading missiles--a superb exhibition of coordination and timing.

And the Kedy control, upon which the defenders had counted so heavily, proved useless. For each Strett missile, within a fraction of a second of emergence, darted toward the nearest Oman missile with an acceleration that made the one-hundred-gravity defenders seem to be standing still.

One to one, missiles crashed into missiles and detonated. There were no solid or liquid end-products. Each of those frightful weapons carried so many megatons-equivalent of atomic concentrate that all nearby space blossomed out into superatomic blasts hundreds of times more violent than the fireballs of lithium-hydride fusion bombs.

For a moment even Hilton was stunned; but only for a moment.

"Kedy!" he barked. "Get your big stuff out there! Use the boosters!" He started for the door at a full run. "That tears it--that _really_ tears it! Scrap the plan. I'll board the _Sirius_ and take the task-force to Strett. Bring your stuff along, Skipper, as soon as you're ready."

* * * * *

Ardan superdreadnoughts in their massed thousands poured out through Ardvor's one-way screen. Each went instantly to work. Now the Kedy control system, doing what it was designed to do, proved its full worth. For the weapons of the big battle-wagons did not depend upon acceleration, but were driven at the speed of light; and Grand Fleet Operations were planned and were carried out at the almost infinite velocity of thought itself.

Or, rather, they were not planned at all. They were simply carried out, immediately and without confusion.

For all the Kedys were one. Each Kedy element, without any lapse of time whatever for consultation with any other, knew exactly where every other element was; exactly what each was doing; and exactly what he himself should do to make maximum contribution to the common cause.

Nor was any time lost in relaying orders to crewmen within the ship. There were no crewmen. Each Kedy element was the sole personnel of, and was integral with, his vessel. Nor were there any wires or relays to impede and slow down communication. Operational instructions, too, were transmitted and were acted upon with thought's transfinite speed. Thus, if decision and execution were not quite mathematically simultaneous, they were separated by a period of time so infinitesimally small as to be impossible of separation.

Wherever a Strett missile was, or wherever a Strett skeleton-ship appeared, an Oman beam reached it, usually in much less than one second. Beam clung to screen--caressingly, hungrily--absorbing its total energy and forming the first-stage booster. Then, three microseconds later, that booster went off into a ragingly incandescent, glaringly violent burst of fury so hellishly, so inconceivably hot that less than a thousandth of its total output of energy was below the very top of the visible spectrum!

If the previous display of atomic violence had been so spectacular and of such magnitude as to defy understanding or description, what of this? When hundreds of thousands of Kedys, each wielding world-wrecking powers as effortlessly and as deftly and as precisely as thought, attacked and destroyed millions of those tremendously powerful war-fabrications of the Stretts? The only simple answer is that all nearby space might very well have been torn out of the most radiant layers of S-Doradus itself.

* * * * *

Hilton made the hundred yards from office door to curb in just over twelve seconds. Larry was waiting. The car literally burned a hole in the atmosphere as it screamed its way to Ardane Field.

It landed with a thump. Heavy black streaks of synthetic rubber marked the pavement as it came to a screeching, shrieking stop at the flagship's main lock. And, in the instant of closing that lock's outer portal, all twenty-thousand-plus warships of the task force took off as one at ten gravities. Took off, and in less than one minute went into overdrive.

All personal haste was now over. Hilton went up into what he still thought of as the "control room," even though he knew that there were no controls, nor even any instruments, anywhere aboard. He knew what he would find there. Fast as he had acted, Temple had not had as far to go and she had got there first.

He could not have said, for the life of him, how he actually felt about this direct defiance of his direct orders. He walked into the room, sat down beside her and took her hand.

"I told you to stay home, Temple," he said.

"I know you did. But I'm not only the assistant head of your Psychology Department. I'm your wife, remember? 'Until death do us part.' And if there's any way in the universe I can manage it, death isn't going to part us--at least, this one isn't. If this is it, we'll go together."

"I know, sweetheart." He put his arm around her, held her close. "As a psych I wouldn't give a whoop. You'd be expendable. But as my wife, especially now that you're pregnant, you aren't. You're a lot more important to the future of our race than I am."

She stiffened in the circle of his arm. "What's _that_ crack supposed to mean? Think I'd ever accept a synthetic zombie imitation of you for my husband and go on living with it just as though nothing had happened?"

Hilton started to say something, but Temple rushed heedlessly on: "_Drat_ the race! No matter how many children we ever have you were first and you'll _stay_ first, and if you have to go I'll go, too, so there! Besides, you know darn well that they can't duplicate whatever it is that makes you Jarvis Hilton."

"Now wait a minute, Tempy. The conversion ..."

"Yes, the conversion," she interrupted, triumphantly. "The thing I'm talking about is immaterial--untouchable--they didn't--couldn't--do any thing about it at all. Kedy, will you please tell this big goofus that even though you have got Jarvis Hilton's brain you aren't Jarvis Hilton and never can be?"

* * * * *

The atmosphere of the room vibrated in the frequencies of a deep bass laugh. "You are trying to hold a completely untenable position, friend Hilton. Any attempt to convince a mind of real power that falsity is truth is illogical. My advice is for you to surrender."

That word hit Temple hard. "Not surrender, sweetheart. I'm not fighting you. I never will." She seized both of his hands; tears welled into her glorious eyes. "It's just that I simply couldn't _stand_ it to go on living without you!"

"I know, darling." He got up and lifted her to her feet, so that she could come properly into his arms. They stood there, silent and motionless, for minutes.

Temple finally released herself and, after feeling for a handkerchief she did not have, wiped her eyes with a forefinger and then wiped the finger on her bare leg. She grinned and turned to the Omans. "Prince, will you and Dark Lady please conjure us up a steak-and-mushrooms supper? They should be in the pantry ... since this _Sirius_ was designed for us."

After supper the two sat companionably on a davenport. "One thing about this business isn't quite clear," Temple said. "Why all this tearing rush? They haven't got the booster or anything like it, or they'd have used it. Surely it'll take them a long time to go from the mere analysis of the forces and fields we used clear through to the production and installation of enough weapons to stop this whole fleet?"

"It surely won't. They've had the absorption principle for ages. Remember that first, ancient skeleton that drained all the power of our suits and boats in nothing flat? From there it isn't too big a jump. And as for producing stuff; uh-_uh_! If there's any limit to what they can do, I don't know what it is. If we don't slug 'em before they get it, it's curtains."

"I see.... I'm afraid. We're almost there, darling."

He glanced at the chronometer. "About eleven minutes. And of course I don't need to ask you to stay out of the way."

"Of course not. I won't interfere, no matter what happens. All I'm going to do is hold your hand and pull for you with all my might."

"That'll help, believe me. I'm mighty glad you're along, sweetheart. Even though both of us know you shouldn't be."

* * * * *

The task force emerged. Each ship darted toward its pre-assigned place in a mathematically exact envelope around the planet Strett.

Hilton sat on a davenport strained and still. His eyes were closed and every muscle tense. Left hand gripped the arm-rest so fiercely that fingertips were inches deep in the leather-covered padding.

The Stretts _knew_ that any such attack as this was futile. No movable structure or any combination of such structures could possibly wield enough power to break down screens powered by such engines as theirs.

Hilton, however, knew that there was a chance. Not with the first-stage boosters, which were manipulable and detonable masses of ball lightning, but with those boosters' culminations, the Vangs; which were ball lightning raised to the sixth power and which only the frightful energies of the boosters could bring into being.

But, even with twenty-thousand-plus Vangs--or any larger number--success depended entirely upon a nicety of timing never before approached and supposedly impossible. Not only to thousandths of a microsecond, but to a small fraction of one such thousandth: roughly, the time it takes light to travel three-sixteenths of an inch.

It would take practically absolute simultaneity to overload to the point of burnout to those Strett generators. They were the heaviest in the Galaxy.

That was why Hilton himself had to be there. He could not possibly have done the job from Ardvor. In fact, there was no real assurance that, even at the immeasurable velocity of thought and covering a mere million miles, he could do it even from his present position aboard one unit of the fleet. Theoretically, with his speed-up, he could. But that theory had yet to be reduced to practice.

Tense and strained, Hilton began his countdown.

Temple sat beside him. Both hands pressed his right fist against her breast. Her eyes, too, were closed; she was as stiff and as still as was he. She was not interfering, but giving; supporting him, backing him, giving to him in full flood everything of that tremendous inner strength that had made Temple Bells what she so uniquely was.

On the exact center of the needle-sharp zero beat every Kedy struck. Gripped and activated as they all were by Hilton's keyed-up-and-stretched-out mind, they struck in what was very close indeed to absolute unison.

Absorbing beams, each one having had precisely the same number of millimeters to travel, reached the screen at the same instant. They clung and sucked. Immeasurable floods of energy flashed from the Strett generators into those vortices to form twenty thousand-plus first-stage boosters.

* * * * *

But this time the boosters did not detonate.

Instead, as energies continued to flood in at a frightfully accelerating rate, they turned into something else. Things no Terran science has ever even imagined; things at the formation of which all neighboring space actually warped, and in that warping seethed and writhed and shuddered. The very sub-ether screamed and shrieked in protest as it, too, yielded in starkly impossible fashions to that irresistible stress.

How even those silicon-fluorine brains stood it, not one of them ever knew.

Microsecond by slow microsecond the Vangs grew and grew and grew. They were pulling not only the full power of the Ardan warships, but also the immeasurably greater power of the strainingly overloaded Strettsian generators themselves. The ethereal and sub-ethereal writhings and distortions and screamings grew worse and worse; harder and ever harder to bear.

Imagine, if you can, a constantly and rapidly increasing mass of plutonium--a mass already thousands of times greater than critical, but not _allowed_ to react! That gives a faint and very inadequate picture of what was happening then.

Finally, at perhaps a hundred thousand times critical mass, and still in perfect sync, the Vangs all went off.

The planet Strett became a nova.

"We won! We _won_!" Temple shrieked, her perception piercing through the hellish murk that was all nearby space.

"Not quite yet, sweet, but we're over the biggest hump," and the two held an impromptu, but highly satisfactory, celebration.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the planet Strett became a junior-grade nova, since the actual nova stage was purely superficial and did not last very long. In a couple of hours things had quieted down enough so that the heavily-screened warships could approach the planet and finish up their part of the job.

Much of Strett's land surface was molten lava. Much of its water was gone. There were some pockets of resistance left, of course, but they did not last long. Equally of course the Stretts themselves, twenty-five miles underground, had not been harmed at all.

But that, too, was according to plan.

* * * * *

Leaving the task force on guard, to counter any move the Stretts might be able to make, Hilton shot the _Sirius_ out to the planet's moon. There Sawtelle and his staff and tens of thousands of Omans and machines were starting to work. No part of this was Hilton's job; so all he and Temple did was look on.

Correction, please. That was not _all_ they did. But while resting and eating and loafing and sleeping and enjoying each other's company, both watched Operation Moon closely enough to be completely informed as to everything that went on.

Immense, carefully placed pits went down to solid bedrock. To that rock were immovably anchored structures strong enough to move a world. Driving units were installed--drives of such immensity of power as to test to the full the highest engineering skills of the Galaxy. Mountains of fuel-concentrate filled vast reservoirs of concrete. Each was connected to a drive by fifty-inch high-speed conveyors.

Sawtelle drove a thought and those brutal super-drives began to blast.

As they blasted, Strett's satellite began to move out of its orbit. Very slowly at first, but faster and faster. They continued to blast, with all their prodigious might and in carefully-computed order, until the desired orbit was attained--an orbit which terminated in a vertical line through the center of the Stretts' supposedly impregnable retreat.

The planet Strett had a mass of approximately seven times ten to the twenty-first metric tons. Its moon, little more than a hundredth as massive, still weighed in at about eight times ten to the nineteenth--that is, the figure eight followed by nineteen zeroes.

And moon fell on planet, in direct central impact, after having fallen from a height of over a quarter of a million miles under the full pull of gravity and the full thrust of those mighty atomic drives.

The kinetic energy of such a collision can be computed. It can be expressed. It is, however, of such astronomical magnitude as to be completely meaningless to the human mind.

Simply, the two worlds merged and splashed. Droplets, weighing up to millions of tons each, spattered out into space; only to return, in seconds or hours or weeks or months, to add their atrocious contributions to the enormity of the destruction already wrought.

No trace survived of any Strett or of any thing, however small, pertaining to the Stretts.

Epilogue

As had become a daily custom, most of the Ardans were gathered at the natatorium. Hilton and Temple were wrestling in the water--she was trying to duck him and he was hard put to it to keep her from doing it. The platinum-haired twins were--oh, ever so surreptitiously and indetectably!--studying the other girls.

Captain Sawtelle--he had steadfastly refused to accept any higher title--and his wife were teaching two of their tiny grandchildren to swim.

In short, everything was normal.

Beverly Bell Poynter, from the top platform, hit the board as hard as she could hit it; and, perfectly synchronized with it, hurled herself upward. Up and up and up she went. Up to her top ceiling of two hundred ten feet. Then, straightening out into a shapely arrow and without again moving a muscle, she hurtled downward, making two and a half beautifully stately turns and striking the water with a slurping, splashless _chug_! Coming easily to the surface, she shook the water out of her eyes.

Temple, giving up her attempts to near-drown her husband, rolled over and floated quietly beside him.

"You know, this is fun," he said.

"Uh-_huh_," she agreed enthusiastically.

"I'm glad you and Sandy buried the hatchet. Two of the top women who ever lived. Or should I have said sheathed the claws? Or have you, really?"

"Pretty much ... I guess." Temple didn't seem altogether sure of the point. "Oh-oh. _Now_ what?"

A flitabout had come to ground. Dark Lady, who never delivered a message via thought if she could possibly get away with delivering it in person, was running full tilt across the sand toward them. Her long black hair was streaming out behind her; she was waving a length of teletype tape as though it were a pennon.

"Oh, no. Not _again_?" Temple wailed. "Don't tell us it's Terra again, Dark Lady, please."

"But it is!" Dark Lady cried, excitedly. "And it says 'From Five-Jet Admiral Gordon, Commanding.'"

"Omit flowers, please," Hilton directed. "Boil it down."

"The _Perseus_ is in orbit with the whole Advisory Board. They want to hold a top-level summit conference with Director Hilton and Five-Jet Admiral Sawtelle." Dark Lady raised her voice enough to be sure Sawtelle heard the title, and shot him a wicked glance as she announced it. "They hope to conclude all unfinished business on a mutually satisfactory and profitable basis."

"Okay, Lady, thanks. Tell 'em we'll call 'em shortly."

Dark Lady flashed away and Hilton and Temple swam slowly toward a ladder.

"Drat Terra and everything and everybody on it," Temple said, vigorously. "And especially drat His Royal Fatness Five-Jet Admiral Gordon. How much longer will it take, do you think, to pound some sense into their pointed little heads?"

"Oh, we're not doing too bad," Hilton assured his lovely bride. "Two or three more sessions ought to do it."

Everything was normal....

END

       THE SKYLARK OF SPACE

by

EDWARD ELMER SMITH

In Collaboration with

LEE HAWKINS GARBY

CHAPTER I

The Occurrence of the Impossible

Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of "X," the unknown metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing apparatus and bottles of chemicals on its way, and was even now disappearing through the open window. He seized his prism binoculars and focused them upon the flying vessel, a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, only its rapidly diminishing size showing the enormous velocity with which it was moving. It grew smaller and smaller, and in a few moments disappeared utterly.

The chemist turned as though in a trance. How was this? The copper bath he had used for months was gone--gone like a shot, with nothing to make it go. Nothing, that is, except an electric cell and a few drops of the unknown solution. He looked at the empty space where it had stood, at the broken glass covering his laboratory table, and again stared out of the window.

He was aroused from his stunned inaction by the entrance of his colored laboratory helper, and silently motioned him to clean up the wreckage.

"What's happened, Doctah?" asked the dusky assistant.

"Search me, Dan. I wish I knew, myself," responded Seaton, absently, lost in wonder at the incredible phenomenon of which he had just been a witness.

Ferdinand Scott, a chemist employed in the next room, entered breezily.

"Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a racket in here," the newcomer remarked. Then he saw the helper busily mopping up the reeking mass of chemicals.

"Great balls of fire!" he exclaimed. "What've you been celebrating? Had an explosion? How, what, and why?"

"I can tell you the 'what,' and part of the 'how'," Seaton replied thoughtfully, "but as to the 'why,' I am completely in the dark. Here's all I know about it," and in a few words he related the foregoing incident. Scott's face showed in turn interest, amazement, and pitying alarm. He took Seaton by the arm.

"Dick, old top, I never knew you to drink or dope, but this stuff sure came out of either a bottle or a needle. Did you see a pink serpent carrying it away? Take my advice, old son, if you want to stay in Uncle Sam's service, and lay off the stuff, whatever it is. It's bad enough to come down here so far gone that you wreck most of your apparatus and lose the rest of it, but to pull a yarn like that is going too far. The Chief will have to ask for your resignation, sure. Why don't you take a couple of days of your leave and straighten up?"

Seaton paid no attention to him, and Scott returned to his own laboratory, shaking his head sadly.

Seaton, with his mind in a whirl, walked slowly to his desk, picked up his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down to study out what he had done, or what could possibly have happened, to result in such an unbelievable infraction of all the laws of mechanics and gravitation. He knew that he was sober and sane, that the thing had actually happened. But why? And how? All his scientific training told him that it was impossible. It was unthinkable that an inert mass of metal should fly off into space without any applied force. Since it had actually happened, there must have been applied an enormous and hitherto unknown force. What was that force? The reason for this unbelievable manifestation of energy was certainly somewhere in the solution, the electrolytic cell, or the steam-bath. Concentrating all the power of his highly-trained analytical mind upon the problem--deaf and blind to everything else, as was his wont when deeply interested--he sat motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth. Hour after hour he sat there, while most of his fellow-chemists finished the day's work and left the building and the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.

Finally he jumped up. Crashing his hand down upon the desk, he exclaimed:

"I have liberated the intra-atomic energy of copper! Copper, 'X,' and electric current!

"I'm sure a fool for luck!" he continued as a new thought struck him. "Suppose it had been liberated all at once? Probably blown the whole world off its hinges. But it wasn't: it was given off slowly and in a straight line. Wonder why? Talk about power! Infinite! Believe me, I'll show this whole Bureau of Chemistry something to make their eyes stick out, tomorrow. If they won't let me go ahead and develop it, I'll resign, hunt up some more 'X', and do it myself. That bath is on its way to the moon right now, and there's no reason why I can't follow it. Martin's such a fanatic on exploration, he'll fall all over himself to build us any kind of a craft we'll need ... we'll explore the whole solar system! Great Cat, what a chance! A fool for luck is right!"

He came to himself with a start. He switched on the lights and saw that it was ten o'clock. Simultaneously he recalled that he was to have had dinner with his fiance at her home, their first dinner since their engagement. Cursing himself for an idiot he hastily left the building, and soon his motorcycle was tearing up Connecticut Avenue toward his sweetheart's home.

CHAPTER II

Steel Becomes Interested

Dr. Marc DuQuesne was in his laboratory, engaged in a research upon certain of the rare metals, particularly in regard to their electrochemical properties. He was a striking figure. Well over six feet tall, unusually broad-shouldered even for his height, he was plainly a man of enormous physical strength. His thick, slightly wavy hair was black. His eyes, only a trifle lighter in shade, were surmounted by heavy black eyebrows which grew together above his aquiline nose.

Scott strolled into the room, finding DuQuesne leaning over a delicate electrical instrument, his forbidding but handsome face strangely illuminated by the ghastly glare of his mercury-vapor arcs.

"Hello, Blackie," Scott began. "I thought it was Seaton in here at first. A fellow has to see your faces to tell you two apart. Speaking of Seaton, d'you think that he's quite right?"

"I should say, off-hand, that he was a little out of control last night and this morning," replied DuQuesne, manipulating connections with his long, muscular fingers. "I don't think that he's insane, and I don't believe that he dopes--probably overwork and nervous strain. He'll be all right in a day or two."

"I think he's a plain nut, myself. That sure was a wild yarn he sprung on us, wasn't it? His imagination was hitting on all twelve, that's sure. He seems to believe it himself, though, in spite of making a flat failure of his demonstration to us this morning. He saved that waste solution he was working on--what was left of that carboy of platinum residues after he had recovered all the values, you know--and got them to put it up at auction this noon. He resigned from the Bureau, and he and M. Reynolds Crane, that millionaire friend of his, bid it in for ten cents."

"M. Reynolds Crane?" DuQuesne concealed a start of surprise. "Where does he come in on this?"

"Oh, they're always together in everything. They've been thicker than Damon and Pythias for a long time. They play tennis together--they're doubles champions of the District, you know--and all kinds of things. Wherever you find one of them you'll usually find the other. Anyway, after they got the solution Crane took Seaton in his car, and somebody said they went out to Crane's house. Probably trying to humor him. Well, ta-ta; I've got a week's work to do yet today."

As Scott left DuQuesne dropped his work and went to his desk, with a new expression, half of chagrin, half of admiration, on his face. Picking up his telephone, he called a number.

"Brookings?" he asked, cautiously. "This is DuQuesne. I must see you immediately. There's something big started that may as well belong to us.... No, can't say anything over the telephone.... Yes, I'll be right out."

He left the laboratory and soon was in the private office of the head of the Washington or "diplomatic" branch, as it was known in certain circles, of the great World Steel Corporation. Offices and laboratories were maintained in the city, ostensibly for research work, but in reality to be near the center of political activity.

"How do you do, Doctor DuQuesne?" Brookings said as he seated his visitor. "You seem excited."

"Not excited, but in a hurry," DuQuesne replied. "The biggest thing in history has just broken, and we've got to work fast if we get in on it. Have you any doubts that I always know what I am talking about?"

"No," answered the other in surprise. "Not the slightest. You are widely known as an able man. In fact, you have helped this company several times in various deal--er, in various ways."

"Say it. Brookings. 'Deals' is the right word. This one is going to be the biggest ever. The beauty of it is that it should be easy--one simple burglary and an equally simple killing--and won't mean wholesale murder, as did that...."

"Oh, no, Doctor, not murder. Unavoidable accidents."

"Why not call things by their right names and save breath, as long as we're alone? I'm not squeamish. But to get down to business. You know Seaton, of our division, of course. He has been recovering the various rare metals from all the residues that have accumulated in the Bureau for years. After separating out all the known metals he had something left, and thought it was a new element, a metal. In one of his attempts to get it into the metallic state, a little of its solution fizzed out and over a copper steam bath or tank, which instantly flew out of the window like a bullet. It went clear out of sight, out of range of his binoculars, just that quick." He snapped his fingers under Brookings' nose. "Now that discovery means such power as the world never dreamed of. In fact, if Seaton hadn't had all the luck in the world right with him yesterday, he would have blown half of North America off the map. Chemists have known for years that all matter contains enormous stores of intra-atomic energy, but have always considered it 'bound'--that is, incapable of liberation. Seaton has liberated it."

"And that means?"

"That with the process worked out, the Corporation could furnish power to the entire world, at very little expense."

* * * * *

A look of scornful unbelief passed over Brookings' face.

"Sneer if you like," DuQuesne continued evenly. "Your ignorance doesn't change the fact in any particular. Do you know what intra-atomic energy is?"

"I'm afraid that I don't, exactly."

"Well, it's the force that exists between the ultimate component parts of matter, if you can understand that. A child ought to. Call in your chief chemist and ask him what would happen if somebody would liberate the intra-atomic energy of one hundred pounds of copper."

"Pardon me, Doctor. I didn't presume to doubt you. I will call him in."

He telephoned a request and soon a man in white appeared. In response to the question he thought for a moment, then smiled slowly.

"If it were done instantaneously it would probably blow the entire world into a vapor, and might force it clear out of its orbit. If it could be controlled it would furnish millions of horsepower for a long time. But it can't be done. The energy is bound. Its liberation is an impossibility, in the same class with perpetual motion. Is that all, Mr. Brookings?"

As the chemist left, Brookings turned again to his visitor, with an apologetic air.

"I don't know anything about these things myself, but Chambers, also an able man, says that it is impossible."

"As far as he knows, he is right. I should have said the same thing this morning. But I do know about these things--they're my business--and I tell you that Seaton has done it."

"This is getting interesting. Did you see it done?"

"No. It was rumored around the Bureau last night that Seaton was going insane, that he had wrecked a lot of his apparatus and couldn't explain what had happened. This morning he called a lot of us into his laboratory, told us what I have just told you, and poured some of his solution on a copper wire. Nothing happened, and he acted as though he didn't know what to make of it. The foolish way he acted and the apparent impossibility of the whole thing, made everybody think him crazy. I thought so until I learned this afternoon that Mr. Reynolds Crane is backing him. Then I knew that he had told us just enough of the truth to let him get away clean with the solution."

"But suppose the man _is_ crazy?" asked Brookings. "He probably is a monomaniac, really insane on that one thing, from studying it so much."

"Seaton? Yes, he's crazy--like a fox. You never heard of any insanity in Crane's family, though, did you? You know that he never invests a cent in anything more risky than Government bonds. You can bet your last dollar that Seaton showed him the real goods." Then, as a look of conviction appeared upon the other's face, he continued:

"Don't you understand that the solution was Government property, and he had to do something to make everybody think it worthless, so that he could get title to it? That faked demonstration that failed was certainly a bold stroke--so bold that it was foolhardy. But it worked. It fooled even me, and I am not usually asleep. The only reason he got away with it, is, that he has always been such an open-faced talker, always telling everything he knew.

"He certainly played the fox," he continued, with undisguised admiration. "Heretofore he has never kept any of his discoveries secret or tried to make any money out of them, though some of them were worth millions. He published them as soon as he found them, and somebody else got the money. Having that reputation, he worked it to make us think him a nut. He certainly is clever. I take off my hat to him--he's a wonder!"

"And what is your idea? Where do we come in?"

"You come in by getting that solution away from Seaton and Crane, and furnishing the money to develop the stuff and to build, under my direction, such a power-plant as the world never saw before."

"Why get that particular solution? Couldn't we buy up some platinum wastes and refine them?"

"Not a chance," replied the scientist. "We have refined platinum residues for years, and never found anything like that before. It is my idea that the stuff, whatever it is, was present in some particular lot of platinum in considerable quantities as an impurity. Seaton hasn't all of it there is in the world, of course, but the chance of finding any more of it without knowing exactly what it is or how it reacts is extremely slight. Besides, we must have exclusive control. How could we make any money out of it if Crane operates a rival company and is satisfied with ten percent profit? No, we must get all of that solution. Seaton and Crane, or Seaton, at least, must be killed, for if he is left alive he can find more of the stuff and break our monopoly. I want to borrow your strong-arm squad tonight, to go and attend to it."

After a few moments' thought, his face set and expressionless, Brookings said:

"No, Doctor. I do not think that the Corporation would care to go into a matter of this kind. It is too flagrant a violation of law, and we can afford to buy it from Seaton after he proves its worth."

* * * * *

"Bah!" snorted DuQuesne. "Don't try that on me, Brookings. You think you can steal it yourself, and develop it without letting me in on it? You can't do it. Do you think I am fool enough to tell you all about it, with facts, figures, and names, if you could get away with it without me? Hardly! You can steal the solution, but that's all you can do. Your chemist or the expert you hire will begin experimenting without Seaton's lucky start, which I have already mentioned, but about which I haven't gone into any detail. He will have no information whatever, and the first attempt to do anything with the stuff will blow him and all the country around him for miles into an impalpable powder. You will lose your chemist, your solution, and all hope of getting the process. There are only two men in the United States, or in the world, for that matter, with brains enough and information enough to work it out. One is Richard B. Seaton, the other is Marc C. DuQuesne. Seaton certainly won't handle it for you. Money can't buy him and Crane, and you know it. You must come to me. If you don't believe that now, you will very shortly, after you try it alone."

Brookings, caught in his duplicity and half-convinced of the truth of DuQuesne's statements, still temporized.

"You're modest, aren't you, Doctor?" he asked, smiling.

"Modest? No," said the other calmly. "Modesty never got anybody anything but praise, and I prefer something more substantial. However, I never exaggerate or make over-statements, as you should know. What I have said is merely a statement of fact. Also, let me remind you that I am in a hurry. The difficulty of getting hold of that solution is growing greater every minute, and my price is getting higher every second."

"What is your price at the present second?"

"Ten thousand dollars per month during the experimental work; five million dollars in cash upon the successful operation of the first power unit, which shall be of not less than ten thousand horsepower; and ten percent of the profits."

"Oh, come, Doctor, let's be reasonable. You can't mean any such figures as those."

"I never say anything I don't mean. I have done a lot of dirty work with you people before, and never got much of anything out of it. You were always too strong for me; that is, I couldn't force you without exposing my own crookedness, but now I've got you right where I want you. That's my price; take it or leave it. If you don't take it now, the first two of those figures will be doubled when you do come to me. I won't go to anybody else, though others would be glad to get it on my terms, because I have a reputation to maintain and you are the only ones who know that I am crooked. I know that my reputation is safe as long as I work with you, because I know enough about you to send all you big fellows, clear down to Perkins, away for life. I also know that that knowledge will not shorten my days, as I am too valuable a man for you to kill, as you did...."

"Please, Doctor, don't use such language...."

"Why not?" interrupted DuQuesne, in his cold, level voice. "It's all true. What do a few lives amount to, as long as they're not yours and mine? As I said, I can trust you, more or less. You can trust me, because you know that I can't send you up without going with you. Therefore, I am going to let you go ahead without me as far as you can--it won't be far. Do you want me to come in now or later?"

"I'm afraid we can't do business on any such terms as that," said Brookings, shaking his head. "We can undoubtedly buy the power rights from Seaton for what you ask."

"You don't fool me for a second, Brookings. Go ahead and steal the solution, but take my advice and give your chemist only a little of it. A very little of that stuff will go a long way, and you will want to have some left when you have to call me in. Make him experiment with extremely small quantities. I would suggest that he work in the woods at least a hundred miles from his nearest neighbor, though it matters nothing to me how many people you kill. That's the only pointer I will give you--I'm giving it merely to keep you from blowing up the whole country," he concluded with a grim smile. "Good-bye."

* * * * *

As the door closed behind the cynical scientist, Brookings took a small gold instrument, very like a watch, from his pocket. He touched a button and held the machine close to his lips.

"Perkins," he said softly, "M. Reynolds Crane has in his house a bottle of solution."

"Yes, sir. Can you describe it?"

"Not exactly. It is greenish yellow in color, and I gather that it is in a small bottle, as there isn't much of the stuff in the world. I don't know what it smells or tastes like, and I wouldn't advise experimenting with it, as it seems to be a violent explosive and is probably poisonous. Any bottle of solution of that color kept in a particularly safe place would probably be the one. Let me caution you that this is the biggest thing you have ever been in, and _it must not fail_. Any effort to purchase it would be useless, however large a figure were named. But if the bottle were only partly emptied and filled up with water, I don't believe anyone would notice the difference, at least for some time, do you?"

"Probably not, sir. Good-bye."

Next morning, shortly after the office opened, Perkins, whose principal characteristic was that of absolute noiselessness, glided smoothly into Brookings' office. Taking a small bottle about half full of a greenish-yellow liquid from his pocket, he furtively placed it under some papers upon his superior's desk.

"A man found this last night, sir, and thought it might belong to you. He said this was a little less than half of it, but that you could have the rest of it any time you want it."

"Thank you, Perkins, he was right. It is ours. Here's a letter which just came," handing him an envelope, which rustled as Perkins folded it into a small compass and thrust it into his vest pocket. "Good morning."

As Perkins slid out, Brookings spoke into his telephone, and soon Chambers, his chief chemist, appeared.

"Doctor Chambers," Brookings began, showing him the bottle, "I have here a solution which in some way is capable of liberating the intra-atomic energy of matter, about which I asked you yesterday. It works on copper. I would like to have you work out the process for us, if you will."

"What about the man who discovered the process?" asked Chambers, as he touched the bottle gingerly.

"He is not available. Surely what one chemist can do, others can? You will not have to work alone. You can hire the biggest men in the line to help you--expense is no object."

"No, it wouldn't be, if such a process could be worked out. Let me see, whom can we get? Doctor Seaton is probably the best man in the country for such a research, but I don't think that we can get him. I tried to get him to work on the iridium-osmium problem, but he refused."

"We might make an offer big enough to get him."

"No. Don't mention it to him," with a significant look. "He's to know nothing about it."

"Well, then, how about DuQuesne, who was in here yesterday? He's probably next to Seaton."

"I took it up with him yesterday. We can't get him, his figures are entirely out of reason. Aren't there any other men in the country who know anything? You are a good man, why don't you tackle it yourself?"

"Because I don't know anything about that particular line of research, and I want to keep on living awhile longer," the chemist replied bluntly. "There are other good men whom I can get, however. Van Schravendyck, of our own laboratory, is nearly as good as either Seaton or DuQuesne. He has done a lot of work on radio-activity and that sort of thing, and I think he would like to work on it."

"All right. Please get it started without delay. Give him about a quarter of the solution and have the rest put in the vault. Be sure that his laboratory is set up far enough away from everything else to avoid trouble in case of an explosion, and caution him not to work on too much copper at once. I gather that an ounce or so will be plenty."

* * * * *

The chemist went back to his laboratory and sought his first assistant.

"Van," he began, "Mr. Brookings has been listening to some lunatic who claims to have solved the mystery of liberating intra-atomic energy."

"That's old stuff," the assistant said, laughing. "That and perpetual motion are always with us. What did you tell him?"

"I didn't get a chance to tell him anything--he told me. Yesterday, you know, he asked me what would happen if it could be liberated, and I answered truthfully that lots of things would happen, and volunteered the information that it was impossible. Just now he called me in, gave me this bottle of solution, saying that it contained the answer to the puzzle, and wanted me to work it out. I told him that it was out of my line and that I was afraid of it--which I would be if I thought there was anything in it--but that it was more or less in your line, and he said to put you on it right away. He also said that expense was no object; to set up an independent laboratory a hundred miles off in the woods, to be safe in case of an explosion; and to caution you not to use too much copper at once--that an _ounce or so_ would be plenty!"

"An ounce! Ten thousand tons of nitroglycerin! I'll say an ounce would be plenty, if the stuff is any good at all, which of course it isn't. Queer, isn't it, how the old man would fall for anything like that? How did he explain the failure of the discoverer to develop it himself?"

"He said the discoverer is not available," answered Chambers with a laugh. "I'll bet he isn't available--he's back in St. Elizabeth's again by this time, where he came from. I suggested that we get either Seaton or DuQuesne of Rare Metals to help us on it, and he said that they had both refused to touch it, or words to that effect. If those two turned down a chance to work on a thing as big as this would be, there probably is nothing in this particular solution that is worth a rap. But what Brookings says goes, around here, so it's you for the woods. And don't take any chances, either--it is conceivable that something might happen."

"Sure it might, but it won't. We'll set up that lab near a good trout stream, and I'll have a large and juicy vacation. I'll work on the stuff a little, too--enough to make a good report, at least. I'll analyze it, find out what is in it, deposit it on some copper, shoot an electrolytic current through it, and make a lot of wise motions generally, and have a darn good time besides."

CHAPTER III

Seaton Solves the Problem of Power

"Well, Mart," said Seaton briskly, "now that the Seaton-Crane Company, Engineers, is organized to your satisfaction, let's hop to it. I suppose I'd better beat it downtown and hunt up a place to work?"

"Why not work here?"

"Your house? You don't want this kind of experimenting going on around here, do you? Suppose a chunk of the stuff gets away from me and tears the side out of the house?"

"This house is the logical place to work. I already have a complete machine shop and testing laboratory out in the hangar, and we can easily fit up a chemical laboratory for you up in the tower room. You can have open windows on four sides there, and if you should accidentally take out the wall there will be little damage done. We will be alone here, with the few neighbors so thoroughly accustomed to my mechanical experiments that they are no longer curious."

"Fine. There's another good thing, too. Your man Shiro. He's been with you in so many tight pinches in all the unknown corners of the world on your hunting trips and explorations that we can trust him, and he'll probably come in handy."

"Yes, we can trust him implicitly. As you know, he is really my friend instead of my man."

During the next few days, while workmen were installing a complete chemical laboratory in the tower room, Seaton busied himself in purchasing the equipment necessary for the peculiar problem before him. His list was long and varied, ranging from a mighty transformer, capable of delivering thousands of kilovolts down to a potentiometer, so sensitive that it would register the difference of potential set up by two men in shaking hands.

From daylight until dark Seaton worked in the laboratory, either alone or superintending and assisting the men at work there. Every night when Crane went to bed he saw Seaton in his room in a haze of smoke, poring over blueprints or, surrounded by abstruse works upon the calculus and sub-atomic phenomena, making interminable calculations.

Less than two miles away lived Dorothy Vaneman, who had promised to be his wife. He had seen her but once since "the impossible" had happened, since his prosaic copper steam-bath had taken flight under his hand and pointed the way to a great adventure. In a car his friend was to build, moved by this stupendous power which he must learn to control, they would traverse interstellar space--visit strange planets and survey strange solar systems.

While he did not forget his sweetheart--the thought of her was often in his mind, and the fact that her future was so intimately connected with his own gave to every action a new meaning--he had such a multitude of things to do and was so eager to get them all done at once that day after day went by and he could not find time to call upon her.

Crane remonstrated in vain. His protests against Seaton's incessant work had no effect. Seaton insisted that he _must_ fix firmly just a few more points before they eluded him, and stuck doggedly to his task.

Finally, Crane laid his work aside and went to call upon the girl. He found her just leaving home, and fell into step beside her. For awhile she tried to rouse herself to be entertaining, or at least friendly, but the usual ease with which she chatted had deserted her, and her false gayety did not deceive the keen-minded Crane for an instant. Soon the two were silent as they walked along together. Crane's thoughts were on the beautiful girl beside him, and on the splendid young genius under his roof, so deeply immersed in his problem that he was insensible to everything else.

* * * * *

"I have just left Dick," Crane said suddenly, and paying no attention to her startled glance. "Did you ever in your life see anyone with his singleness of purpose? With all his brilliance, one idea at a time is all that he seems capable of--though that is probably why he is such a genius. He is working himself insane. Has he told you about leaving the Bureau?"

"No. Has he? Has it anything to do with what happened that day at the laboratory? I haven't seen him since the accident, or discovery, whichever it was, happened. He came to see me at half-past ten, when he was invited for dinner--oh, Martin, I had been _so_ angry!--and he told such a preposterous story, I've been wondering since if I didn't dream it."

"No, you didn't dream it, no matter how wild it sounded. He said it, and it is all true. I cannot explain it to you; Dick himself cannot explain it, even to me. But I can give you an idea of what we both think it may come to."

"Yes, do."

"Well, he has discovered something that makes copper act mighty queer--knocks it off its feet, so to speak. That day a piece went up and never did come down."

"Yes, that is what is so preposterous!"

"Just a moment, please," replied the imperturbable Crane. "You should know that nothing ordinary can account for Dick's behavior, and after what I have seen this last week I shall never again think anything preposterous. As I said, this piece of copper departed, _via_ the window, for scenes unknown. As far as a pair of good binoculars could follow it, it held to a perfectly straight course toward those scenes. We intend to follow it in some suitable vehicle."

He paused, looking at his companion's face, but she did not speak.

"Building the conveyance is where I come in," he continued in his matter-of-fact voice. "As you know, I happen to have almost as much money as Dick has brains, and some day, before the summer is over, we expect to go somewhere. We do not know where, but it will be a long way from this earth."

There was a silence, then Dorothy said, helplessly:

"Well, go on.... I can't understand...."

"Neither can I. All I know is that Dick wants to build a heavy steel hull, and he is going to put something inside it that will take us out into space. Only occasionally do I see a little light as he tries to explain the mechanism of the thing to me."

After enjoining upon her the strictest secrecy he repeated the story that Seaton had told him, and informed her as to the present condition of affairs.

"It's no wonder the other chemists thought he was crazy, is it, Martin?"

"No, especially after the failure of his demonstration the next morning. You see, he tried to prove to the others that he was right, and nothing happened. He has found out since that an electrical machine in another room, which was not running that morning, played a very important part. When the copper refused to act as it had the night before they all took the snap judgment that he had suffered an attack of temporary insanity, and that the solution was worthless. They called him 'Nobody Holme'."

"It almost fits, at that!" exclaimed Dorothy, laughing.

"But if he thought of that," she added, thoughtfully, "if he was brilliant enough to build up such a wonderful theory ... think out such a thing as actually traveling to the stars ... all on such a slight foundation of fact ... I wonder why he couldn't have told me?"

She hadn't meant to utter the last thought. Nobody must know how being left out of it had hurt her, and she would have recalled the words if she could. Crane understood, and answered loyally.

"He will tell you all about it very soon, never fear. His is the mind of a great scientist, working on a subject of which but very few men have even an inkling. I am certain that the only reason he thought of me is that he could not finance the investigation alone. Never think for an instant that his absorption implies a lack of fondness for you. You are his anchor, his only hold on known things. In fact, it was about this that I came to see you. Dick is working himself at a rate that not even a machine can stand. He eats hardly anything, and if he sleeps at all, I have never caught him at it. That idea is driving him day and night, and if he goes on the way he is going, it means a breakdown. I do not know whether you can make him listen to reason or not--certainly no one else can. If you think you can do it, that is to be your job, and it will be the biggest one of the three."

"How well you understand him," Dorothy said, after a pause. "You make me feel ashamed, Martin. I should have known without being told. Then I wouldn't have had these nasty little doubts about him."

"I should call them perfectly natural, considering the circumstances," he answered. "Men with minds like Dick's are rare. They work on only one track. Your part will be hard. He will come to you, bursting with news and aching to tell you all about his theories and facts and calculations, and you must try to take his mind off the whole thing and make him think of something else. It looks impossible to me."

* * * * *

The smile had come back to Dorothy's face. Her head, graced by its wealth of gleaming auburn hair, was borne proudly, and glancing mischief lit her violet eyes.

"Didn't you just tell me nothing is impossible? You know, Martin, that I can make Dicky forget everything, even interstellar--did I get that word right?--space itself, with my violin."

"Trying to beguile a scientist from his hobby is comparable only to luring a drug addict away from his vice ... but I would not be surprised if you could do it," he slowly replied.

For he had heard her play. She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower while on horseback, and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside and while Shiro was preparing one of his famous suppers, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his "fiddle." Dorothy realized, with the first sweep of the bow, that she was playing a Stradivarius, the like of which she had played before only in her dreams. She forgot her listeners, forgot the time and the place, and poured out in her music all the beauty and tenderness of her nature. Soft and full the tones filled the room, and in Crane's vision there rose a home filled with happy work, with laughter and companionship, with playing children who turned their faces to their mother as do flowers to the light. Sensing the girl's dreams as the music filled his ears, he realized as never before in his busy, purposeful life how beautiful a home with the right woman could be. No thought of love for Dorothy entered his mind, for he knew that the love existing between her and his friend was of the kind that nothing could alter, but he felt that she had unwittingly given him a great gift. Often thereafter in his lonely hours he had imagined that dream-home, and nothing less than its perfection would ever satisfy him.

For a time they walked on in silence. On Dorothy's face was a tender look, the reflection of her happy thoughts, and in Crane's mind floated again the vision of his ideal home, the home whose central figure he was unable to visualize. At last she turned and placed her hand on his arm.

"You have done a great deal for me--for us," she said simply. "I wish there were something I could do for you in return."

"You have already done much more than that for me, Dorothy," he answered, more slowly even than usual. "It is hard for me to express just what it is, but I want you to know that you and Dick mean much to me.... You are the first real woman I have ever known, and some day, if life is good to me, I hope to have some girl as lovely care for me."

Dorothy's sensitive face flushed warmly. So unexpected and sincere was his praise that it made her feel both proud and humble. She had never realized that this quiet, apparently unimaginative man had seen all the ideals she expressed in her music. A woman expects to appear lovely to her lover, and to the men who would be her lovers if they could, but here was a man who neither sought nor expected any favors, saying that he wanted some girl as lovely for his own. Truly it was a compliment to be cherished.

After they had returned to the house and Crane had taken his departure, Dorothy heard the purr of a rapidly approaching motorcycle, and her heart leaped as she went to the door to welcome her lover.

"It seems like a month since I saw you last, sweetheart!" he exclaimed, as he lifted her clear from the floor in a passionate embrace and kissed in turn her lips, her eyes, the tip of her nose, the elusive dimple in her cheek, and the adorable curve of her neck.

"It seems longer than that to me, Dicky. I was perfectly miserable until Martin called this afternoon and explained what you have been doing."

"Yes, I met him on the way over. But honestly, Dottie, I simply couldn't get away. I wanted to, the worst way, but everything went so slow...."

"Slow? When you have a whole laboratory installed in a week? What would you call speed?"

"About two days. And then, there were a lot of little ideas that had to be nailed down before they got away from me. This is a horribly big job, Dottie, and when a fellow gets into it he can't quit. But you know that I love you just the same, even though I do appear to neglect you," he continued with fierce intensity. I love you with everything there is in me. "I love you, mind, body and spirit; love you as a man should love the one and only woman. For you are the only woman, there never was and never will be another. I love you morally, physically, intellectually, and every other way there is, for the perfect little darling that you are."

She moved in his embrace and her arms tightened about his neck.

"You are the nearest thing to absolute perfection that ever came into this imperfect world," he continued. "Just to think of a girl of your sheer beauty, your ability, your charm, your all-round perfection, being engaged to a thing like me, makes me dizzy--but I sure do love you, little girl of mine. I will love you as long as we live, and afterward, my soul will love your soul throughout eternity. You know that, sweetheart girl."

"Oh, Dick!" she whispered, her soul shaken with response to his love. "I never dreamed it possible for a woman to love as I love you. 'Whither thou goest....'"

Her voice failed in the tempest of her emotion, and they clung together in silence.

They were finally interrupted by Dorothy's stately and gracious mother, who came in to greet Seaton and invite him to have dinner with them.

"I knew that Dot would forget such an unimportant matter," she said, with a glint of Dorothy's own mischief in her eyes.

* * * * *

As they went into the dining-room Dorothy was amazed to see the changes that six days had wrought in Seaton. His face looked thin, almost haggard. Fine lines had made their appearance at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth, and faint but unmistakable blue rings encircled his eyes.

"You have been working too hard, boy," she reproved him gravely.

"Oh, no," he rejoined lightly. "I'm all right, I never felt better. Why, I could whip a rattlesnake right now, and give him the first bite!"

She laughed at his reply, but the look of concern did not leave her face. As soon as they were seated at the table she turned to her father, a clean-cut, gray-haired man of fifty, known as one of the shrewdest attorneys in the city.

"Daddy," she demanded, "what do you mean by being elected director in the Seaton-Crane Company and not telling me anything about it?"

"Daughter," he replied in the same tone, "what do you mean by asking such a question as that? Don't you know that it is a lawyer's business to get information, and to give it out only to paying clients? However, I can tell you all I know about the Seaton-Crane Company without adding to your store of knowledge at all. I was present at one meeting, gravely voted 'aye' once, and that is all."

"Didn't you draw up the articles of incorporation?"

"I am doing it, yes; but they don't mean anything. They merely empower the Company to do anything it wants to, the same as other large companies do." Then, after a quick but searching glance at Seaton's worn face and a warning glance at his daughter, he remarked:

"I read in the _Star_ this evening that Enright and Stanwix will probably make the Australian Davis Cup team, and that the Hawaiian with the unpronounceable name has broken three or four more world's records. What do you think of our tennis chances this year, Dick?"

Dorothy flushed, and the conversation, steered by the lawyer into the safer channels, turned to tennis, swimming, and other sports. Seaton, whose plate was unobtrusively kept full by Mr. Vaneman, ate such a dinner as he had not eaten in weeks. After the meal was over they all went into the spacious living-room, where the men ensconced themselves in comfortable Morris chairs with long, black cigars between their teeth, and all four engaged in a spirited discussion of various topics of the day. After a time, the older couple left the room, the lawyer going into his study to work, as he always did in the evening.

"Well, Dicky, how's everything?" Dorothy asked, unthinkingly.

The result of this innocent question was astonishing. Seaton leaped to his feet. The problem, dormant for two hours, was again in complete possession of his mind.

"Rotten!" he snapped, striding back and forth and brandishing his half-smoked cigar. "My head is so thick that it takes a thousand years for an idea to filter into it. I should have the whole thing clear by this time, but I haven't. There's something, some little factor, that I can't get. I've almost had it a dozen times, but it always gets away from me. I know that the force is there and I can liberate it, but I can't work out a system of control until I can understand exactly why it acts the way it does." Then, more slowly, thinking aloud rather than addressing the girl:

"The force is attraction toward all matter, generated by the vibrations of all the constituent electrons in parallel planes. It is directed along a line perpendicular to the plane of vibration at its center, and approaches infinity as the angle theta approaches the limit of Pi divided by two. Therefore, by shifting the axis of rotation or the plane of vibration thus making theta vary between the limits of zero and Pi divided by two...."

He was interrupted by Dorothy, who, mortified by her thoughtlessness in getting him started, had sprung up and seized him by the arm.

"Sit down, Dicky!" she implored. "Sit down, you're rocking the boat! Save your mathematics for Martin. Don't you know that I could never find out why 'x' was equal to 'y' or to anything else in algebra?"

She led him back to his chair, where he drew her down to a seat on the arm beside him.

"Whom do you love?" she whispered gayly in his ear.

After a time she freed herself.

* * * * *

"I haven't practised today. Don't you want me to play for you a little?"

"Fine business, Dottie. When you play a violin, it talks."

She took down her violin and played; first his favorites, crashing selections from operas and solos by the great masters, abounding in harmonies on two strings. Then she changed to reveries and soft, plaintive melodies. Seaton listened with profound enjoyment. Under the spell of the music he relaxed, pushed out the footrest of the chair, and lay back at ease, smoking dreamily. The cigar finished and his hands at rest, his eyes closed of themselves. The music, now a crooning lullaby, grew softer and slower, until his deep and regular breathing showed that he was sound asleep. She stopped playing and sat watching him intently, her violin in readiness to play again, if he should show the least sign of waking, but there was no such sign. Freed from the tyranny of the mighty brain which had been driving it so unmercifully, his body was making up for many hours of lost sleep.

Assured that he was really asleep, Dorothy tip-toed to her father's study and quietly went in.

"Daddy, Dick is asleep out there in the chair. What shall we do with him?"

"Good work, Dottie Dimple. I heard you playing him to sleep--you almost put me to sleep as well. I'll get a blanket and we'll put him to bed right where he is."

"Dear old Dad," she said softly, sitting on the arm of his chair and rubbing her cheek against his. "You always did understand, didn't you?"

"I try to, Kitten," he answered, pulling her ear. "Seaton is too good a man to see go to pieces when it can be prevented. That is why I signalled you to keep the talk off the company and his work. One of the best lawyers I ever knew, a real genius, went to pieces that same way. He was on a big, almost an impossible, case. He couldn't think of anything else, didn't eat or sleep much for months. He won the case, but it broke him. But he wasn't in love with a big, red-headed beauty of a girl, and so didn't have her to fiddle him to sleep.

"Well, I'll go get the blanket," he concluded, with a sudden change in his tone.

In a few moments he returned and they went into the living-room together. Seaton lay in exactly the same position, only the regular lifting of his powerful chest showing that he was alive.

"I think we had better...."

"Sh ... sh," interrupted the girl in an intense whisper. "You'll wake him up, Daddy."

"Bosh! You couldn't wake him up with a club. His own name might rouse him, particularly if you said it; no other ordinary sound would. I started to say that I think we had better put him to bed on the davenport. He would be more comfortable."

"But that would surely wake him. And he's so big...."

"Oh, no, it wouldn't, unless I drop him on the floor. And he doesn't weigh much over two hundred, does he?"

"About ten or eleven pounds."

"Even though I am a lawyer, and old and decrepit, I can still handle that much."

With Dorothy anxiously watching the proceeding and trying to help, Vaneman picked Seaton up out of the chair, with some effort, and carried him across the room. The sleeping man muttered as if in protest at being disturbed, but made no other sign of consciousness. The lawyer then calmly removed Seaton's shoes and collar, while the girl arranged pillows under his head and tucked the blanket around him. Vaneman bent a quizzical glance upon his daughter, under which a flaming blush spread from her throat to her hair.

"Well," she said, defiantly, "I'm going to, anyway."

"My dear, of course you are. If you didn't, I would disown you."

As her father turned away, Dorothy knelt beside her lover and pressed her lips tightly to his.

"Good night, sweetheart," she murmured.

"'Night," he muttered in his sleep, as his lips responded faintly to her caress.

Vaneman waited for his daughter, and when she appeared, the blush again suffusing her face, he put his arm around her.

"Dorothy," he said at the door of her room, using her full name, a very unusual thing for him, "the father of such a girl as you are hates to lose her, but I advise you to stick to that boy. Believe in him and trust him, no matter what happens. He is a real man."

"I know it, Dad ... thank you. I had a touch of the blues today, but I never will again. I think more of his little finger than I do of all the other men I ever knew, put together. But how do you know him so well? I know him, of course, but that's different."

"I have various ways of getting information. I know Dick Seaton better than you do--better than he knows himself. I have known all about every man who ever looked at you twice. I have been afraid once or twice that I would have to take a hand, but you saw them right, just as you see Seaton right. For some time I have been afraid of the thought of your marrying, the young men in your social set are such a hopeless lot, but I am not any more. When I hand my little girl over to her husband next October I can be really happy with you, instead of anxious for you. That's how well I know Richard Seaton.... Well, good night, daughter mine."

"Good night, Daddy dear," she replied, throwing her arms around his neck. "I have the finest Dad a girl ever had, and the finest ... boy. Good night."

* * * * *

It was three o'clock the following afternoon when Seaton appeared in the laboratory. His long rest had removed all the signs of overwork and he was his alert, vigorous self, but when Crane saw him and called out a cheery greeting he returned it with a sheepish smile.

"Don't say anything, Martin--I'm thinking it all, and then some. I made a regular fool of myself last night. Went to sleep in a chair and slept seventeen hours without a break. I never felt so cheap in my life."

"You were worn out, Dick, and you know it. That sleep put you on your feet again, and I hope you will have sense enough to take care of yourself after this. I warn you now, Dick, that if you start any more of that midnight work I will simply call Dorothy over here and have her take charge of you."

"That's it, Mart, rub it in. Don't you see that I am flat on my back, with all four paws in the air? But I'm going to sleep every night. I promised Dottie to go to bed not later than twelve, if I have to quit right in the middle of an idea, and I told her that I was coming out to see her every other evening and every Sunday. But here's the dope. I've got that missing factor in my theory--got it while I was eating breakfast this afternoon."

"If you had eaten and slept regularly here and kept yourself fit you would have seen it before."

"Yes, I guess that's right, too. If I miss a meal or a sleep from now on I want you to sand-bag me. But never mind that. Here's the explanation. We doped out before, you know, that the force is something like magnetism, and is generated when the coil causes the electrons of this specially-treated copper to vibrate in parallel planes. The knotty point was what could be the effect of a weak electric current in liberating the power. I've got it! It shifts the plane of vibration of the electrons!"

"It is impossible to shift that plane, Dick. It is fixed by physical state, just as speed is fixed by temperature."

"No, it isn't. That is, it usually is, but in this case it may be shifted. Here's the mathematical proof."

So saying, Seaton went over to the drafting table, tacked down a huge sheet of paper, and sketched rapidly, explaining as he drew. Soon the two men were engaged in a profound mathematical argument. Sheet after sheet of paper was filled with equations and calculations, and the table was covered with reference books. After two hours of intense study and hot discussion Crane's face took on a look of dawning comprehension, which changed to amazement and then to joy. For the first time in Seaton's long acquaintance with him, his habitual calm was broken.

"By George!" he cried, shaking Seaton's hand in both of his. "I think you have it! But how under the sun did you get the idea? That calculus isn't in any of the books. Where did you get it? Dick, you're a wonder!"

"I don't know how I got the idea, it merely came to me. But that Math is right--it's _got_ to be right, no other conclusion is possible. Now, if that calc. is right, and I know it is, do you see how narrow the permissible limits of shifting are? Look at equation 236. Believe me, I sure was lucky, that day in the Bureau. It's a wonder I didn't blow up the whole works. Suppose I hadn't been working with a storage cell that gave only four amperes at two volts? That's unusually low, you know, for that kind of work."

* * * * *

Crane carefully studied the equation referred to and figured for a moment.

"In that case the limit would be exactly eight watts. Anything above that means instant decomposition?"

"Yes."

Crane whistled, a long, low whistle.

"And that bath weighed forty pounds--enough to vaporize the whole planet. Dick, it cannot be possible."

"It doesn't seem that way, but it is. It certainly makes me turn cold all over, though, to think of what might have happened. You know now why I wouldn't touch the solution again until I had this stuff worked out?"

"I certainly do. You should be even more afraid of it now. I don't mind nitroglycerin or T.N.T., but anything like that is merely a child's plaything compared to this. Perhaps we had better drop it?"

"Not in seven thousand years. The mere fact that I was so lucky at first proves that Fate intended this thing to be my oyster. However, I'll not tempt the old lady any farther. I'm going to start with one millionth of a volt, and will use a piece of copper visible only under a microscope. But there's absolutely no danger, now that we know what it is. I can make it eat out of my hand. Look at this equation here, though. That being true, it looks as though you could get the same explosive effect by taking a piece of copper which had once been partially decomposed and subjecting it to some force, say an extremely heavy current. Again under the influence of the coil, a small current would explode it, wouldn't it?"

"It looks that way, from those figures."

"Say, wouldn't that make some bullet? Unstabilize a piece of copper in that way and put it inside a rifle bullet, arranged to make a short circuit on impact. By making the piece of copper barely visible you could have the explosive effect of only a few sticks of dynamite--a piece the size of a pea would obliterate New York City. But that's a long way from our flying-machine."

"Perhaps not so far as you think. When we explore new worlds it might be a good idea to have a liberal supply of such ammunition, of various weights, for emergencies."

"It might, at that. Here's another point in equation 249. Suppose the unstabilized copper were treated with a very weak current, not strong enough to explode it? A sort of borderline condition? The energy would be liberated, apparently, but in an entirely new way. Wonder what would happen? I can't see from the theory--have to work it out. And here's another somewhat similar condition, right here, that will need investigating. I've sure got a lot of experimental work ahead of me before I'll know anything. How're things going with you?"

"I have the drawings and blue-prints of the ship itself done, and working sketches of the commercial power-plant. I am working now on the details, such as navigating instruments, food, water, and air supplies, special motors, and all of the hundred and one little things that must be taken into consideration. Then, as soon as you get the power under control, we will have only to sketch in the details of the power-plant and its supports before we can begin construction."

"Fine, Mart, that's great. Well, let's get busy!"

CHAPTER IV

Steel Liberates Energy--Unexpectedly

DuQuesne was in his laboratory, poring over an abstruse article in a foreign journal of science, when Scott came breezily in with a newspaper in his hand, across the front page of which stretched great headlines.

"Hello, Blackie!" he called. "Come down to earth and listen to this tale of mystery from that world-renowned fount of exactitude and authority, the _Washington Clarion_. Some miscreant has piled up and touched off a few thousand tons of T.N.T. and picric acid up in the hills. Read about it, it's good."

DuQuesne read:

MYSTERIOUS EXPLOSION!

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE WIPED OUT OF EXISTENCE! TWO HUNDRED DEAD, NONE INJURED!

FORCE FELT ALL OVER WORLD. CAUSE UNKNOWN. SCIENTISTS BAFFLED.

HARPER'S FERRY. March 26.--At 10: 23 A.M. today, the village of Bankerville, about thirty miles north of this place, was totally destroyed by an explosion of such terrific violence that seismographs all over the world recorded the shock, and that windows were shattered even in this city. A thick pall of dust and smoke was observed in the sky and parties set out immediately. They found, instead of the little mountain village, nothing except an immense, crater-like hole in the ground, some two miles in diameter and variously estimated at from two to three thousand feet deep. No survivors have been found, no bodies have been recovered. The entire village, with its two hundred inhabitants, has been wiped out of existence. Not so much as a splinter of wood or a fragment of brick from any of the houses can be found. Scientists are unable to account for the terrific force of the explosion, which far exceeded that of the most violent explosive known.

"Hm ... m. That sounds reasonable, doesn't it?" asked DuQuesne, sarcastically, as he finished reading.

"It sure does," replied Scott, grinning. "What'd'you suppose it was? Think the reporter heard a tire blow out on Pennsylvania Avenue?"

"Perhaps. Nothing to it, anyway," as he turned back to his work.

As soon as the visitor had gone a sneering smile spread over DuQuesne's face and he picked up his telephone.

"The fool did it. That will cure him of sucking eggs!" he muttered. "Operator? DuQuesne speaking. I am expecting a call this afternoon. Please ask him to call me at my house.... Thank you."

"Fred," he called to his helper, "if anyone wants me, tell them that I have gone home."

He left the building and stepped into his car. In less than half an hour he arrived at his house on Park Road, overlooking beautiful Rock Creek Park. Here he lived alone save for an old colored couple who were his servants.

In the busiest part of the afternoon Chambers rushed unannounced into Brookings' private office. His face was white as chalk.

"Read that, Mr. Brookings!" he gasped, thrusting the _Clarion_ extra into his hand.

Brookings read the news of the explosion, then looked at his chief chemist, his face turning gray.

"Yes, sir, that was our laboratory," said Chambers, dully.

"The fool! Didn't you tell him to work with small quantities?"

"I did. He said not to worry, that he was taking no chances, that he would never have more than a gram of copper on hand at once in the whole laboratory."

"Well ... I'll ... be ... damned!" Slowly turning to the telephone, Brookings called a number and asked for Doctor DuQuesne, then called another.

"Brookings speaking. I would like to see you this afternoon. Will you be at home?... I'll be there in about an hour. Good bye."

* * * * *

When Brookings arrived he was shown into DuQuesne's study. The two men shook hands perfunctorily and sat down, the scientist waiting for the other to speak.

"Well, DuQuesne, you were right. Our man couldn't handle it. But of course you didn't mean the terms you mentioned before?"

DuQuesne's lips smiled; a hard, cold smile.

"You know what I said, Brookings. Those terms are now doubled, twenty thousand and ten million. Nothing else goes."

"I expected it, since you never back down. The Corporation expects to pay for its mistakes. We accept your terms and I have contracts here for your services as research director, at a salary of two hundred and forty thousand dollars per annum, with the bonus and royalties you demand."

DuQuesne glanced over the documents and thrust them into his pocket.

"I'll go over these with my attorney to-night, and mail one back to you if he approves the contract. In the meantime, we may as well get down to business."

"What would you suggest?" asked Brookings.

"You people stole the solution, I see...."

"Don't use such harsh language, Doctor, it's...."

"Why not? I'm for direct action, first, last and all the time. This thing is too important to permit of mincing words or actions, it's a waste of time. Have you the solution here?"

"Yes, here it is," drawing the bottle from his pocket.

"Where's the rest of it?" asked DuQuesne as he noted the size of the bottle.

"All that we found is here, except about a teaspoonful which the expert had to work on," replied Brookings. "We didn't get it all, only half of it. The rest of it was diluted with water, so that it wouldn't be missed. After we get started, if you find it works out satisfactorily, we can procure the rest of it. That will certainly cause a disturbance, but it may be necessary...."

"Half of it!" interrupted DuQuesne. "You haven't one-twentieth of it here. When I saw it in the Bureau, Seaton had about five hundred milliliters--over a pint--of it. I wonder if you're double-crossing me again?"

"No, you're not," he continued, paying no attention to the other's protestations of innocence. "You're paying me too much to want to block me now. The crook you sent out to get the stuff turned in only this much. Do you suppose he is holding out on us?"

"No. You know Perkins and his methods."

"He missed the main bottle, then. That's where your methods make me tired. When I want anything done, I believe in doing it myself, then I know it's done right. As to what I suggest, that's easy. I will take three or four of Perkins' gunmen tonight. We'll go out there and raid the place. We'll shoot Seaton and anybody else who gets in the way. We'll dynamite the safe and take their solution, plans, notes, money, and anything else we want."

"No, no, Doctor, that's too crude altogether. If we have to do that, let it be only as a last resort."

"I say do it first, then we know we will get results. I tell you I'm afraid of pussyfooting and gumshoeing around Seaton and Crane. I used to think that Seaton was easy, but he seems to have developed greatly in the last few weeks, and Crane never was anybody's fool. Together they make a combination hard to beat. Brute force, applied without warning, is our best bet, and there's no danger, you know that. We've got away clean with lots worse stuff."

"It's always dangerous, and we could wink at such tactics only after everything else has failed. Why not work it out from this solution we have, and then quietly get the rest of it? After we have it worked out, Seaton might get into an accident on his motorcycle, and we could prove by the state of development of our plans that we discovered it long ago."

"Because developing the stuff is highly dangerous, as you have found out. Even Seaton wouldn't have been alive now if he hadn't had a lot of luck at the start. Then, too, it would take too much time. Seaton has already developed it--you see, I haven't been asleep and I know what he has done, just as well as you do--and why should we go through all that slow and dangerous experimental work when we can get their notes and plans as well as not? There is bound to be trouble anyway when we steal all their solution, even though they haven't missed this little bit of it yet, and it might as well come now as any other time. The Corporation is amply protected, and I am still a Government chemist. Nobody even suspects that I am in on this deal. I will never see you except after hours and in private, and will never come near your offices. We will be so cautious that, even if anyone should get suspicious, they can't possibly link us together, and until they do link us together, we are all safe. No, Brookings, a raid in force is the only sure and safe way. What is more natural than a burglary of a rich man's house? It will be a simple affair. The police will stir around for a few days, then it will all be forgotten and we can go ahead. Nobody will suspect anything except Crane, if he is alive, and he won't be able to do anything."

So the argument raged. Brookings was convinced that DuQuesne was right in wanting to get possession of all the solution, and also of the working notes and plans, but would not agree to the means suggested, holding out for quieter and more devious, but less actionable methods. Finally he ended the argument with a flat refusal to countenance the raid, and the scientist was forced to yield, although he declared that they would have to use his methods in the end, and that it would save time, money, and perhaps lives, if they were used first. Brookings then took from his pocket his wireless and called Perkins. He told him of the larger bottle of solution, instructing him to secure it and to bring back all plans, notes, and other material he could find which in any way pertained to the matter in hand. Then, after promising DuQuesne to keep him informed of developments, and giving him an instrument similar to the one he himself carried, Brookings took his leave.

* * * * *

Seaton had worked from early morning until late at night, but had rigorously kept his promise to Dorothy. He had slept seven or eight hours every night and had called upon her regularly, returning from the visits with ever-keener zest for his work.

Late in the afternoon, upon the day of the explosion, Seaton stepped into Crane's shop with a mass of notes in his hand.

"Well, Mart, I've got it--some of it, at least. The power is just what we figured it, so immensely large as to be beyond belief. I have found:

"First: That it is a practically irresistible _pull_ along the axis of the treated wire or bar. It is apparently focused at infinity, as near-by objects are not affected.

"Second: I have studied two of the border-line regions of current we discussed. I have found that in one the power is liberated as a similar attractive force but is focused upon the first object in line with the axis of the bar. As long as the current is applied it remains focused upon that object, no matter what comes between. In the second border-line condition the power is liberated as a terrific repulsion.

"Third: That the copper is completely transformed into available energy, there being no heat whatever liberated.

"Fourth: Most important of all, that the X acts only as a catalyst for the copper and is not itself consumed, so that an infinitesimally thin coating is all that is required."

"You certainly have found out a great deal about it," replied Crane, who had been listening with the closest attention, a look of admiration upon his face. "You have all the essential facts right there. Now we can go ahead and put in the details which will finish up the plans completely. Also, one of those points solves my hardest problem, that of getting back to the earth after we lose sight of it. We can make a small bar in that border-line condition and focus it upon the earth, and we can use that repulsive property to ward off any meteorites which may come too close to us."

"That's right. I never thought of using those points for anything. I found them out incidentally, and merely mentioned them as interesting facts. I have a model of the main bar built, though, that will lift me into the air and pull me all around. Want to see it work?"

"I certainly do."

As they were going out to the landing field Shiro called to them and they turned back to the house, learning that Dorothy and her father had just arrived.

"Hello, boys!" Dorothy said, bestowing her radiant smile upon them both as Seaton seized her hand. "Dad and I came out to see that you were taking care of yourselves, and to see what you are doing. Are visitors allowed?"

"No," replied Seaton promptly. "All visitors are barred. Members of the firm and members of the family, however, are not classed as visitors."

"You came at the right time," said Crane, smiling. "Dick has just finished a model, and was about to demonstrate it to me when you arrived. Come with us and watch the...."

"I object," interrupted Seaton. "It is a highly undignified performance as yet, and...."

"Objection overruled," interposed the lawyer, decisively. "You are too young and impetuous to have any dignity; therefore, any performance not undignified would be impossible, _a priori_. The demonstration will proceed."

* * * * *

Laughing merrily, the four made their way to the testing shed, in front of which Seaton donned a heavy leather harness, buckled about his shoulders, body and legs; to which were attached numerous handles, switches, boxes and other pieces of apparatus. He snapped the switch which started the Tesla coil in the shed and pressed a button on an instrument in his hand, attached to his harness by a small steel cable. Instantly there was a creak of straining leather and he shot vertically into the air for perhaps a hundred feet, where he stopped and remained motionless for a few moments. Then the watchers saw him point his arm and dart in the direction in which he pointed. By merely pointing, apparently, he changed his direction at will; going up and down, forward and backward, describing circles and loops and figures of eight. After a few minutes of this display he descended, slowing up abruptly as he neared the ground and making an easy landing.

"There, oh beauteous lady and esteemed sirs," he began, with a low bow and a sweeping flourish--when there was a snap, and he was jerked sidewise off his feet. In bowing, his cumbersome harness had pressed the controlling switch and the instrument he held in his hand, which contained the power-plant, or bar, had torn itself loose from its buckle. Instead of being within easy reach of his hand it was over six feet away, and was dragging him helplessly after it, straight toward the high stone wall! But only momentarily was he helpless, his keen mind discovering a way out of the predicament even as he managed to scramble to his feet in spite of the rapid pace. Throwing his body sidewise and reaching out his long arm as far as possible toward the bar, he succeeded in swinging it around so that he was running back toward the party and the spacious landing field. Dorothy and her father were standing motionless, staring at Seaton; the former with terror in her eyes, the latter in blank amazement. Crane had darted to the switch controlling the coil, and was reaching for it when Seaton passed them.

"Don't touch that switch!" he yelled. "I'll catch that thing yet!"

At this evidence that Seaton still thought himself master of the situation, Crane began to laugh, though he still kept his hand near the controlling switch. Dorothy, relieved of her fear for her lover's safety, could not help but join him, so ludicrous were Seaton's antics. The bar was straight out in front of him, about five feet above the ground, going somewhat faster than a man could run. It turned now to the right, now to the left, as his weight was thrown to one side or the other. Seaton, dragged along like a small boy trying to hold a runaway calf by the tail, was covering the ground in prodigious leaps and bounds; at the same time pulling himself up, hand over hand, to the bar in front of him. He soon reached it, seized it in both hands, again darted into the air, and descended lightly near the others, who were rocking with laughter.

"I said it would be undignified," chuckled Seaton, rather short of breath, "but I didn't know just how much so it was going to be."

Dorothy tucked her fingers into his hand.

"Are you hurt anywhere, Dick?"

"Not a bit. He led me a great chase, though."

"I was scared to death until you told Martin to let the switch alone. But it was funny then! I hadn't noticed your resemblance to a jumping-jack before. Won't you do it again sometime and let us take a movie of it?"

"That was as good as any show in town, Dick," said the lawyer, wiping his eyes, "but you must be more careful. Next time, it might not be funny at all."

"There will be no next time for this rig," replied Seaton. "This is merely to show us that our ideas are all right. The next trip will be in a full-scale, completely-equipped boat."

"It was perfectly wonderful," declared Dorothy. "I know this first flight of yours will be a turning-point or something in history. I don't pretend to understand how you did it--the sight of you standing still up there in the air made me wonder if I really were awake, even though I knew what to expect--but we wouldn't have missed it for worlds, would we, Dad?"

"No. I am very glad that we saw the first demonstration. The world has never before seen anything like it, and you two men will rank as two of the greatest discoverers."

"Seaton will, you mean," replied Crane, uncomfortably. "You know I didn't have anything to do with it."

"It's nearly all yours," denied Seaton. "Without your ideas I would have lost myself in space in my first attempt."

"You are both wrong," said Vaneman. "You, Martin, haven't enough imagination; and you, Dick, have altogether too much, for either of you to have done this alone. The honor will be divided equally between you."

* * * * *

He turned to Crane as Dorothy and Seaton set out toward the house.

"What are you going to do with it, commercially? Dick, of course, hasn't thought of anything except this space-car--equally of course, you have?"

"Yes. Knowing the general nature of the power and confident that Dick would control it, I have already drawn up sketches for a power-plant installation of five hundred thousand electrical horsepower, which will enable us to sell power for less than one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour and still return twenty percent annual dividends. However, the power-plant comes after the flyer."

"Why? Why not build the power-plant first, and take the pleasure trip afterward?"

"There are several reasons. The principal one is that Dick and I would rather be off exploring new worlds, while the other members of the Seaton-Crane Company, Engineers, build the power-plant."

During the talk the men had reached the house, into which the others had disappeared some time before. Upon Crane's invitation, Vaneman and his daughter stayed to dinner, and Dorothy played for awhile upon Crane's wonderful violin. The rest of the evening was spent in animated discussion of the realization of Seaton's dreams of flying without wings and beyond the supporting atmosphere. Seaton and Crane did their best to explain to the non-technical visitors how such flight was possible.

"Well, I am beginning to understand it a little," said Dorothy finally. "In plain language, it is like a big magnet or something, but different. Is that it?"

"That's it exactly," Seaton assured her.

"What are you going to call it? It isn't like anything else that ever was. Already this evening you have called it a bus, a boat, a kite, a star-hound, a wagon, an aerial flivver, a sky-chariot, a space-eating wampus, and I don't know what else. Even Martin has called it a vehicle, a ship, a bird, and a shell. What is its real name?"

"I don't know. It hasn't got any that I know of. What would you suggest, Dottie?"

"I don't know what general name should be applied to them, but for this one there is only one possible name, 'The Skylark.'"

"Exactly right, Dorothy," said Crane.

"Fine!" cried Seaton. "And you shall christen it, Dottie, with a big Florence flask full of absolute vacuum. 'I christen you "The Skylark." BANG!'"

As the guests were leaving, at a late hour, Vaneman said:

"Oh, yes. I bought an extra _Clarion_ as we came out. It tells a wild tale of an explosion so violent that science cannot explain it. I don't suppose it is true, but it may make interesting reading for you two scientific sharps. Good night."

Seaton accompanied Dorothy to the car, bidding her a more intimate farewell on the way. When he returned, Crane, with an unusual expression of concern on his face, handed him the paper without a word.

* * * * *

"What's up, old man? Something in it?" he asked, as he took the paper. He fell silent as he read the first words, and after he had read the entire article he said slowly:

"True, beyond a doubt. Even a _Clarion_ reporter couldn't imagine that. It's all intra-atomic energy, all right--some poor devil trying our stunt without my horseshoe in his pocket."

"Think, Dick! Something is wrong somewhere. You know that two people did not discover X at the same time. The answer is that somebody stole your idea, but the idea is worthless without the X. You say that the stuff is extremely rare--where did they get it?"

"That's right, Mart. I never thought of that. The stuff _is_ extremely rare. I am supposed to know something about rare metals, and I never heard of it before--there isn't even a gap in the Periodic System in which it belongs. I would bet a hat that we have every milligram known to the world at present."

"Well, then," said the practical Crane. "We had better see whether or not we have all we started with."

Asking Shiro to bring the large bottle from the vault, he opened the living-room safe and brought forth the small vial. The large bottle was still nearly full, the seal upon it unbroken. The vial was apparently exactly as Seaton had left it after he had made his bars.

"Our stuff seems to be all there," said Crane. "It looks as though someone else has discovered it also."

"I don't believe it," said Seaton, their positions now reversed. "It's altogether too rare."

He scanned both bottles narrowly.

"I can tell by taking the densities," he added, and ran up to the laboratory, returning with a Westphal balance in his hand. After testing both solutions he said slowly:

"Well, the mystery is solved. The large bottle has a specific gravity of 1.80, as it had when I prepared it; that in the vial reads only 1.41. Somebody has burglarized this safe and taken almost half of the solution, filling the vial up with colored water. The stuff is so strong that I probably never would have noticed the difference."

"But who could it have been?"

"Search me! But it's nothing to worry about now, anyway, because whoever it was is gone where he'll never do it again. He's taken the solution with him, too, so that nobody else can get it."

"I wish I were sure of that, Dick. The man who tried to do the research work is undoubtedly gone--but who is back of him?"

"Nobody, probably. Who would want to be?"

"To borrow your own phrase, Dick, Scott 'chirped it' when he called you 'Nobody Holme.' For a man with your brains you have the least sense of anybody I know. You know that this thing is worth, as a power project alone, thousands of millions of dollars, and that there are dozens of big concerns who would cheerfully put us both out of the way for a thousandth of that amount. The question is not to find one concern who might be backing a thing like that, but to pick out the one who is backing it."

* * * * *

After thinking deeply for a few moments he went on:

"The idea was taken from your demonstration in the Bureau, either by an eye-witness or by someone who heard about it afterward, probably the former. Even though it failed, one man saw the possibilities. Who was that man? Who was there?"

"Oh, a lot of the fellows were there. Scott, Smith, Penfield, DuQuesne, Roberts--quite a bunch of them. Let's see--Scott hasn't brains enough to do anything. Smith doesn't know anything about anything except amines. Penfield is a pure scientist, who wouldn't even quote an authority without asking permission. DuQuesne is ... hm-m ... DuQuesne ... he ... I...."

"Yes. DuQuesne. I have heard of him. He's the big black fellow, about your own size? He has the brains, the ability, and the inclination, has he not?"

"Well, I wouldn't want to say that. I don't know him very well, and personal dislike is no ground at all for suspicion, you know."

"Enough to warrant investigation. Is there anyone else who might have reasoned it out as you did, and as DuQuesne possibly could?"

"Not that I remember. But we can count DuQuesne out, anyway, because he called me up this afternoon about some notes on gallium; so he is still in the Bureau. Besides, he wouldn't let anybody else investigate it if he got it. He would do it himself, and I don't think he would have blown himself up. I never did like him very well personally--he's such a cold, inhuman son of a fish--but you've got to hand it to him for ability. He's probably the best man in the world today on that kind of thing."

"No, I do not think that we will count him out yet. He may have had nothing to do with it, but we will have him investigated nevertheless, and will guard against future visitors here."

Turning to the telephone, he called the private number of a well-known detective.

"Prescott? Crane speaking. Sorry to get you out of bed, but I should like to have a complete report upon Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne, of the Rare Metals Laboratory, as soon as possible. Every detail for the last two weeks, every move and every thought if possible. Please keep a good man on him until further notice.... I wish you would send two or three guards out here right away, to-night; men you can trust and who will stay awake.... Thanks. Good night."

CHAPTER V

Direct Action

Seaton and Crane spent some time developing the object-compass. Crane made a number of these instruments, mounted in gymbals, so that the delicate needles were free to turn in any direction whatever. They were mounted upon jeweled bearings, but bearings made of such great strength, that Seaton protested.

"What's the use, Mart? You don't expect a watch to be treated like a stone-crusher. That needle weighs less than half a gram. Why mount it as though it weighed twenty pounds?"

"To be safe. Remember the acceleration the Lark will be capable of, and also that on some other worlds, which we hope to visit, this needle will weigh more than it does here."

"That's right, Mart, I never thought of that. Anyway, we can't be too safe to suit me."

When the compasses were done and the power through them had been adjusted to one-thousandth of a watt, the lowest they could maintain with accuracy, they focused each instrument upon one of a set of most carefully weighed glass beads, ranging in size from a pin-head up to a large marble, and had the beads taken across the country by Shiro, in order to test the sensitiveness and accuracy of the new instruments. The first test was made at a distance of one hundred miles, the last at nearly three thousand. They found, as they had expected, that from the weight of the object and the time it took the needle to come to rest after being displaced from its line by a gentle tap of the finger, they could easily calculate the distance from the compass to the object. This fact pleased Crane immensely, as it gave him a sure means of navigation in space. The only objection to its use in measuring earthly distances was its extreme delicacy, the needle focused upon the smallest bead in the lot at a distance of three thousand miles coming to rest in little more than one second.

The question of navigation solved, the two next devoted themselves to perfecting the "X-plosive bullet," as Seaton called it. From his notes and equations Seaton calculated the weight of copper necessary to exert the explosive force of one pound of nitro-glycerin, and weighed out, on the most delicate assay-balance made, various fractions and multiples of this amount of the treated copper, while Crane fitted up the bullets of automatic-pistol cartridges to receive the charges and to explode them on impact.

They placed their blueprints and working notes in the safe, as usual, taking with them only those notes dealing with the object-compass and the X-plosive bullet, upon which they were still working. No one except Shiro knew that the original tracings, from which the blue-prints had been made, and their final, classified notes were always kept in the vault. They cautioned him and the three guards to keep a close watch until they returned. Then they set out in the biplane, to try out the new weapon in a lonely place where the exploding shells could do no damage.

* * * * *

They found that the X-plosive came fully up to expectations. The smallest charge they had prepared, fired by Crane at a great stump a full hundred yards away from the bare, flat-topped knoll that had afforded them a landing-place, tore it bodily from the ground and reduced it to splinters, while the force of the explosion made the two men stagger.

"She sure is big medicine!" laughed Seaton. "Wonder what a real one will do?" and drawing his pistol, he inserted a cartridge carrying a much heavier charge.

"Better be careful with the big ones," cautioned Crane. "What are you going to shoot at?"

"That rock over there," pointing to a huge boulder half a mile away across the small valley. "Want to bet me a dinner I can't hit it?"

"No. You forget that I saw you win the pistol trophy of the District."

The pistol cracked, and when the bullet reached its destination the great stone was obliterated in a vast ball of flame. After a moment there was a deafening report--a crash as though the world were falling to pieces. Both men were hurled violently backward, stumbling and falling flat. Picking themselves up, they looked across the valley at the place where the boulder had stood, to see only an immense cloud of dust, which slowly blew away, revealing a huge hole in the ground. They were silent a moment, awed by the frightful power they had loosed.

"Well, Mart," Seaton broke the silence, "I'll say those one-milligram loads are plenty big enough. If that'd been something coming after us--whether any possible other-world animal, a foreign battleship, or the mythical great sea-serpent himself, it'd be a good Indian now. Yes? No?"

"Yes. When we use the heavier charges we must use long-range rifles. Have you had enough demonstration or do you want to shoot some more?"

"I've had enough, thanks. That last rock I bounced off of was no pillow, I'll tell the world. Besides, it looks as though I'd busted a leg or two off of our noble steed with my shot, and we may have to walk back home."

An examination of the plane, which had been moved many feet and almost overturned by the force of the explosion, revealed no damage that they could not repair on the spot, and dusk saw them speeding through the air toward the distant city.

In response to a summons from his chief, Perkins silently appeared in Brookings' office, without his usual complacent smile.

"Haven't you done anything yet, after all this time?" demanded the magnate. "We're getting tired of this delay."

"I can't help it, Mr. Brookings," replied the subordinate. "They've got detectives from Prescott's all over the place. Our best men have been trying ever since the day of the explosion, but can't do a thing without resorting to violence. I went out there myself and looked them over, without being seen. There isn't a man there with a record, and I haven't been able so far to get anything on any one of them that we can use as a handle."

"No, Prescott's men are hard to do anything with. But can't you...?" Brookings paused significantly.

"I was coming to that. I thought one of them might be seen, and I talked to him a little, over the phone, but I couldn't talk loud enough without consulting you. I mentioned ten, but he held out for twenty-five. Said he wouldn't consider it at all, but he wants to quit Prescott and go into business for himself."

"Go ahead on twenty-five. We want to get action," said Brookings, as he wrote an order on the cashier for twenty-five thousand dollars in small-to-medium bills. "That is cheap enough, considering what DuQuesne's rough stuff would probably cost. Report tomorrow about four, over our private phone--no, I'll come down to the caf, it's safer."

* * * * *

The place referred to was the Perkins Caf, a high-class restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, heavily patronized by the diplomatic, political, financial, and sporting circles of upper-class Washington. It was famous for its discreet waiters, and for the absolutely private rooms. Many of its patrons knew of its unique telephone service, in which each call went through such a devious system of relays that any attempt to trace it was hopeless; they knew that while "The Perkins" would not knowingly lend itself to any violation of law, it was an entirely safe and thoroughly satisfactory place in which to conduct business of the most secret and confidential character; a place from which one could enjoy personal conversation with persons to whom he wished to remain invisible and untraceable: a place which had never been known to "leak." For these reasons it was really the diplomatic and political center of the country, and over its secret wires had gone, in guarded language, messages that would have rocked the world had they gone astray. It was recognized that the place was occasionally, by its very nature, used for illegal purposes, but it was such a political, financial, and diplomatic necessity that it carried a "Hands Off" sign. It was never investigated by Congress and never raided by the police. Hundreds of telephone calls were handled daily. A man would come in, order something served in a private room, leave a name at the desk, and say that he was expecting a call. There the affair ended. The telephone operators were hand-picked, men of very short memories, carefully trained never to look at a face and never to remember a name or a number. Although the precaution was unnecessary, this shortness of memory was often encouraged by bills of various denominations.

No one except Perkins and the heads of the great World Steel Corporation knew that the urbane and polished proprietor of the caf was a criminal of the blackest kind, whose liberty and life itself were dependent upon the will of the Corporation; or that the restaurant was especially planned and maintained as a blind for its underground activities; or that Perkins was holding a position which suited him exactly and which he would not have given up for wealth or glory--that of being the guiding genius who planned nefarious things for the men higher up, and saw to it that they were carried out by the men lower down. He was in constant personal touch with his superiors, but in order to avoid any chance of betrayal he never saw his subordinates personally. Not only were they entirely ignorant of his identity, but all possible means of their tracing him had been foreseen and guarded against. He called them on the telephone, but they never called him. The only possible way in which any of his subordinates could get in touch with him was by means of the wonderful wireless telephone already referred to, developed by a drug-crazed genius who had died shortly after it was perfected. It was a tiny instrument, no larger than a watch, but of practically unlimited range. The controlling central station of the few instruments in existence, from which any instrument could be cut out, changed in tune, or totally destroyed at will, was in Perkins' office safe. A man intrusted with an unusually important job would receive from an unknown source an instrument, with directions sufficient for its use. As soon as the job was done he would find, upon again attempting to use the telephone, that its interior was so hopelessly wrecked that not even the most skilled artisan could reproduce what it had once been.

* * * * *

At four o'clock Brookings was ushered into the private office of the master criminal, who was plainly ill at ease.

"I've got to report another failure, Mr. Brookings. It's nobody's fault, just one of those things that couldn't be helped. I handled this myself. Our man left the door unlocked and kept the others busy in another room. I had just started to work when Crane's Japanese servant, who was supposed to be asleep, appeared upon the scene. If I hadn't known something about jiu-jutsu myself, he'd have broken my neck. As it was, I barely got away, with the Jap and all three guards close behind me...."

"I'm not interested in excuses," broke in the magnate, angrily. "We'll have to turn it over to DuQuesne after all unless you get something done, and get it done quick. Can't you get to that Jap some way?"

"Certainly I can. I never yet saw the man who couldn't be reached, one way or another. I've had 'Silk' Humphreys, the best fixer in the business, working on him all day, and he'll be neutral before night. If the long green won't quiet him--and I never saw a Jap refuse it yet--a lead pipe will. Silk hasn't reported yet, but I expect to hear from him any minute now, through our man out there."

As he spoke, the almost inaudible buzzer in his pocket gave a signal.

"There he is now," said Perkins, as he took out his wireless instrument. "You might listen in and hear what he has to say."

Brookings took out his own telephone and held it to his ear.

"Hello," Perkins spoke gruffly into the tiny transmitter. "What've you got on your chest?"

"Your foot slipped on the Jap," the stranger replied. "He crabbed the game right. Slats and the big fellow put all the stuff into the box, told us to watch it until they get back tonight--they may be late--then went off in Slats' ship to test something--couldn't find out what. Silk tackled the yellow boy, and went up to fifty grand, but the Jap couldn't see him at all. Silk started to argue, and the Jap didn't do a thing but lay him out, cold. This afternoon, while the Jap was out in the grounds, three stick-up men jumped him. He bumped one of them off with his hands and the others with his gat--one of those big automatics that throw a slug like a cannon. None of us knew he had it. That's all, except that I am quitting Prescott right now. Anything else I can do for you, whoever you are?"

"No. Your job's done."

The conversation closed. Perkins pressed the switch which reduced the interior of the spy's wireless instrument to a fused mass of metal, and Brookings called DuQuesne on the telephone.

"I would like to talk to you," he said. "Shall I come there or would you rather come to my office?"

"I'll come there. They're watching this house. They have one man in front and one in back, a couple of detectaphones in my rooms here, and have coupled onto this telephone.

"Don't worry," he continued calmly as the other made an exclamation of dismay. "Talk ahead as loud as you please--they can't hear you. Do you think that those poor, ignorant flat feet can show me anything about electricity? I'd shoot a jolt along their wires that would burn their ears off if it weren't my cue to act the innocent and absorbed scientist. As it is, their instruments are all registering dense silence. I am deep in study right now, and can't be disturbed!"

"Can you get out?"

"Certainly. I have that same private entrance down beside the house wall and the same tunnel I used before. I'll see you in about fifteen minutes."

* * * * *

In Brookings' office, DuQuesne told of the constant surveillance over him.

"They suspect me on general principles, I think," he continued. "They are apparently trying to connect me with somebody. I don't think they suspect you at all, and they won't unless they get some better methods. I have devices fitted up to turn the lights off and on, raise and lower the windows, and even cast shadows at certain times. The housekeeper knows that when I go to my library after dinner, I have retired to study, and that it is as much as anyone's life is worth to disturb me. Also, I am well known to be firmly fixed in my habits, so it's easy to fool those detectives. Last night I went out and watched them. They hung around a couple of hours after my lights went out, then walked off together. I can dodge them any time and have all my nights free without their ever suspecting anything."

"Are you free tonight?"

"Yes. The time-switches are all set, and as long as I get back before daylight, so they can see me get up and go to work, it will be all right."

Brookings told him briefly of the failures to secure the solution and the plans, of the death of the three men sent to silence Shiro, and of all the other developments. DuQuesne listened, his face impassive.

"Well," he said as Brookings ceased. "I thought you would bull it, but not quite so badly. But there's no use whining now. I can't use my original plan of attack in force, as they are prepared and might be able to stand us off until the police could arrive."

He thought deeply for a time, then said, intensely:

"If I go into this thing, Brookings, I am in absolute command. Everything goes as I say. Understand?"

"Yes. It's up to you, now."

"All right, I think I've got it. Can you get me a Curtiss biplane in an hour, and a man about six feet tall who weighs about a hundred and sixty pounds? I want to drive the plane myself, and have the man, dressed in full leathers and hood, in the passenger's seat, shot so full of chloroform or dope that he will be completely unconscious for at least two hours."

"Easy. We can get you any kind of plane you want in an hour, and Perkins can find a man of that description who would be glad to have a dream at that price. But what's the idea?... Pardon me, I shouldn't have asked that," he added, as the saturnine chemist shot him a black look from beneath his heavy brows.

Well, within the hour, DuQuesne drove up to a private aviation field and found awaiting him a Curtiss biplane, whose attendant jumped into an automobile and sped away as he approached. He quickly donned a heavy leather suit, similar to the one Seaton always wore in the air, and drew the hood over his face. Then, after a searching look at the lean form of the unconscious man in the other seat, he was off, the plane climbing swiftly under his expert hand. He took a wide circle to the west and north.

Soon Shiro and the two guards, hearing the roar of an approaching airplane, looked out and saw what they supposed to be Crane's biplane coming down with terrific speed in an almost vertical nose-dive, as though the driver were in an extremity of haste. Flattening out just in time to avert destruction it taxied up the field almost to the house. The watchers saw a man recognizable as Seaton by his suit and his unmistakable physique stand up and wave both arms frantically, heard him shout hoarsely "... all of you ... out here," saw him point to Crane's apparently lifeless form and slump down in his seat. All three ran out to help the unconscious aviators, but just as they reached the machine there were three silenced reports and the three men fell to the ground. DuQuesne leaped lightly out of the machine and looked narrowly at the bodies at his feet. He saw that the two detectives were dead, but found with some chagrin that the Japanese still showed faint signs of life. He half drew his pistol to finish the job, but observing that the victim was probably fatally wounded he thrust it back into its holster and went on into the house. Drawing on rubber gloves he rapidly blew the door off the safe with nitro-glycerin and took out everything it contained. He set aside a roll of blueprints, numerous notebooks, some money and other valuables, and a small vial of solution--but of the larger bottle there was no trace. He then ransacked the entire house, from cellar to attic, with no better success. So cleverly was the entrance to the vault concealed in the basement wall that he failed to discover it.

"I might have expected this of Crane," he thought, half aloud, "after all the warning that fool Brookings persisted in giving him. This is the natural result of his nonsense. The rest of the solution is probably in the safest safe-deposit vault in the United States. But I've got their plans and notes, and enough solution for the present. I'll get the rest of it when I want it--there's more than one way to kill any cat that ever lived!"

Returning to the machine, DuQuesne calmly stepped over the bodies of the detectives and the unconscious form of the dying Japanese, who was uttering an occasional groan. He started the engine and took his seat. There was an increasing roar as he opened the throttle, and soon he descended upon the field from which he had set out. He noted that there was a man in an automobile at some distance from the hangar, evidently waiting to take care of the plane and his still unconscious passenger. Rapidly resuming his ordinary clothing, he stepped into his automobile and was soon back in his own rooms, poring over the blueprints and notebooks.

* * * * *

Seaton and Crane both felt that something was wrong when they approached the landing field and saw that the landing-lights were not burning, as they always were kept lighted whenever the plane was abroad after dark. By the dim light of the old moon Crane made a bumpy landing and they sprang from their seats and hastened toward the house. As they neared it they heard a faint moan and turned toward the sound, Seaton whipping out his electric torch with one hand and his automatic pistol with the other. At the sight that met their eyes, however, he hastily replaced the weapon and bent over Shiro, a touch assuring him that the other two were beyond the reach of help. Silently they picked up the injured man and carried him gently into his own room, barely glancing at the wrecked safe on the way. Seaton applied first-aid treatment to the ghastly wound in Shiro's head, which both men supposed to be certainly fatal, while Crane called a noted surgeon, asking him to come at once. He then telephoned the coroner, the police, and finally Prescott, with whom he held a long conversation.

Having done all in their power for the unfortunate man, they stood at his bedside, their anger all the more terrible for the fact that it was silent. Seaton stood with every muscle tense. He was seething with rage, his face purple and his eyes almost emitting sparks, his teeth clenched until the muscles of his jaws stood out in bands and lumps. His right hand, white-knuckled, gripped the butt of his pistol, while under his left the brass rail of the bed slowly bent under the intensity of his unconscious muscular effort. Crane stood still, apparently impassive, but with his face perfectly white and with every feature stern and cold as though cut from marble. Seaton was the first to speak.

"Mart," he gritted, his voice husky with fury, "a man who would leave another man alone to die after giving him that, ain't a man--he's a thing. If Shiro dies and we can ever find out who did it I'll shoot him with the biggest explosive charge I've got. No, I won't either, that'd be too sudden. I'll take him apart with my bare hands."

"We will find him, Dick," Crane replied in a level, deadly voice entirely unlike his usual tone. "That is one thing money can do. We will get him if money, influence, and detectives can do it."

The tension was relieved by the arrival of the surgeon and his two nurses, who set to work with the machine-like rapidity and precision of their highly-specialized craft. After a few minutes, the work completed, the surgeon turned to the two men who had been watching him so intently, with a smile upon his clean-shaven face.

"Merely a scalp wound, Mr. Crane," he stated. "He should recover consciousness in an hour or so." Then, breaking in upon Seaton's exclamation, "It looks much worse than it really is. The bullet glanced off the skull instead of penetrating it, stunning him by the force the blow. There are no indications that the brain is affected in any way, and while the affected area of the scalp is large, it is a clean wound and should heal rapidly. He will probably be up and around in a couple of days, and by the time his hair grows again, he will not be able to find a scar."

As he took his leave, the police and coroner arrived. After making a thorough investigation, in which they learned what had been stolen and shrewdly deduced the manner in which the robbery had been accomplished, they departed, taking with them the bodies. They were authorized by Crane to offer a reward of one million dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer. After everyone except the nurses had gone, Crane showed them the rooms they were to occupy while caring for the wounded man. As the surgeon had foretold, Shiro soon recovered consciousness. After telling his story he dropped into a deep sleep, and Seaton and Crane, after another telephonic conference with Prescott, retired for the rest of the night.

CHAPTER VI

The Object-Compass at Work

Prescott, after a sleepless night, joined Seaton and Crane at breakfast.

"What do you make of it, Mr. Prescott?" asked Crane. "Seaton here thinks it was DuQuesne, possibly acting for some foreign power, after our flying-machine to use in war. I think it was some big industrial concern after our power-plant. What is your opinion?"

"I haven't any," replied the great detective after a moment. "Either guess may be true, although I am almost positive that Dr. DuQuesne had nothing to do with it, either way. It was no ordinary burglary, that is certain from Shiro's story. It was done by someone who had exact information of your movements and habits. He chose a time when you were away, probably not so much from fear of you as because it was only in your absence that he could succeed as he did in getting all the guards out at once where he could handle them. He was a man with one accomplice or who worked alone, and who was almost exactly Seaton's size and build. He was undoubtedly an expert, as he blew the safe and searched the whole house without leaving a finger-print or any other clue, however slight, that I can find--a thing I have never before seen done in all my experience."

"His size should help in locating him," declared Crane. "While there are undoubtedly thousands of men of Dick's six-feet-one and two-fifths, they are fairly well scattered, are they not?"

"Yes, they are, but his very size only makes it worse. I have gone over all the records I could, in the short time I have had, and can't find an expert of that class with anywhere near that description."

"How about the third guard, the one who escaped?" asked Seaton.

"He wasn't here. It was his afternoon off, you know, and he said that he wouldn't come back into this job on a bet--that he wasn't afraid of anything ordinary, but he didn't like the looks of things out here. That sounded fishy to me, and I fired him. He may have been the leak, of course, though I have always found him reliable before. If he did leak, he must have got a whale of a slice for it. He is under constant watch, and if we can ever get anything on him, I will nail him to the cross. But that doesn't help get this affair straightened out. I haven't given up, of course, there are lots of things not tried yet, but I must admit that temporarily, at least, I am up a stump."

"Well," remarked Seaton, "that million-dollar reward will bring him in, sure. No honor that ever existed among thieves, or even among free-lances of diplomacy, could stand that strain."

"I'm not so sure of that, Dick," said Crane. "If either one of our ideas is the right one, very few men would know enough about the affair to give pertinent information, and they probably would not live long enough to enjoy the reward very thoroughly. Even a million dollars fails in that case."

"I rather agree with Mr. Crane, Seaton. If it were an ordinary affair--and I am as sure it is not as the police are that it is--a reward of that size would get us our man within two days. As it is, I doubt very much that the reward will do us any good. I'm afraid that it will never be claimed."

"Wonder if the Secret Service could help us out? They'd be interested if it should turn out to be some foreign power."

"I took it up with the Chief himself, just after it happened last night. He doesn't think that it can be a foreign country. He has their agents pretty well spotted, and the only one that could fill the bill--you know a man with that description and with the cold nerve to do the job would be apt to be known--was in San Francisco, the time this job was pulled off."

* * * * *

"The more you talk, the more I am convinced that it was DuQuesne himself," declared Seaton, positively. "He is almost exactly my size and build, is the only man I know of who could do anything with the solution after he got it, and he has nerve enough to do anything."

"I would like to think it was DuQuesne," replied the detective, thoughtfully, "but I'm afraid we'll have to count him out of it entirely. He has been under the constant surveillance of my best men ever since you mentioned him. We have detectaphones in his rooms, wires on his telephone, and are watching him night and day. He never goes out except to work, never has any except unimportant telephone calls, and the instruments register only the occasional scratching of a match, the rustle of papers, and other noises of a man studying. He's innocent."

"That may be true," assented Seaton doubtfully, "but you want to remember that he knows more about electricity than the guy that invented it, and I'm not sure that he can't talk to a detectaphone and make it say anything he wants it to. Anyway, we can soon settle it. Yesterday I made a special trip down to the Bureau, with some notes as an excuse, to set this object-compass on him," taking one of the small instruments from his pocket as he spoke. "I watched him a while last night, then fixed an alarm to wake me if the needle moved much, but it pointed steady all night. See! It's moving now. That means that he is going to work early, as usual. Now I'm morally certain that he's mixed up in this thing somewhere, and I'm not convinced that he isn't slipping one over on your men some way--he's a clever devil. I wonder if you wouldn't take this compass and watch him yourself tonight, just on general principles? Or let me do it. I'd be glad to. I say 'tonight' because if he did get the stuff here he didn't deliver it anywhere last night. It's just a chance, of course, but he may do it tonight."

After the compass had been explained to the detective he gladly consented to the plan, declaring that he would willingly spend the time just to watch such an unheard-of instrument work. After another hour of fruitless discussion Prescott took his leave, saying that he would mount an impregnable guard from that time on.

Late that evening Prescott joined the two men who were watching DuQuesne's house. They reported that all was perfectly quiet, as usual. The scientist was in his library, the instruments registering only the usual occasional faint sounds of a man absorbed in study. But after an hour of waiting, and while the microphones made a noise as of rustling papers, the needle of the compass moved. It dipped slowly toward the earth as though DuQuesne were descending into the cellar, but at the same time the shadow of his unmistakable profile was thrown upon the window shade as he apparently crossed the room.

"Can't you hear him walk?" demanded Prescott.

"No. He has heavy Turkish rugs all over the library, and he always walks very lightly, besides."

* * * * *

Prescott watched the needle in amazement as it dipped deeper and deeper, pointing down into the earth almost under his feet and then behind him, as though DuQuesne had walked beneath him. He did not, could not, believe it. He was certain that something had gone wrong with the strange instrument in his hand, nevertheless he followed the pointing needle. It led him beside Park Road, down the hill, straight toward the long bridge which forms one entrance to Rock Creek Park. Though skeptical, Prescott took no chances, and as he approached the bridge he left the road and concealed himself behind a clump of trees, from which point of vantage he could see the ground beneath the bridge as well as the roadway. Soon the bridge trembled under the weight of a heavy automobile going toward the city at a high rate of speed. He saw DuQuesne, with a roll of papers under his arm, emerge from under the bridge just in time to leap aboard the automobile, which slowed down only enough to enable him to board it in safety. The detective noticed that the car was a Pierce-Arrow limousine--a car not common, even in Washington--and rushed out to get its number, but the license plates were so smeared with oil and dust that the numbers could not be read by the light of the tail lamp. Glancing at the compass in his hand he saw that the delicate needle was now pointing steadily at the fleeing car, and all doubts as to the power of the instrument were dispelled. He rejoined his men, informed them that DuQuesne had eluded them, and took one of them up the hill to a nearby garage. There he engaged a fast car and set out in pursuit, choosing the path for the chauffeur by means of the compass. His search ended at the residence of Brookings, the General Manager of the great World Steel Corporation. Here he dismissed the car and watched the house while his assistant went to bring out the fast motorcycle used by Prescott when high speed was desirable.

After four hours a small car bearing the license number of a distant state--which was found, by subsequent telegraphing, to be unknown to the authorities of that state--drove under the porte-cochre, and the hidden watcher saw DuQuesne, without the papers, step into it. Knowing now what to expect, Prescott drove his racing motorcycle at full speed out to the Park Road Bridge and concealed himself beneath the structure, in a position commanding a view of the concrete abutment through which the scientist must have come. Soon he heard a car slow down overhead, heard a few rapid footfalls, and saw the dark form of a large man outlined against the gray face of the abutment. He saw the man lift his hand high above his head, and saw a black rectangle appear in the gray, engulf the man, and disappear. After a few minutes he approached the abutment and searched its face with the help of his flash-light. He finally succeeded in tracing the almost imperceptible crack which outlined the door, and the concealed button which DuQuesne had pressed to open it. He did not press the button, as it might be connected to an alarm. Deep in thought, he mounted his motorcycle and made his way to his home to get a few hours of sleep before reporting to Crane whom he was scheduled to see at breakfast next morning.

* * * * *

Both men were waiting for him when he appeared, and he noticed with pleasure that Shiro, with a heavily-bandaged head, was insisting that he was perfectly able to wait on the table instead of breakfasting in bed. He calmly proceeded to serve breakfast in spite of Crane's remonstrances, having ceremoniously ordered out of the kitchen the colored man who had been secured to take his place.

"Well, gentlemen," the detective began, "part of the mystery is straightened out. I was entirely wrong, and each of you were partly right. It was DuQuesne, in all probability. It is equally probable that a great company--in this case the World Steel Corporation--is backing him, though I don't believe there is a ghost of a show of ever being able to prove it in law. Your 'object-compass' did the trick."

He narrated all the events of the previous night.

"I'd like to send him to the chair for this job," said Seaton with rising anger. "We ought to shoot him anyway, damn him--I'm sorry duels have gone out of fashion, for I can't shoot him off-hand, the way things are now--I sure wish I could."

"No, you cannot shoot him," said Crane, thoughtfully, "and neither can I, worse luck. We are not in his class there. And you must not fight with him, either"--noting that Seaton's powerful hands had doubled into fists, the knuckles showing white through the tanned skin--"though that would be a fight worth watching and I would like to see you give him the beating of his life. A little thing like a beating is not a fraction of what he deserves and it would show him that we have found him out. No, we must do it legally or let him entirely alone. You think there is no hope of proving it, Prescott?"

"Frankly, I see very little chance of it. There is always hope, of course, and if that bunch of pirates ever makes a slip, we'll be right there waiting to catch 'em. While I don't believe in holding out false encouragement, they've never slipped yet. I'll take my men off DuQuesne, now that we've linked him up with Steel. It doesn't make any difference, does it, whether he goes to them every night or only once a week?

"No."

"Then about all I can do is to get everything I can on that Steel crowd, and that is very much like trying to get blood out of a turnip. I intend to keep after them, of course, for I owe them something for killing two of my men here, as well as for other favors they have done me in the past, but don't expect too much. I have tackled them before, and so have police headquarters and even the Secret Service itself, under cover, and all that any of us has been able to get is an occasional small fish. We could never land the big fellows. In fact, we have never found the slightest material proof of what we are morally certain is the truth, that World Steel is back of a lot of deviltry all over the country. The little fellows who do the work either don't know anything or are afraid to tell. I'll see if I can find out what they are doing with the stuff they stole, but I'm not even sure of doing that. You can't plant instruments on that bunch--it would be like trying to stick a pin into a sleeping cat without waking him up. They undoubtedly have one of the best corps of detectives in the world. You haven't perfected an instrument which enables you to see into a closed room and hear what is going on there, have you?" And upon being assured that they had not, he took his leave.

"Optimistic cuss, ain't he?" remarked Seaton.

"He has cause to be, Dick. World Steel is a soulless corporation if there ever was one. They have the shrewdest lawyers in the country, and they get away legally with things that are flagrantly illegal, such as freezing out competitors, stealing patents, and the like. Report has it that they do not stop at arson, treason, or murder to attain their ends, but as Prescott said, they never leave any legal proof behind them."

"Well, _we_ should fret, anyway. Of course, a monopoly is what they're after, but they can't form one because they can't possibly get the rest of our solution. Even if they should get it, we can get more. It won't be as easy as this last batch was, since the X was undoubtedly present in some particular lot of platinum in extraordinary quantities, but now that I know exactly what to look for, I can find more. So they can't get their monopoly unless they kill us off...."

"Exactly. Go on, I see you are getting the idea. If we should both conveniently die, they could get the solution from the company, and have the monopoly, since no one else can handle it."

"But they couldn't get away with it, Mart--never in a thousand years, even if they wanted to. Of course I am small fry, but you are too big a man for even Steel to do away with. It can't be done."

"I am not so sure of that. Airplane accidents are numerous, and I am an aviator. Also, has it ever occurred to you that the heavy forging for the Skylark, ordered a while ago, are of steel?"

Seaton paused, dumbfounded, in the act of lighting his pipe.

"But thanks to your object-compass, we are warned." Crane continued, evenly. "Those forgings are going through the most complete set of tests known to the industry, and if they go into the Skylark at all it will be after I am thoroughly convinced that they will not give way on our first trip into space. But we can do nothing until the steel arrives, and with the guard Prescott has here now we are safe enough. Luckily, the enemy knows nothing of the object-compass or the X-plosive, and we must keep them in ignorance. Hereinafter, not even the guards get a look at anything we do."

"They sure don't. Let's get busy!"

* * * * *

DuQuesne and Brookings met in conference in a private room of the Perkins Caf.

"What's the good word, Doctor?"

"So-so," replied the scientist. "The stuff is all they said it was, but we haven't enough of it to build much of a power-plant. We can't go ahead with it, anyway, as long as Seaton and Crane have nearly all their original solution."

"No, we can't. We must find a way of getting it. I see now that we should have done as you suggested, and taken it before they had warning and put it out of our reach."

"There's no use holding post-mortems. We've got to get it, some way, and everybody that knows anything about that new metal, how to get it or how to handle it, must die. At first, it would have been enough to kill Seaton. Now, however, there is no doubt that Crane knows all about it, and he probably has left complete instructions in case he gets killed in an accident--he's the kind that would. We will have to keep our eyes open and wipe out those instructions and anyone who has seen them. You see that, don't you?"

"Yes, I am afraid that is the only way out. We must have the monopoly, and anyone who might be able to interfere with it must be removed. How has your search for more X prospered?"

"About as well as I expected. We bought up all the platinum wastes we could get, and reworked all the metallic platinum and allied metals we could buy in the open market, and got less than a gram of X out of the whole lot. It's scarcer than radium. Seaton's finding so much of it at once was an accident, pure and simple--it couldn't happen once in a million years."

"Well, have you any suggestions as to how we can get that solution?"

"No. I haven't thought of anything but that very thing ever since I found that they had hidden it, and I can't yet see any good way of getting it. My forte is direct action and that fails in this case, since no amount of force or torture could make Crane reveal the hiding-place of the solution. It's probably in the safest safe-deposit vault in the country. He wouldn't carry the key on him, probably wouldn't have it in the house. Killing Seaton or Crane, or both of them, is easy enough, but it probably wouldn't get us the solution, as I have no doubt that Crane has provided for everything."

"Probably he has. But if he should disappear the stuff would have to come to light, or the Seaton-Crane Company might start their power-plant. In that case, we probably could get it?"

"_Possibly_, you mean. That method is too slow to suit me, though. It would take months, perhaps years, and would be devilishly uncertain, to boot. They'll know something is in the wind, and the stuff will be surrounded by every safeguard they can think of. There must be some better way than that, but I haven't been able to think of it."

"Neither have I, but your phrase 'direct action' gives me an idea. You say that that method has failed. What do you think of trying indirect action in the shape of Perkins, who is indirection personified?"

"Bring him in. He may be able to figure out something."

* * * * *

Perkins was called in, and the main phases of the situation laid before him. The three men sat in silence for many minutes while the crafty strategist studied the problem. Finally he spoke.

"There's only one way, gentlemen. We must get a handle on either Seaton or Crane strong enough to make them give up their bottle of dope, their plans, and everything...."

"Handle!" interrupted DuQuesne. "You talk like a fool! You can't get anything on either of them."

"You misunderstand me, Doctor. You can get a handle of some kind on any living man. Not necessarily in his past, you understand--I know that anything like that is out of the question in this case--but in his future. With some men it is money, with others power, with others fame, with others women or some woman, and so on down the list. What can we use here? Money is out of the question, so are power and fame, as they already have both in plain sight. It seems to me that women would be our best chance."

"Hah!" snorted the chemist. "Crane has been chased by all the women of three continents so long that he's womanproof. Seaton is worse--he's engaged, and wouldn't realize that a woman was on his trail, even if you could find a better looking one to work on him than the girl he's engaged to--which would be a hard job. Cleopatra herself couldn't swing that order."

"Engaged? That makes it simple as A B C."

"Simple? In the devil's name, how?"

"Easy as falling off a log. You have enough of the dope to build a space-car from those plans, haven't you?"

"Yes. What has that to do with the case?"

"It has everything to do with it. I would suggest that we build such a car and use it to carry off the girl. After we have her safe we could tell Seaton that she is marooned on some distant planet, and that she will be returned to earth only after all the solution, all notes, plans, and everything pertaining to the new metal are surrendered. That will bring him, and Crane will consent. Then, afterward, Dr. Seaton may go away indefinitely, and if desirable, Mr. Crane may accompany him."

"But suppose they try to fight?" asked Brookings.

Perkins slid down into his chair in deep thought, his pale eyes under half-closed lids darting here and there, his stubby fingers worrying his watch-chain restlessly.

"Who is the girl?" he asked at last.

"Dorothy Vaneman, the daughter of the lawyer. She's that auburn-haired beauty that the papers were so full of when she came out last year."

"Vaneman is a director in the Seaton-Crane Company. That makes it still better. If they show fight and follow us, that beautiful car we are making for them will collapse and they will be out of the way. Vaneman, as Seaton's prospective father-in-law and a member of his company, probably knows something about the secret. Maybe all of it. With his daughter in a space-car, supposedly out in space, and Seaton and Crane out of the way, Vaneman would listen to reason and let go of the solution, particularly as nobody knows much about it except Seaton and Crane."

"That strikes me as a perfectly feasible plan," said Brookings. "But you wouldn't really take her to another planet, would you? Why not use an automobile or an airplane, and tell Seaton that it was a space-car?"

"I wouldn't advise that. He might not believe it, and they might make a lot of trouble. It must be a real space-car even if we don't take her out of the city. To make it more impressive, you should take her in plain sight of Seaton--no, that would be too dangerous, as I have found out from the police that Seaton has a permit to carry arms, and I know that he is one of the fastest men with a pistol in the whole country. Do it in plain sight of her folks, say, or a crowd of people; being masked, of course, or dressed in an aviator's suit, with the hood and goggles on. Take her straight up out of sight, then hide her somewhere until Seaton listens to reason. I know that he _will_ listen, but if he doesn't, you might let him see you start out to visit her. He'll be sure to follow you in their rotten car. As soon as he does that, he's our meat. But that raises the question of who is going to drive the car?"

"I am," replied DuQuesne. "I will need some help, though, as at least one man must stay with the girl while I bring the car back."

"We don't want to let anybody else in on this if we can help it," cautioned Brookings. "You could go along, couldn't you, Perkins?"

"Is it safe?"

"Absolutely," answered DuQuesne. "They have everything worked out to the queen's taste."

"That's all right, then. I'll take the trip. Also," turning to Brookings, "it will help in another little thing we are doing--the Spencer affair."

"Haven't you got that stuff away from her yet, after having had her locked up in that hell-hole for two months?" asked Brookings.

"No. She's stubborn as a mule. We've given her the third degree time after time, but it's no use."

* * * * *

"What's this?" asked DuQuesne. "Deviltry in the main office?"

"Yes. This Margaret Spencer claims that we swindled her father out of an invention and indirectly caused his death. She secured a position with us in search of evidence. She is an expert stenographer, and showed such ability that she was promoted until she became my secretary. Our detectives must have been asleep, as she made away with some photographs and drawings before they caught her. She has no real evidence, of course, but she might cause trouble with a jury, especially as she is one of the best-looking women in Washington. Perkins is holding her until she returns the stolen articles."

"Why can't you kill her off?"

"She cannot be disposed of until after we know where the stuff is, because she says, and Perkins believes, that the evidence will show up in her effects. We must do something about her soon, as the search for her is dying down and she will be given up for dead."

"What's the idea about her and the space-car?"

"If the car proves reliable we might actually take her out into space and give her the choice between telling and walking back. She has nerve enough here on earth to die before giving up, but I don't believe any human being would be game to go it alone on a strange world. She'd wilt."

"I believe you're right, Perkins. Your suggestions are the best way out. Don't you think so, Doctor?"

"Yes, I don't see how we can fail--we're sure to win, either way. You are prepared for trouble afterward, of course?"

"Certainly, but I don't think there will be much trouble. They can't possibly link the three of us together. They aren't wise to you, are they, Doctor?"

"Not a chance!" sneered DuQuesne. "They ran themselves ragged trying to get something on me, but they couldn't do it. They have given me up as a bad job. I am still as careful as ever, though--I am merely a pure scientist in the Bureau of Chemistry!"

All three laughed, and Perkins left the room. The talk then turned to the construction of the space-car. It was decided to rush the work on it, so that DuQuesne could familiarize himself with its operation, but not to take any steps in the actual abduction until such time as Seaton and Crane were nearly ready to take their first flight, so that they could pursue the abductors in case Seaton was still obdurate after a few days of his fiance's absence. DuQuesne insisted that the car should mount a couple of heavy guns, to destroy the pursuing car if the faulty members should happen to hold together long enough to carry it out into space.

After a long discussion, in which every detail of the plan was carefully considered, the two men left the restaurant, by different exits.

CHAPTER VII

The Trial Voyage

The great steel forgings which were to form the framework of the Skylark finally arrived and were hauled into the testing shed. There, behind closed doors, Crane inspected every square inch of the massive members with a lens, but could find nothing wrong. Still unsatisfied, he fitted up an electrical testing apparatus in order to search out flaws which might be hidden beneath the surface. This device revealed flaws in every piece, and after thoroughly testing each one and mapping out the imperfections he turned to Seaton with a grave face.

"Worse than useless, every one of them. They are barely strong enough to stand shipment. They figured that we would go slowly until we were well out of the atmosphere, then put on power--then something would give way and we would never come back."

"That's about the right dope, I guess. But now what'll we do? We can't cancel without letting them know we're onto them, and we certainly can't use this stuff."

"No, but we will go ahead and build this ship, anyway, so that they will think that we are going ahead with it. At the same time we will build another one, about four times this size, in absolute secrecy, and...."

"What d'you mean, absolute secrecy? How can you keep steel castings and forgings of that size secret from Steel?"

"I know a chap who owns and operates a small steel plant, so insignificant, relatively, that he has not yet been bought out or frozen out by Steel. I was able to do him a small favor once, and I am sure that he will be glad to return it. We will not be able to oversee the work, that is a drawback. We can get MacDougall to do it for us, however, and with him doing the work we can rest assured that there will be nothing off color. Even Steel couldn't buy _him_."

"MacDougall! The man who installed the Intercontinental plant? He wouldn't touch a little job like this with a pole!"

"I think he would. He and I are rather friendly, and after I tell him all about it he will be glad to take it. It means building the first interplanetary vessel, you know."

"Wouldn't Steel follow him up if he should go to work on a mysterious project? He's too big to hide."

"No. He will go camping--he often does. I have gone with him several times when we were completely out of touch with civilization for two months at a time. Now, about the ship we want. Have you any ideas?"

"It will cost more than our entire capital."

"That is easily arranged. We do not care how much it costs."

Seaton began to object to drawing so heavily upon the resources of his friend, but was promptly silenced.

"I told you when we started," Crane said flatly, "that your solution and your idea are worth far more than half a million. In fact, they are worth more than everything I have. No more talk of the money end of it, Dick."

"All right. We'll build a regular go-getter. Four times the size--she'll be a bear-cat, Mart. I'm glad this one is on the fritz. She'll carry a two-hundred-pound bar--Zowie! Watch our smoke! And say, why wouldn't it be a good idea to build an attractor--a thing like an object-compass, but mounting a ten-pound bar instead of a needle, so that if they chase us in space we can reach out and grab 'em? We might mount a machine-gun in each quadrant, shooting X-plosive bullets, through pressure gaskets in the walls. We should have something for defense--I don't like the possibility of having that gang of pirates after us, and nothing to fight back with except thought-waves."

"Right. We will do both those things. But we should make the power-plant big enough to avert any possible contingency--say four hundred pounds--and we should have everything in duplicate, from power-plant to push-buttons."

"I don't think that's necessary, Mart. Don't you think that's carrying caution to extremes?"

"Possibly--but I would rather be a live coward than a dead hero, wouldn't you?"

"You chirped it, old scout, I sure would. I never did like the looks of that old guy with the scythe, and I would hate to let DuQuesne feel that he had slipped something over on me at my own game. Besides, I've developed a lot of caution myself, lately. Double she is, with a skin of four-foot Norwegian armor. Let's get busy!"

* * * * *

They made the necessary alteration in the plans, and in a few days work was begun upon the huge steel shell in the little mountain steel-plant. The work was done under the constant supervision of the great MacDougall, by men who had been in his employ for years and who were all above suspicion. While it was being built Seaton and Crane employed a force of men and went ahead with the construction of the space-car in the testing shed. While they did not openly slight the work nearly all their time was spent in the house, perfecting the many essential things which were to go into the real Skylark. There was the attractor, for which they had to perfect a special sighting apparatus so that it could act in any direction, and yet would not focus upon the ship itself nor anything it contained. There were many other things.

It was in this work that the strikingly different temperaments and abilities of the two men were most clearly revealed. Seaton strode up and down the room, puffing great volumes of smoke from his hot and reeking briar, suggesting methods and ideas, his keen mind finding the way over, around, or through the apparently insuperable obstacles which beset their path. Crane, seated calmly at the drafting-table, occasionally inhaling a mouthful of smoke from one of his specially-made cigarettes, mercilessly tore Seaton's suggestions to shreds--pointing out their weaknesses, proving his points with his cold, incisive reasoning and his slide-rule calculations of factors, stresses, and strains. Seaton in turn would find a remedy for every defect, and finally, the idea complete and perfect, Crane would impale it upon the point of his drafting pencil and spread it in every detail upon the paper before him, while Seaton's active mind leaped to the next problem.

Not being vitally interested in the thing being built in the shed, they did not know that to the flawed members were being attached faulty plates, by imperfect welding. Even if they had been interested they could not have found the poor workmanship by any ordinary inspection, for it was being done by a picked crew of experts picked by Perkins. But to make things even, Perkins' crew did not know that the peculiar instruments installed by Seaton and Crane, of which their foreman took many photographs, were not real instruments, and were made only nearly enough like them to pass inspection. They were utterly useless, in design and function far different from the real instruments intended for the Skylark.

Finally, the last dummy instrument was installed in the worthless space-car, which the friends referred to between themselves as "The Cripple," a name which Seaton soon changed to "Old Crip." The construction crew was dismissed after Crane had let the foreman overhear a talk between Seaton and himself in which they decided not to start for a few days as they had some final experiments to make. Prescott reported that Steel had relaxed its vigilance and was apparently waiting for the first flight. About the same time word was received from MacDougall that the real Skylark was ready for the finishing touches. A huge triplane descended upon Crane Field and was loaded to its capacity with strange looking equipment. When it left Seaton and Crane went with it, "to make the final tests before the first flight," leaving a heavy guard over the house and the testing shed.

A few nights later, in inky blackness, a huge shape descended rapidly in front of the shed, whose ponderous doors opened to receive it and closed quickly after it. The Skylark moved lightly and easily as a wafted feather, betraying its thousands of tons of weight only by the hole it made in the hard-beaten earth of the floor as it settled to rest. Opening one of the heavy doors, Seaton and Crane sprang out into the darkness.

Dorothy and her father, who had been informed that the Skylark was to be brought home that night, were waiting. Seaton caught up his sweetheart in one mighty arm and extended his hand past her to Vaneman, who seized it in both his own. Upon the young man's face was the look of a victorious king returning from conquest. For a few minutes disconnected exclamations were all that any of the party could utter. Then Seaton, loosening slightly his bear's hold upon Dorothy, spoke.

"She flies!" he cried exultantly. "She flies, dearest, like a ray of light for speed and like a bit of thistledown for lightness. We've been around the moon!"

"Around the moon!" cried the two amazed visitors. "So soon?" asked Vaneman. "When did you start?"

"Almost an hour ago," replied Crane readily; he had already taken out his watch. His voice was calm, his face quiet, but to those who knew him best a deeper resonance in his voice and a deeper blue sparkle in his eyes betrayed his emotion. Both inventors were moved more than they could have told by their achievement, by the complete success of the great space-cruiser upon which they had labored for months with all the power of their marvelous intellects. Seaton stood now at the summit of his pride. No recognition by the masses, no applause by the multitudes, no praise even from the upper ten of his own profession could equal for him the silent adulation of the two before him. Dorothy's exquisite face was glorified as she looked at her lover. Her eyes wonderful as they told him how high he stood above all others in her world, how much she loved him. Seeing that look; that sweet face, more beautiful than ever in this, his hour of triumph; that perfect, adorable body, Seaton forgot the others and a more profound exaltation than that brought by his flight filled his being--humble thankfulness that he was the man to receive the untold treasure of her great giving.

"Every bit of mechanism we had occasion to use worked perfectly," Crane stated proudly. "We did not find it necessary to change any of our apparatus and we hope to make a longer flight soon. The hour we took on this trip might easily have been only a few minutes, for the Lark did not even begin to pick up speed."

* * * * *

Shiro looked at Crane with an air of utter devotion and bowed until his head approached the floor.

"Sir," he said in his stilted English. "Honorable Skylark shall be marvelous wonder. If permitting, I shall luxuriate in preparing suitable refreshment."

The permission granted, he trotted away into the house, and the travelers invited their visitors to inspect the new craft. Crane and the older man climbed through the circular doorway, which was at an elevation of several feet above the ground. Seaton and Dorothy exchanged a brief but enthusiastic caress before he lifted her lightly up to the opening and followed her up a short flight of stairs. Although she knew what to expect, from her lover's descriptions and from her own knowledge of "Old Crip," which she had seen many times, she caught her breath in amazement as she stood up and looked about the brilliantly-lighted interior of the great sky-rover. It was a sight such as had never before been seen upon earth.

[Illustration: In the exact center of the huge shell was a spherical network of enormous steel beams. Inside this structure could be seen a similar network which, mounted upon universal bearings, was free to revolve in any direction.]

She saw a spherical shell of hardened steel armor-plate, fully forty feet in diameter; though its true shape was not readily apparent from the inside, as it was divided into several compartments by horizontal floors or decks. In the exact center of the huge shell was a spherical network of enormous steel beams. Inside this structure could be seen a similar network which, mounted upon universal bearings, was free to revolve in any direction. This inner network was filled with machinery, surrounding a shining copper cylinder. From the outer network radiated six mighty supporting columns. These, branching as they neared the hull of the vessel, supported the power-plant and steering apparatus in the center and so strengthened the shell that the whole structure was nearly as strong as a solid steel ball. She noticed that the floor, perhaps eight feet below the center, was heavily upholstered in leather and did not seem solid; and that the same was true of the dozen or more seats--she could not call them chairs--which were built in various places. She gazed with interest at the two instrument boards, upon which flashed tiny lights and the highly-polished plate glass, condensite, and metal of many instruments, the use of which she could not guess.

After a few minutes of silence both visitors began to ask questions, and Seaton showed them the principal features of the novel craft. Crane accompanied them in silence, enjoying their pleasure, glorying in the mighty vessel. Seaton called attention to the great size and strength of the lateral supporting columns, one of which was immediately above their heads, and then led them over to the vertical column which pierced the middle of the floor. Enormous as the lateral had seemed, it appeared puny in comparison with this monster of fabricated steel. Seaton explained that the two verticals were many times stronger than the four laterals, as the center of gravity of the ship had been made lower than its geometrical center, so that the apparent motion of the vessel and therefore the power of the bar, would usually be merely vertical. Resting one hand caressingly upon the huge column, he exultantly explained that these members were "the last word in strength, made up of many separate I-beams and angles of the strongest known special steel, latticed and braced until no conceivable force could make them yield a millimeter."

"But why such strength?" asked the lawyer doubtfully. "This column alone would hold up Brooklyn Bridge."

"To hold down the power-plant, so that the bar won't tear through the ship when we cut her loose," replied Seaton. "Have you any idea how fast this bird can fly?"

"Well, I have heard you speak of traveling with the velocity of light, but that is overdrawn, isn't it?"

"Not very much. Our figures show that with this four-hundred-pound bar"--pointing to the copper cylinder in the exact center of the inner sphere--"we could develop not only the velocity of light, but an acceleration equal to that velocity, were it not for the increase in mass at high velocities, as shown by Einstein and others. We can't go very fast near the earth, of course, as the friction of the air would melt the whole works in a few minutes. Until we get out of the atmosphere our speed will be limited by the ability of steel to withstand melting by the friction of the air to somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five thousand miles per hour, but out in space we can develop any speed we wish, up to that of light as a limit."

"I studied physics a little in my youth. Wouldn't the mere force of such an acceleration as you mention flatten you on the floor and hold you there? And any sudden jar would certainly kill you."

* * * * *

"There can't be any sudden jar. This is a special floor, you notice. It is mounted on long, extremely heavy springs, to take up any possible jar. Also, whenever we are putting on power we won't try to stand up, our legs would crimple up like strings. We will ride securely strapped into those special seats, which are mounted the same as the floor, only a whole lot more so. As to the acceleration...."

"That word means picking up speed, doesn't it?" interrupted Dorothy.

"The rate of picking up speed," corrected Seaton. "That is, if you were going forty miles per hour one minute, and fifty the next minute, your acceleration would be ten miles per hour per minute. See? It's acceleration that makes you feel funny when you start up or down in an elevator."

"Then riding in this thing will be like starting up in an elevator so that your heart sinks into your boots and you can't breathe?"

"Yes, only worse. We will pick up speed faster and keep on doing it...."

"Seriously," interrupted the lawyer, "do you think that the human body can stand any such acceleration as that?"

"I don't know. We are going to find out, by starting out slowly and increasing our acceleration to as much as we can stand."

"I see," Vaneman replied. "But how are you going to steer her? How do you keep permanent reference points, since there are no directions in space?"

"That was our hardest problem," explained Seaton, "but Martin solved it perfectly. See the power-plant up there? Notice those big supporting rings and bearings? Well, the power-plant is entirely separate from the ship, as it is inside that inner sphere, about which the outer sphere and the ship itself are free to revolve in any direction. No matter how much the ship rolls and pitches, as she is bound to do every time we come near enough to any star or planet to be influenced by its gravitation, the bar stays where it is pointed. Those six big jackets in the outer sphere, on the six sides of the bar, cover six pairs of gyroscope wheels, weighing several tons each, turning at a terrific speed in a vacuum. The gyroscopes keep the whole outer sphere in exactly the same position as long as they are kept turning, and afford us not only permanent planes of reference, but also a solid foundation in those planes which can be used in pointing the bar. The bar can be turned instantly to any direction whatever by special electrical instruments on the boards. You see, the outer sphere stays immovably fixed in that position, with the bar at liberty to turn in any direction inside it, and the ship at liberty to do the same thing outside it.

"Now we will show you where we sleep," Seaton continued. "We have eight rooms, four below and four above," leading the way to a narrow, steep steel stairway and down into a very narrow hall, from either side of which two doors opened. "This is my room, the adjoining one is Mart's. Shiro sleeps across the hall. The rest of the rooms are for our guests on future trips."

Sliding back the door, he switched on the light and revealed a small but fully-appointed bedroom, completely furnished with everything necessary, yet everything condensed into the least possible space. The floor, like the one above, was of cushioned leather supported by springs. The bed was a modification of the special seats already referred to. Opening another sliding door, he showed them an equally complete and equally compact bathroom.

"You see, we have all the comforts of home. This bathroom, however, is practical only when we have some force downward, either gravitation or our own acceleration. The same reasoning accounts for the hand-rails you see everywhere on board. Drifting in space, you know, there is no weight, and you can't walk; you must pull yourself around. If you tried to take a step you would bounce up and hit the ceiling, and stay there. That is why the ceilings are so well padded. And if you tried to wash your face you would throw water all over the place, and it would float around in the air instead of falling to the floor. As long as we can walk we can use the bathroom--if I should want to wash my face while we are drifting, I just press this button here, and the pilot will put on enough acceleration to make the correct use of water possible. There are a lot of surprising things about a trip into space."

"I don't doubt it a bit, and I'm simply wild to go for a ride with you. When will you take me, Dicky?" asked Dorothy eagerly.

"Very soon, Dottie. As soon as we get her in perfect running condition. You shall be the first to ride with us, I promise you."

"Where do you cook and eat? How do you see out? How about the air and water supply? How do you keep warm, or cool, as the case may be?" asked the girl's father, as though he were cross-examining a witness.

"Shiro has a galley on the main floor, and tables fold up into the wall of the main compartment. The passengers see out by sliding back steel panels, which normally cover the windows. The pilot can see in any direction from his seat at the instrument-board, by means of special instruments, something like periscopes. The windows are made of optical glass similar to that used in the largest telescopes. They are nearly as thick as the hull and have a compressive resistance almost equal to that of armor steel. Although so thick, they are crystal clear, and a speck of dust on the outer surface is easily seen. We have water enough in tanks to last us three months, or indefinitely if we should have to be careful, as we can automatically distill and purify all our waste water, recovering absolutely pure H2O. We have compressed air, also in tanks, but we need very little, as the air is constantly being purified. Also, we have oxygen-generating apparatus aboard, in case we should run short. As to keeping warm, we have electric heating coils, run by the practically inexhaustible power of a small metal bar. If we get too near the sun and get too warm, we have a refrigerating machine to cool us off. Anything else?"

"You'd better give up, Dad," laughingly advised his daughter. "You've thought of everything, haven't you, Dick?"

"Mart has, I think. This is all his doing, you know. I wouldn't have thought of a tenth of it, myself."

"I must remind you young folks," said the older man, glancing at his watch, "that it is very late and high time for Dottie and me to be going home. We would like to stay and see the rest of it, but you know we must be away from here before daylight."

* * * * *

As they went into the house Vaneman asked:

"What does the other side of the moon look like? I have always been curious about it."

"We were not able to see much," replied Crane "It was too dark and we did not take the time to explore it, but from what we could see by means of our searchlights it is very much like this side--the most barren and desolate place imaginable. After we go to Mars, we intend to explore the moon thoroughly."

"Mars, then, is your first goal? When do you intend to start?"

"We haven't decided definitely. Probably in a day or two. Everything is ready now."

As the Vanemans had come out in the street car, in order to attract as little attention as possible, Seaton volunteered to take them home in one of Crane's cars. As they bade Crane goodnight after enjoying Shiro's "suitable refreshment" the lawyer took the chauffeur's seat, motioning his daughter and Seaton into the closed body of the car. As soon as they had started Dorothy turned in the embrace of her lover's arm.

"Dick," she said fiercely. "I would have been worried sick if I had known that you were way off there?"

"I knew it, sweetheart. That's why I didn't tell you we were going. We both knew the Skylark was perfectly safe, but I knew that you would worry about our first trip. Now that we have been to the moon you won't be uneasy when we go to Mars, will you, dear?"

"I can't help it, boy. I will be afraid that something terrible has happened, every minute. Won't you take me with you? Then, if anything happens, it will happen to both of us, and that is as it should be. You know that I wouldn't want to keep on living if anything _should_ happen to you."

He put both arms around her as his reply, and pressed his cheek to hers.

"Dorothy sweetheart, I know exactly how you feel. I feel the same way myself. I'm awfully sorry, dear, but I can't do it. I know the machine is safe, but I've got to prove it to everybody else before I take you on a long trip with me. Your father will agree with me that you ought not to go, on the first trip or two, anyway. And besides, what would Madam Grundy say?"

"Well, there _is_ a way...." she began, and he felt her face turn hot.

His arms tightened around her and his breath came fast.

"I know it, sweetheart, and I would like nothing better in the world than to be married today and take our honeymoon in the Skylark, but I can't do it. After we come back from the first long trip we will be married just as soon as you say ready, and after that we will always be together wherever I go. But I can't take even the millionth part of a chance with anything as valuable as you are--you see that, don't you, Dottie?"

"I suppose so," she returned disconsolately, "but you'll make it a short trip, for my sake? I know I won't rest a minute until you get back."

"I promise you that we won't be gone more than four days. Then for the greatest honeymoon that ever was," and they clung together in the dark body of the car, each busy with solemn and beautiful thoughts of the happiness to come.

They soon reached their destination. As they entered the house Dorothy made one more attempt.

"Dad, Dick is just too perfectly mean. He says he won't take me on the first trip. If you were going out there wouldn't mother want to go along too?"

After listening to Seaton he gave his decision.

"Dick is right, Kitten. He must make the long trip first. Then, after the machine is proved reliable, you may go with him. I can think of no better way of spending a honeymoon--it will be a new one, at least. And you needn't worry about the boys getting back safely. I might not trust either of them alone, but together they are invincible. Good-night, children. I wish you success, Dick," as he turned away.

Seaton took a lover's leave of Dorothy, and went into the lawyer's study, taking an envelope from his pocket.

"Mr. Vaneman," he said in a low voice, "we think the Steel crowd is still camping on our trail. We are ready for them, with a lot of stuff that they never heard of, but in case anything goes wrong, Martin has written between the lines of this legal form, in invisible ink A-36, exactly how to get possession of all our notes and plans, so that the company can go ahead with everything. With those directions any chemist can find and use the stuff safely. Please put this envelope in the safest place you can think of, and then forget it unless they get both Crane and me. There's about one chance in a million of their doing that, but Mart doesn't gamble on even that chance."

"He is right, Dick. I believe that you can outwit them in any situation, but I will keep this paper where no one except myself can ever see it, nevertheless. Good-night, son, and good luck."

"The same to you, sir, and thank you. Good-night."

+--------------------------------------+ | | | _The author of this story, being a | | chemist of high standing and an | | excellent mathematician, gives us a | | rare gem in this interplanetary | | tale. For one thing, he suggests an | | interesting use of the action of | | acceleration. In this instalment it | | is made to take the place of gravity | | when the interplanetary vehicle is | | out in open space. In order to get | | the gravity effect, a positive or | | negative acceleration could be given | | out. | | | | This instalment retains its easy | | flow of language and continues to | | develop surprise episodes with a | | remarkable degree of realism._ | | | +--------------------------------------+

CHAPTER VIII

Indirect Action

The afternoon following the homecoming of the Skylark, Seaton and Dorothy returned from a long horseback ride in the park. After Seaton had mounted his motorcycle Dorothy turned toward a bench in the shade of an old elm to watch a game of tennis on the court next door. Scarcely had she seated herself when a great copper-plated ball alighted upon the lawn in front of her. A heavy steel door snapped open and a powerful figure clad in aviator's leather, the face completely covered by the hood, leaped out. She jumped to her feet with a cry of joyful surprise, thinking it was Seaton--a cry which died suddenly as she realized that Seaton had just left her and that this vessel was far too small to be the Skylark. She turned in flight, but the stranger caught her in three strides. She found herself helpless in a pair of arms equal in strength to Seaton's own. Picking her up lightly as a baby, DuQuesne carried her over to the space-car. Shriek after shriek rang out as she found that her utmost struggles were of no avail against the giant strength of her captor, that her fiercely-driven nails glanced harmlessly off the heavy glass and leather of his hood, and that her teeth were equally ineffective against his suit.

With the girl in his arms DuQuesne stepped into the vessel, and as the door clanged shut behind them Dorothy caught a glimpse of another woman, tied hand and foot in one of the side seats of the car.

"Tie her feet, Perkins," DuQuesne ordered brusquely, holding her around the body so that her feet extended straight out in front of him. "She's a wildcat."

As Perkins threw one end of a small rope around her ankles Dorothy doubled up her knees, drawing her feet as far away from him as possible. As he incautiously approached, she kicked out viciously, with all the force of her muscular young body behind her heavy riding-boots.

The sharp heel of one small boot struck Perkins squarely in the pit of the stomach--a true "solar-plexus" blow--and completely knocked out, he staggered back against the instrument-board. His out-flung arm pushed the speed lever clear out to its last notch, throwing the entire current of the batteries through the bar, which was pointed straight up, as it had been when they made their landing, and closing the switch which threw on the power of the repelling outer coating. There was a creak of the mighty steel fabric, stressed almost to its limit as the vessel darted upward with its stupendous velocity, and only the carefully-planned spring-and-cushion floor saved their lives as they were thrown flat and held there by the awful force of their acceleration as the space-car tore through the thin layer of the earth's atmosphere. So terrific was their speed, that the friction of the air did not have time to set them afire--they were through it and into the perfect vacuum of interstellar space before the thick steel hull was even warmed through. Dorothy lay flat upon her back, just as she had fallen, unable even to move her arms, gaining each breath only by a terrible effort. Perkins was a huddled heap under the instrument-board. The other captive, Brookings' ex-secretary, was in somewhat better case, as her bonds had snapped like string and she was lying at full length in one of the side-seats--forced into that position and held there, as the design of the seats was adapted for the most comfortable position possible under such conditions. She, like Dorothy, was gasping for breath, her straining muscles barely able to force air into her lungs because of the paralyzing weight of her chest.

DuQuesne alone was able to move, and it required all of his Herculean strength to creep and crawl, snake-like, toward the instrument-board. Finally attaining his goal, he summoned all his strength to grasp, not the controlling lever, which he knew was beyond his reach, but a cut-out switch only a couple of feet above his head. With a series of convulsive movements he fought his way up, first until he was crouching on his elbows and knees, and then into a squatting position. Placing his left hand under his right, he made a last supreme effort. Perspiration streamed from him, his mighty muscles stood out in ridges visible even under the heavy leather of his coat, his lips parted in a snarl over his locked teeth as he threw every ounce of his wonderful body into an effort to force his right hand up to the switch. His hand approached it slowly--closed over it and pulled it out.

The result was startling. With the mighty power instantly cut off, and with not even the ordinary force of gravitation to counteract the force DuQuesne was exerting, his own muscular effort hurled him up toward the center of the car and against the instrument-board. The switch, still in his grasp, was again closed. His shoulder crashed against the levers which controlled the direction of the bar, swinging it through a wide arc. As the ship darted off in the new direction with all its old acceleration, he was hurled against the instrument board, tearing one end loose from its supports and falling unconscious to the floor on the other side. After a time, which seemed like an eternity, Dorothy and the other girl felt their senses slowly leave them.

With four unconscious passengers, the space-car hurtled through empty space, its already inconceivable velocity being augmented every second by a quantity bringing its velocity near to that of light, driven onward by the incredible power of the disintegrating copper bar.

* * * * *

Seaton had gone only a short distance from his sweetheart's home when over the purring of his engine he thought he heard Dorothy's voice raised in a scream. He did not wait to make sure, but whirled his machine about and the purring changed instantly to a staccato roar as he threw open the throttle and advanced the spark. Gravel flew from beneath his skidding wheels as he negotiated the turn into the Vaneman grounds at suicidal speed. But with all his haste he arrived upon the scene just in time to see the door of the space-car close. Before he could reach it the vessel disappeared, with nothing to mark its departure save a violent whirl of grass and sod, uprooted and carried far into the air by the vacuum of its wake. To the excited tennis-players and the screaming mother of the abducted girl it seemed as though the great metal ball had vanished utterly--only Seaton, knowing what to expect, saw the line it made in the air and saw for an instant a minute dot in the sky before it disappeared.

Interrupting the clamor of the young people, each of whom was trying to tell him what had happened, he spoke to Mrs. Vaneman.

"Mother, Dottie's all right," he said rapidly but gently. "Steel's got her, but they won't keep her long. Don't worry, we'll get her. It may take a week or it may take a year, but we'll bring her back," and leaping upon his motorcycle, he shattered all the speed laws on his way to Crane's house.

"Mart!" he yelled, rushing into the shop, "they've got Dottie, in a bus made from our plans. Let's go!" as he started on a run for the testing shed.

"Wait a minute!" crisply shouted Crane. "Don't go off half-cocked. What is your plan?"

"Plan, hell!" barked the enraged chemist. "Chase 'em!"

"Which way did they go, and when?"

"Straight up, full power, twenty minutes ago."

"Too long ago. Straight up has changed its direction several degrees since then. They may have covered a million miles, or they may have come back and landed next door. Sit down and think--we need all your brains now."

Regaining his self-possession as the wisdom of his friend's advice came home to him, Seaton sat down and pulled out his pipe. There was a tense silence for an instant. Then he leaped to his feet and darted into his room, returning with an object-compass whose needle pointed upward.

"DuQuesne did it," he cried exultantly. "This baby is still looking right at him. Now let's go--make it snappy!"

"Not yet. We should find out how far away they are; that may give us an idea."

Suiting action to word, he took up his stopwatch and set the needle swinging. They watched it with strained faces as second after second went by and it still continued to swing. When it had come to rest Crane read his watch and made a rapid calculation.

"About three hundred and fifty million miles," he stated. "Clear out of our solar system already, and from the distance covered he must have had a constant acceleration so as to approximate the velocity of light, and he is still going with full...."

"But nothing can possibly go that fast, Mart, it's impossible. How about Einstein's theory?"

"That is a theory, this measurement of distance is a fact, as you know from our tests."

"That's right. Another good theory gone to pot. But how do you account for his distance? D'you suppose he's lost control?"

"He must have. I do not believe that he would willingly stand that acceleration, nor that he would have gone that far of his own accord. Do you?"

"I sure don't. We don't know how big a bar they are carrying, so we can't estimate how long it is going to take us to catch them. But let's not waste any more time, Mart. For Cat's sake, let's get busy!"

"We have only those four bars, Dick--two for each unit. Do you think that will be enough? Think of how far we may have to go, what we may possibly get into, and what it will mean to Dottie if we fail for lack of power."

Seaton, though furiously eager to be off, paused at this new idea, and half-regretfully he replied:

"We are so far behind them already that I guess a few hours more won't make much difference. It sure would be disastrous to get out near one of the fixed stars and have our power quit. I guess you're right, we'd better get a couple more--make it four, then we'll have enough to chase them half our lives. We'd better load up on grub and X-plosive ammunition, too."

* * * * *

While Crane and Shiro carried additional provisions and boxes of cartridges into the "Skylark," Seaton once more mounted his motorcycle and sped across the city to the brass foundry. The manager of the plant took his order, but blandly informed him that there was not that much copper in the city, that it would be a week or ten days before the order could be filled. Seaton suggested that they melt up some copper cable and other goods already manufactured, offering ten times their value, but the manager was obdurate, saying that he could not violate the rule of priority of orders. Seaton then went to other places, endeavoring to buy scrap copper, trolley wire, electric cable, anything made of the ruddy metal, but found none for sale in quantities large enough to be of any use. After several hours of fruitless search, he returned home in a towering rage and explained to Crane, in lurid language, his failure to secure the copper. The latter was unmoved.

"After you left, it occurred to me that you might not get any. You see, Steel is still watching us."

Fire shot from Seaton's eyes.

"I'm going to clean up that bunch," he gritted through his teeth as he started straight for the door.

"Not yet, Dick," Crane remonstrated. "We can go down to Wilson's in a few minutes, and I know we can get it there if he has it. The "Skylark" is all ready to travel."

No more words were needed. They hurried into the space-car and soon were standing in the office of the plant in which the vessel had been built. When they had made their wants known, the iron-master shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Crane, but I have only a few pounds of copper in the shop, and we have no suitable furnace."

Seaton broke out violently at this, but Crane interrupted him, explaining their inability to get the metal anywhere else and the urgency of their need. When he had finished, Wilson brought his fist down upon his desk.

"I'll get it if I have to melt up our dynamos," he roared. "We'll have to rig a crucible, but we'll have your bars out just as soon as the whole force of this damned scrap-heap can make 'em!"

Calling in his foreman, he bellowed orders, and while automobiles scoured the nearby towns for scrap copper, the crucible and molds were made ready.

Nearly two days passed before the gleaming copper cylinders were finished. During this time Crane added to their already complete equipment every article he could conceive of their having any use for, while Seaton raged up and down the plant in a black fury of impatience. Just before the bars were ready, they made another reading on the object-compass. Their faces grew tense and drawn and their hearts turned sick as second followed second and minute followed minute and the needle still oscillated. Finally, however, it came to rest, and Seaton's voice almost failed him as he read his figures.

"Two hundred and thirty-five light-years, Mart. They're lost, and still going. Good-bye, old scout," holding out his hand, "Tell Vaneman that I'll bring her back or else stay out there myself."

"You must be crazy, Dick. You know I am going."

"Why? No use in both of us taking such a chance. If Dottie's gone, of course I want to go too, but you don't."

"Nonsense, Dick. Of course this is somewhat farther than we had planned on going for our maiden voyage, but where is the difference? It is just as safe to go a thousand light-years as only one, and we have power and food for any contingency. There is no more danger in this trip than there is in one to Mars. At all events, I am going whether you want me to or not, so save your breath."

"You lie like a thief, Mart--you know what we are up against as well as I do. But if you insist on coming along, I'm sure glad to have you."

As their hands met in a crushing grip, the bars were brought up and loaded into the carriers. Waving good-bye to Wilson, they closed the massive door and took their positions. Seaton adjusted the bar parallel with the needle of the object-compass, turned on the coil, and advanced the speed-lever until Crane, reading the pyro-meters, warned him to slow down, as the shell was heating. Free of the earth's atmosphere, he slowly advanced the lever, one notch at a time, until he could no longer support the increasing weight of his hand, but had to draw out the rolling support designed for that emergency. He pushed the lever a few notches farther, and felt himself forced down violently into the seat. He was now lying at full length, the seat having automatically moved upward so that his hand still controlled the lever. Still he kept putting on more power, until the indicator showed that more than three-quarters of the power was in operation and he felt that he could stand but little more.

"How are you making it, Mart?" he asked, talking with difficulty because of the great weight of his tongue and jaws.

"All right so far," came the response, in a hesitating, almost stammering voice, "but I do not know how much more I can take. If you can stand it, go ahead."

"This is enough for awhile, until we get used to it. Any time you want to rest, tell me and I'll cut her down."

"Keep her at this for four or five hours. Then cut down until we can walk, so that we can eat and take another reading on distance. Remember that it will take as long to stop as it does to get up speed, and that we must be careful not to ram them. There would be nothing left of either car."

"All right. Talking's too darn much work, I'll talk to you again when we ease down. I sure am glad we're on our way at last."

CHAPTER IX

Lost In Space

For forty-eight hours the uncontrolled atomic motor dragged the masterless vessel with its four unconscious passengers through the illimitable reaches of empty space, with an awful and constantly increasing velocity. When only a few traces of copper remained in the power-plant, the acceleration began to decrease and the powerful springs began to restore the floor and the seats to their normal positions. The last particle of copper having been transformed into energy, the speed of the vessel became constant. Apparently motionless to those inside it, it was in reality traversing space with a velocity thousands of times greater than that of light. As the force which had been holding them down was relaxed, the lungs, which had been able to secure only air enough to maintain faint sparks of life, began to function more normally and soon all four recovered consciousness, drinking in the life-giving oxygen in a rapid succession of breaths so deep that it seemed as though their lungs must burst with each inhalation.

DuQuesne was the first to gain control of himself. His first effort to rise to his feet lifted him from the floor, and he floated lightly to the ceiling, striking it with a gentle bump and remaining suspended in the air. The others, who had not yet attempted to move, stared at him in wide-eyed amazement. Reaching out and clutching one of the supporting columns, he drew himself back to the floor and cautiously removed his leather suit, transferring two heavy automatic pistols as he did so. By gingerly feeling of his injured body, he discovered that no bones were broken, although he was terribly bruised. He then glanced around to learn how his companions were faring. He saw that they were all sitting up, the girls resting, Perkins removing his aviator's costume.

"Good morning, Doctor DuQuesne. What happened when I kicked your friend?"

DuQuesne smiled.

"Good morning, Miss Vaneman. Several things happened. He fell into the controls, turning on all the juice. We left shortly afterward. I tried to shut the power off, and in doing so I balled things up worse than ever. Then I went to sleep, and just woke up."

"Have you any idea where we are?"

"No, but I can make a fair estimate, I think," and glancing at the empty chamber in which the bar had been, he took out his notebook and pen and figured for a few minutes. As he finished, he drew himself along by a handrail to one of the windows, then to another. He returned with a puzzled expression on his face and made a long calculation.

"I don't know exactly what to make of this," he said thoughtfully. "We are so far away from the earth that even the fixed stars are unrecognizable. The power was on exactly forty-eight hours, since that is the life of that particular bar under full current. We should still be close to our own solar system, since it is theoretically impossible to develop any velocity greater than that of light. But in fact, we have. I know enough about astronomy to recognize the fixed stars from any point within a light-year or so of the sun, and I can't see a single familiar star. I never could see how mass could be a function of velocity, and now I am convinced that it is not. We have been accelerating for forty-eight hours!"

He turned to Dorothy.

"While we were unconscious, Miss Vaneman, we had probably attained a velocity of something like seven billion four hundred thirteen million miles per second, and that is the approximate speed at which we are now traveling. We must be nearly six quadrillion miles, and that is a space of several hundred light-years--away from our solar system, or, more plainly, about six times as far away from our earth as the North Star is. We couldn't see our sun with a telescope, even if we knew which way to look for it."

* * * * *

At this paralyzing news, Dorothy's face turned white and Margaret Spencer quietly fainted in her seat.

"Then we can never get back?" asked Dorothy slowly.

At this question, Perkins' self-control gave way and his thin veneer of decency disappeared completely.

"You got us into this whole thing!" he screamed as he leaped at Dorothy with murderous fury gleaming in his pale eyes and his fingers curved into talons. Instead of reaching her, however, he merely sprawled grotesquely in midair, and DuQuesne knocked him clear across the vessel with one powerful blow of his fist.

"Get back there, you cowardly cur," he said evenly. "Even though we are a long way from home, try to remember you're a man, at least. One more break like that and I'll throw you out of the boat. It isn't her fault that we are out here, but our own. The blame for it is a very small matter, anyway; the thing of importance is to get back as soon as possible."

"But how can we get back?" asked Perkins sullenly from the corner where he was crouching, fear in every feature. "The power is gone, the controls are wrecked, and we are hopelessly lost in space."

"Oh, I wouldn't say 'hopelessly,'" returned the other, "I have never been in any situation yet that I couldn't get out of, and I won't be convinced until I am dead that I can't get out of this one. We have two extra power bars, we can fix the board, and if I can't navigate us back close enough to our solar system to find it, I am more of a dub than I think I am. How about a little bite to eat?"

"Show us where it is!" exclaimed Dorothy. "Now that you mention it, I find that I am starved to death."

DuQuesne looked at her keenly.

"I admire your nerve, Miss Vaneman. I didn't suppose that that animal over there would show such a wide streak of yellow, but I was rather afraid that you girls might go to pieces."

"I'm scared blue, of course," Dorothy admitted frankly, "but hysterics won't do any good, and we simply _must_ get back."

"Certainly, we must and we will," stated DuQuesne calmly. "If you like, you might find something for us to eat in the galley there, while I see what I can do with this board that I wrecked with my head. By the way, that cubby-hole there is the apartment reserved for you two ladies. We are in rather cramped quarters, but I think you will find everything you need."

As Dorothy drew herself along the handrail toward the room designated, accompanied by the other girl who, though conscious, had paid little attention to anything around her, she could not help feeling a thrill of admiration for the splendid villain who had abducted her. Calm and cool, always master of himself, apparently paying no attention to the terrible bruises which disfigured half his face and doubtless half his body as well, she admitted to herself that it was only his example, which had enabled her to maintain her self-control in their present plight. As she crawled over Perkins' discarded suit, she remembered that he had not taken any weapons from it. After a rapid glance around to assure herself that she was not being watched, she quickly searched the coat, bringing to light not one, but two pistols, which she thrust into her pocket. She saw with relief that they were regulation army automatics, with whose use she was familiar from much target practise with Seaton.

In the room, which was a miniature of the one she had seen on the Skylark, the girls found clothing, toilet articles, and everything necessary for a long trip. As they were setting themselves to rights, Dorothy electing to stay in her riding suit, they surveyed each other frankly and each was reassured by what she saw. Dorothy saw a girl of twenty-two, of her own stature, with a mass of heavy, wavy black hair. Her eyes, a singularly rich and deep brown, contrasted strangely with the beautiful ivory of her skin. She was normally a beautiful girl, thought Dorothy, but her beauty was marred by suffering and privation. Her naturally slender form was thin, her face was haggard and worn. The stranger broke the silence.

* * * * *

"I'm Margaret Spencer," she began abruptly, "former secretary to His Royal Highness, Brookings of Steel. They swindled my father out of an invention worth millions and he died, broken-hearted. I got the job to see if I couldn't get enough evidence to convict them, and I had quite a lot when they caught me. I had some things that they were afraid to lose, and I had them so well hidden that they couldn't find them, so they kidnapped me to make me give them back. They haven't dared kill me so far for fear the evidence will show up after my death--which it will. However, I will be legally dead before long, and then they know the whole thing will come out, so they have brought me out here to make me talk or kill me. Talking won't do me any good now, though, and I don't believe it ever would have. They would have killed me after they got the stuff back, anyway. So you see I, at least, will never get back to the earth alive."

"Cheer up--we'll all get back safely."

"No, we won't. You don't know that man Perkins--if that is his name. I never heard him called any real name before. He is simply unspeakable--vile--hideous--everything that is base. He was my jailer, and I utterly loathe and despise him. He is mean and underhanded and tricky--he reminds me of a slimy, poisonous snake. He will kill me: I know it."

"But how about Doctor DuQuesne? Surely he isn't that kind of man? He wouldn't let him."

"I've never met him before, but from what I heard of him in the office, he's even worse than Perkins, but in an entirely different way. There's nothing small or mean about him, and I don't believe he would go out of his way to hurt anyone, as Perkins would. But he is absolutely cold and hard, a perfect fiend. Where his interests are concerned, there's nothing under the sun, good or bad, that he won't do. But I'm glad that Perkins had me instead of 'The Doctor,' as they call him. Perkins raises such a bitter personal feeling, that anybody would rather die than give up to him in anything. DuQuesne, however, would have tortured me impersonally and scientifically--cold and self-contained all the while and using the most efficient methods, and I am sure he would have got it out of me some way. He always gets what he goes after."

"Oh, come, Miss Spencer!" Dorothy interrupted the half-hysterical girl. "You're too hard on him. Didn't you see him knock Perkins down when he came after me?"

"Well, maybe he has a few gentlemanly instincts, which he uses when he doesn't lose anything by it. More likely he merely intended to rebuke him for a useless action. He is a firm Pragmatist--anything that is useful is all right, anything that is useless is a crime. More probably yet, he wants you left alive. Of course that is his real reason. He went to the trouble of kidnapping you, so naturally he won't let Perkins or anybody else kill you until he is through with you. Otherwise he would have let Perkins do anything he wanted to with you, without lifting a finger."

"I can't quite believe that," Dorothy replied, though a cold chill struck at her heart as she remembered the inhuman crime attributed to this man, and she quailed at the thought of being in his charge, countless millions of miles from earth, a thought only partly counteracted by the fact that she was now armed. "He has treated us with every consideration so far, let's hope for the best. Anyway, I'm sure that we'll get back safely."

"Why so sure? Have you something up your sleeve?"

"No--or yes, in a way I have, though nothing very definite. I'm Dorothy Vaneman, and I am engaged to the man who discovered the thing that makes this space-car go...."

"That's why they kidnapped you, then--to make him give up all his rights to it. It's like them."

"Yes, I think that's why they did it. But they won't keep me long. Dick Seaton will find me, I know. I feel it."

"But that's exactly what they want!" cried Margaret excitedly. "In my spying around I heard a little about this very thing--the name Seaton brings it to my mind. His car is broken in some way, so that it will kill him the first time he tries to run it."

"That's where they underestimated Dick and his partner. You have heard of Martin Crane, of course?"

"I think I heard his name mentioned in the office, together with Seaton's, but that's all."

"Well, besides other things, Martin is quite a wonderful mechanic, and he found out that our Skylark was spoiled. So they built another one, a lot bigger, and I am sure that they are following us, right now."

"But how can they possibly follow us, when we are going so fast and are so far away?" queried the other girl, once more despondent.

"I don't quite know, but I do know that Dick will find a way. He's simply wonderful. He knows more now than that Doctor DuQuesne will ever learn in all his life, and he will find us in a few days. I feel it in my bones. Besides, I picked Perkins' pockets of these two pistols. Can you shoot an automatic?"

"Yes," replied the other girl, as she seized one of the guns, assured herself that its magazine was full, and slipped it into her pocket. "I used to practise a lot with my father's. This makes me feel a whole lot better. And call me Peggy, won't you? It will seem good to hear my name again. After what I've been through lately, even this trip will be a vacation for me."

"Well, then, cheer up, Peggy dear, we're going to be great friends. Let's go get us all something to eat. I'm simply starved, and I know you are, too."

* * * * *

The presence of the pistol in her pocket and Dorothy's unwavering faith in her lover, lifted the stranger out of the mood of despair into which the long imprisonment, the brutal treatment, and the present situation had plunged her, and she was almost cheerful as they drew themselves along the hand-rail leading to the tiny galley.

"I simply can't get used to the idea of nothing having any weight--look here!" laughed Dorothy, as she took a boiled ham out of the refrigerator and hung it upon an imaginary hook in the air, where it remained motionless. "Doesn't it make you feel funny?"

"It is a queer sensation. I feel light, like a toy balloon, and I feel awfully weird inside. If we have no weight, why does it hurt so when we bump into anything? And when you throw anything, like the Doctor did Perkins, why does it hit as hard as ever?"

"It's mass or inertia or something like that. A thing has it everywhere, whether it weighs anything or not. Dick explained it all to me. I understood it when he told me about it, but I'm afraid it didn't sink in very deep. Did you ever study physics?"

"I had a year of it in college, but it was more or less of a joke. I went to a girls' school, and all we had to do in physics was to get the credit; we didn't have to learn it."

"Me too. Next time I go to school I'm going to Yale or Harvard or some such place, and I'll learn so much mathematics and science that I'll have to wear a bandeau to keep my massive intellect in place."

During this conversation they had prepared a substantial luncheon and had arranged it daintily upon two large trays, in spite of the difficulty caused by the fact that nothing would remain in place by its own weight. The feast prepared, Dorothy took her tray from the table as carefully as she could, and saw the sandwiches and bottles start to float toward the ceiling. Hastily inverting the tray above the escaping viands, she pushed them back down upon the table. In doing so she lifted herself clear from the floor, as she had forgotten to hold herself down.

"What'll we do, anyway?" she wailed when she had recovered her position. "Everything wants to fly all over the place!"

"Put another tray on top of it and hold them together," suggested Margaret. "I wish we had a birdcage. Then we could open the door and grab a sandwich as it flies out."

By covering the trays the girls finally carried the luncheon out into the main compartment, where they gave DuQuesne and Perkins one of the trays and all fell to eating hungrily. DuQuesne paused with a glint of amusement in his one sound eye as he saw Dorothy trying to pour ginger ale out of a bottle.

"It can't be done, Miss Vaneman. You'll have to drink it through a straw. That will work, since our air pressure is normal. Be careful not to choke on it, though; your swallowing will have to be all muscular out here. Gravity won't help you. Or wait a bit--I have the control board fixed and it will be a matter of only a few minutes to put in another bar and get enough acceleration to take the place of gravity."

He placed one of the extra power bars in the chamber and pushed the speed lever into the first notch, and there was a lurch of the whole vessel as it swung around the bar so that the floor was once more perpendicular to it. He took a couple of steps, returned, and advanced the lever another notch.

"There that's about the same as gravity. Now we can act like human beings and eat in comfort."

"That's a wonderful relief, Doctor!" cried Dorothy. "Are we going back toward the earth?"

"Not yet. I reversed the bar, but we will have to use up all of this one before we can even start back. Until this bar is gone we will merely be slowing down."

* * * * *

As the meal progressed, Dorothy noticed that DuQuesne's left arm seemed almost helpless, and that he ate with great difficulty because of his terribly bruised face. As soon as they had removed the trays she went into her room, where she had seen a small medicine chest, and brought out a couple of bottles.

"Lie down here, Doctor DuQuesne," she commanded. "I'm going to apply a little first-aid to the injured. Arnica and iodine are all I can find, but they'll help a little."

"I'm all right," began the scientist, but at her imperious gesture he submitted, and she bathed his battered features with the healing lotion and painted the worst bruises with iodine.

"I see your arm is lame. Where does it hurt?"

"Shoulder's the worst. I rammed it through the board when we started out."

He opened his shirt at the throat and bared his shoulder, and Dorothy gasped--as much at the size and power of the muscles displayed, as at the extent and severity of the man's injuries. Stepping into the gallery, she brought out hot water and towels and gently bathed away the clotted blood that had been forced through the skin.

"Massage it a little with the arnica as I move the arm," he directed coolly, and she did so, pityingly. He did not wince and made no sign of pain, but she saw beads of perspiration appear upon his face, and wondered at his fortitude.

"That's fine," he said gratefully as she finished, and a peculiar expression came over his face. "It feels one hundred per cent better already. But why do you do it? I should think you would feel like crowning me with that basin instead of playing nurse."

"Efficiency," she replied with a smile. "I'm taking a leaf out of your own book. You are our chief engineer, you know, and it won't do to have you laid up."

"That's a logical explanation, but it doesn't go far enough," he rejoined, still studying her intently. She did not reply, but turned to Perkins.

"How are you, Mr. Perkins? Do you require medical attention?"

"No," growled Perkins from the seat in which he had crouched immediately after eating. "Keep away from me, or I'll cut your heart out!"

"Shut up!" snapped DuQuesne. "Remember what I said?"

"I haven't done anything," snarled the other.

"I said I would throw you out if you made another break," DuQuesne informed him evenly, "and I meant it. If you can't talk decently, keep still. Understand that you are to keep off Miss Vaneman, words and actions. I am in charge of her, and I will put up with no interference whatever. This is your last warning."

"How about Spencer, then?"

"I have nothing to say about her, she's not mine," responded DuQuesne with a shrug.

An evil light appeared in Perkins' eyes and he took out a wicked-looking knife and began to strop it carefully upon the leather of the seat, glaring at his victim the while.

"Well, _I_ have something to say...." blazed Dorothy, but she was silenced by a gesture from Margaret, who calmly took the pistol from her pocket, jerked the slide back, throwing a cartridge into the chamber, and held the weapon up on one finger, admiring it from all sides.

* * * * *

"Don't worry about his knife. He has been sharpening it for my benefit for the last month. He doesn't mean anything by it."

At this unexpected show of resistance, Perkins stared at her for an instant, then glanced at his coat.

"Yes, this was yours, once. You needn't bother about picking up your coat, they're both gone. You might be tempted to throw that knife, so drop it on the floor and kick it over to me before I count three.

"One." The heavy pistol steadied into line with his chest and her finger tightened on the trigger.

"Two." He obeyed and she picked up the knife. He turned to DuQuesne, who had watched the scene unmoved, a faint smile upon his saturnine face.

"Doctor!" he cried, shaking with fear. "Why don't you shoot her or take that gun away from her? Surely you don't want to see me murdered?"

"Why not?" replied DuQuesne calmly. "It is nothing to me whether she kills you or you kill her. You brought it on yourself by your own carelessness. Any man with brains doesn't leave guns lying around within reach of prisoners, and a blind man could have seen Miss Vaneman getting your hardware."

"You saw her take them and didn't warn me?" croaked Perkins.

"Why should I warn you? If you can't take care of your own prisoner she earns her liberty, as far as I am concerned. I never did like your style, Perkins, especially your methods of handling--or rather mishandling--women. You could have made her give up the stuff she recovered from that ass Brookings inside of an hour, and wouldn't have had to kill her afterward, either."

"How?" sneered the other. "If you are so good at that kind of thing, why didn't you try it on Seaton and Crane?"

"There are seven different methods to use on a woman like Miss Spencer, each of which will produce the desired result. The reason I did not try them on either Seaton or Crane is that they would have failed. Your method of indirect action is probably the only one that will succeed. That is why I adopted it."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" shrieked Perkins. "Are you going to sit there and lecture all day?"

"I am going to do nothing whatever," answered the scientist coldly. "If you had any brains you would see that you are in no danger. Miss Spencer will undoubtedly kill you if you attack her--not otherwise. That is an Anglo-Saxon weakness."

"Did you see me take the pistols?" queried Dorothy.

"Certainly. I'm not blind. You have one of them in your right coat pocket now."

"Then why didn't you, or don't you, try to take it away from me?" she asked in wonder.

"If I had objected to your having them, you would never have got them. If I didn't want you to have a gun now, I would take it away from you. You know that, don't you?" and his black eyes stared into her violet ones with such calm certainty of his ability that she felt her heart sink.

"Yes," she admitted finally, "I believe you could--that is, unless I were angry enough to shoot you."

"That wouldn't help you. I can shoot faster and straighter than you can, and would shoot it out of your hand. However, I have no objection to your having the gun, since it is no part of my plan to offer you any further indignity of any kind. Even if you had the necessary coldness of nerve or cruelty of disposition--of which I have one, Perkins the other, and you neither--you wouldn't shoot me now, because you can't get back to the earth without me. After we get back I will take the guns away from both of you if I think it desirable. In the meantime, play with them all you please."

"Has Perkins any more knives or guns or things in his room?" demanded Dorothy.

"How should I know?" indifferently; then, as both girls started for Perkins' room he ordered brusquely:

"Sit down, Miss Vaneman. Let them fight it out. Perkins has his orders to lay off you--you lay off him. I'm not taking any chances of getting you hurt, that's one reason I wanted you armed. If he gets gay, shoot him; otherwise, hands off completely."

Dorothy threw up her head in defiance, but meeting his cold stare she paused irresolutely and finally sat down, biting her lips in anger, while the other girl went on.

"That's better. She doesn't need any help to whip that yellow dog. He's whipped already. He never would think of fighting unless the odds were three to one in his favor."

* * * * *

When Margaret had returned from a fruitless search of Perkins' room and had assured herself that he had no more weapons concealed about his person, she thrust the pistol back into her pocket and sat down.

"That ends that," she declared. "I guess you will be good now, won't you, Mr. Perkins?"

"Yes," that worthy muttered. "I have to be, now that you've got the drop on me and DuQuesne's gone back on me. But wait until we get back! I'll get you then, you...."

"Stop right there!" sharply. "There's nothing I would rather do than shoot you right now, if you give me the slightest excuse, such as that name you were about to call me. Now go ahead!"

DuQuesne broke the silence that followed.

"Well, now that the battle is over, and since we are fed and rested, I suggest that we slow down a bit and get ready to start back. Pick out comfortable seats, everybody, and I'll shoot a little more juice through that bar."

Seating himself before the instrument board, he advanced the speed lever slowly until nearly three-quarters of the full power was on, as much as he thought the others could stand.

For sixty hours he drove the car, reducing the acceleration only at intervals during which they ate and walked about their narrow quarters in order to restore the blood to circulation in their suffering bodies. The power was not reduced for sleep; everyone slept as best he could.

Dorothy and Margaret talked together at every opportunity, and a real intimacy grew up between them. Perkins was for the most part sullenly quiet, knowing himself despised by all the others and having no outlet here for his particular brand of cleverness. DuQuesne was always occupied with his work and only occasionally addressed a remark to one or another of the party, except during meals. At those periods of general recuperation, he talked easily and well upon many topics. There was no animosity in his bearing nor did he seem to perceive any directed toward himself, but when any of the others ventured to infringe upon his ideas of how discipline should be maintained, DuQuesne's reproof was merciless. Dorothy almost liked him, but Margaret insisted that she considered him worse than ever.

When the bar was exhausted, DuQuesne lifted the sole remaining cylinder into place.

"We should be nearly stationary with respect to the earth," he remarked. "Now we will start back."

"Why, it felt as though we were picking up speed for the last three days!" exclaimed Margaret.

"Yes, it feels that way because we have nothing to judge by. Slowing down in one direction feels exactly like starting up in the opposite one. There is no means of knowing whether we are standing still, going away from the earth, or going toward it, since we have nothing stationary upon which to make observations. However, since the two bars were of exactly the same size and were exerted in opposite directions except for a few minutes after we left the earth, we are nearly stationary now. I will put on power until this bar is something less than half gone, then coast for three or four days. By the end of that time we should be able to recognize our solar system from the appearance of the fixed stars."

He again advanced the lever, and for many hours silence filled the car as it hurtled through space. DuQuesne, waking up from a long nap, saw that the bar no longer pointed directly toward the top of the ship, perpendicular to the floor, but was inclined at a sharp angle. He reduced the current, and felt the lurch of the car as it swung around the bar, increasing the angle many degrees. He measured the angle carefully and peered out of all the windows on one side of the car. Returning to the bar after a time, he again measured the angle, and found that it had increased greatly.

"What's the matter, Doctor DuQuesne?" asked Dorothy, who had also been asleep.

"We are being deflected from our course. You see the bar doesn't point straight up any more? Of course the direction of the bar hasn't changed, the car has swung around it."

"What does that mean?"

"We have come close enough to some star so that its attraction swings the bottom of the car around. Normally, you know, the bottom of the car follows directly behind the bar. It doesn't mean much yet except that we are being drawn away from our straight line, but if the attraction gets much stronger it may make us miss our solar system completely. I have been looking for the star in question, but can't see it yet. We'll probably pull away from it very shortly."

* * * * *

He threw on the power, and for some time watched the bar anxiously, expecting to see it swing back into the vertical, but the angle continually increased. He again reduced the current and searched the heavens for the troublesome body.

"Do you see it yet?" asked Dorothy with concern.

"No, there's apparently nothing near enough to account for all this deflection."

He took out a pair of large night-glasses and peered through them for several minutes.

"Good God! It's a dead sun, and we're nearly onto it! It looks as large as our moon!"

Springing to the board, he whirled the bar into the vertical. He took down a strange instrument, went to the bottom window, and measured the apparent size of the dark star. Then, after cautioning the rest of the party to sit tight, he advanced the lever farther than it had been before. After half an hour he again slackened the pace and made another observation, finding to his astonishment that the dark mass had almost doubled its apparent size! Dorothy, noting his expression, was about to speak, but he forestalled her.

"We lost ground, instead of gaining, that spurt," he remarked, as he hastened to his post. "It must be inconceivably large, to exert such an enormous attractive force at this distance. We'll have to put on full power. Hang onto yourselves as best you can."

He then pushed the lever out to its last notch and left it there until the bar was nearly gone, only to find that the faint disk of the monster globe was even larger than before, being now visible to the unaided eye. Revived, the three others saw it plainly--a great dim circle, visible as is the dark portion of the new moon--and, the power shut off, they felt themselves falling toward it with sickening speed. Perkins screamed with mad fear and flung himself grovelling upon the floor. Margaret, her nerves still unstrung, clutched at her heart with both hands. Dorothy, though her eyes looked like great black holes in her white face, looked DuQuesne in the eye steadily.

"This is the end, then?"

"Not yet," he replied in a calm and level voice. "The end will not come for a good many hours, as I have calculated that it will take at least two days, probably more, to fall the distance we have to go. We have all that time in which to think out a way of escape."

"Won't the outer repulsive shell keep up from striking it, or at least break the force of our fall?"

"No. It was designed only as protection from meteorites and other small bodies. It is heavy enough to swing us away from a small planet, but it will be used up long before we strike."

He lighted a cigarette and sat at case, as though in his own study, his brow wrinkled in thought as he made calculations in his notebook. Finally he rose to his feet.

"There's only one chance that I can see. That is to gather up every scrap of copper we have and try to pull ourselves far enough out of line so that we will take an hyperbolic orbit around that body instead of falling into it."

"What good will that do us?" asked Margaret, striving for self-control. "We will starve to death finally, won't we?"

"Not necessarily. That will give us time to figure out something else."

"You won't have to figure out anything else, Doctor," stated Dorothy positively. "If we miss that moon, Dick and Martin will find us before very long."

"Not in this life. If they tried to follow us, they're both dead before now."

"That's where even you are wrong!" she flashed at him. "They knew you were wrecking our machine, so they built another one, a good one. And they know a lot of things about this new metal that you have never dreamed of, since they were not in the plans you stole."

* * * * *

DuQuesne went directly to the heart of the matter, paying no attention to her barbed shafts.

"Can they follow us through space without seeing us?" he demanded.

"Yes--or at least, I think they can."

"How do they do it?"

"I don't know--I wouldn't tell you if I did."

"You'll tell if you know," he declared, his voice cutting like a knife. "But that can wait until after we get out of this. The thing to do now is to dodge that world."

He searched the vessel for copper, ruthlessly tearing out almost everything that contained the metal, hammering it flat and throwing it into the power-plant. He set the bar at right angles to the line of their fall and turned on the current. When the metal was exhausted, he made another series of observations upon the body toward which they were falling, and reported quietly:

"We made a lot of distance, but not enough. Everything goes in, this time."

He tore out the single remaining light-wire, leaving the car in darkness save for the diffused light of his electric torch, and broke up the only remaining motor. He then took his almost priceless Swiss watch, his heavy signet ring, his scarf pin, and the cartridges from his pistol, and added them to the collection. Flashing his lamp upon Perkins, he relieved him of everything he had which contained copper.

"I think I have a few pennies in my pocketbook," suggested Dorothy.

"Get 'em," he directed briefly, and while she was gone he searched Margaret, without result save for the cartridges in her pistol, as she had no jewelry remaining after her imprisonment. Dorothy returned and handed him everything she had found.

"I would like to keep this ring," she said slowly, pointing to a slender circlet of gold set with a solitaire diamond, "if you think there is any chance of us getting clear."

"Everything goes that has any copper in it," he said coldly, "and I am glad to see that Seaton is too good a chemist to buy any platinum jewelry. You may keep the diamond, though," as he wrenched the jewel out of its setting and returned it to her.

He threw all the metal into the central chamber and the vessel gave a tremendous lurch as the power was again applied. It was soon spent, however, and after the final observation, the others waiting in breathless suspense for him to finish his calculations, he made his curt announcement.

"Not enough."

Perkins, his mind weakened by the strain of the last few days, went completely insane at the words. With a wild howl he threw himself at the unmoved scientist, who struck him with the butt of his pistol as he leaped, the mighty force of DuQuesne's blow crushing his skull like an eggshell and throwing him backward to the opposite side of the vessel. Margaret lay in her seat in a dead faint. Dorothy and DuQuesne looked at each other in the feeble light of the torch. To the girl's amazement, the man was as calm as though he were safe in his own house, and she made a determined effort to hold herself together.

"What next, Doctor DuQuesne?"

"I don't know. We have a couple of days yet, at least. I'll have to study awhile."

"In that time Dick will find us, I know."

"Even if they do find us in time, which I doubt, what good will it do? It simply means that they will go with us instead of saving us, for of course they can't pull away, since we couldn't. I hope they don't find us, but locate this star in time to keep away from it."

"Why?" she gasped. "You have been planning to kill both of them! I should think you would be delighted to take them with us?"

"Far from it. Please try to be logical. I intended to remove them because they stood in the way of my developing this new metal. If I am to be out of the way--and frankly, I see very little chance of getting out of this--I hope that Seaton goes ahead with it. It is the greatest discovery the world has ever known, and if both Seaton and I, the only two men in the world who know how to handle it, drop out, it will be lost for perhaps hundreds of years."

"If Dick's finding us means that he must go, too, of course I hope that he won't find us, but I don't believe that. I simply know that he could get us away from here."

She continued more slowly, almost speaking to herself, her heart sinking with her voice:

"He is following us, and he won't stop even if he does see this dead star and knows that he can't get away. We will die together."

"There's no denying the fact that our situation is critical, but you know a man isn't dead until after his heart stops beating. We have two whole days yet, and in that time, I can probably dope out some way of getting away from here."

"I hope so," she replied, keeping her voice from breaking only by a great effort. "But go ahead with your doping. I'm worn out." She drew herself down upon one of the seats and stared at the ceiling, fighting to restrain an almost overpowering impulse to scream.

Thus the hours wore by--Perkins dead; Margaret still unconscious; Dorothy lying in her seat, her thoughts a formless prayer, buoyed up only by her faith in God and in her lover; DuQuesne self-possessed, smoking innumerable cigarettes, his keen mind grappling with its most desperate problem, grimly fighting until the very last instant of life--while the powerless space-car fell with an appalling velocity, faster and faster; falling toward that cold and desolate monster of the heaven.

CHAPTER X

The Rescue

Seaton and Crane drove the Skylark in the direction indicated by the unwavering object-compass with the greatest acceleration they could stand, each man taking a twelve-hour watch at the instrument board.

Now, indeed, did the Skylark justify the faith of her builders, and the two inventors, with an exultant certainty of their success, flew out beyond man's wildest imaginings. Had it not been for the haunting fear for Dorothy's safety, the journey would have been one of pure triumph, and even that anxiety did not prevent a profound joy in the enterprise.

"If that misguided mutt thinks he can pull off a stunt like that and get away with it, he's got another think coming," asserted Seaton, after making a reading on the other car after several days of the flight. "He went off half-cocked this time, for sure, and we've got him foul. We'd better put on some negative pretty soon hadn't we, Mart? Only a little over a hundred light-years now."

Crane nodded agreement and Seaton continued:

"It'll take as long to stop, of course, as it has taken to get out here, and if we ram them--GOOD NIGHT! Let's figure it out as nearly as we can."

They calculated their own speed, and that of the other vessel, as shown by the various readings taken, and applied just enough negative acceleration to slow the Skylark down to the speed of the other space-car when they should come up with it. They smiled at each other in recognition of the perfect working of the mechanism when the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed. Each knew that they were actually traveling in a direction that to them seemed "down," but with a constantly diminishing velocity, even though they seemed to be still going "up" with an increasing speed.

Until nearly the end of the calculated time the two took turns as before, but as the time of meeting drew near both men were on the alert, taking readings on the object-compass every few minutes. Finally Crane announced:

"We are almost on them, Dick. They are so close that it is almost impossible to time the needle--less than ten thousand miles."

Seaton gradually increased the retarding force until the needle showed that they were very close to the other vessel and maintaining a constant distance from it. He then shut off the power, and both men hurried to the bottom window to search for the fleeing ship with their powerful night-glasses. They looked at each other in amazement as they felt themselves falling almost directly downward, with an astounding acceleration.

"What do you make of it, Dick?" asked Crane calmly, as he brought his glasses to his eyes and stared out into the black heavens, studded with multitudes of brilliant and unfamiliar stars.

"I don't make it at all, Mart. By the feel, I should say we were falling toward something that would make our earth look like a pin-head. I remember now that I noticed that the bus was getting a little out of plumb with the bar all this last watch. I didn't pay much attention to it, as I couldn't see anything out of the way. Nothing but a sun could be big enough to raise all this disturbance, and I can't see any close enough to be afraid of, can you?"

"No, and I cannot see the Steel space-car, either. Look sharp."

"Of course," Seaton continued to argue as he peered out into the night, "it is theoretically possible that a heavenly body can exist large enough so that it could exert even this much force and still appear no larger than an ordinary star, but I don't believe it is probable. Give me three or four minutes of visual angle and I'll believe anything, but none of these stars are big enough to have any visual angle at all. Furthermore...."

"There is at least half a degree of visual angle!" broke in his friend intensely. "Just to the left of that constellation that looks so much like a question mark. It is not bright, but dark, like a very dark moon--barely perceptible."

Seaton pointed his glass eagerly in the direction indicated.

"Great Cat!" he ejaculated. "I'll say that's some moon! Wouldn't that rattle your slats? And there's DuQuesne's bus, too, on the right edge. Get it?"

As they stood up, Seaton's mood turned to one of deadly earnestness, and a grave look came over Crane's face as the seriousness of their situation dawned upon them. Trained mathematicians both, they knew instantly that that unknown world was of inconceivable mass, and that their chance of escape was none too good, even should they abandon the other craft to its fate. Seaton stared at Crane, his fists clenched and drops of perspiration standing on his forehead. Suddenly, with agony in his eyes and in his voice, he spoke.

"Mighty slim chance of getting away if we go through with it, old man.... Hate like the devil.... Have no right to ask you to throw yourself away, too."

"Enough of that, Dick. You had nothing to do with my coming: you could not have kept me away. We will see it through."

Their hands met in a fierce clasp, broken by Seaton, as he jumped to the levers with an intense:

"Well, let's get busy!"

In a few minutes they had reduced the distance until they could plainly see the other vessel, a small black circle against the faintly luminous disk. As it leaped into clear relief in the beam of his powerful searchlight, Seaton focused the great attractor upon the fugitive car and threw in the lever which released the full force of that mighty magnet, while Crane attracted the attention of the vessel's occupants by means of a momentary burst of solid machine-gun bullets, which he knew would glance harmlessly off the steel hull.

* * * * *

After an interminable silence, DuQuesne drew himself out of his seat. He took a long inhalation, deposited the butt of his cigarette carefully in his ash tray, and made his way to his room. He returned with three heavy fur suits provided with air helmets, two of which he handed to the girls, who were huddled in a seat with their arms around each other. These suits were the armor designed by Crane for use in exploring the vacuum and the intense cold of dead worlds. Air-tight, braced with fine steel netting, and supplied with air at normal pressure from small tanks by automatic valves, they made their wearers independent of surrounding conditions of pressure and temperature.

"The next thing to do," DuQuesne stated calmly, "is to get the copper off the outside of the ship. That is the last resort, as it robs us of our only safeguard against meteorites, but this is the time for last-resort measures. I'm going after that copper. Put these suits on, as our air will leave as soon as I open the door, and practically an absolute vacuum and equally absolute zero will come in."

As he spoke, the ship was enveloped in a blinding glare and they were thrown flat as the vessel slowed down in its terrific fall. The thought flashed across DuQuesne's mind that they had already entered the atmosphere of that monster globe and were being slowed down and set afire by its friction, but he dismissed it as quickly as it had come--the light in that case would be the green of copper, not this bluish-white. His next thought was that there had been a collision of meteors in the neighborhood, and that their retardation was due to the outer coating. While these thoughts were flickering through his mind, they heard an insistent metallic tapping, which DuQuesne recognized instantly.

"A machine-gun!" he blurted in amazement. "How in...."

"It's Dick!" screamed Dorothy, with flashing eyes. "He's found us, just as I knew he would. You couldn't beat Dick and Martin in a thousand years!"

The tension under which they had been laboring so long suddenly released, the two girls locked their arms around each other in a half-hysterical outburst of relief. Margaret's meaningless words and Dorothy's incoherent praises of her lover and Crane mingled with their racking sobs as each fought to recover self-possession.

DuQuesne had instantly mounted to the upper window. Throwing back the cover, he flashed his torch rapidly. The glare of the searchlight was snuffed out and he saw a flashing light spell out in dots and dashes:

"Can you read Morse?"

"Yes," he signalled back. "Power gone, drifting into...."

"We know it. Will you resist?"

"No."

"Have you fur pressure-suits?"

"Yes."

"Put them on. Shut off your outer coating. Will touch so your upper door against our lower. Open, transfer quick."

"O. K."

* * * * *

Hastily returning to the main compartment, he briefly informed the girls as to what had happened. All three donned the suits and stationed themselves at the upper opening. Rapidly, but with unerring precision, the two ships were brought into place and held together by the attractor. As the doors were opened, there was a screaming hiss as the air of the vessels escaped through the narrow crack between them. The passengers saw the moisture in the air turn into snow, and saw the air itself first liquefy and then freeze into a solid coating upon the metal around the orifices at the touch of the frightful cold outside--the absolute zero of interstellar space, about four hundred sixty degrees below zero in the every-day scale of temperature. The moisture of their breath condensed upon the inside of the double glasses of their helmets, rendering sight useless.

[Illustration: DuQuesne seized her and tossed her lightly through the doorway in such a manner that she would not touch the metal, which would have frozen instantly anything coming into contact with it.]

Dorothy pushed the other girl ahead of her. DuQuesne seized her and tossed her lightly through the doorway in such a manner that she would not touch the metal, which would have frozen instantly anything coming into contact with it. Seaton was waiting. Feeling a woman's slender form in his arms, he crushed her to him in a mighty embrace, and was astonished to feel movements of resistance, and to hear a strange, girlish voice cry out:

"Don't! It's me! Dorothy's next!"

Releasing her abruptly, he passed her on to Martin and turned just in time to catch his sweetheart, who, knowing that he would be there and recognizing his powerful arms at the first touch, returned his embrace with a fierce intensity which even he had never suspected that she could exert. They stood motionless, locked in each other's arms, while DuQuesne dove through the opening and snapped the door shut behind him.

The air-pressure and temperature back to normal, the cumbersome suits were hastily removed, and Seaton's lips met Dorothy's in a long, clinging caress. DuQuesne's cold, incisive voice broke the silence.

"Every second counts. I would suggest that we go somewhere."

"Just a minute!" snapped Crane. "Dick, what shall we do with this murderer?"

Seaton had forgotten DuQuesne utterly in the joy of holding his sweetheart in his arms, but at his friend's words, he faced about and his face grew stern.

"By rights, we ought to chuck him back into his own tub and let him go to the devil," he said savagely, doubling his fists and turning swiftly.

"No, no, Dick," remonstrated Dorothy, seizing his arm. "He treated us very well, and saved my life once. Anyway, you mustn't kill him."

"No, I suppose not," grudgingly assented her lover, "and I won't, either, unless he gives me at least half an excuse."

"We might iron him to a post?" suggested Crane, doubtfully.

"I think there's a better way," replied Seaton. "He may be able to work his way. His brain hits on all twelve, and he's strong as a bull. Our chance of getting back isn't a certainty, as you know." He turned to DuQuesne.

"I've heard that your word is good."

"It has never been broken."

"Will you give your word to act as one of the party, for the good of us all, if we don't iron you?"

"Yes--until we get back to the earth. Provided, of course, that I reserve the right to escape at any time between now and then if I wish to and can do so without injuring the vessel or any member of the party in any way."

"Agreed. Let's get busy--we're altogether too close to that dud there to suit me. Sit tight, everybody, we're on our way!" he cried, as he turned to the board, applied one notch of power, and shut off the attractor. The Skylark slowed down a trifle in its mad fall, the other vessel continued on its way--a helpless hulk, manned by a corpse, falling to destruction upon the bleak wastes of a desert world.

"Hold on!" said DuQuesne sharply. "Your power is the same as mine was, in proportion to your mass, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then our goose is cooked. I couldn't pull away from it with everything I had, couldn't even swing out enough to make an orbit, either hyperbolic or elliptical around it. With a reserve bar you will be able to make an orbit, but you can't get away from it."

"Thanks for the dope. That saves our wasting some effort. Our power-plant can be doubled up in emergencies, thanks to Martin's cautious old bean. We'll simply double her up and go away from here."

* * * * *

"There is one thing we didn't consider quite enough," said Crane, thoughtfully. "I started to faint back there before the full power of even one motor was in use. With the motor doubled, each of us will be held down by a force of many tons--we would all be helpless."

"Yes," added Dorothy, with foreboding in her eyes, "we were all unconscious on the way out, except Dr. DuQuesne."

"Well, then, Blackie and I, as the huskiest members of the party, will give her the juice until only one of us is left with his eyes open. If that isn't enough to pull us clear, we'll have to give her the whole works and let her ramble by herself after we all go out. How about it, Blackie?" unconsciously falling into the old Bureau nickname. "Do you think we can make it stop at unconsciousness with double power on?"

DuQuesne studied the two girls carefully.

"With oxygen in the helmets instead of air, we all may be able to stand it. These special cushions keep the body from flattening out, as it normally would under such a pressure. The unconsciousness is simply a suffocation caused by the lateral muscles being unable to lift the ribs--in other words, the air-pumps aren't strong enough for the added work put upon them. At least we stand a chance this way. We may live through the pressure while we are pulling away, and we certainly shall die if we don't pull away."

After a brief consultation, the men set to work with furious haste. While Crane placed extra bars in each of the motors and DuQuesne made careful observations upon the apparent size of the now plainly visible world toward which they were being drawn so irresistibly, Seaton connected the helmets with the air-and oxygen-tanks through a valve upon the board, by means of which he could change at will the oxygen content of the air they breathed. He then placed the strange girl, who seemed dazed by the frightful sensation of their never-ending fall, upon one of the seats, fitted the cumbersome helmet upon her head, strapped her carefully into place, and turned to Dorothy. In an instant they were in each other's arms. He felt her labored breathing and the wild beating of her heart, pressed so closely to his, and saw the fear of the unknown in the violet depths of her eyes, but she looked at him unflinchingly.

"Dick, sweetheart, if this is good-bye...."

He interrupted her with a kiss.

"It isn't good-bye yet, Dottie mine. This is merely a trial effort, to see what we will have to do to get away. Next time will be the time to worry."

"I'm not worried, really ... but in case ... you see ... I ... we ..."

The gray eyes softened and misted over as he pressed his cheek to hers.

"I understand, sweetheart," he whispered. "This is not good-bye, but if we don't pull through we'll go together, and that is what we both want."

As Crane and DuQuesne finished their tasks, Seaton fitted his sweetheart's helmet, placed her tenderly upon the seat, buckled the heavy restraining straps about her slender body, and donned his own helmet. He took his place at the main instrument board, DuQuesne stationing himself at the other.

"What did you read on it, Blackie?" asked Seaton.

"Two degrees, one minute, twelve seconds diameter," replied DuQuesne. "Altogether too close for comfort. How shall we apply the power? One of us must stay awake, or we'll go on as long as the bars last."

"You put on one notch, then I'll put on one. We can feel the bus jump with each notch. We'll keep it up until one of us is so far gone that he can't raise the bar--the one that raises last will have to let the ship run for thirty minutes or an hour, then cut down his power. Then the other fellow will revive and cut his off, for an observation. How's that?"

"All right."

* * * * *

They took their places, and Seaton felt the vessel slow down in its horrible fall as DuQuesne threw his lever into the first notch. He responded instantly by advancing his own, and notch after notch the power applied to the ship by the now doubled motor was rapidly increased. The passengers felt their suits envelope them and began to labor for breath. Seaton slowly turned the mixing valve, a little with each advance of his lever, until pure oxygen flowed through the pipes. The power levers had moved scarcely half of their range, yet minutes now intervened between each advance instead of seconds, as at the start.

As each of the two men was determined that he would make the last advance, the duel continued longer than either would have thought possible. Seaton made what he thought his final effort and waited--only to feel, after a few minutes, the upward surge telling him that DuQuesne was still able to move his lever. His brain reeled. His arm seemed paralyzed by its own enormous weight, and felt as though it, the rolling table upon which it rested, and the supporting framework were so immovably welded together that it was impossible to move it even the quarter-inch necessary to operate the ratchet-lever. He could not move his body, which was oppressed by a sickening weight. His utmost efforts to breathe forced only a little of the life-giving oxygen into his lungs, which smarted painfully at the touch of the undiluted gas, and he felt that he could not long retain consciousness under such conditions. Nevertheless, he summoned all his strength and advanced the lever one more notch. He stared at the clock-face above his head, knowing that if DuQuesne could advance his lever again he would lose consciousness and be beaten. Minute after minute went by, however, and the acceleration of the ship remained constant. Seaton, knowing that he was in sole control of the power-plant, fought to retain possession of his faculties, while the hands of the clock told off the interminable minutes.

After an eternity of time an hour had passed, and Seaton attempted to cut down his power, only to find with horror that the long strain had so weakened him that he could not reverse the ratchet. He was still able, however, to give the lever the backward jerk which disconnected the wires completely--and the safety straps creaked with the sudden stress as, half the power instantly shut off, the suddenly released springs tried to hurl five bodies against the ceiling. After a few minutes DuQuesne revived and slowly cut off his power. To the dismay of both men they were again falling!

DuQuesne hurried to the lower window to make the observation, remarking:

"You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

"Only because you're so badly bunged up. One more notch would've got my goat," replied Seaton frankly as he made his way to Dorothy's side. He noticed as he reached her, that Crane had removed his helmet and was approaching the other girl. By the time DuQuesne had finished the observation, the other passengers had completely recovered, apparently none the worse for their experience.

* * * * *

"Did we gain anything?" asked Seaton eagerly.

"I make it two, four, thirteen. We've lost about two minutes of arc. How much power did we have on?"

"A little over half--thirty-two points out of sixty possible."

"We were still falling pretty fast. We'll have to put on everything we've got. Since neither of us can put it on we'll have to rig up an automatic feed. It'll take time, but it's the only way."

"The automatic control is already there," put in Crane, forestalling Seaton's explanation. "The only question is whether we will live through it--and that is not really a question, since certain death is the only alternative. We must do it."

"We sure must," answered Seaton soberly.

Dorothy gravely nodded assent.

"What do you fellows think of a little plus pressure on the oxygen?" asked Seaton. "I think it would help a lot."

"I think it's a good idea," said DuQuesne, and Crane added:

"Four or five inches of water will be about all the pressure we can stand. Any more might burn our lungs too badly."

The pressure apparatus was quickly arranged and the motors filled to capacity with reserve bars--enough to last seventy-two hours--the scientists having decided that they must risk everything on one trial and put in enough, if possible, to pull them clear out of the influence of this center of attraction, as the time lost in slowing up to change bars might well mean the difference between success and failure. Where they might lie at the end of the wild dash for safety, how they were to retrace their way with their depleted supply of copper, what other dangers of dead star, planet, or sun lay in their path--all these were terrifying questions that had to be ignored.

* * * * *

DuQuesne was the only member of the party who actually felt any calmness, the quiet of the others expressing their courage in facing fear. Life seemed very sweet and desirable to them, the distant earth a very Paradise! Through Dorothy's mind flashed the visions she had built up during long sweet hours, visions of a long life with Seaton. As she breathed an inaudible prayer, she glanced up and saw Seaton standing beside her, gazing down upon her with his very soul in his eyes. Never would she forget the expression upon his face. Even in that crucial hour, his great love for her overshadowed every other feeling, and no thought of self was in his mind--his care was all for her. There was a long farewell caress. Both knew that it might be goodbye, but both were silent as the violet eyes and the gray looked into each other's depths and conveyed messages far beyond the power of words. Once more he adjusted her helmet and strapped her into place.

As Crane had in the meantime cared for the other girl, the men again took their places and Seaton started the motor which would automatically advance the speed levers, one notch every five seconds, until the full power of both motors was exerted. As the power was increased, he turned the valve as before, until the helmets were filled with pure oxygen under a pressure of five inches of water.

Margaret Spencer, weakened by her imprisonment, was the first to lose consciousness, and soon afterward Dorothy felt her senses leave her. A half-minute, in the course of which six mighty surges were felt, as more of the power of the doubled motor was released, and Crane had gone, calmly analyzing his sensations to the last. After a time DuQuesne also lapsed into unconsciousness, making no particular effort to avoid it, as he knew that the involuntary muscles would function quite as well without the direction of the will. Seaton, although he knew it was useless, fought to keep his senses as long as possible, counting the impulses he felt as the levers were advanced.

"Thirty-two." He felt exactly as he had before, when he had advanced the lever for the last time.

"Thirty-three." A giant hand shut off his breath completely, though he was fighting to his utmost for air. An intolerable weight rested upon his eyeballs, forcing them backward into his head. The universe whirled about him in dizzy circles--orange and black and green stars flashed before his bursting eyes.

"Thirty-four." The stars became more brilliant and of more variegated colors, and a giant pen dipped in fire was writing equations and mathematico-chemical symbols upon his quivering brain. He joined the circling universe, which he had hitherto kept away from him by main strength, and whirled about his own body, tracing a logarithmic spiral with infinite velocity--leaving his body an infinite distance behind.

"Thirty-five." The stars and the fiery pen exploded in a wild coruscation of searing, blinding light and he plunged from his spiral into a black abyss.

* * * * *

In spite of the terrific stress put upon the machine, every part functioned perfectly, and soon after Seaton had lost consciousness the vessel began to draw away from the sinister globe; slowly at first, faster and faster as more and more of the almost unlimited power of the mighty motor was released. Soon the levers were out to the last notch and the machine was exerting its maximum effort. One hour and an observer upon the Skylark would have seen that the apparent size of the massive unknown world was rapidly decreasing; twenty hours and it was so far away as to be invisible, though its effect was still great; forty hours and the effect was slight; sixty hours and the Skylark was out of range of the slightest measurable force of the monster it had left.

Hurtled onward by the inconceivable power of the unleashed copper demon in its center, the Skylark flew through the infinite reaches of interstellar space with an unthinkable, almost incalculable velocity--beside which the velocity of light was as that of a snail to that of a rifle bullet; a velocity augmented every second by a quantity almost double that of light itself.

CHAPTER XI

Through Space Into the Carboniferous

Seaton opened his eyes and gazed about him wonderingly. Only half conscious, bruised and sore in every part of his body, he could not at first realize what had happened. Instinctively drawing a deep breath, he coughed and choked as the undiluted oxygen filled his lungs, bringing with it a complete understanding of the situation. Knowing from the lack of any apparent motion that the power had been sufficient to pull the car away from that fatal globe, his first thought was for Dorothy, and he tore off his helmet and turned toward her. The force of even that slight movement, wafted him gently into the air where he hung suspended several minutes before his struggles enabled him to clutch a post and draw himself down to the floor. A quick glance around informed him that Dorothy, as well as the others, was still unconscious. Making his way rapidly to her, he placed her face downward upon the floor and began artificial respiration. Very soon he was rewarded by the coughing he had longed to hear. He tore off her helmet and clasped her to his breast in an agony of relief, while she sobbed convulsively upon his shoulder. The first ecstasy of their greeting over, Dorothy started guiltily.

"Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed. "How about Peggy? You must see how she is!"

"Never mind," answered Crane's voice cheerily. "She is coming to nicely."

Glancing around quickly, they saw that Crane had already revived the stranger, and that DuQuesne was not in sight. Dorothy blushed, the vivid wave of color rising to her glorious hair, and hastily disengaged her arms from around her lover's neck, drawing away from him. Seaton, also blushing, dropped his arms, and Dorothy floated away from him, frantically clutching at a brace just beyond reach.

"Pull me down, Dick!" she called, laughing gaily.

Seaton, seizing her instinctively, neglected his own anchorage and they hung in the air together, while Crane and Margaret, each holding a strap, laughed with unrestrained merriment.

"Tweet, tweet--I'm a canary!" chuckled Seaton. "Throw us a rope!"

"A Dicky-bird, you mean," interposed Dorothy.

"I knew that you were a sleight-of-hand expert, Dick, but I did not know that levitation was one of your specialties," remarked Crane with mock gravity. "That is a peculiar pose you are holding now. What are you doing--sitting on an imaginary pedestal?"

"I'll be sitting on your neck if you don't get a wiggle on with that rope!" retorted Seaton, but before Crane had time to obey the command the floating couple had approached close enough to the ceiling so that Seaton, with a slight pressure of his hand against the leather, sent them floating back to the floor, within reach of one of the handrails.

Seaton made his way to the power-plant, lifted in one of the remaining bars, and applied a little power. The Skylark seemed to jump under them, then it seemed as though they were back on Earth--everything had its normal weight once more, as the amount of power applied was just enough to equal the acceleration of gravity. After this fact had been explained, Dorothy turned to Margaret.

"Now that we are able to act intelligently, the party should be introduced to each other. Peggy, this is Dr. Dick Seaton, and this is Mr. Martin Crane. Boys, this is Miss Margaret Spencer, a dear friend of mine. These are the boys I have told you so much about, Peggy. Dick knows all about atoms and things; he found out how to make the Skylark go. Martin, who is quite a wonderful inventor, made the engines and things for it."

"I may have heard of Mr. Crane," replied Margaret eagerly. "My father was an inventor, and I have heard him speak of a man named Crane who invented a lot of instruments for airplanes. He used to say that the Crane instruments revolutionized flying. I wonder if you are that Mr. Crane?"

"That is rather unjustifiably high praise, Miss Spencer," replied Crane, "but as I have been guilty of one or two things along that line, I may be the man he meant."

"Pardon me if I seem to change the subject," put in Seaton, "but where's DuQuesne?"

"We came to at the same time, and he went into the galley to fix up something to eat."

"Good for him!" exclaimed Dorothy. "I'm simply starved to death. I would have been demanding food long ago, but I have so many aches and pains that I didn't realize how hungry I was until you mentioned it. Come on, Peggy, I know where our room is. Let's go powder our noses while these bewhiskered gentlemen reap their beards. Did you bring along any of my clothes, Dick, or did you forget them in the excitement?"

"I didn't think anything about clothes, but Martin did. You'll find your whole wardrobe in your room. I'm with you, Dot, on that eating proposition--I'm hungry enough to eat the jamb off the door!"

* * * * *

After the girls had gone, Seaton and Crane went to their rooms, where they exercised vigorously to restore the circulation to their numbed bodies, shaved, bathed, and returned to the saloon feeling like new men. They found the girls already there, seated at one of the windows.

"Hail and greeting!" cried Dorothy at sight of them. "I hardly recognized you without your whiskers. Do hurry over here and look out this perfectly wonderful window. Did you ever in your born days see anything like this sight? Now that I'm not scared pea-green, I can enjoy it thoroughly!"

The two men joined the girls and peered out into space through the window, which was completely invisible, so clear was the glass. As the four heads bent, so close together, an awed silence fell upon the little group. For the blackness of the interstellar void was not the dark of an earthly night, but the absolute black of the absence of all light, beside which the black of platinum dust is pale and gray; and laid upon this velvet were the jewel stars. They were not the twinkling, scintillating beauties of the earthly sky, but minute points, so small as to seem dimensionless, yet of dazzling brilliance. Without the interference of the air, their rays met the eye steadily and much of the effect of comparative distance was lost. All seemed nearer and there was no hint of familiarity in their arrangement. Like gems thrown upon darkness they shone in multi-colored beauty upon the daring wanderers, who stood in their car as easily as though they were upon their parent Earth, and gazed upon a sight never before seen by eye of man nor pictured in his imaginings.

Through the daze of their wonder, a thought smote Seaton like a blow from a fist. His eyes leaped to the instrument board and he exclaimed:

"Look there, Mart! We're heading almost directly away from the Earth, and we must be making billions of miles per second. After we lost consciousness, the attraction of that big dud back there would swing us around, of course, but the bar should have stayed pointed somewhere near the Earth, as I left it. Do you suppose it could have shifted the gyroscopes?"

"It not only could have, it did," replied Crane, turning the bar until it again pointed parallel with the object-compass which bore upon the Earth. "Look at the board. The angle has been changed through nearly half a circumference. We couldn't carry gyroscopes heavy enough to counteract that force."

"But they were heavier there--Oh, sure, you're right. It's mass, not weight, that counts. But we sure are in one fine, large jam now. Instead of being half-way back to the Earth we're--where are we, anyway?"

They made a reading on an object-compass focused upon the Earth. Seaton's face lengthened as seconds passed. When it had come to rest, both men calculated the distance.

"What d'you make it, Mart? I'm afraid to tell you my result."

"Forty-six point twenty-seven light-centuries," replied Crane, calmly. "Right?"

"Right, and the time was 11:32 P. M. of Thursday, by the chronometer there. We'll time it again after a while and see how fast we're traveling. It's a good thing you built the ship's chronometers to stand any kind of stress. My watch is a total loss. Yours is, too?"

"All of our watches must be broken. We will have to repair them as soon as we get time."

"Well, let's eat next! No human being can stand my aching void much longer. How about you, Dot?"

"Yes, for Cat's sake, let's get busy!" she mimicked him gaily. "Doctor DuQuesne's had dinner ready for ages, and we're all dying by inches of hunger."

* * * * *

The wanderers, battered, bruised, and sore, seated themselves at a folding table, Seaton keeping a watchful eye upon the bar and upon the course, while enjoying Dorothy's presence to the full. Crane and Margaret talked easily, but at intervals. Save when directly addressed. DuQuesne maintained silence--not the silence of one who knows himself to be an intruder, but the silence of perfect self-sufficiency. The meal over, the girls washed the dishes and busied themselves in the galley. Seaton and Crane made another observation upon the Earth, requesting DuQuesne to stay out of the "engine room" as they called the partially-enclosed space surrounding the main instrument board, where were located the object-compasses and the mechanism controlling the attractor, about which DuQuesne knew nothing. As they rejoined DuQuesne in the main compartment, Seaton said:

"DuQuesne, we're nearly five thousand light-years away from the Earth, and are getting farther at the rate of about one light-year per minute."

"I suppose that it would be poor technique to ask how you know?"

"It would--very poor. Our figures are right. The difficulty is that we have only four bars left--enough to stop us and a little to spare, but not nearly enough to get back with, even if we could take a chance on drifting straight that far without being swung off--which, of course, is impossible."

"That means that we must land somewhere and dig some copper, then."

"Exactly.

"The first thing to do is to find a place to land."

Seaton picked out a distant star in their course and observed it through the spectroscope. Since it was found to contain copper in notable amounts, all agreed that its planets probably also contained copper.

"Don't know whether we can stop that soon or not," remarked Seaton as he set the levers, "but we may as well have something to shoot at. We'd better take our regular twelve-hour tricks, hadn't we, Mart? It's a wonder we got as far as this without striking another snag. I'll take the first trick at the board--beat it to bed."

"Not so fast, Dick," argued Crane, as Seaton turned toward the engine-room: "It's my turn."

"Flip a nickel," suggested Seaton. "Heads I get it."

Crane flipped a coin. Heads it was, and the worn-out party went to their rooms, all save Dorothy, who lingered after the others to bid her lover a more intimate good-night.

Seated beside him, his arm around her and her head upon his shoulder, Dorothy exclaimed:

"Oh, Dicky, Dicky, it is wonderful to be with you again! I've lived as many years in the last week as we have covered miles!"

Seaton kissed her with ardor, then turned her fair face up to his and gazed hungrily at every feature.

"It sure was awful until we found you, sweetheart girl. Those two days at Wilson's were the worst and longest I ever put in. I could have wrung Martin's cautious old neck!

"But isn't he a wiz at preparing for trouble? We sure owe him a lot, little dimpled lady."

Dorothy was silent for a moment, then a smile quirked at one corner of her mouth and a dimple appeared. Seaton promptly kissed it, whereupon it deepened audaciously.

"What are you thinking about--mischief?" he asked.

"Only of how Martin is going to be paid what we owe him," she answered teasingly. "Don't let the debt worry you any."

"Spill the news, Reddy," he commanded, as his arm tightened about her.

She stuck out a tiny tip of red tongue at him.

"Don't let Peggy find out he's a millionaire."

"Why not?" he asked wonderingly, then he saw her point and laughed:

"You little matchmaker!"

"I don't care, laugh if you want to. Martin's as nice a man as I know, and Peggy's a real darling. Don't you let slip a word about Martin's money, that's all!"

"She wouldn't think any less of him, would she?"

"Dick, sometimes you are absolutely dumb. It would spoil everything. If she knew he was a millionaire she would be scared to death--not of him, of course, but because she would think that he would think that she was chasing him, and then of course he would think that she was, see? As it is, she acts perfectly natural, and so does he. Didn't you notice that while we were eating they talked together for at least fifteen minutes about her father's invention and the way they stole the plans and one thing and another? I don't believe he has talked that much to any girl except me the last five years--and he wouldn't talk to me until he knew that I couldn't see any man except you. Much as we like Martin, we've got to admit that about him. He's been chased so much that he's wild. If any other girl he knows had talked to him that long, he would have been off to the North Pole or somewhere the next morning, and the best part of it is that he didn't think anything of it."

* * * * *

"You think she is domesticating the wild man?"

"Now, Dick, don't be foolish. You know what I mean. Martin is a perfect dear, but if she knew that he is _the_ M. Reynolds Crane, everything would be ruined. You know yourself how horribly hard it is to get through his shell to the real Martin underneath. He is lonely and miserable inside, I know, and the right kind of girl, one that would treat him right, would make life Heaven for him, and herself too."

"Yes, and the wrong kind would make it...."

"She would," interrupted Dorothy hastily, "but Peggy's the right kind. Wouldn't it be fine to have Martin and Peggy as happy, almost, as you and I are?"

"All right, girlie, I'm with you," he answered, embracing her as though he intended never to let her go, "but you'd better go get some sleep--you're all in."

Considerably later, when Dorothy had finally gone, Seaton settled himself for the long vigil. Promptly at the end of the twelve hours Crane appeared, alert of eye and of bearing.

"You look fresh as a daisy, Mart. Feeling fit?"

"Fit as the proverbial fiddle. I could not have slept any better or longer if I had had a week off. Seven hours and a half is a luxury, you know."

"All wrong, old top. I need eight every night, and I'm going to take about ten this time."

"Go to it, twelve if you like. You have earned it."

Seaton stumbled to his room and slept as though in a trance for ten hours. Rising, he took his regular morning exercises and went into the saloon. All save Martin were there, but he had eyes only for his sweetheart, who was radiantly beautiful in a dress of deep bronze-brown.

"Good morning, Dick," she hailed him joyously. "You woke up just in time--we are all starving again, and were just going to eat without you!"

"Good morning, everybody. I would like to eat with you, Dottie, but I've got to relieve Martin. How'd it be for you to bring breakfast into the engine room and cheer my solitude, and let Crane eat with the others?"

"Fine--that's once you had a good idea, if you never have another!"

After the meal DuQuesne, who abhorred idleness with all his vigorous nature, took the watches of the party and went upstairs to the "shop," which was a completely-equipped mechanical laboratory, to repair them. Seaton stayed at the board, where Dorothy joined him as a matter of course. Crane and Margaret sat down at one of the windows.

She told him her story, frankly and fully, shuddering with horror as she recalled the awful, helpless fall, during which Perkins had met his end.

"Dick and I have a heavy score to settle with that Steel crowd and with DuQuesne," Crane said slowly. "We have no evidence that will hold in law, but some day DuQuesne will over-reach himself. We could convict him of abduction now, but the penalty for that is too mild for what he has done. Perkins' death was not murder, then?"

"Oh, no, it was purely self-defense. Perkins would have killed him if he could. And he really deserved it--Perkins was a perfect fiend. The Doctor, as they call him, is no better, although entirely different. He is so utterly heartless and ruthless, so cold and scientific. Do you know him very well?"

"We know all that about him, and more. And yet Dorothy said he saved her life?"

"He did, from Perkins, but I still think it was because he didn't want Perkins meddling in his affairs. He seems to me to be the very incarnation of a fixed purpose--to advance himself in the world."

"That expresses my thoughts exactly. But he slips occasionally, as in this instance, and he will again. He will have to walk very carefully while he is with us. Nothing would please Dick better than an excuse for killing him, and I must admit that I feel very much the same way."

"Yes, all of us do, and the way he acts proves what a machine he is. He knows just exactly how far to go, and never goes beyond it."

They felt the Skylark lurch slightly.

"Oh, Mart!" called Seaton. "Going to pass that star we were headed for--too fast to stop. I'm giving it a wide berth and picking out another one. There's a big planet a few million miles off in line with the main door, and another one almost dead ahead--that is, straight down. We sure are traveling. Look at that sun flit by!"

* * * * *

They saw the two planets, one like a small moon, the other like a large star, and saw the strange sun increase rapidly in size as the Skylark flew on at such a pace that any earthly distance would have been covered as soon as it was begun. So appalling was their velocity that their ship was bathed in the light of that sun for only a short time, then was again surrounded by the indescribable darkness. Their seventy-two-hour flight without a pilot had seemed a miracle, now it seemed entirely possible that they might fly in a straight line for weeks without encountering any obstacle, so vast was the emptiness in comparison with the points of light that punctuated it. Now and then they passed so close to a star that it apparently moved rapidly, but for the most part the silent sentinels stood, like distant mountain peaks to the travelers in an express train, in the same position for many minutes.

Awed by the immensity of the universe, the two at the window were silent, not with the silence of embarrassment, but with that of two friends in the presence of something beyond the reach of words. As they stared out into the infinity each felt as never before the pitiful smallness of even our whole solar system and the utter insignificance of human beings and their works. Silently their minds reached out to each other in mutual understanding.

Unconsciously Margaret half shuddered and moved closer to her companion, the movement attracting his attention but not her own. A tender expression came into Crane's steady blue eyes as he looked down at the beautiful young woman by his side. For beautiful she undoubtedly was. Untroubled rest and plentiful food had erased the marks of her imprisonment; Dorothy's deep, manifestly unassumed faith in the ability of Seaton and Crane to bring them safely back to Earth had quieted her fears; and a complete costume of Dorothy's simple but well-cut clothes, which fitted her perfectly, and in which she looked her best and knew it, had completely restored her self-possession. He quickly glanced away and again gazed at the stars, but now, in addition to the wonders of space, he saw masses of wavy black hair, high-piled upon a queenly head; deep down brown eyes half veiled by long, black lashes; sweet, sensitive lips; a firmly rounded but dimpled chin; and a perfectly-formed young body.

After a time she drew a deep, tremulous breath. As he turned, her eyes met his. In their shadowy depths, still troubled by the mystery of the unknowable, he read her very soul--the soul of a real woman.

"I had hoped," said Margaret slowly, "to take a long flight above the clouds, but anything like this never entered my mind. How unbelievably great it is! So much vaster than any perception we could get upon earth! It seems strange that we were ever awed by the sea or the mountains ... and yet...."

She paused, with her lip caught under two white teeth, then went on hesitatingly:

"Doesn't it seem to you, Mr. Crane, that there is something in man as great as all this? Otherwise, Dorothy and I could not be sailing here in a wonder like the Lark, which you and Dick Seaton have made."

* * * * *

Since from the first, Dorothy had timed her waking hours with those of Seaton--waiting upon him, preparing his meals, and lightening the long hours of his vigils at the board--Margaret took it upon herself to do the same thing for Crane. But often they assembled in the engine-room, and there was much fun and laughter, as well as serious talk, among the four. Margaret was quickly accepted as a friend, and proved a delightful companion. Her wavy, jet-black hair, the only color in the world that could hold its own with Dorothy's auburn glory, framed features self-reliant and strong, yet of womanly softness; and in this genial atmosphere her quick tongue had a delicate wit and a facility of expression that delighted all three. Dorothy, after the manner of Southern women, became the hostess of this odd "party," as she styled it, and unconsciously adopted the attitude of a lady in her own home.

Early in their flight, Crane suggested that they should take notes upon the systems of stars through which were passing.

"I know very little of astronomy," he said to Seaton, "but with our telescope, spectroscope, and other instruments, we should be able to take some data that will be of interest to astronomers. Possibly Miss Spencer would be willing to help us?"

"Sure," Seaton returned readily. "We'd be idiots to let a chance like this slide. Go to it!"

Margaret was delighted at the opportunity to help.

"Taking notes is the best thing I do!" she cried, and called for a pad and pencil.

Stationed at the window, they fell to work in earnest. For several hours Crane took observations, calculated distances, and dictated notes to Margaret.

"The stars are wonderfully different!" she exclaimed to him once. "That planet, I'm sure, has strange and lovely life upon it. See how its color differs from most of the others we have seen so near? It is rosy and soft like a home fire. I'm sure its people are happy."

They fell into a long discussion, laughing a little at their fancies. Were these multitudes of worlds peopled as the Earth? Could it be that only upon Earth had occurred the right combination for the generation of life, so that the rest of the Universe was unpeopled?

"It is unthinkable that they are all uninhabited," mused Crane. "There must be life. The beings may not exist in any form with which we are familiar--they may well be fulfilling some purpose in ways so different from ours that we should be unable to understand them at all."

Margaret's eyes widened in startled apprehension, but in a moment she shook herself and laughed.

"But there's no reason to suppose they would be awful," she remarked, and turned with renewed interest to the window.

Thus days went by and the Skylark passed one solar system after another, with a velocity so great that it was impossible to land upon any planet. Margaret's association with Crane, begun as a duty, soon became an intense pleasure for them both. Taking notes or seated at the board in companionable conversation or sympathetic silence, they compressed into a few days more real companionship than is ordinarily enjoyed in months. Oftener and oftener, as time went on, Crane found the vision of his dream home floating in his mind as he steered the Skylark in her meteoric flight or as he strapped himself into his narrow bed. Now, however, the central figure of the vision, instead of being an indistinct blur, was clear and sharply defined. And for her part, more and more was Margaret drawn to the quiet and unassuming, but utterly dependable and steadfast young inventor, with his wide knowledge and his keen, incisive mind.

* * * * *

Sometimes, when far from any star, the pilot would desert his post and join the others at meals. Upon one such occasion Seaton asked:

"How's the book on astronomy, oh, learned ones?"

"It will be as interesting as Egyptian hieroglyphics," Margaret replied, as she opened her notebook and showed him pages of figures and symbols.

"May I see it, Miss Spencer?" asked DuQuesne from across the small table, extending his hand.

She looked at him, hot hostility in her brown eyes, and he dropped his hand.

"I beg your pardon," he said, with amused irony.

After the meal Seaton and Crane held a short consultation, and the former called to the girls, asking them to join in the "council of war." There was a moment's silence before Crane said diffidently:

"We have been talking about DuQuesne, Miss Spencer, trying to decide a very important problem."

Seaton smiled in spite of himself as the color again deepened in Margaret's face, and Dorothy laughed outright.

"Talk about a red-headed temper! Your hair must be dyed, Peggy!"

"I know I acted like a naughty child," Margaret said ruefully, "but he makes me perfectly furious and scares me at the same time. A few more remarks like that 'I beg your pardon' of his and I wouldn't have a thought left in my head!"

Seaton, who had opened his mouth, shut it again ludicrously, without saying a word, and Margaret gave him a startled glance.

"Now I _have_ said it!" she exclaimed. "I'm not afraid of him, boys, really. What do you want me to do?"

Seaton plunged in.

"What we were trying to get up nerve enough to say is that he'd be a good man on the astronomy job," and Crane added quickly:

"He undoubtedly knows more about it than I do, and it would be a pity to lose the chance of using him. Besides, Dick and I think it rather dangerous to leave him so much time to himself, in which to work up a plan against us."

"He's cooking one right now, I'll bet a hat," Seaton put in, and Crane added:

"If you are sure that you have no objections, Miss Spencer, we might go below, where we can have it dark, and all three of us see what we can make of the stargazing. We are really losing an unusual opportunity."

Margaret hid gallantly any reluctance she might have felt.

"I wouldn't deserve to be here if I can't work with the Doctor and hate him at the same time."

"Good for you, Peg, you're a regular fellow!" Seaton exclaimed. "You're a trump!"

* * * * *

Finally, the enormous velocity of the cruiser was sufficiently reduced to effect a landing, a copper-bearing sun was located, and a course was laid toward its nearest planet.

As the vessel approached its goal a deep undercurrent of excitement kept all the passengers feverishly occupied. They watched the distant globe grow larger, glowing through its atmosphere more and more clearly as a great disk of white light, its outline softened by the air about it. Two satellites were close beside it. Its sun, a great, blazing orb, a little nearer than the planet, looked so great and so hot that Margaret became uneasy.

"Isn't it dangerous to get so close, Dick? We might burn up, mightn't we?"

"Not without an atmosphere," he laughed.

"Oh," murmured the girl apologetically, "I might have known that."

Dropping rapidly into the atmosphere of the planet, they measured its density and analyzed it in apparatus installed for that purpose, finding that its composition was very similar to the Earth's air and that its pressure was not enough greater to be uncomfortable. When within one thousand feet of the surface, Seaton weighed a five-pound weight upon a spring-balance, finding that it weighed five and a half pounds, thus ascertaining that the planet was either somewhat larger than the Earth or more dense. The ground was almost hidden by a rank growth of vegetation, but here and there appeared glade-like openings.

Seaton glanced at the faces about him. Tense interest marked them all. Dorothy's cheeks were flushed, her eyes shone. She looked at him with awe and pride.

"A strange world, Dorothy," he said gravely. "You are not afraid?"

"Not with you," she answered. "I am only thrilled with wonder."

"Columbus at San Salvador," said Margaret, her dark eyes paying their tribute of admiration.

A dark flush mounted swiftly into Seaton's brown face and he sought to throw most of the burden upon Crane, but catching upon his face also a look of praise, almost of tenderness, he quickly turned to the controls.

"Man the boats!" he ordered an imaginary crew, and the Skylark descended rapidly.

Landing upon one of the open spaces, they found the ground solid and stepped out. What had appeared to be a glade was in reality a rock, or rather, a ledge of apparently solid metal, with scarcely a loose fragment to be seen. At one end of the ledge rose a giant tree wonderfully symmetrical, but of a peculiar form. Its branches were longer at the top than at the bottom, and it possessed broad, dark-green leaves, long thorns, and odd, flexible, shoot-like tendrils. It stood as an outpost of the dense vegetation beyond. Totally unlike the forests of Earth were those fern-like trees, towering two hundred feet into the air. They were of an intensely vivid green and stood motionless in the still, hot air of noonday. Not a sign of animal life was to be seen; the whole landscape seemed asleep.

The five strangers stood near their vessel, conversing in low tones and enjoying the sensation of solid ground beneath their feet. After a few minutes DuQuesne remarked:

"This is undoubtedly a newer planet than ours. I should say that it was in the Carboniferous age. Aren't those trees like those in the coal-measures, Seaton?"

"True as time, Blackie--there probably won't be a human race here for ages, unless we bring out some colonists."

Seaton kicked at one of the loose lumps of metal questioningly with his heavy shoe, finding that it was as immovable as though it were part of the ledge. Bending over, he found that it required all his great strength to lift it and he stared at it with an expression of surprise, which turned to amazement as he peered closer.

"DuQuesne! Look at this!"

* * * * *

DuQuesne studied the metal, and was shaken out of his habitual taciturnity.

"Platinum, by all the little gods!"

"We'll grab some of this while the grabbing's good," announced Seaton, and the few visible lumps were rolled into the car. "If we had a pickaxe we could chop some more off one of those sharp ledges down there."

"There's an axe in the shop," replied DuQuesne. "I'll go get it. Go ahead, I'll soon be with you."

"Keep close together," warned Crane as the four moved slowly down the slope. "This is none too safe, Dick."

"No, it isn't, Mart. But we've got to see whether we can't find some copper, and I would like to get some more of this stuff, too. I don't think it's platinum, I believe that it's X."

As they reached the broken projections, Margaret glanced back over her shoulder and screamed. The others saw that her face was white and her eyes wide with horror, and Seaton instinctively drew his pistol as he whirled about, only to check his finger on the trigger and lower his hand.

"Nothing but X-plosive bullets," he growled in disgust, and in helpless silence the four watched an unspeakably hideous monster slowly appear from behind the Skylark. Its four huge, squat legs supported a body at least a hundred feet long, pursy and ungainly; at the extremity of a long and sinuous neck a comparatively small head seemed composed entirely of a cavernous mouth armed with row upon row of carnivorous teeth. Dorothy gasped with terror and both girls shrank closer to the two men, who maintained a baffled silence as the huge beast passed his revolting head along the hull of the vessel.

"I dare not shoot, Martin," Seaton whispered, "it would wreck the bus. Have you got any solid bullets?"

"No. We must hide behind these small ledges until it goes away," answered Crane, his eyes upon Margaret's colorless face. "You two hide behind that one, we will take this one."

"Oh, well, it's nothing to worry about, anyway. We can kill him as soon as he gets far enough away from the boat," said Seaton as, with Dorothy clinging to him, he dropped behind one of the ledges. Margaret, her staring eyes fixed upon the monster, remained standing until Crane touched her gently and drew her down beside him.

"He will go away soon," his even voice assured her. "We are in no danger."

In spite of their predicament, a feeling of happiness flowed through Crane's whole being as he crouched beside the wall of metal with one arm protectingly around Margaret, and he longed to protect her through life as he was protecting her then. Accustomed as he was to dangerous situations, he felt no fear. He felt only a great tenderness for the girl by his side, who had ceased trembling but was still staring wide-eyed at the monster through a crevice.

"Scared, Peggy?" he whispered.

"Not now, Martin, but if you weren't here I would die of fright."

At this reply his arm tightened involuntarily, but he forced it to relax.

"It will not be long," he promised himself silently, "until she is back at home among her friends, and then...."

There came the crack of a rifle from the Skylark. There was an awful roar from the dinosaur, which was quickly silenced by a stream of machine-gun bullets.

"Blackie's on the job--let's go!" cried Seaton, and they raced up the slope. Making a detour to avoid the writhing and mutilated mass they plunged through the opening door. DuQuesne shut it behind them and in overwhelming relief, the adventurers huddled together as from the wilderness without there arose an appalling tumult.

* * * * *

The scene, so quiet a few moments before, was instantly changed. The trees, the swamp, and the air seemed filled with monsters so hideous as to stagger the imagination. Winged lizards of prodigious size hurtled through the air, plunging to death against the armored hull. Indescribable flying monsters, with feathers like birds, but with the fangs of tigers, attacked viciously. Dorothy screamed and started back as a scorpion-like thing with a body ten feet in length leaped at the window in front of her, its terrible sting spraying the glass with venom. As it fell to the ground, a huge spider--if an eight-legged creature with spines instead of hair, many-faceted eyes, and a bloated, globular body weighing hundreds of pounds, may be called a spider--leaped upon it and, mighty mandibles against poisonous sting, the furious battle raged. Several twelve-foot cockroaches climbed nimbly across the fallen timber of the morass and began feeding voraciously upon the body of the dead dinosaur, only to be driven away by another animal, which all three men recognized instantly as that king of all prehistoric creatures, the saber-toothed tiger. This newcomer, a tawny beast towering fifteen feet high at the shoulder, had a mouth disproportionate even to his great size--a mouth armed with four great tiger-teeth more than three feet in length. He had barely begun his meal, however, when he was challenged by another nightmare, a something apparently half-way between a dinosaur and a crocodile. At the first note the tiger charged. Clawing, striking, rending each other with their terrible teeth, a veritable avalanche of bloodthirsty rage, the combatants stormed up and down the little island. But the fighters were rudely interrupted, and the earthly visitors discovered that in this primitive world it was not only animal life that was dangerous.

[Illustration: The great tree standing on the farther edge of the island suddenly bent over, lashing out like a snake and grasping both. It transfixed them with the terrible thorns, which were now seen to be armed with needlepoints and to possess barbs like fish-hooks.]

The great tree standing on the farther edge of the island suddenly bent over, lashing out like a snake and grasping both. It transfixed them with the terrible thorns, which were now seen to be armed with needlepoints and to possess barbs like fish-hooks. It ripped at them with the long branches, which were veritable spears. The broad leaves, armed with revolting sucking disks, closed about the two animals, while the long, slender twigs, each of which was now seen to have an eye at its extremity, waved about, watching each movement of the captives from a safe distance.

If the struggle between the two animals had been awful, this was Titanic. The air was torn by the roars of the reptile, the screams of the great cat, and the shrieks of the tree. The very ground rocked with the ferocity of the conflict. There could be but one result--soon the tree, having absorbed the two gladiators, resumed its upright position in all its beauty.

The members of the little group stared at each other, sick at heart.

"This is NO place to start a copper-mine. I think we'd better beat it," remarked Seaton presently, wiping drops of perspiration from his forehead.

"I think so," acquiesced Crane. "We found air and Earth-like conditions here; we probably will elsewhere."

"Are you all right, Dottie?" asked Seaton.

"All right, Dicky," she replied, the color flowing back into her cheeks. "It scared me stiff, and I think I have a lot of white hairs right now, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything."

She paused an instant, and continued:

"Dick, there must be a queer streak of brutality in me, but would you mind blowing up that frightful tree? I wouldn't mind its nature if it were ugly--but look at it! It's so deceptively beautiful! You wouldn't think it had the disposition of a fiend, would you?"

* * * * *

A general laugh relieved the nervous tension, and Seaton stepped impulsively toward DuQuesne with his hand outstretched.

"You've squared your account, Blackie. Say the word and the war's all off."

DuQuesne ignored the hand and glanced coldly at the group of eager, friendly faces.

"Don't be sentimental," he remarked evenly as he turned away to his room. "Emotional scenes pain me. I gave my word to act as one of the party."

"Well, may I be kicked to death by little red spiders!" exclaimed Seaton, dumbfounded, as the other disappeared. "He ain't a man, he's a fish!"

"He's a machine. I always thought so, and now I know it," stated Margaret, and the others nodded agreement.

"Well, we'll sure pull his cork as soon as we get back!" snapped Seaton. "He asked for it, and we'll give him both barrels!"

"I know I acted the fool out there," Margaret apologized, flushing hotly and looking at Crane. "I don't know what made me act so stupid. I used to have a little nerve."

"You were a regular little brick, Peg," Seaton returned instantly. "Both you girls are all to the good--the right kind to have along in ticklish places."

Crane held out his steady hand and took Margaret's in a warm clasp.

"For a girl in your weakened condition you were wonderful. You have no reason to reproach yourself."

Tears filled the dark eyes, but were held back bravely as she held her head erect and returned the pressure of his hand.

"Just so you don't leave me behind next time," she returned lightly, and the last word concerning the incident had been said.

Seaton applied the power and soon they were approaching another planet, which was surrounded by a dense fog. Descending slowly, they found it to be a mass of boiling-hot steam and rank vapors, under enormous pressure.

The next planet they found to have a clear atmosphere, but the ground had a peculiar, barren look; and analysis of the gaseous envelope proved it to be composed almost entirely of chlorin. No life of an earthly type could be possible upon such a world, and a search for copper, even with the suits and helmets, would probably be fruitless if not impossible.

"Well," remarked Seaton as they were again in space, "we've got enough copper to visit several more worlds--several more solar systems, if necessary. But there's a nice, hopeful-looking planet right in front of us. It may be the one we're looking for."

Arrived in the belt of atmosphere, they tested it as before, and found it satisfactory.

CHAPTER XII

The Mastery of Mind Over Matter

They descended rapidly, directly over a large and imposing city in the middle of a vast, level, beautifully-planted plain. While they were watching it, the city vanished and the plain was transformed into a heavily-timbered mountain summit, the valleys falling away upon all sides as far as the eye could reach.

"Well, I'll say that's SOME mirage!" exclaimed Seaton, rubbing his eyes in astonishment. "I've seen mirages before, but never anything like that. Wonder what this air's made of? But we'll land, anyway, if we finally have to swim!"

The ship landed gently upon the summit, the occupants half expecting to see the ground disappear before their eyes. Nothing happened, however, and they disembarked, finding walking somewhat difficult because of the great mass of the planet. Looking around, they could see no sign of life, but they _felt_ a presence near them--a vast, invisible something.

Suddenly, out of the air in front of Seaton, a man materialized: a man identical with him in every feature and detail, even to the smudge of grease under one eye, the small wrinkles in his heavy blue serge suit, and the emblem of the American Chemical Society upon his watch-fob.

"Hello, folks," the stranger began in Seaton's characteristic careless speech. "I see you're surprised at my knowing your language. You're a very inferior race of animals--don't even understand telepathy, don't understand the luminiferous ether, or the relation between time and space. Your greatest things, such as the Skylark and your object-compass, are merely toys."

Changing instantly from Seaton's form to that of Dorothy, likewise a perfect imitation, the stranger continued without a break:

"Atoms and electrons and things, spinning and whirling in their dizzy little orbits...." It broke off abruptly, continuing in the form of DuQuesne:

"Couldn't make myself clear as Miss Vaneman--not a scientific convolution in her foolish little brain. You are a freer type, DuQuesne, unhampered by foolish, soft fancies. But you are very clumsy, although working fairly well with your poor tools--Brookings and his organization, the Perkins Caf and its clumsy wireless telephones. All of you are extremely low in the scale. Such animals have not been known in our universe for ten million years, which is as far back as I can remember. You have millions of years to go before you will amount to anything; before you will even rise above death and its attendant necessity, sex."

The strange being then assumed form after form with bewildering rapidity, while the spectators stared in dumb astonishment. In rapid succession it took on the likeness of each member of the party, of the vessel itself, of the watch in Seaton's pocket--reappearing as Seaton.

"Well, bunch," it said in a matter-of-fact voice, "there's no mental exercise in you and you're such a low form of life that you're of no use on this planet; so I'll dematerialize you."

* * * * *

A peculiar light came into its eyes as they stared intently into Seaton's, and he felt his senses reel under the impact of an awful mental force, but he fought back with all his power and remained standing.

"What's this?" the stranger demanded in surprise, "This is the first time in history that mere matter--which is only a manifestation of mind--has ever refused to obey mind. There's a screw loose somewhere."

"I must reason this out," it continued analytically, changing instantaneously into Crane's likeness. "Ah! I am not a perfect reproduction. This is the first matter I have ever encountered that I could not reproduce perfectly. There is some subtle difference. The external form is the same, the organic structure likewise. The molecules of substance are arranged as they should be, as are also the atoms in the molecule. The electrons in the atom--ah! There is the difficulty. The arrangement and number of electrons, as well as positive charges, are entirely different from what I had supposed. I must derive the formula."

"Let's go, folks!" said Seaton hastily, drawing Dorothy back toward the Skylark. "This dematerialization stunt may be play for him, but I don't want any of it in my family."

"No, you really _must_ stay," remonstrated the stranger. "Much as it is against my principles to employ brute force, you must stay and be properly dematerialized, alive or dead. Science demands it."

As he spoke, he started to draw his automatic pistol. Being in Crane's form, he drew slowly, as Crane did; and Seaton, with the dexterity of much sleight-of-hand work and of years of familiarity with his weapon, drew and fired in one incredibly rapid movement, before the other had withdrawn the pistol from his pocket. The X-plosive shell completely volatilized the stranger and hurled the party backward toward the Skylark, into which they fled hastily. As Crane, the last one to enter the vessel, fired his pistol and closed the massive door, Seaton leaped to the levers. As he did so, he saw a creature materialize in the air of the vessel and fall to the floor with a crash as he threw on the power. It was a frightful thing, like nothing ever before seen upon any world; with great teeth, long, sharp claws, and an automatic pistol clutched firmly in a human hand. Forced flat by the terrific acceleration of the vessel, it was unable to lift either itself or the weapon, and lay helpless.

"We take one trick, anyway!" blazed Seaton, as he threw on the power of the attractor and diffused its force into a screen over the party, so that the enemy could not materialize in the air above them and crush them by mere weight. "As pure mental force, you're entirely out of my class, but when you come down to matter, which I can understand, I'll give you a run for your money until my angles catch fire."

"That is a childish defiance. It speaks well for your courage, but ill for your intelligence," the animal said, and vanished.

A moment later Seaton's hair almost stood on end as he saw an automatic pistol appear upon the board directly in front of him, clamped to it by bands of steel. Paralyzed by this unlooked-for demonstration of the mastery of mind over matter, unable to move a muscle, he lay helpless, staring at the engine of death in front of him. Although the whole proceeding occupied only a fraction of a second, it seemed to Seaton as though he watched the weapon for hours. As the sleeve drew back, cocking the pistol and throwing a cartridge into the chamber, the trigger moved, and the hammer descended to speed on its way the bullet which was to blot out his life. There was a sharp click as the hammer fell--Seaton was surprised to find himself still alive until a voice spoke, apparently from the muzzle of the pistol, with the harsh sound of a metallic diaphragm.

"I was almost certain that it wouldn't explode," the stranger said, chattily. "You see, I haven't derived that formula yet, so I couldn't make a real explosive. I could of course, materialize beside you, under your protective screen, and crush you in a vise. I could materialize as a man of metal, able to stand up under this acceleration, and do you to death. I could even, by a sufficient expenditure of mental energy, materialize a planet around your ship and crush it. However, these crude methods are distasteful in the extreme, especially since you have already given me some slight and unexpected mental exercise. In return, I shall give you one chance for your lives. I cannot dematerialize either you or your vessel until I work out the formula for your peculiar atomic structure. If I can derive the formula before you reach the boundaries of my home-space, beyond which I cannot go, I shall let you go free. Deriving the formula will be a neat little problem. It should be fairly easy, as it involves only a simple integration in ninety-seven dimensions."

* * * * *

Silence ensued, and Seaton advanced his lever to the limit of his ability to retain consciousness. Almost overcome by the horror of their position, in an agony of suspense, expecting every instant to be hurled into nothingness, he battled on, with no thought of yielding, even in the face of those overwhelming mental odds.

"You can't do it, old top," he thought savagely, concentrating all the power of his highly-trained mind against the intellectual monster. "You can't dematerialize us, and you can't integrate above ninety-five dimensions to save your neck. You can't do it--you're slipping--you're all balled up right now!"

For more than an hour the silent battle raged, during which time the Skylark flew millions upon millions of miles toward Earth. Finally the stranger spoke again.

"You three win," it said abruptly. In answer to the unspoken surprise of all three men it went on: "Yes, all three of you got the same idea and Crane even forced his body to retain consciousness to fight me. Your efforts were very feeble, of course, but were enough to interrupt my calculations at a delicate stage, every time. You are a low form of life, undoubtedly, but with more mentality than I supposed at first. I could get that formula, of course, in spite of you, if I had time, but we are rapidly approaching the limits of my territory, outside of which even I could not think my way back. That is one thing in which your mechanical devices are superior to anything my own race developed before we became pure intellectuals. They point the way back to your Earth, which is so far away that even my mentality cannot grasp the meaning of the distance. I can understand the Earth, can visualize it from your minds, but I cannot project myself any nearer to it than we are at present. Before I leave you, I will say that you have conferred a real favor upon me--you have given me something to think about for thousands of cycles to come. Good-bye."

Assured that their visitor had really gone, Seaton reduced the power to that of gravity and Dorothy soon sat up, Margaret reviving more slowly.

"Dick," said Dorothy solemnly, "did that happen or have I been unconscious and just had a nightmare?"

"It happened, all right," returned her lover, wiping his brow in relief. "See that pistol clamped upon the top of the board? That's a token in remembrance of him."

Dorothy, though she had been only half conscious, had heard the words of the stranger. As she looked at the faces of the men, white and drawn with the mental struggle, she realized what they had gone through, and she drew Seaton down into one of the seats, stroking his hair tenderly.

Margaret went to her room immediately, and as she did not return, Dorothy followed. She came back presently with a look of concern upon her face.

"This life is a little hard on Peggy. I didn't realize how much harder for her it would be than it is for me until I went in there and found her crying. It is much harder for her, of course, since I am with you, Dick, and with you, Martin, whom I know so well. She must feel terribly alone."

"Why should she?" demanded Seaton. "We think she's some game little guy. Why, she's one of the bunch! She must know that!"

"Well, it isn't the same," insisted Dorothy. "You be extra nice to her, Dick. But don't you dare let her know I told you about the tears, or she'd eat me alive!"

Crane said nothing--a not unusual occurrence--but his face grew thoughtful and his manner, when Margaret appeared at mealtime, was more solicitous than usual and more than brotherly in its tenderness.

"I shall be an interstellar diplomat," Dorothy whispered to Seaton as soon as they were alone. "Wasn't that a beautiful bee I put upon Martin?"

Seaton stared at her a moment, then shook her gently before he took her into his arms.

* * * * *

The information, however, did not prevent him from calling to Crane a few minutes later, even though he was still deep in conversation with Margaret. Dorothy gave him an exasperated glance and walked away.

"I sure pulled a boner that time," Seaton muttered as he plucked at his hair ruefully. "It nearly did us.

"Let's test this stuff out and see if it's X, Mart, while DuQuesne's out of the way. If it is X, it's SOME find!"

Seaton cut off a bit of metal with his knife, hammered it into a small piece of copper, and threw the copper into the power-chamber, out of contact with the plating. As the metal received the current the vessel started slightly.

"It _is_ X! Mart, we've got enough of this stuff to supply three worlds!"

"Better put it away somewhere," suggested Crane, and after the metal had been removed to Seaton's cabin, the two men again sought a landing-place. Almost in their line of flight they saw a close cluster of stars, each emitting a peculiar greenish light which, in the spectroscope, revealed a blaze of copper lines.

"That's our meat, Martin. We ought to be able to grab some copper in that system, where there's so much of it that it colors their sunlight."

"The copper is undoubtedly there, but it might be too dangerous to get so close to so many suns. We may have trouble getting away."

"Well, our copper's getting horribly low. We've got to find some pretty quick, somewhere, or else walk back home, and there's our best chance. We'll feel our way along. If it gets too strong, we'll beat it."

When they had approached so close that the suns were great stars widely spaced in the heavens, Crane relinquished the controls to Seaton.

"If you will take the lever awhile, Dick, Margaret and I will go downstairs and see if we can locate a planet."

After a glance through the telescope, Crane knew that they were still too far from the group of suns to place any planet with certainty, and began taking notes. His mind was not upon his work, however, but was completely filled with thoughts of the girl at his side. The intervals between his comments became longer and longer until they were standing in silence, both staring with unseeing eyes out into the trackless void. But it was in no sense their usual companionable silence. Crane was fighting back the words he longed to say. This lovely girl was not here of her own accord--she had been torn forcibly from her home and from her friends, and he would not, could not, make her already difficult position even more unpleasant by forcing his attentions upon her. Margaret sensed something unusual and significant in his attitude and held herself tense, her heart beating wildly.

At that moment an asteroid came within range of the Skylark's watchful repeller, and at the lurch of the vessel, as it swung around the obstruction, Margaret would have fallen had not Crane instinctively caught her with one arm. Ordinarily this bit of courtesy would have gone unnoticed by both, as it had happened many times before, but in that heavily-charged atmosphere it took on a new significance. Both blushed hotly, and as their eyes met each saw that which held them spellbound. Slowly, almost as if without volition, Crane put his other arm around her. A wave of deeper crimson swept over her face and she bent her handsome head as her slender body yielded to his arms with no effort to free itself. Finally Crane spoke, his usually even voice faltering.

"Margaret, I hope you will not think this unfair of me ... but we have been through so much together that I feel as though we had known each other forever. Until we went through this last experience I had intended to wait--but why should we wait? Life is not lived in years alone, and you know how much I love you, my dearest!" he finished, passionately.

Her arms crept up around his neck, her bowed head lifted, and her eyes looked deep into his as she whispered her answer:

"I think I do ... Oh, Martin!"

Presently they made their way back to the engine-room, keeping the singing joy in their hearts inaudible and the kisses fresh upon their lips invisible. They might have kept their secret for a time, had not Seaton promptly asked:

"Well, what did you find, Mart?"

A panicky look appeared upon Crane's self-possessed countenance and Margaret's fair face glowed like a peony.

"_Yes_, what _did_ you find?" demanded Dorothy, as she noticed their confusion.

"My future wife," Crane answered steadily.

The two girls rushed into each other's arms and the two men silently gripped hands in a clasp of steel; for each of the four knew that these two unions were not passing fancies, lightly entered into and as lightly cast aside, but were true partnerships which would endure throughout the entire span of life.

* * * * *

A planet was located and the Skylark flew toward it. Discovering that it was apparently situated in the center of the cluster of suns, they hesitated; but finding that there was no dangerous force present, they kept on. As they drew nearer, so that the planet appeared as a very small moon, they saw that the Skylark was in a blaze of green light, and looking out of the windows, Crane counted seventeen great suns, scattered in all directions in the sky! Slowing down abruptly as the planet was approached, Seaton dropped the vessel slowly through the atmosphere, while Crane and DuQuesne tested and analyzed it.

"Pressure, thirty pounds per square inch. Surface gravity as compared to that of the Earth, two-fifths. Air-pressure about double that of the Earth, while a five-pound weight weighs only two pounds. A peculiar combination," reported Crane, and DuQuesne added:

"Analysis about the same as our air except for two and three-tenths per cent of a gas that isn't poisonous and which has a peculiar, fragrant odor. I can't analyze it and think it probably an element unknown upon Earth, or at least very rare."

"It would have to be rare if you don't know what it is," acknowledged Seaton, locking the Skylark in place and going over to smell the strange gas.

Deciding that the air was satisfactory, the pressure inside the vessel was slowly raised to the value of that outside and two doors were opened, to allow the new atmosphere free circulation.

Seaton shut off the power actuating the repeller and let the vessel settle slowly toward the ocean which was directly beneath them--an ocean of a deep, intense, wondrously beautiful blue, which the scientists studied with interest. Arrived at the surface, Seaton moistened a rod in a wave, and tasted it cautiously, then uttered a yell of joy--a yell broken off abruptly as he heard the sound of his own voice. Both girls started as the vibrations set up in the dense air smote upon their eardrums. Seaton moderated his voice and continued:

"I forgot about the air-pressure. But hurrah for this ocean--it's ammoniacal copper sulphate solution! We can sure get all the copper we want, right here, but it would take weeks to evaporate the water and recover the metal. We can probably get it easier ashore. Let's go!"

They started off just above the surface of the ocean toward the nearest continent, which they had observed from the air.

CHAPTER XIII

Nalboon of Mardonale

As the Skylark approached the shore, its occupants heard a rapid succession of heavy detonations, apparently coming from the direction in which they were traveling.

"Wonder what that racket is?" asked Seaton.

"It sounds like big guns," said Crane, and DuQuesne nodded agreement.

"Big guns is right. They're shooting high explosive shells, too, or I never heard any. Even allowing for the density of the air, that kind of noise isn't made by pop-guns."

"Let's go see what's doing," and Seaton started to walk toward one of the windows with his free, swinging stride. Instantly he was a-sprawl, the effort necessary to carry his weight upon the Earth's surface lifting him into the air in a succession of ludicrous hops, but he soon recovered himself and walked normally.

"I forgot this two-fifths gravity stuff," he laughed. "Walk as though we had only a notch of power on and it goes all right. It sure is funny to feel so light when we're so close to the ground."

He closed the doors to keep out a part of the noise and advanced the speed lever a little, so that the vessel tilted sharply under the pull of the almost horizontal bar.

"Go easy," cautioned Crane. "We do not want to get in the way of one of their shells. They may be of a different kind than those we are familiar with."

"Right--easy it is. We'll stay forty miles above them, if necessary."

As the great speed of the ship rapidly lessened the distance, the sound grew heavier and clearer--like one continuous explosion. So closely did one deafening concussion follow another that the ear could not distinguish the separate reports.

"I see them," simultaneously announced Crane, who was seated at one of the forward windows searching the country with his binoculars, and Seaton, who, from the pilot's seat, could see in any direction.

The others hurried to the windows with their glasses and saw an astonishing sight.

"Aerial battleships, eight of 'em!" exclaimed Seaton, "as big as the Idaho. Four of 'em are about the same shape as our battleships. No wings--they act like helicopters."

"Four of them are battleships, right enough, but what about the other four?" asked DuQuesne. "They are not ships or planes or anything else that I ever heard of."

"They are animals," asserted Crane. "Machines never were and never will be built like that."

As the Skylark cautiously approached, it was evident to the watchers that four of the contestants were undoubtedly animals. Here indeed was a new kind of animal, an animal able to fight on even terms with a first-class battleship! Frightful aerial monsters they were. Each had an enormous, torpedo-shaped body, with scores of prodigiously long tentacles like those of a devil-fish and a dozen or more great, soaring wings. Even at that distance they could see the row of protruding eyes along the side of each monstrous body and the terrible, prow-like beaks tearing through the metal of the warships opposing them. They could see, by the reflection of the light from the many suns, that each monster was apparently covered by scales and joints of some transparent armor. That it was real and highly effective armor there could be no doubt, for each battleship bristled with guns of heavy caliber and each gun was vomiting forth a continuous stream of fire. Shells bursting against each of the creatures made one continuous blaze, and the uproar was indescribable--an uninterrupted cataclysm of sound appalling in its intensity.

* * * * *

The battle was brief. Soon all four of the battleships had crumpled to the ground, their crews absorbed by the terrible sucking arms or devoured by the frightful beaks. They did not die in vain--three of the monsters had been blown to atoms by shells which had apparently penetrated their armor. The fourth was pursuing something, which Seaton now saw was a fleet of small airships, which had flown away from the scene of conflict. Swift as they were, the monster covered three feet to their one.

"We can't stand for anything like that," cried Seaton, as he threw on the power and the Skylark leaped ahead. "Get ready to bump him off, Mart, when I jerk him away. He acts hard-boiled, so give him a real one--fifty milligrams!"

Sweeping on with awful speed the monster seized the largest and most gaily decorated plane in his hundred-foot tentacles just as the Skylark came within sighting distance. In four practically simultaneous movements Seaton sighted the attractor at the ugly beak, released all its power, pointed the main bar of the Skylark directly upward, and advanced his speed lever. There was a crash of rending metal as the thing was torn loose from the plane and jerked a hundred miles into the air, struggling so savagely in that invisible and incomprehensible grip that the three-thousand-ton mass of the Skylark tossed and pitched like a child's plaything. Those inside her heard the sharp, spiteful crack of the machine-gun, and an instant later they heard a report that paralyzed their senses, even inside the vessel and in the thin air of their enormous elevation, as the largest X-plosive bullet prepared by the inventors struck full upon the side of the hideous body. There was no smoke, no gas or vapor of any kind--only a huge volume of intolerable flame as the energy stored within the atoms of copper, instantaneously liberated, heated to incandescence and beyond all the atmosphere within a radius of hundreds of feet. The monster disappeared utterly, and Seaton, with unerring hand, reversed the bar and darted back down toward the fleet of airships. He reached them in time to focus the attractor upon the wrecked and helpless plane in the middle of its five-thousand-foot fall and lowered it gently to the ground, surrounded by the fleet.

The Skylark landed easily beside the wrecked machine, and the wanderers saw that their vessel was completely surrounded by a crowd of people--men and women identical in form and feature with themselves. They were a superbly molded race, the men fully as large as Seaton and DuQuesne; the women, while smaller than the men, were noticeably taller than the two women in the car. The men wore broad collars of metal, numerous metallic ornaments, and heavily-jeweled leather belts and shoulder-straps which were hung with weapons of peculiar patterns. The women carried no weapons, but were even more highly decorated than were the men--each slender, perfectly-formed body scintillated with the brilliance of hundreds of strange gems, flashing points of fire. Jeweled bands of metal and leather restrained their carefully-groomed hair; jeweled collars encircled their throats; jeweled belts, jeweled bracelets, jeweled anklets, each added its quota of brilliance to the glittering whole. The strangers wore no clothing, and their smooth skins shone a dark, livid, utterly indescribable color in the peculiar, unearthly, yellowish-bluish-green glare of the light. Green their skins undoubtedly were, but not any shade of green visible in the Earthly spectrum. The "whites" of their eyes were a light yellowish-green. The heavy hair of the women and the close-cropped locks of the men were green as well--a green so dark as to be almost black, as were also their eyes.

"Well, what d'you know about that?" pondered Seaton, dazedly. "They're human, right enough, but ye gods, what a color!"

"It is hard to tell how much of that color is real, and how much of it is due to this light," answered Crane. "Wait until you get outside, away from our daylight lamps, and you will probably look like a Chinese puzzle. As to the form, it is logical to suppose that wherever conditions are similar to those upon the Earth, and the age is anywhere nearly the same, development would be along the same lines as with us."

"That's right, too. Dottie, your hair will sure look gorgeous in this light. Let's go out and give the natives a treat!"

"I wouldn't look like that for a million dollars!" retorted Dorothy, "and if I'm going to look like that I won't get out of the ship, so there!"

"Cheer up, Dottie, you won't look like that. Your hair will be black in this light."

"Then what color will mine be?" asked Margaret.

Seaton glanced at her black hair.

"Probably a very dark and beautiful green," he grinned, his gray eyes sparkling, "but we'll have to wait and see. Friends and fellow-countrymen, I've got a hunch that this is going to be SOME visit. How about it, shall we go ahead with it?"

Dorothy went up to him, her face bright with eagerness.

"Oh, what a lark! Let's go!"

* * * * *

Even in DuQuesne's cold presence, Margaret's eyes sought those of her lover, and his sleeve, barely touching her arm, was enough to send a dancing thrill along it.

"Onward, men of Earth!" she cried, and Seaton, stepping up to the window, rapped sharply upon the glass with the butt of his pistol and raised both hands high above his head in the universal sign of peace. In response, a man of Herculean mold, so splendidly decorated that his harness was one blazing mass of jewels, waved his arm and shouted a command. The crowd promptly fell back, leaving a clear space of several hundred yards. The man, evidently one in high command, unbuckled his harness, dropping every weapon, and advanced toward the Skylark, both arms upraised in Seaton's gesture.

Seaton went to the door and started to open it.

"Better talk to him from inside," cautioned Crane.

"I don't think so, Mart. He's peaceable, and I've got my gun in my pocket. Since he doesn't know what clothes are he'll think I'm unarmed, which is as it should be; and if he shows fight, it won't take more than a week for me to get into action."

"All right, go on. DuQuesne and I will come along."

"Absolutely not. He's alone, so I've got to be. I notice that some of his men are covering us, though. You might do the same for them, with a couple of the machine guns."

Seaton stepped out of the car and went to meet the stranger. When they had approached to within a few feet of each other the stranger stopped. He flexed his left arm smartly, so that the finger-tips touched his left ear, and smiled broadly, exposing a row of splendid, shining, green teeth. Then he spoke, a meaningless jumble of sounds. His voice, though light and thin, nevertheless seemed to be of powerful timbre.

Seaton smiled in return and saluted.

"Hello, Chief. I get your idea all right, and we're glad you're peaceable, but your language doesn't mean a thing in my young life."

The Chief tapped himself upon the chest, saying distinctly and impressively:

"Nalboon."

"Nalboon," repeated Seaton, and added, pointing to himself:

"Seaton."

"See Tin," answered the stranger, and again indicating himself, "Domak gok Mardonale."

"That must be his title," thought Seaton rapidly. "Have to give myself one, I guess."

"Boss of the Road," he replied, drawing himself up with pride.

The introduction made, Nalboon pointed to the wrecked plane, inclined his head in thanks, and turned to his people with one arm upraised, shouting an order in which Seaton could distinguish something that sounded like "See Tin, Bass uvvy Rood." Instantly every right arm in the assemblage was aloft, that of each man bearing a weapon, while the left arms snapped into the peculiar salute and a mighty cry arose as all repeated the name and title of the distinguished visitor.

Seaton turned to the Skylark, motioning to Crane to open the door.

"Bring out one of those big four-color signal rockets, Mart!" he called. "They're giving us a royal reception--let's acknowledge it right."

* * * * *

The party appeared, Crane carrying the huge rocket with an air of deference. As they approached, Seaton shrugged one shoulder and his cigarette-case appeared in his hand. Nalboon started, and in spite of his utmost efforts at self-control, he glanced at it in surprise. The case flew open and Seaton, taking a cigarette, extended the case.

"Smoke?" he asked affably. The other took one, but showed plainly that he had no idea of the use to which it was to be put. This astonishment of the stranger at a simple sleight-of-hand feat and his apparent ignorance of tobacco emboldened Seaton. Reaching into his mouth, he pulled out a flaming match, at which Nalboon started violently. While all the natives watched in amazement, Seaton lighted the cigarette, and after half consuming it in two long inhalations, he apparently swallowed the remainder, only to bring it to light again. Having smoked it, he apparently swallowed the butt, with evident relish.

"They don't know anything about matches or smoking," he said, turning to Crane. "This rocket will tie them up in a knot. Step back, everybody."

He bowed deeply to Nalboon, pulling a lighted match for his ear as he did so, and lighted the fuse. There was a roar, a shower of sparks, a blaze of colored fire as the great rocket flew upward; but to Seaton's surprise, Nalboon took it quite as a matter of course, saluting as an acknowledgment of the courtesy.

Seaton motioned to his party to approach, and turned to Crane.

"Better not, Dick. Let him think that you are the king of everything in sight."

"Not on your life. If he is one king, we are two," and he introduced Crane, with great ceremony, to the Domak as the "Boss of the Skylark," at which the salute by his people was repeated.

Nalboon then shouted an order and a company of soldiers led by an officer came toward them, surrounding a small group of people, apparently prisoners. These captives, seven men and seven women, were much lighter in color than the rest of the gathering, having skins of a ghastly, pale shade, practically the same color as the whites of their eyes. In other bodily aspects they were the same as their captors in appearance, save that they were entirely naked except for the jeweled metal collars worn by all and a massive metal belt worn by one man. They walked with a proud and lofty carriage, scorn for their captors in every step.

Nalboon barked an order to the prisoners. They stared in defiance, motionless, until the man wearing the belt who had studied Seaton closely, spoke a few words in a low tone, when they all prostrated themselves. Nalboon then waved his hand, giving the whole group to Seaton as slaves. Seaton, with no sign of his surprise, thanked the giver and motioned his slaves to rise. They obeyed and placed themselves behind the party--two men and two women behind Seaton and the same number behind Crane; one man and one woman behind each of the others.

Seaton then tried to make Nalboon understand that they wanted copper, pointing to his anklet, the only copper in sight. The chief instantly removed the trinket and handed it to Seaton; who, knowing by the gasp of surprise of the guard that it was some powerful symbol, returned it with profuse apologies. After trying in vain to make the other understand what he wanted, he led him into the Skylark and showed him the remnant of the power-bar. He showed him its original size and indicated the desired number by counting to sixteen upon his fingers. Nalboon nodded his comprehension and going outside, pointed upward toward the largest of the eleven suns visible, motioning its rising and setting, four times.

He then invited the visitors, in unmistakable sign language, to accompany him as guests of honor, but Seaton refused.

"Lead on, MacDuff, we follow," he replied, explaining his meaning by signs as they turned to enter the vessel. The slaves followed closely until Crane remonstrated.

"We don't want them aboard, do we, Dick? There are too many of them."

"All right," Seaton replied, and waved them away. As they stepped back the guard seized the nearest, a woman, and forced her to her knees; while a man, adorned with a necklace of green human teeth and carrying a shining broadsword, prepared to decapitate her.

"We must take them with us, I see," said Crane, as he brushed the guards aside. Followed by the slaves, the party entered the Skylark, and the dark green people embarked in their airplanes and helicopters.

Nalboon rode in a large and gaily-decorated plane, which led the fleet at its full speed of six hundred miles an hour, the Skylark taking a placing a few hundred yards above the flagship.

"I don't get these folks at all, Mart," said Seaton, after a moment's silence. "They have machines far ahead of anything we have on Earth and big guns that shoot as fast as machine-guns, and yet are scared to death at a little simple sleight-of-hand. They don't seem to understand matches at all, and yet treat fire-works as an every-day occurrence."

"We will have to wait until we know them better," replied Crane, and DuQuesne added:

"From what I have seen, their power seems to be all electrical. Perhaps they aren't up with us in chemistry, even though they are ahead of us in mechanics?"

* * * * *

Flying above a broad, but rapid and turbulent stream, the fleet soon neared a large city, and the visitors from Earth gazed with interest at this metropolis of the unknown world. The buildings were all the same height, flat-roofed, and arranged in squares very much as our cities are arranged. There were no streets, the spaces between the buildings being park-like areas, evidently laid out for recreation, amusement, and sport. There was no need for streets; all traffic was in the air. The air seemed full of flying vehicles, darting in all directions, but it was soon evident that there was exact order in the apparent confusion, each class of vessel and each direction of traffic having its own level. Eagerly the three men studied the craft, which ranged in size from one-man helicopters, little more than single chairs flying about in the air, up to tremendous multiplane freighters, capable of carrying thousands of tons.

Flying high over the city to avoid its congested air-lanes, the fleet descended toward an immense building just outside the city proper, and all landed upon its roof save the flagship, which led the Skylark to a landing-dock nearby--a massive pile of metal and stone, upon which Nalboon and his retinue stood to welcome the guests. After Seaton had anchored the vessel immovably by means of the attractor, the party disembarked, Seaton remarking with a grin:

"Don't be surprised at anything I do, folks. I'm a walking storehouse of junk of all kinds, so that if occasion arises I can put on a real exhibition."

As they turned toward their host, a soldier, in his eagerness to see the strangers, jostled another. Without a word two keen swords flew from their scabbards and a duel to the death ensued. The visitors stared in amazement, but no one else paid any attention to the combat, which was soon over; the victor turning away from the body of his opponent and resuming his place without creating a ripple of interest.

Nalboon led the way into an elevator, which dropped rapidly to the ground-floor level. Massive gates were thrown open, and through ranks of people prostrate upon their faces the party went out into the palace grounds of the Domak, or Emperor, of the great nation of Mardonale.

Never before had Earthly eyes rested upon such scenes of splendor. Every color and gradation of their peculiar spectrum was present, in solid, liquid, and gas. The carefully-tended trees were all colors of the rainbow, as were the grasses and flowers along the walks. The fountains played streams of many and constantly-changing hues, and even the air was tinted and perfumed, swirling through metal arches in billows of ever-varying colors and scents. Colors and combinations of colors impossible to describe were upon every hand, fantastically beautiful in that peculiar, livid light. Diamonds and rubies, their colors so distorted by the green radiance as to be almost unrecognizable; emeralds glowing with an intense green impossible in earthly light, together with strange gems peculiar to this strange world, sparkled and flashed from railings, statues, and pedestals throughout the ground.

"Isn't this gorgeous, Dick?" whispered Dorothy. "But what do I look like? I wish I had a mirror--you look simply awful. Do I look like you do?"

"Not being able to see myself, I can't say, but I imagine you do. You look as you would under a county-fair photographer's mercury-vapor arc lamps, only worse. The colors can't be described. You might as well try to describe cerise to a man born blind as to try to express these colors in English, but as near as I can come to it, your eyes are a dark sort of purplish green, with the whites of your eyes and your teeth a kind of plush green. Your skin is a pale yellowish green, except for the pink of your cheeks, which is a kind of black, with orange and green mixed up in it. Your lips are black, and your hair is a funny kind of color, halfway between black and old rose, with a little green and...."

"Heavens, Dick, stop! That's enough!" choked Dorothy. "We all look like hobgoblins. We're even worse than the natives."

"Sure we are. They were born here and are acclimated to it--we are strangers and aren't. I would like to see what one of these people would look like in Washington."

* * * * *

Nalboon led them into the palace proper and into a great dining hall, where a table was already prepared for the entire party. This room was splendidly decorated with jewels, its many windows being simply masses of gems. The walls were hung with a cloth resembling silk, which fell to the floor in shimmering waves of color.

Woodwork there was none. Doors, panels, tables, and chairs were cunningly wrought of various metals. Seaton and DuQuesne could recognize a few of them, but for the most part they were unknown upon the Earth; and were, like the jewels and vegetation of this strange world, of many and various peculiar colors. A closer inspection of one of the marvelous tapestries showed that it also was of metal, its threads numbering thousands to the inch. Woven of many different metals, of vivid but harmonious colors in a strange and intricate design, it seemed to writhe as its colors changed with every variation in the color of the light; which, pouring from concealed sources, was reflected by the highly-polished metal and innumerable jewels of the lofty, domed ceiling.

"Oh ... isn't this too perfectly gorgeous?" breathed Dorothy. "I'd give anything for a dress made out of that stuff, Dick. Cloth-of-gold is common by comparison!"

"Would you dare wear it, Dottie?" asked Margaret.

"_Would_ I? I'd wear it in a minute if I could only get it. It would take Washington by storm!"

"I'll try to get a piece of it, then," smiled Seaton. "I'll see about it while we are getting the copper."

"We'd better be careful in choosing what we eat here, Seaton," suggested DuQuesne, as the Domak himself led them to the table.

"We sure had. With a copper ocean and green teeth, I shouldn't be surprised if copper, arsenic, and other such trifles formed a regular part of their diet."

"The girls and I will wait for you two chemists to approve every dish before we try it, then," said Crane.

Nalboon placed his guests, the light-skinned slaves standing at attention behind them, and numerous servants, carrying great trays, appeared. The servants were intermediate in color between the light and the dark races, with dull, unintelligent faces, but quick and deft in their movements.

The first course--a thin, light wine, served in metal goblets--was approved by the chemists, and the dinner was brought on. There were mighty joints of various kinds of meat; birds and fish, both raw and cooked in many ways; green, pink, purple, and white vegetables and fruits. The majordomo held each dish up to Seaton for inspection, the latter waving away the fish and the darkest green foods, but approving the others. Heaping plates, or rather metal trays, of food were placed before the diners, and the attendants behind their chairs handed them peculiar implements--knives with razor edges, needle-pointed stilettoes instead of forks, and wide, flexible spatulas, which evidently were to serve the purposes of both forks and spoons.

"I simply can't eat with these things!" exclaimed Dorothy in dismay, "and I don't like to drink soup out of a can, so there!"

"That's where my lumberjack training comes in handy," grinned Seaton. "With this spatula I can eat faster than I could with two forks. What do you want, girls, forks or spoons, or both?"

"Both, please."

Seaton reached out over the table, seizing forks and spoons from the air and passing them to the others, while the natives stared in surprise. The Domak took a bowl filled with brilliant blue crystals from the major-domo, sprinkled his food liberally with the substance, and passed it to Seaton, who looked at the crystals attentively.

"Copper sulphate," he said to Crane. "It's a good thing they add it at the table instead of cooking with it, or we'd be out of luck."

Waving the copper sulphate away, he again reached out, this time producing a pair of small salt-and pepper-shakers, which he passed to the Domak after he had seasoned the dishes before him. Nalboon tasted the pepper cautiously and smiled in delight, half-emptying the shaker upon his plate. He then sprinkled a few grains of salt into his palm, stared at them with an expression of doubting amazement, and after a few rapid sentences poured them into a dish held by an officer who had sprung to his side. The officer studied them closely, then carefully washed his chief's hand. Nalboon turned to Seaton, plainly asking for the salt-cellar.

"Sure, old top. Keep 'em both, there's lots more where those came from," as he produced several more sets in the same mysterious way and handed them to Crane, who in turn passed them to the others.

* * * * *

The meal progressed merrily, with much conversation in the sign-language between the two parties. It was evident that Nalboon, usually stern and reticent, was in an unusually pleasant mood. The viands, though of peculiar flavor, were in the main pleasing to the palates of the Earthly visitors.

"This fruit salad, or whatever it is, is divine," remarked Dorothy, after an experimental bite. "May we eat as much as we like, or had we better just eat a little?"

"Go as far as you like," returned her lover. "I wouldn't recommend it, as a steady diet, as I imagine everything contains copper and other heavy metals in noticeable amounts, and probably considerable arsenic, but for a few days it can't very well hurt us much."

After the meal, Nalboon bade them a ceremonious farewell, and they were escorted to a series of five connecting rooms by the royal usher, escorted by an entire company of soldiers, who mounted guard outside the doors. Gathered in one room, they discussed sleeping arrangements. The girls insisted that they would sleep together, and that the men should occupy the rooms at either side. As the girls turned away, the four slaves followed.

"We don't want these people, and I can't make them go away!" cried Dorothy.

"I don't want them, either," replied Seaton, "but if we chase them out they'll get their heads chopped off. You girls take the women and we'll take the men."

Seaton waved all the women into the girls' room, but they paused irresolutely. One of them went up to the man wearing the metal belt, evidently their leader, and spoke to him rapidly as she threw her arms around his neck. He shook his head, motioning toward Seaton several times as he spoke to her reassuringly. With his arm about her tenderly, he led her to the door, the other women following. Crane and DuQuesne having gone to their rooms with their attendants, the man wearing the belt drew the blinds and turned to assist Seaton in taking off his clothes.

"I never had a valet before, but go as far as you like if it pleases you," remarked Seaton, as he began to throw off his clothes. A multitude of small articles fell from their hiding-places in his garments as he removed them. Almost stripped, Seaton stretched vigorously, the muscles writhing and rippling in great ridges under the satin skin of his broad back and mighty arms and shoulders as he filled his capacious lungs and twisted about, working off the stiffness caused by the days of comparative confinement.

The four slaves stared in open-mouthed astonishment at this display of muscular development and conversed among themselves as they gathered up Seaton's discarded clothing. Their leader picked up a salt-shaker, a couple of silver knives and forks, and some other articles, and turned to Seaton, apparently asking permission to do something with them. Seaton nodded assent carelessly and turned to his bed. As he did so, he heard a slight clank of arms in the hall as the guard was changed, and lifting the blind a trifle he saw that guards were stationed outside as well. As he went to bed, he wondered whether the guards were guards of honor or jailers; whether he and his party were honored guests or prisoners.

Three of the slaves, at a word from their chief, threw themselves upon the floor and slept, but he himself did not rest. Opening the apparently solid metal belt, he took out a great number of small tools, many tiny instruments, and several spools of insulated wire. He then took the articles Seaton had given him, taking great pains not to spill a single grain of salt, and set to work. Hour after hour he labored, a strange, exceedingly complex instrument taking form under his clever fingers.

+--------------------------------------+ | | | _By the time you finish reading the | | final instalment of "The Skylark of | | Space," we are certain that you will | | agree with us that it is one of the | | outstanding scienti-fiction stories | | of the decade; an interplanetarian | | story that will not be eclipsed | | soon. It will be referred to by all | | scienti-fiction fans for years to | | come. It will be read and reread. | | This is not a mere prophecy of ours, | | because we have been deluged with | | letters since we began publishing | | this story. In the closing chapters, | | you will follow the adventures with | | bated breath, and you will find that | | though the two preceding instalments | | were hair-raising and thought | | absorbing, the final instalment | | eclipses the others a good deal. | | Plots, counterplots, hair-raising | | and hair-breadth escapes, mixed with | | love, adventure and good science | | seem to fairly tumble all over the | | pages. By the time you finish this | | instalment, you will wish to go back | | to the beginning of the story and | | read it more carefully and thrill | | all over again._ | | | +--------------------------------------+

CHAPTER XIV

Nalboon Unmasked

After a long, sound sleep, Seaton awoke and sprang out of bed. No sooner had he started to shave, however, than one of the slaves touched his arm, motioning him into a reclining chair and showing him a keen blade, long and slightly curved. Seaton lay down and the slave shaved him with a rapidity and smoothness he had never before experienced, so wonderfully sharp was the peculiar razor. After Seaton had dressed, the barber started to shave the chief slave, without any preliminary treatment save rubbing his face with a perfumed oil.

"Hold on a minute," interjected Seaton, who was watching the process with interest, "here's something that helps a lot." He lathered the face with his brush and the man looked up in surprised pleasure as his stiff beard was swept away without a sound.

Seaton called to the others and soon the party was assembled in his room, all dressed very lightly, because of the unrelieved and unvarying heat, which was constant at one hundred degrees. A gong sounded, and one of the slaves opened the door, ushering in a party of servants bearing a table, ready set. During the meal, Seaton was greatly surprised at hearing Dorothy carrying on a halting conversation, with one of the women standing behind her.

"I knew that you were a language shark, Dottie, with five or six different ones to your credit, but I didn't suppose you could learn to talk this stuff in one day."

"I can't," she replied, "but I've picked up a few words of it. I can understand very little of what they are trying to tell me."

The woman spoke rapidly to the man standing behind Seaton, and as soon as the table had been carried away, he asked permission to speak to Dorothy. Fairly running across to her, he made a slight obeisance and in eager tones poured forth such a stream of language that she held up her hand to silence him.

"Go slower, please," she said, and added a couple of words in his own tongue.

There ensued a strange dialogue, with many repetitions and much use of signs. She turned to Seaton, with a puzzled look.

"I can't make out all he says, Dick, but he wants you to take him into another room of the palace here, to get back something or other that they took from him when they captured him. He can't go alone--I think he says he will be killed if he goes anywhere without you. And he says that when you get there, you must be sure not to let the guards come inside."

"All right, let's go!" and Seaton motioned the man to precede him. As Seaton started for the door, Dorothy fell into step beside him.

"Better stay back, Dottie, I'll be back in a minute," he said at the door.

"I will not stay back. Wherever you go, I go," she replied in a voice inaudible to the others. "I simply will not stay away from you a single minute that I don't have to."

"All right, little girl," he replied in the same tone. "I don't want to be away from you, either, and I don't think that we're in any danger here."

Preceded by the chief slave and followed by half a dozen others, they went out into the hall. No opposition was made to their progress, but a full half-company of armed guards fell in around them as an escort, regarding Seaton with looks composed of equal parts of reverence and fear. The slave led the way rapidly to a room in a distant wing of the palace and opened the door. As Seaton stepped in, he saw that it was evidently an audience-chamber or court-room, and that it was now entirely empty. As the guard approached the door, Seaton waved them back. All retreated across the hall except the officer in charge, who refused to move. Seaton, the personification of offended dignity, first stared at the offender, who returned the stare, and stepped up to him insolently, then pushed him back roughly, forgetting that his strength, great upon Earth, would be gigantic upon this smaller world. The officer spun across the corridor, knocking down three of his men in his flight. Picking himself up, he drew his sword and rushed, while his men fled in panic to the extreme end of the corridor. Seaton did not wait for him, but in one bound leaped half-way across the intervening space to meet him. With the vastly superior agility of his earthly muscles he dodged the falling broadsword and drove his left fist full against the fellow's chin, with all the force of his mighty arm and all the momentum of his rapidly moving body behind the blow. The crack of breaking bones was distinctly audible as the officer's head snapped back. The force of the blow lifted him high into the air, and after turning a complete somersault, he brought up with a crash against the opposite wall, dropping to the floor stone dead. As several of his men, braver than the others, lifted their peculiar rifles, Seaton drew and fired in one incredibly swift motion, the X-plosive bullet obliterating the entire group of men and demolishing that end of the palace.

* * * * *

In the meantime the slave had taken several pieces of apparatus from a cabinet in the room and had placed them in his belt. Stopping only to observe for a few moments a small instrument which he clamped upon the head of the dead man, he rapidly led the way back to the room they had left and set to work upon the instrument he had constructed while the others had been asleep. He connected it, in an intricate system of wiring, with the pieces of apparatus he had just recovered.

"That's a complex job of wiring," said DuQuesne admiringly. "I've seen several intricate pieces of apparatus myself, but he has so many circuits there that I'm lost. It would take an hour to figure out the lines and connections alone."

Straightening abruptly, the slave clamped several electrodes upon his temples and motioned to Seaton and the others, speaking to Dorothy as he did so.

"He wants us to let him put those things on our heads," she translated. "Shall we let him, Dick?"

"Yes," he replied without hesitation. "I've got a real hunch that he's our friend, and I'm not sure of Nalboon. He doesn't act right."

"I think so, too," agreed the girl, and Crane added:

"I can't say that I relish the idea, but since I know that you are a good poker player, Dick, I am willing to follow your hunch. How about you, DuQuesne?"

"Not I," declared that worthy, emphatically. "Nobody wires me up to anything I can't understand, and that machine is too deep for me."

Margaret elected to follow Crane's example, and, impressed by the need for haste evident in the slave's bearing, the four walked up to the machine without further talk. The electrodes were clamped into place quickly and the slave pressed a lever. Instantly the four visitors felt that they had a complete understanding of the languages and customs of both Mardonale, the nation in which they now were, and of Kondal, to which nation the slaves belonged, the only two civilized nations upon Osnome. While the look of amazement at this method of receiving instruction was still upon their faces, the slave--or rather, as they now knew him, Dunark, the Kofedix or Crown Prince of the great nation of Kondal--began to disconnect the wires. He cut out the wires leading to the two girls and to Crane, and was reaching for Seaton's, when there was a blinding flash, a crackling sound, the heavy smoke of burning metal and insulation, and both Dunark and Seaton fell to the floor.

Before Crane could reach them, however, they were upon their feet and the stranger said in his own tongue, now understood by every one but DuQuesne:

"This machine is a mechanical educator, a thing entirely new, in our world at least. Although I have been working on it for a long time, it is still in a very crude form. I did not like to use it in its present state of development, but it was necessary in order to warn you of what Nalboon is going to do to you, and to convince you that the best way of saving your lives would save our lives as well. The machine worked perfectly until something, I don't know what, went wrong. Instead of stopping, as it should have done, at teaching your party to speak our languages, it short-circuited us two completely, so that every convolution in each of our brains has been imprinted upon the brain of the other. It was the sudden formation of all the new convolutions that rendered us unconscious. I can only apologize for the break-down, and assure you that my intentions were of the best."

"You needn't apologize," returned Seaton. "That was a wonderful performance, and we're both gainers, anyway, aren't we? It has taken us all our lives to learn what little we know, and now we each have the benefit of two lifetimes, spent upon different worlds! I must admit, though, that I have a whole lot of knowledge that I don't know how to use."

"I am glad you take it that way," returned the other warmly, "for I am infinitely the better off for the exchange. The knowledge I imparted was nothing, compared to that which I received. But time presses--I must tell you our situation. I am, as you now know, the Kofedix of Kondal. The other thirteen are fedo and fediro, or, as you would say, princes and princesses of the same nation. We were captured by one of Nalboon's raiding parties while upon a hunting trip, being overcome by some new, stupefying gas, so that we could not kill ourselves. As you know, Kondal and Mardonale have been at war for over ten thousand karkamo--something more than six thousand years of your time. The war between us is one of utter extermination. Captives are never exchanged and only once during an ordinary lifetime does one ever escape. Our attendants were killed immediately. We were being taken to furnish sport for Nalboon's party by being fed to one of his captive kolono--animals something like your earthly devilfish--when the escort of battleships was overcome by those four karlono, the animals you saw, and one of them seized Nalboon's plane, in which we were prisoners. You killed the karlon, saving our lives as well as those of Nalboon and his party.

* * * * *

"Having saved his life, you and your party should be honored guests of the most honored kind, and I venture to say that you would be so regarded in any other nation of the universe. But Nalboon, the Domak--a title equivalent to your word 'Emperor' and our word 'Karfedix'--of Mardonale, is utterly without either honor or conscience, as are all Mardonalians. At first he was afraid of you, as were we all. We thought you visitors from a planet of our fifteenth sun, which is now at its nearest possible approach to us. After your display of superhuman power and ability, we expected instant annihilation. However, after seeing the Skylark as a machine, discovering that you are short of power, and finding that you are gentle instead of bloodthirsty by nature, Nalboon lost his fear of you and resolved to rob you of your vessel, with its wonderful secrets of power. Though we are so ignorant of chemistry that I cannot understand the thousandth part of what I just learned from you, we are a race of mechanics and have developed machines of many kinds to a high state of efficiency, including electrical machines of all kinds. In fact, electricity, generated by our great waterfalls, is our only power. No scientist upon Osnome has ever had an inkling that intra-atomic energy exists. Nalboon cannot understand the power, but he solved the means of liberating it at a glance--and that glance sealed your death-warrants. With the Skylark, he could conquer Kondal, and to assure the downfall of my nation he would do anything.

"Also, he or any other Osnomian scientist would go to any lengths whatever--would challenge the great First Cause itself--to secure even one of those little bottles of the chemical you call 'salt.' It is far and away the scarcest and most precious substance in the world. It is so rare that those bottles you produced at the table held more than the total amount previously known to exist upon Osnome. We have great abundance of all the heavy metals, but the lighter metals are rare. Sodium and chlorin are the rarest of all known elements. Its immense value is due, not to its rarity, but to the fact that it is an indispensable component of the controlling instruments of our wireless power stations and that it is used as a catalyst in the manufacture of our hardest metals.

"For these reasons, you understand why Nalboon does not intend to let you escape and why he intends that this kokam (our equivalent of a day) shall be your last. About the second or third kam (hour) of the sleeping period he intends to break into the Skylark, learn its control, and secure the salt you undoubtedly have in the vessel. Then my party and myself will be thrown to the kolon. You and your party will be killed and your bodies smelted to recover the salt that is in them. This is the warning I had to give you. Its urgency explains the use of my untried mechanical educator; the hope that my party could escape with yours, in your vessel, explains why you saw me, the Kofedix of Kondal, prostrate myself before that arch-fiend Nalboon."

"How do you, a captive prince of another nation, know these things?" asked Crane, doubtfully.

"I read Nalboon's ideas from the brain of that officer whom the Karfedix Seaton killed. He was a ladex of the guards--an officer of about the same rank as one of your colonels. He was high in Nalboon's favor, and he was to have been in charge of the work of breaking into the Skylark and killing us all. Let me caution you now; do not let any Mardonalian touch our hands with a wire, for if you do, your thoughts will be recorded and the secrets of the Skylark and your many other mysterious things, such as smoking, matches, and magic feats, will be secrets no longer."

"Thanks for the information," responded Seaton, "but I want to correct your title for me. I'm no Karfedix--merely a plain citizen."

"In one way I see that that is true," replied the Kofedix with a puzzled look. "I cannot understand your government at all--but the inventor of the Skylark must certainly rank as a Karfedix."

As he spoke, a smile of understanding passed over his face and he continued:

"I see. Your title is Doctor of Philosophy, which must mean that you are the Karfedix of Knowledge of the Earth."

"No, no. You're way off. I'm...."

"Certainly Seaton is the Karfedix of Knowledge," broke in DuQuesne. "Let it go at that, anyway, whatever it means. The thing to do now is to figure a way out of this."

"You chirped it then, Blackie. Dunark, you know this country better than we do; what do you suggest?"

"I suggest that you take my party into the Skylark and escape from Mardonale as soon as possible. I can pilot you to Kondalek, the capital city of our nation. There, I can assure you, you will be welcomed as you deserve. My father, the Karfedix, will treat you as a Karfedix should be treated. As far as I am concerned, nothing I can ever do will lighten the burden of my indebtedness to you, but I promise you all the copper you want, and anything else you may desire that is within the power of man to give you."

* * * * *

Seaton thought deeply a moment, then shook Dunark's hand vigorously.

"That suits me, Kofedix," he said warmly. "I thought from the first that you were our friend. Shall we make for the Skylark right now, or wait a while?"

"We had better wait until after the second meal," the prince replied. "We have no armor, and no way of making any. We would be helpless against the bullets of any except a group small enough so that you could kill them all before they could fire. The kam after the second meal is devoted to strolling about the grounds, so that our visiting the Skylark would look perfectly natural. As the guard is very lax at that time, it is the best time for the attempt."

"But how about my killing his company of guards and blowing up one wing of his palace? Won't he have something to say about that?"

"I don't know," replied the Kofedix doubtfully. "It depends upon whether his fear of you or his anger is the greater. He should pay his call of state here in your apartment in a short time, as it is the inviolable rule of Osnome, that any visitor shall receive a call of state from one of his own rank before leaving his apartment for the first time. His actions may give you some idea as to his feelings, though he is an accomplished diplomat and may conceal his real feelings entirely. But let me caution you not to be modest or soft-spoken. He will mistake softness for fear."

"All right," grinned Seaton. "In that case I won't wait to try to find out what he thinks. If he shows any signs of hostility at all, I'll open up on him."

"Well," remarked Crane, calmly, "if we have some time to spare, we may as well wait comfortably instead of standing in the middle of the room. I, for one, have a lot of questions to ask about this new world."

Acting upon this suggestion, the party seated themselves upon comfortable divans, and Dunark rapidly dismantled the machine he had constructed. The captives remained standing, always behind the visitors until Seaton remonstrated.

"Please sit down, everybody. There's no need of keeping up this farce of your being slaves as long as we're alone, is there, Dunark?"

"No, but at the first sound of the gong announcing a visitor we must be in our places. Now that we are all comfortable and waiting, I will introduce my party to yours.

"Fellow Kondalians, greet the Karfedo Seaton and Crane," he began, his tongue fumbling over the strange names, "of a distant world, the Earth, and the two noble ladies, Miss Vaneman and Miss Spencer, soon to be their Karfediro.

"Guests from Earth, allow me to present to you the Kofedir Sitar, the only one of my wives who accompanied me upon our ill-fated hunting expedition."

Then, still ignoring DuQuesne as a captive, he introduced the other Kondolians in turn as his brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, and nephews--all members of the great ruling house of Kondal.

"Now," he concluded, "after I have a word with you in private, Doctor Seaton, I will be glad to give the others all the information in my power."

He led Seaton out of earshot of the others and said in a low voice:

"It is no part of Nalboon's plan to kill the two women. They are so beautiful, so different from our Osnomian women, that he intends to keep them--alive. Understand?"

"Yes," returned Seaton grimly, his eyes turning hard, "I get you all right--but what he'll do and what he thinks he'll do are two entirely different breeds of cats."

Returning to the others, they found Dorothy and Sitar deep in conversation.

"So a man has half a dozen or so wives?" Dorothy was asking in surprise. "How do you get along together? I'd fight like a wildcat if my husband tried to have other wives!"

"We get along splendidly, of course," returned the Osnomian princess in equal surprise. "I would not think of being a man's only wife. I wouldn't consider marrying a man who could win only one wife--think what a disgrace it would be! And think how lonely one would be while her husband is away at war--we would go insane if we did not have the company of the other wives. There are six of us, and we could not get along at all without each other."

"I've got a compliment for you and Peggy, Dottie," said Seaton. "Dunark here thinks that you two girls look good enough to eat--or words to that effect." Both girls flushed slightly, the purplish-black color suffusing their faces. They glanced at each other and Dorothy voiced the thought of both as she said:

"How can you, Kofedix Dunark? In this horrible light we both look perfectly dreadful. These other girls would be beautiful, if we were used to the colors, but we two look simply hideous."

"Oh, no," interrupted Sitar. "You have a wonderfully rich coloring. It is a shame to hide so much of yourselves with robes."

"Their eyes interpret colors differently than ours do," explained Seaton. "What to us are harsh and discordant colors are light and pleasing to their eyes. What looks like a kind of sloppy greenish black to us may--in fact, does--look a pale pink to them."

"Are Kondal and Mardonale the only two nations upon Osnome?" asked Crane.

"The only civilized nations, yes. Osnome is divided into two great and almost equal continents, separated by a wide ocean which encircles the globe. One is Kondal, the other Mardonale. Each nation has several nations or tribes of savages, which inhabit various waste places."

* * * * *

"You are the light race, Mardonale the dark," continued Crane. "What are the servants, who seem half-way between?"

"They are slaves...."

"Captured savages?" interrupted Dorothy.

"No. They are a separate race. They are a race so low in intelligence that they cannot exist except as slaves, but they can be trained to understand language and to do certain kinds of work. They are harmless and mild, making excellent servants, otherwise they would have perished ages ago. All menial work and most of the manual labor is done by the slave race. Formerly criminals were sterilized and reduced to unwilling slavery, but there have been no unwilling slaves in Kondal for hundreds of karkamo."

"Why? Are there no criminals any more?"

"No. With the invention of the thought recorder an absolutely fair trial was assured and the guilty were all convicted. They could not reproduce themselves, and as a natural result crime died out."

"That is," he added hastily, "what we regard as crime. Duelling, for instance, is a crime upon Earth; here it is a regular custom. In Kondal duels are rather rare and are held only when honor is involved, but here in Mardonale they are an every-day affair, as you saw when you landed."

"What makes the difference?" asked Dorothy curiously.

"As you know, with us every man is a soldier. In Kondal we train our youth in courage, valor, and high honor--in Mardonale they train them in savage blood-thirstiness alone. Each nation fixed its policy in bygone ages to produce the type of soldier it thought most efficient."

"I notice that everyone here wears those heavy collars," said Margaret. "What are they for?"

"They are identification marks. When a child is nearly grown, a collar bearing his name and the device of his house is cast about his neck. This collar is made of 'arenak,' a synthetic metal which, once formed, cannot be altered by any usual means. It cannot be scratched, cut, bent, broken, or worked in any way except at such a high temperature that death would result, if such heat were applied to the collar. Once the arenak collar is cast about a person's neck he is identified for life, and any adult Osnomian not wearing a collar is put to death."

"That must be an interesting metal," remarked Crane. "Is your belt a similar mark?"

"This belt is an idea of my own," and Dunark smiled broadly. "It looks like opaque arenak, but isn't. It is merely a pouch in which I carry anything I am particularly interested in. Even Nalboon thought it was arenak, so he didn't trouble to try to open it. If he had opened it and taken my tools and instruments, I couldn't have built the educator."

"Is that transparent armor arenak?"

"Yes, the only difference being that nothing is added to the matrix to color or make opaque the finished metal. It is in the preparation of this metal that salt is indispensable. It acts only as a catalyst, being recovered afterward, but neither nation has ever had enough salt to make all the armor they want."

"Aren't those monsters--karlono, I think you called them--covered by the same thing? And what are those animals, anyway?" Dorothy asked.

"Yes, they are armored with arenak, and it is thought that the beasts grow it, the same as fishes grow scales. The karlono are the most frightful scourge of Osnome. Very little is known of them, though every scientist has theorized upon them since time immemorial. It is very seldom that one is ever killed, as they easily outfly our swiftest battleships, and only fight when they can be victorious. To kill one requires a succession of the heaviest high-explosive shells in the same spot, a joint in the armor; and after the armor is once penetrated, the animal is blown into such small fragments that reconstruction is impossible. From such remains it has been variously described as a bird, a beast, a fish, and a vegetable; sexual, asexual, and hermaphroditic. Its habitat is unknown, it being variously supposed to live high in the air, deep in the ocean, and buried in the swamps. Another theory is that they live upon one of our satellites, which encounters our belt of atmosphere every karkam. Nothing is certainly known about the monsters except their terrible destructiveness and their insatiable appetites. One of them will devour five or six airships at one time, absorbing the crews and devouring the cargo and all of the vessels except the very hardest of the metal parts."

"Do they usually go in groups?" asked Crane. "If they do, I should think that a fleet of warships would be necessary for every party."

"No, they are almost always found alone. Only very rarely are two found together. This is the first time in history that more than two have ever been seen together. Two battleships can always defeat one karlon, so they are never attacked. With four battleships Nalboon considered his expedition perfectly safe, especially as they are now rare. The navies hunted down and killed what was supposed to be the last one upon Osnome more than a karkam ago, and none have been seen since, until we were attacked...."

* * * * *

The gong over the door sounded and the Kondalians leaped to their positions back of the Earthly visitors. The Kofedix went to the door. Nalboon brushed him aside and entered, escorted by a full company of heavily-armed soldiery. A scowl of anger was upon his face and he was plainly in an ugly mood.

"Stop, Nalboon of Mardonale!" thundered Seaton in the Mardonalian tongue and with the full power of his mighty voice. "Dare you invade my privacy unannounced and without invitation?"

The escort shrank back, but the Domak stood his ground, although he was plainly taken aback. With an apparent effort he smoothed his face into lines of cordiality.

"I merely came to inquire why my guards are slain and my palace destroyed by my honored guest?"

"As for slaying your guards, they sought to invade my privacy. I warned them away, but one of them was foolish enough to try to kill me. Then the others attempted to raise their childish rifles against me, and I was obliged to destroy them. As for the wall, it happened to be in the way of the thought-waves I hurled against your guards--consequently it was demolished. An honored guest! Bah! Are honored guests put to the indignity of being touched by the filthy hands of a mere ladex?"

"You do not object to the touch of slaves!" with a wave of his hand toward the Kondalians.

"That is what slaves are for," coldly. "Is a Domak to wait upon himself in the court of Mardonale? But to return to the issue. Were I an honored guest this would never have happened. Know, Nalboon, that when you attempt to treat a visiting Domak of MY race as a low-born captive, you must be prepared to suffer the consequences of your rashness!"

"May I ask how you, so recently ignorant, know our language?"

"You question me? That is bold! Know that I, the Boss of the Road, show ignorance or knowledge, when and where I please. You may go."

CHAPTER XV

The Escape from Mardonale

"That was a wonderful bluff, Dick!" exclaimed the Kofedix in English as soon as Nalboon and his guards had disappeared. "That was exactly the tone to take with him, too--you've sure got him guessing!"

"It seemed to get him, all right, but I'm wondering how long it'll hold him. I think we'd better make a dash for the Skylark right now, before he has time to think it over, don't you?"

"That is undoubtedly the best way," Dunark replied, lapsing into his own tongue. "Nalboon is plainly in awe of you now, but if I understand him at all, he is more than ever determined to seize your vessel, and every darkam's delay is dangerous."

The Earth-people quickly secured the few personal belongings they had brought with them. Stepping out into the hall and waving away the guards, Seaton motioned Dunark to lead the way. The other captives fell in behind, as they had done before, and the party walked boldly toward the door of the palace. The guards offered no opposition, but stood at attention and saluted as they passed. As they approached the entrance, however, Seaton saw the major-domo hurrying away and surmised that he was carrying the news to Nalboon. Outside the door, walking directly toward the landing dock, Dunark spoke in a low voice to Seaton, without turning.

"Nalboon knows by this time that we are making our escape, and it will be war to the death from here to the Skylark. I do not think there will be any pursuit from the palace, but he has warned the officers in charge of the dock and they will try to kill us as soon as we step out of the elevator, perhaps sooner. Nalboon intended to wait, but we have forced his hand and the dock is undoubtedly swarming with soldiers now. Shoot first and oftenest. Shoot first and think afterward. Show no mercy, as you will receive none--remember that the quality you call 'mercy' does not exist upon Osnome."

Rounding a great metal statue about fifty feet from the base of the towering dock, they saw that the door leading into one of the elevators was wide open and that two guards stood just inside it. As they caught sight of the approaching party, the guards raised their rifles; but, quick as they were, Seaton was quicker. At the first sight of the open door he had made two quick steps and had hurled himself across the intervening forty feet in a long football plunge. Before the two guards could straighten, he crashed into them, his great momentum hurling them across the elevator cage and crushing them into unconsciousness against its metal wall.

"Good work!" said Dunark, as he preceded the others into the elevator, and, after receiving Seaton's permission, distributed the weapons of the two guards among the men of his party. "Now we can surprise those upon the roof. That was why you didn't shoot?"

"Yes, I was afraid to risk a shot--it would give the whole thing away," Seaton replied, as he threw the unconscious guards out into the grounds and closed the massive door.

"Aren't you going to kill them?" asked Sitar, amazement in every feature and a puzzled expression in her splendid eyes. A murmur arose from the other Kondalians, which was quickly silenced by the Kofedix.

"It is dishonorable for a soldier of Earth to kill a helpless prisoner," he said briefly. "We cannot understand it, but we must not attempt to sway him in any point of honor."

Dunark stepped to the controls and the elevator shot upward, stopping at a landing several stories below the top of the dock. He took a peculiar device from his belt and fitted it over the muzzle of his strange pistol.

"We will get out here," he instructed the others, "and go up the rest of the way by a little-used flight of stairs. We will probably encounter some few guards, but I can dispose of them without raising an alarm. You will all stay behind me, please."

Seaton remonstrated, and Dunark went on:

"No, Seaton, you have done your share, and more. I am upon familiar ground now, and can do the work alone better than if you were to help me. I will call upon you, however, before we reach the dock."

The Kofedix led the way, his pistol resting lightly against his hip, and at the first turn of the corridor they came full upon four guards. The pistol did not move from its place at the side of the leader, but there were four subdued clicks and the four guards dropped dead, with bullets through their brains.

"Seaton, that is _some_ silencer," whispered DuQuesne. "I didn't suppose a silencer could work that fast."

"They don't use powder," Seaton replied absently, all his faculties directed toward the next corner. "The bullets are propelled by an electrical charge."

In the same manner Dunark disposed of several more guards before the last stairway was reached.

* * * * *

"Seaton," he whispered in English, "now is the time we need your rapid pistol-work and your high-explosive shells. There must be hundreds of soldiers on the other side of that door, armed with machine-cannon shooting high-explosive shells at the rate of a thousand per minute. Our chance is this--their guns are probably trained upon the elevators and main stairways, since this passage is unused and none of us would be expected to know of it. Most of them don't know of it themselves. It will take them a second or two to bring their guns to bear upon us. We must do all the damage we can--kill them all, if possible--in that second or two. If Crane will lend me a pistol, we'll make the rush together."

"I've a better scheme than that," interrupted DuQuesne. "Next to you, Seaton, I'm the fastest man with a gun here. Also, like you, I can use both hands at once. Give me a couple of clips of those special cartridges and you and I will blow that bunch into the air before they know we're here."

It was decided that the two pistol experts should take the lead, closely followed by Crane and Dunark. The weapons were loaded to capacity and put in readiness for instant use.

"Let's go, bunch!" said Seaton. "The quicker we start the quicker we'll get back. Get ready to run out there, all the rest of you, as soon as the battle's over. Ready? On your marks--get set--go!"

He kicked the door open and there was a stuttering crash as the four automatic pistols simultaneously burst into practically continuous flame--a crash obliterated by an overwhelming concussion of sound as the X-plosive shells, sweeping the entire roof with a rapidly-opening fan of death, struck their marks and exploded. Well it was for the little group of wanderers that the two men in the door were past masters in the art of handling their weapons; well it was that they had in their tiny pistol-bullets the explosive force of hundreds of giant shells! For rank upon rank of soldiery were massed upon the roof; rapid-fire cannon, terrible engines of destruction, were pointing toward the elevators and toward the main stairways and approaches. But so rapid and fierce was the attack, that even those trained gunners had no time to point their guns. The battle lasted little more than a second, being over before either Crane or Dunark could fire a shot, and silence again reigned even while broken and shattered remnants of the guns and fragments of the metal and stone of the dock were still falling to the ground through a fine mist of what had once been men.

Assured by a rapid glance that not a single Mardonalian remained upon the dock, Seaton turned back to the others.

"Make it snappy, bunch! This is going to be a mighty unhealthy spot for us in a few minutes."

Dorothy threw her arms around his neck in relief. With one arm about her, he hastily led the way across the dock toward the Skylark, choosing the path with care because of the yawning holes blown into the structure by the terrific force of the explosions. The Skylark was still in place, held immovable by the attractor, but what a sight she was! Her crystal windows were shattered; her mighty plates of four-foot Norwegian armor were bent and cracked and twisted; two of her doors, warped and battered, hung awry from their broken hinges. Not a shell had struck her: all this damage had been done by flying fragments of the guns and of the dock itself; and Seaton and Crane, who had developed the new explosive, stood aghast at its awful power.

They hastily climbed into the vessel, and Seaton assured himself that the controls were uninjured.

"I hear battleships," Dunark said. "Is it permitted that I operate one of your machine guns?"

"Go as far as you like," responded Seaton, as he placed the women beneath the copper bar--the safest place in the vessel--and leaped to the instrument board. Before he reached it, and while DuQuesne, Crane, and Dunark were hastening to the guns, the whine of giant helicopter-screws was plainly heard. A ranging shell from the first warship, sighted a little low, exploded against the side of the dock beneath them. He reached the levers just as the second shell screamed through the air a bare four feet above them. As he shot the Skylark into the air under five notches of power, a steady stream of the huge bombs poured through the spot where, an instant before, the vessel had been. Crane and DuQuesne aimed several shots at the battleships, which were approaching from all sides, but the range was so extreme that no damage was done.

They heard the continuous chattering of the machine gun operated by the Kofedix, however, and turned toward him. He was shooting, not at the warships, but at the city rapidly growing smaller beneath them; moving the barrel of the rifle in a tiny spiral; spraying the entire city with death and destruction! As they looked, the first of the shells reached the ground, just as Dunark ceased firing for lack of ammunition. They saw the palace disappear as if by magic, being instantly blotted out in a cloud of dust--a cloud which, with a spiral motion of dizzying rapidity, increased in size until it obscured the entire city.

* * * * *

Having attained sufficient altitude to be safe from any possible pursuit and out of range of even the heaviest guns, Seaton stopped the vessel and went out into the main compartment to consult with the other members of the group, about their next move.

"It sure does feel good to get a breath of cool air, folks," he said, as he drew with relief a deep breath of the air, which, at that great elevation, was of an icy temperature and very thin. He glanced at the little group of Kondalians as he spoke, then leaped back to the instrument board with an apology on his lips--they were gasping for breath and shivering with the cold. He switched on the heating coils and dropped the Skylark rapidly in a long descent toward the ocean.

"If that is the temperature you enjoy, I understand at last why you wear clothes," said the Kofedix, as soon as he could talk.

"Do not your planes fly up into the regions of low temperature?" asked Crane.

"Only occasionally, and all high-flying vessels are enclosed and heated to our normal temperature. We have heavy wraps, but we dislike to wear them so intensely that we never subject ourselves to any cold."

"Well, there's no accounting for tastes," returned Seaton, "but I can't hand your climate a thing. It's hotter even than Washington in August; 'and that,' as the poet feelingly remarked, 'is going some!'

"But there's no reason for sitting here in the dark," he continued, as he switched on the powerful daylight lamps which lighted the vessel with the nearest approach to sunlight possible to produce. As soon as the lights were on, Dorothy looked intently at the strange women.

"Now we can see what color they really are," she explained to her lover in a low voice. "Why, they aren't so very different from what they were before, except that the colors are much softer and more pleasing. They really are beautiful, in spite of being green. Don't you think so, Dick?"

"They're a handsome bunch, all right," he agreed, and they were. Their skins were a light, soft green, tanned to an olive shade by their many fervent suns. Their teeth were a brilliant and shining grass-green. Their eyes and their long, thick hair were a glossy black.

The Kondalians looked at the Earthly visitors and at each other, and the women uttered exclamations of horror.

"What a frightful light?" exclaimed Sitar. "Please shut it off. I would rather be in total darkness than look like this!"

"What's the matter, Sitar?" asked the puzzled Dorothy as Seaton turned off the lights. "You look perfectly stunning in this light."

"They see things differently than we do," explained Seaton. "Their optic nerves react differently than ours do. While we look all right to them, and they look all right to us, in both kinds of light, they look just as different to themselves under our daylight lamps as we do to ourselves in their green light. Is that explanation clear?"

"It's clear enough as far as it goes, but what do they look like to themselves?"

"That's too deep for me--I can't explain it, any better than you can. Take the Osnomian color 'mlap,' for instance. Can you describe it?"

"It's a kind of greenish orange--but it seems as though it ought not to look like that color either."

"That's it, exactly. From the knowledge you received from the educator, it should be a brilliant purple. That is due to the difference in the optic nerves, which explains why we see things so differently from the way the Osnomians do. Perhaps they can describe the way they look to each other in our white light."

"Can you, Sitar?" asked Dorothy.

"One word describes it--'horrible.'" replied the Kondalian princess, and her husband added:

"The colors are distorted and unrecognizable, just as your colors are to your eyes in our light."

"Well, now that the color question is answered, let's get going. I pretty nearly asked you the way, Dunark--forgot that I know it as well as you do."

* * * * *

The Skylark set off at as high an altitude as the Osnomians could stand. As they neared the ocean several great Mardonalian battleships, warned of the escape, sought to intercept them; but the Skylark hopped over them easily, out of range of their heaviest guns, and flew onward at such speed that pursuit was not even attempted. The ocean was quickly crossed. Soon the space-car came to rest over a great city, and Seaton pointed out the palace; which, with its landing dock nearby, was very similar to that of Nalboon, in the capital city of Mardonale.

Crane drew Seaton to one side.

"Do you think it is safe to trust these Kondalians, any more than it was the others? How would it be to stay in the Lark instead of going into the palace?"

"Yes, Mart, this bunch can be trusted. Dunark has a lot of darn queer ideas, but he's square as a die. He's our friend, and will get us the copper. We have no choice now, anyway, look at the bar. We haven't an ounce of copper left--we're down to the plating in spots. Besides, we couldn't go anywhere if we had a ton of copper, because the old bus is a wreck. She won't hold air--you could throw a cat out through the shell in any direction. She'll have to have a lot of work done on her before we can think of leaving. As to staying in her, that wouldn't help us a bit. Steel is as soft as wood to these folks--their shells would go through her as though she were made of mush. They are made of metal that is harder than diamond and tougher than rubber, and when they strike they bore in like drill-bits. If they are out to get us they'll do it anyway, whether we're here or there, so we may as well be guests. But there's no danger, Mart. You know I swapped brains with him, and I know him as well as I know myself. He's a good, square man--one of our kind of folks."

Convinced, Crane nodded his head and the Skylark dropped toward the dock. While they were still high in air, Dunark took an instrument from his belt and rapidly manipulated a small lever. The others felt the air vibrate--a peculiar, pulsating wave, which, to the surprise of the Earthly visitors, they could read without difficulty. It was a message from the Kofedix to the entire city, telling of the escape of his party and giving the news that he was accompanied by two great Karfedo from another world. Then the pulsations became unintelligible, and all knew that he had tuned his instrument away from the "general" key into the individual key of some one person.

"I just let my father, the Karfedix, know that we are coming," he explained, as the vibrations ceased.

From the city beneath them hundreds of great guns roared forth a welcome, banners and streamers hung from every possible point, and the air became tinted and perfumed with a bewildering variety of colors and scents and quivered with the rush of messages of welcome. The Skylark was soon surrounded by a majestic fleet of giant warships, who escorted her with impressive ceremony to the landing dock, while around them flitted great numbers of other aircraft. The tiny one-man helicopters darted hither and thither, apparently always in imminent danger of colliding with some of their larger neighbors, but always escaping as though by a miracle. Beautiful pleasure-planes soared and dipped and wheeled like giant gulls; and, cleaving their stately way through the numberless lesser craft; immense multiplane passenger liners partially supported by helicopter screws turned aside from their scheduled courses to pay homage to the Kofedix of Kondal.

As the Skylark approached the top of the dock, all the escorting vessels dropped away and Crane saw that instead of the brilliant assemblage he had expected to see upon the landing-place there was only a small group of persons, as completely unadorned as were those in the car. In answer to his look of surprise, the Kofedix said, with deep feeling:

"My father, mother, and the rest of the family. They know that we, as escaped captives, would be without harness or trappings, and are meeting us in the same state."

* * * * *

Seaton brought the vessel to the dock near the little group, and the Earthly visitors remained inside their vessel while the rulers of Kondal welcomed the sons and daughters they had given up for dead.

After the affecting reunion, which was very similar to an earthly one under similar circumstances, the Kofedix led his father up to the Skylark and his guests stepped down upon the dock.

"Friends," Dunark began, "I have told you of my father, Roban, the Karfedix of Kondal. Father, it is a great honor to present to you those who rescued us from Mardonale--Seaton, Karfedix of Knowledge; Crane, Karfedix of Wealth; Miss Vaneman; and Miss Spencer. Karfedix DuQuesne," waving his hand toward him, "is a lesser Karfedix of Knowledge, captive to the others."

"The Kofedix Dunark exaggerates our services," deprecated Seaton, "and doesn't mention the fact that he saved all our lives. But for him we all should have been killed."

The Karfedix, disregarding Seaton's remark, acknowledged the indebtedness of Kondal in heartfelt accents before he led them back to the other party and made the introductions. As all walked toward the elevators, the emperor turned to his son with a puzzled expression.

"I know from your message, Dunark, that our guests are from a distant solar system, and I can understand your accident with the educator, but I cannot understand the titles of these men. Knowledge and wealth are not ruled over. Are you sure that you have translated their titles correctly?"

"As correctly as I can--we have no words in our language to express the meaning. Their government is a most peculiar one, the rulers all being chosen by the people of the whole nation...."

"Extraordinary!" interjected the older man. "How, then, can anything be accomplished?"

"I do not understand the thing myself, it is so utterly unheard-of. But they have no royalty, as we understand the term. In America, their country, every man is equal.

"That is," he hastened to correct himself, "they are not all equal, either, as they have two classes which would rank with royalty--those who have attained to great heights of knowledge and those who have amassed great wealth. This explanation is entirely inadequate and does not give the right idea of their positions, but it is as close as I can come to the truth in our language."

"I am surprised that you should be carrying a prisoner with you, Karfedo," said Roban, addressing Seaton and Crane. "You will, of course, be at perfect liberty to put him to death in any way that pleases you, just as though you were in your own kingdoms. But perchance you are saving him so that his death will crown your home-coming?"

The Kofedix spoke in answer while Seaton, usually so quick to speak, was groping for words.

"No, father, he is not to be put to death. That is another peculiar custom of the Earth-men; they consider it dishonorable to harm a captive, or even an unarmed enemy. For that reason we must treat the Karfedix DuQuesne with every courtesy due his rank, but at the same time he is to be allowed to do only such things as may be permitted by Seaton and Crane."

"Yet they do not seem to be a weak race," mused the older man.

"They are a mighty race, far advanced in evolution," replied his son. "It is not weakness, but a peculiar moral code. We have many things to learn from them, and but few to give them in return. Their visit will mean much to Kondal."

* * * * *

During this conversation they had descended to the ground and had reached the palace, after traversing grounds even more sumptuous and splendid than those surrounding the palace of Nalboon. Inside the palace walls the Kofedix himself led the guests to their rooms, accompanied by the major-domo and an escort of guards. He explained to them that the rooms were all inter-communicating, each having a completely equipped bathroom.

"Complete except for cold water, you mean," said Seaton with a smile.

"There is cold water," rejoined the other, leading him into the bathroom and releasing a ten-inch stream of lukewarm water into the small swimming pool, built of polished metal, which forms part of every Kondalian bathroom. "But I am forgetting that you like extreme cold. We will install refrigerating machines at once."

"Don't do it--thanks just the same. We won't be here long enough to make it worth while."

Dunark smilingly replied that he would make his guests as comfortable as he could, and after informing them that in one kam he would return and escort them in to koprat, took his leave. Scarcely had the guests freshened themselves when he was back, but he was no longer the Dunark they had known. He now wore a metal-and-leather harness which was one blaze of precious gems, and a leather belt hung with jeweled weapons replaced the familiar hollow girdle of metal. His right arm, between the wrist and the elbow, was almost covered by six bracelets of a transparent metal, deep cobalt-blue in color, each set with an incredibly brilliant stone of the same shade. On his left wrist he wore an Osnomian chronometer. This was an instrument resembling the odometer of an automobile, whose numerous revolving segments revealed a large and constantly increasing number--the date and time of the Osnomian day, expressed in a decimal number of the karkamo of Kondalian history.

"Greetings, oh guests from Earth! I feel more like myself, now that I am again in my trappings and have my weapons at my side. Will you accompany me to koprat, or are you not hungry?" as he attached the peculiar timepieces to the wrists of the guests, with bracelets of the deep-blue metal.

"We accept with thanks," replied Dorothy promptly. "We're starving to death, as usual."

As they walked toward the dining hall, Dunark noticed that Dorothy's eyes strayed toward his bracelets, and he answered her unasked question:

"These are our wedding rings. Man and wife exchange bracelets as part of the ceremony."

"Then you can tell whether a man is married or not, and how many wives he has, simply by looking at his arm? We should have something like that on Earth, Dick--then married men wouldn't find it so easy to pose as bachelors!"

Roban met them at the door of the great dining hall. He also was in full panoply, and Dorothy counted ten of the heavy bracelets upon his right arm as he led them to places near his own. The room was a replica of the other Osnomian dining hall they had seen and the women were decorated with the same barbaric splendor of scintillating gems.

After the meal, which was a happy one, taking the nature of a celebration in honor of the return of the captives, DuQuesne went directly to his room while the others spent the time until the zero hour in strolling about the splendid grounds, always escorted by many guards. Returning to the room occupied by the two girls, the couples separated, each girl accompanying her lover to the door of his room.

Margaret was ill at ease, though trying hard to appear completely self-possessed.

"What is the matter, sweetheart Peggy?" asked Crane, solicitously.

"I didn't know that you...." she broke off and continued with a rush: "What did the Kofedix mean just now, when he called you the Karfedix of Wealth?"

"Well, you see, I happen to have some money...." he began.

"Then you are the great M. Reynolds Crane?" she interrupted, in consternation.

"Leave off 'the great,'" he said, then, noting her expression, he took her in his arms and laughed slightly.

"Is that all that was bothering you? What does a little money amount to between you and me?"

"Nothing--but I'm awfully glad that I didn't know it before," she replied, as she returned his caress with fervor. "That is, it means nothing if you are perfectly sure I'm not...."

Crane, the imperturbable, broke a life-long rule and interrupted her.

"Do not say that, dear. You know as well as I do that between you and me there never have been, are not now, and never shall be, any doubts or any questions."

* * * * *

"If I could have a real cold bath now, I'd feel fine," remarked Seaton, standing in his own door with Dorothy by his side. "I'm no blooming Englishman but in weather as hot as this I sure would like to dive into a good cold tank. How do you feel after all this excitement, Dottie? Up to standard?"

"I'm scared purple," she replied, nestling against him, "or, at least, if not exactly scared, I'm apprehensive and nervous. I always thought I had good nerves, but everything here is so horrible and unreal, that I can't help but feel it. When I'm with you I really enjoy the experience, but when I'm alone or with Peggy, especially in the sleeping-period, which is so awfully long and when it seems that something terrible is going to happen every minute, my mind goes off in spite of me into thoughts of what may happen. Why, last night, Peggy and I just huddled up to each other in a ghastly yellow funk--dreading we knew not what--the two of us slept hardly at all."

"I'm sorry, little girl," replied Seaton, embracing her tenderly, "sorrier than I can say. I know that your nerves are all right, but you haven't roughed it enough, or lived in strange environments enough, to be able to feel at home. The reason you feel safer with me is that I feel perfectly at home here myself, not that your nerves are going to pieces or anything like that. It won't be for long, though, sweetheart--as soon as we get the chariot fixed up we'll beat it back to the Earth so fast it'll make your head spin."

"Yes, I think that's the reason, lover. I hope you won't think I'm a clinging vine, but I can't help being afraid of something here every time I'm away from you. You're so self-reliant, so perfectly at ease here, that it makes me feel the same way."

"I am perfectly at ease. There's nothing to be afraid of. I've been in hundreds of worse places, right on Earth. I sure wish I could be with you all the time, sweetheart girl--only you can understand just how much I wish it--but, as I said before, it won't be long until we can be together all the time."

Dorothy pushed him into his room, followed him within it, closed the door, and put both hands on his arm.

"Dick, sweetheart," she whispered, while a hot blush suffused her face, "you're not as dumb as I thought you were--you're dumber! But if you simply won't say it, I will. Don't you know that a marriage that is legal where it is performed is legal anywhere, and that no law says that the marriage must be performed upon the Earth?"

He pressed her to his heart in a mighty embrace, and his low voice showed in every vibration the depth of the feeling he held for the beautiful woman in his arms as he replied:

"I never thought of that, sweetheart, and I wouldn't have dared mention it if I had. You're so far away from your family and your friends that it would seem...."

"It wouldn't seem anything of the kind," she broke in earnestly. "Don't you see, you big, dense, wonderful man, that it is the only thing to do? We need each other, or at least, I need you, so much now...."

"Say 'each other'; it's right," declared her lover with fervor.

"It's foolish to wait. Mother would like to have seen me married, of course; but there will be great advantages, even on that side. A grand wedding, of the kind we would simply have to have in Washington, doesn't appeal to me any more than it does to you--and it would bore you to extinction. Dad would hate it, too--it's better all around to be married here."

Seaton, who had been trying to speak, silenced her.

"I'm convinced, Dottie, have been ever since the first word. If you can see it that way I'm so glad that I can't express it. I've been scared stiff every time I thought of our wedding. I'll speak to the Karfedix the first thing in the morning, and we'll be married tomorrow--or rather today, since it is past the zero kam," as he glanced at the chronometer upon his wrist, which, driven by wireless impulses from the master-clock in the national observatory, was clicking off the darkamo with an almost inaudible purr of its smoothly-revolving segments.

"How would it be to wake him up and have it done now?"

"Oh, Dick, be reasonable! That would never do. Tomorrow will be most awfully sudden, as it is! And Dick, please speak to Martin, will you? Peggy's even more scared than I am, and Martin, the dear old stupid, is even less likely to suggest such a thing as this kind of a wedding than you are. Peggy's afraid to suggest it to him."

"Woman!" he said in mock sternness, "Is this a put-up job?"

"It certainly is. Did you think I had nerve enough to do it without help?"

Seaton turned and opened the door.

"Mart! Bring Peggy over here!" he called, as he led Dorothy back into the girls' room.

"Heavens, Dick, be careful! You'll spoil the whole thing!"

"No, I won't. Leave it to me--I bashfully admit that I'm a regular bear-cat at this diplomatic stuff. Watch my smoke!"

"Folks," he said, when the four were together, "Dottie and I have been talking things over, and we've decided that today's the best possible date for a wedding. Dottie's afraid of these long, daylight nights, and I admit that I'd sleep a lot sounder if I knew where she was all the time instead of only part of it. She says she's willing, provided you folks see it the same way and make it double. How about it?"

Margaret blushed furiously and Crane's lean, handsome face assumed a darker color as he replied:

"A marriage here would, of course, be legal anywhere, provided we have a certificate, and we could be married again upon our return if we think it desirable. It might look as though we were taking an unfair advantage of the girls, Dick, but considering all the circumstances, I think it would be the best thing for everyone concerned."

He saw the supreme joy in Margaret's eyes, and his own assumed a new light as he drew her into the hollow of his arm.

"Peggy has known me only a short time, but nothing else in the world is as certain as our love. It is the bride's privilege to set the date, so I will only say that it cannot be too soon for me."

"The sooner the better," said Margaret, with a blush that would have been divine in any earthly light, "did you say 'today,' Dick?"

"I'll see the Karfedix as soon as he gets up," he answered, and walked with Dorothy to his door.

"I'm just too supremely happy for words," Dorothy whispered in Seaton's ear as he bade her good-night. "I won't be able to sleep or anything!"

CHAPTER XVI

An Osnomian Marriage

Seaton awoke, hot and uncomfortable, but with a great surge of joy in his heart--this was his wedding day! Springing from the bed, he released the full stream of the "cold" water, filling the tank in a few moments. Poising lightly upon the edge, he made a clean, sharp dive, and yelled in surprise as he came snorting to the surface. For Dunark had made good his promise--the water was only a few degrees above the freezing point! After a few minutes of vigorous splashing in the icy water, he rubbed himself down with a coarse towel, shaved, threw on his clothes, and lifted his powerful, but musical, bass voice in the wedding chorus from "The Rose Maiden."

_"Rise, sweet maid, arise, arise, Rise, sweet maid, arise, arise, 'Tis the last fair morning for thy maiden eyes,"_

he sang lustily, out of his sheer joy in being alive, and was surprised to hear Dorothy's clear soprano, Margaret's pleasing contralto, and Crane's mellow tenor chime in from the adjoining room. Crane threw open the door and Seaton joined the others.

"Good morning. Dick, you sound happy," said Crane.

"Who wouldn't be? Look what's doing today," as he ardently embraced his bride-to-be. "Besides, I found some cold water this morning."

"Everyone in the palace heard you discovering it," dryly returned Crane, and the girls laughed merrily.

"It surprised me at first," admitted Seaton, "but it's great after a fellow once gets wet."

"We warmed ours a trifle," said Dorothy. "I like a cold bath myself, but not in ice-water."

All four became silent, thinking of the coming event of the day, until Crane said:

"They have ministers here, I know, and I know something of their religion, but my knowledge is rather vague. You know more about it than we do, Dick, suppose you tell us about it while we wait."

Seaton paused a moment, with an odd look on his face. As one turning the pages of an unfamiliar book of reference, he was seeking the answer to Crane's question in the vast store of Osnomian information received from Dunark. His usually ready speech came a little slowly.

"Well, as nearly as I can explain it, it's a funny kind of a mixture--partly theology, partly Darwinism, or at least, making a fetish of evolution, and partly pure economic determinism. They believe in a Supreme Being, whom they call the First Cause--that is the nearest English equivalent--and they recognize the existence of an immortal and unknowable life-principle, or soul. They believe that the First Cause has decreed the survival of the fittest as the fundamental law, which belief accounts for their perfect physiques...."

"Perfect physiques? Why, they're as weak as children," interrupted Dorothy.

"Yes, but that is because of the smallness of the planet," returned Seaton. "You see, a man of my size weighs only eighty-six pounds here, on a spring balance, so he would need only the muscular development of a boy of twelve or so. In a contest of strength, either of you girls could easily handle two of the strongest men upon Osnome. In fact, the average Osnomian could stand up on our Earth only with the greatest difficulty. But that isn't the fault of the people; they are magnificently developed for their surroundings. They have attained this condition by centuries of weeding out the unfit. They have no hospitals for the feeble-minded or feeble-bodied--abnormal persons are not allowed to live. The same reasoning accounts for their perfect cleanliness, moral and physical. Vice is practically unknown. They believe that clean living and clean thinking are rewarded by the production of a better physical and mental type...."

"Yes, especially as they correct wrong living by those terrible punishments the Kofedix told us about," interrupted Margaret.

"That probably helps some. They also believe that the higher the type is, the faster will evolution proceed, and the sooner will mankind reach what they call the Ultimate Goal, and know all things. Believing as they do that the fittest must survive, and thinking themselves, of course, the superior type, it is ordained that Mardonale must be destroyed utterly, root and branch. They believe that the slaves are so low in the scale, millions of years behind in evolution, that they do not count. Slaves are simply intelligent and docile animals, little more than horses or oxen. Mardonalians and savages are unfit to survive and must be exterminated.

"Their ministers are chosen from the very fittest. They are the strongest, cleanest-living, and most vigorous men of this clean and vigorous nation, and are usually high army officers as well as ministers."

* * * * *

An attendant announced the coming of the Karfedix and his son, to pay the call of state. After the ceremonious greetings had been exchanged, all went into the dining hall for darprat. As soon as the meal was over, Seaton brought up the question of the double wedding that kokam, and the Karfedix was overjoyed.

"Karfedix Seaton," he said earnestly, "nothing could please us more than to have such a ceremony performed in our palace. Marriage between such highly-evolved persons as are you four is wished by the First Cause, whose servants we are. Aside from that, it is an unheard-of honor for any ruler to have even one karfedix married beneath his roof, and you are granting me the privilege of two! I thank you, and assure you that we will do our poor best to make the occasion memorable."

"Don't do anything fancy," said Seaton hastily. "A simple, plain wedding will do."

Unheeding Seaton's remark, the Karfedix took his wireless from its hook at his belt and sent a brief message.

"I have summoned Karbix Tarnan to perform the ceremony. Our usual time for ceremonies is just before koprat--is that time satisfactory to you?"

Assured that it was, he turned to his son.

"Dunark, you are more familiar than I with the customs of our illustrious visitors. May I ask you to take charge of the details?"

While Dunark sent a rapid succession of messages, Dorothy whispered to Seaton:

"They must be going to make a real function of our double wedding, Dick. The Karbix is the highest dignitary of the church, isn't he?"

"Yes, in addition to being the Commander-in-Chief of all the Kondalian armies. Next to the Karfedix he is the most powerful man in the empire. Something tells me, Dottie, that this is going to be SOME ceremony!"

As Dunark finished telegraphing, Seaton turned to him.

"Dorothy said, a while ago, that she would like to have enough of that tapestry-fabric for a dress. Do you suppose it could be managed?"

"Certainly. In all state ceremonials we always wear robes made out of the same fabric as the tapestries, but much finer and more delicate. I would have suggested it, but thought perhaps the ladies would prefer their usual clothing. I know that you two men do not care to wear our robes?"

"We will wear white ducks, the dressiest and coolest things we have along," replied Seaton. "Thank you for your offer, but you know how it is. We should feel out of place in such gorgeous dress."

"I understand. I will call in a few of our most expert robe-makers, who will weave the gowns. Before they come, let us decide upon the ceremony. I think you are familiar with our marriage customs, but I will explain them to make sure. Each couple is married twice. The first marriage is symbolized by the exchange of plain bracelets and lasts four karkamo, during which period divorce may be obtained at will. The children of such divorced couples formerly became wards of the state, but in my lifetime I have not heard of there being any such children--all divorces are now between couples who discover their incompatibility before children are conceived."

"That surprises me greatly," said Crane. "Some system of trial-marriage is advocated among us on Earth every few years, but they all so surely degenerate into free love that no such system has found a foothold."

"We are not troubled in that way at all. You see, before the first marriage, each couple, from the humblest peasantry to the highest royalty, must submit to a mental examination. If they are marrying for any reason at all other than love, such as any thought of trifling in the mind of the man, or if the woman is marrying him for his wealth or position, he or she is summarily executed, regardless of station."

No other questions being asked, Dunark continued:

"At the end of four karkamo the second marriage is performed, which is indissoluble. In this ceremony jeweled bracelets are substituted for the plain ones. In the case of highly-evolved persons it is permitted that the two ceremonies be combined into one. Then there is a third ceremony, used only in the marriage of persons of the very highest evolution, in which the 'eternal' vows are taken and the faidon, the eternal jewel, is exchanged. As you are all in the permitted class, you may use the eternal ceremony if you wish."

"I think we all know our minds well enough to know that we want to be married for good--the longer the better," said Seaton, positively. "We'll make it the eternal, won't we, folks?"

"I should like to ask one question," said Crane, thoughtfully. "Does that ceremony imply that my wife would be breaking her vows if she married again upon my death?"

"Far from it. Numbers of our men are killed every karkam. Their wives, if of marriageable age, are expected to marry again. Then, too, you know that most Kondalian men have several wives. No matter how many wives or husbands may be linked together in that way, it merely means that after death their spirits will be grouped into one. Just as in your chemistry," smiling in comradely fashion at Seaton, "a varying number of elements may unite to form a stable compound."

* * * * *

After a short pause, the speaker went on:

"Since you are from the Earth and unaccustomed to bracelets, rings will be substituted for them. The plain rings will take the place of your Earthly wedding rings, the jeweled ones that of your engagement rings. The only difference is that while we discard the plain bracelets, you will continue to wear them. Have you men any objections to wearing the rings during the ceremony? You may discard them later if you wish and still keep the marriage valid."

"Not I! I'll wear mine all my life," responded Seaton earnestly, and Crane expressed the same thought.

"There is only one more thing," added the Kofedix. "That is, about the mental examination. Since it is not your custom, it is probable that the justices would waive the ruling, especially since everyone must be examined by a jury of his own or a superior rank, so that only one man, my father alone, could examine you."

"Not in a thousand years!" replied Seaton emphatically. "I want to be examined, and have Dorothy see the record. I don't care about having her put through it, but I want her to know exactly the kind of a guy she is getting."

Dorothy protested at this, but as all four were eager that they themselves should be tested, the Karfedix was notified and Dunark clamped sets of multiple electrodes, connected to a set of instruments, upon the temples of his father, Dorothy, and Seaton. He pressed a lever, and instantly Dorothy and Seaton read each other's minds to the minutest detail, and each knew that the Karfedix was reading the minds of both.

After Margaret and Crane had been examined, the Karfedix expressed himself as more than satisfied.

"You are all of the highest evolution and your minds are all untainted by any base thoughts in your marriage. The First Cause will smile upon your unions," he said solemnly.

"Let the robe-makers appear," the Karfedix ordered, and four women, hung with spools of brilliantly-colored wire of incredible fineness and with peculiar looms under their arms, entered the room and accompanied the two girls to their apartment.

As soon as the room was empty save for the four men, Dunark said:

"While I was in Mardonale, I heard bits of conversation regarding an immense military discovery possessed by Nalboon, besides the gas whose deadly effects we felt. I could get no inkling of its nature, but feel sure that it is something to be dreaded. I also heard that both of these secrets had been stolen from Kondal, and that we were to be destroyed by our own superior inventions."

The Karfedix nodded his head gloomily.

"That is true, my son--partly true, at least. We shall not be destroyed, however. Kondal shall triumph. The discoveries were made by a Kondalian, but I am as ignorant as are you concerning their nature. An obscure inventor, living close to the bordering ocean, was the discoverer. He was rash enough to wireless me concerning them. He would not reveal their nature, but requested a guard. The Mardonalian patrol intercepted the message and captured both him and his discoveries before our guard could arrive."

"That's easily fixed," suggested Seaton. "Let's get the Skylark fixed up, and we'll go jerk Nalboon out of his palace--if he's still alive--bring him over here, and read his mind."

"That might prove feasible," answered the Kofedix, "and in any event we must repair the Skylark and replenish her supply of copper immediately. That must be our first consideration, so that you, our guests, will have a protection in any emergency."

The Karfedix went to his duties and the other three made their way to the wrecked space-car. They found that besides the damage done to the hull, many of the instruments were broken, including one of the object-compasses focused upon the Earth.

"It's a good thing you had three of them, Mart. I sure hand it to you for preparedness," said Seaton, as he tossed the broken instruments out upon the dock. Dunark protested at this treatment, and placed the discarded instruments in a strong metal safe, remarking:

"These things may prove useful at some future time."

"Well, I suppose the first thing to do is to get some powerful jacks and straighten these plates," said Seaton.

"Why not throw away this soft metal, steel, and build it of arenak, as it should be built? You have plenty of salt," suggested Dunark.

"Fine! We have lots of salt in the galley, haven't we, Mart?"

"Yes, nearly a hundred pounds. We are stocked for emergencies, with two years' supply of food, you know."

* * * * *

Dunark's eyes opened in astonishment at the amount mentioned, in spite of his knowledge of earthly conditions. He started to say something, then stopped in confusion, but Seaton divined his thought.

"We can spare him fifty pounds as well as not, can't we, Mart?"

"Certainly. Fifty pounds of salt is a ridiculously cheap price for what he is doing for us, even though it is very rare here."

Dunark acknowledged the gift with shining eyes and heartfelt, but not profuse, thanks, and bore the precious bag to the palace under a heavy escort. He returned with a small army of workmen, and after making tests to assure himself that the power-bar would work as well through arenak as through steel, he instructed the officers concerning the work to be done. As the wonderfully skilled mechanics set to work without a single useless motion, the prince stood silent, with a look of care upon his handsome face.

"Worrying about Mardonale, Dunark?"

"Yes. I cannot help wondering what that terrible new engine of destruction is, which Nalboon now has at his command."

"Say, why don't you build a bus like the Skylark, and blow Mardonale off the map?"

"Building the vessel would be easy enough, but X is as yet unknown upon Osnome."

"We've got a lot of it...."

"I could not accept it. The salt was different, since you have plenty. X, however, is as scarce upon Earth as salt is upon Osnome."

"Sure you can accept it. We stopped at a planet that has lots of it, and we've got an object-compass pointing at it so that we can go back and get more of it any time we want it. We've got more of it on hand now than we're apt to need for a long time, so have a hunk and get busy," and he easily carried one of the lumps out of his cabin and tossed it upon the dock, from whence it required two of Kondal's strongest men to lift it.

The look of care vanished from the face of the prince and he summoned another corps of mechanics.

"How thick shall the walls be? Our battleships are armed with arenak the thickness of a hand, but with your vast supply of salt you may have it any thickness you wish, since the materials of the matrix are cheap and abundant."

"One inch would be enough, but everything in the bus is designed for a four-foot shell, and if we change it from four feet we'll have to redesign our guns and all our instruments. Let's make it four feet."

Seaton turned to the crippled Skylark, upon which the first crew of Kondalian mechanics were working with skill and with tools undreamed-of upon Earth. The whole interior of the vessel was supported by a complex falsework of latticed metal, then the four-foot steel plates and the mighty embers, the pride of the great MacDougall, were cut away as though they were made of paper by revolving saws and enormous power shears. The sphere, grooved for the repellers and with the members, braces, and central machinery complete, of the exact dimensions of the originals, was rapidly moulded of a stiff, plastic substance resembling clay. This matrix soon hardened into a rock-like mass into which the doors, machine-gun emplacements, and other openings were carefully cut. All surfaces were then washed with a dilute solution of salt, which the workmen handled as though it were radium. Two great plates of platinum were clamped into place upon either side of the vessel, each plate connected by means of silver cables as large as a man's leg to the receiving terminal of an enormous wireless power station. The current was applied and the great spherical mass apparently disappeared, being transformed instantly into the transparent metal arenak. Then indeed had the Earth-men a vehicle such as had never been seen before! A four-foot shell of metal five hundred times as strong and hard as the strongest and hardest steel, cast in one piece with the sustaining framework designed by the world's foremost engineer--a structure that no conceivable force could deform or injure, housing an inconceivable propulsive force!

* * * * *

The falsework was rapidly removed and the sustaining framework was painted with opaque varnish to render it plainly visible. At Seaton's suggestion the walls of the cabins were also painted, leaving transparent several small areas to serve as windows.

The second work-period was drawing to a close, and as Seaton and Crane were to be married before koprat, they stopped work. They marveled at the amount that had been accomplished, and the Kofedix told them:

"Both vessels will be finished tomorrow, except for the controlling instruments, which we will have to make ourselves. Another crew will work during the sleeping-period, installing the guns and other fittings. Do you wish to have your own guns installed, or guns of our pattern? You are familiar with them now."

"Our own, please. They are slower and less efficient than yours, but we are used to them and have a lot of X-plosive ammunition for them," replied Seaton, after a short conference with Crane.

After instructing the officers in charge of the work, the three returned to the palace, the hearts of two of them beating high in anticipation. Seaton went into Crane's room, accompanied by two attendants bearing his suitcase and other luggage.

"We should have brought along dress clothes, Mart. Why didn't you think of that, too?"

"Nothing like this ever entered my mind. It is a good thing we brought along ducks and white soft shirts. I must say that this is extremely informal garb for a state wedding, but since the natives are ignorant of our customs, it will not make any difference."

"That's right, too--we'll make 'em think it's the most formal kind of dress. Dunark knows what's what, but he knows that full dress would be unbearable here. We'd melt down in a minute. It's plenty hot enough as it is, with only duck trousers and sport-shirts on. They'll look green instead of white, but that's a small matter."

Dunark, as best man, entered the room some time later.

"Give us a look, Dunark," begged Seaton, "and see if we'll pass inspection. I was never so rattled in my life."

They were clad in spotless white, from their duck oxfords to the white ties encircling the open collars of their tennis shirts. The two tall figures--Crane's slender, wiry, at perfect ease; Seaton's broad-shouldered, powerful, prowling about with unconscious, feline suppleness and grace--and the two handsome, high-bred, intellectual faces, each wearing a look of eager happiness, fully justified Dunark's answer.

"You sure will do!" he pronounced enthusiastically, and with Seaton's own impulsive good will he shook hands and wished them an eternity of happiness.

"When you have spoken with your brides," he continued, "I shall be waiting to escort you into the chapel. Sitar told me to say that the ladies are ready."

Dorothy and Margaret had been dressed in their bridal gowns by Sitar and several other princesses, under the watchful eyes of the Karfedir herself. Sitar placed the two girls side by side and drew off to survey her work.

"You are the loveliest creatures in the whole world!" she cried.

They looked at each other's glittering gowns, then Margaret glanced at Dorothy's face and a look of dismay overspread her own.

"Oh, Dottie!" she gasped. "Your lovely complexion! Isn't it terrible for the boys to see us in this light?"

There was a peal of delighted laughter from Sitar and she spoke to one of the servants, who drew dark curtains across the windows and pressed a switch, flooding the room with brilliant white light.

"Dunark installed lamps like those of your ship for you," she explained with intense satisfaction. "I knew in advance just how you would feel about your color."

Before the girls had time to thank their thoughtful hostess she disappeared and their bridegrooms stood before them. For a moment no word was spoken. Seaton stared at Dorothy hungrily, almost doubting the evidence of his senses. For white was white, pink was pink, and her hair shone in all its natural splendor of burnished bronze.

In their wondrous Osnomian bridal robes the beautiful Earth-maidens stood before their lovers. Upon their feet were jeweled slippers. Their lovely bodies were clothed in softly shimmering garments that left their rounded arms and throats bare--garments infinitely more supple than the finest silk, thick-woven of metallic threads of such fineness that the individual wires were visible only under a lens; garments that floated and clung about their perfect forms in lines of exquisite grace. For black-haired Margaret, with her ivory skin, the Kondalian princess had chosen a background of a rare white metal, upon which, in complicated figures, glistened numberless jewels of pale colors, more brilliant than diamonds. Dorothy's dress was of a peculiar, dark-green shade, half-hidden by an intricate design of blazing green gems--the strange, luminous jewels of this strange world. Both girls wore their long, heavy hair unbound, after the Kondalian bridal fashion, brushed until it fell like mist about them and confined at the temples by metallic bands entirely covered with jewels.

Seaton looked from Dorothy to Margaret and back again; looked down into her violet eyes, deep with wonder and with love, more beautiful than any jewel in all her gorgeous costume. Unheeding the presence of the others, she put her dainty hands upon his mighty shoulders and stood on tiptoe.

"I love you, Dick. Now and always, here or at home or anywhere in the Universe. We'll never be parted again," she whispered, and her own beloved violin had no sweeter tones than had her voice.

A few minutes later, her eyes wet and shining, she drew herself away from him and glanced at Margaret.

"Isn't she the most beautiful thing you ever laid eyes on?"

"No," Seaton answered promptly, "she is not--but poor old Mart thinks she is!"

* * * * *

Accompanied by the Karfedix and his son, Seaton and Crane went into the chapel, which, already brilliant, had been decorated anew with even greater splendor. Glancing through the wide arches they saw, for the first time, Osnomians clothed. The great room was filled with the highest nobility of Kondal, wearing their heavily-jeweled, resplendent robes of state. Every color of the rainbow and numberless fantastic patterns were there, embodied in the soft, lustrous, metallic fabric.

As the men entered one door Dorothy and Margaret, with the Karfedir and Sitar, entered the other, and the entire assemblage rose to its feet and snapped into the grand salute. Moving to the accompaniment of strange martial music from concealed instruments, the two parties approached each other, meeting at the raised platform or pulpit where Karbix Tarnan, a handsome, stately, middle-aged man who carried easily his hundred and fifty karkamo of age, awaited them. As he raised his arms, the music ceased.

It was a solemn and wonderfully impressive spectacle. The room, of burnished metal, with its bizarre decorations wrought in scintillating gems; the constantly changing harmony of colors as the invisible lamps were shifted from one shade to another; the group of mighty nobles standing rigidly at attention in a silence so profound that it was an utter absence of everything audible as the Karbix lifted both arms in a silent invocation of the great First Cause--all these things deepened the solemnity of that solemn moment.

When Tarnan spoke, his voice, deep with some great feeling, inexplicable even to those who knew him best, carried clearly to every part of the great chamber.

"Friends, it is our privilege to assist today in a most notable event, the marriage of four personages from another world. For the first time in the history of Osnome, one karfedix has the privilege of entertaining the bridal party of another. It is not for this fact alone, however, that this occasion is to be memorable. A far deeper reason is that we are witnessing, possibly for the first time in the history of the Universe, the meeting upon terms of mutual fellowship and understanding of the inhabitants of two worlds separated by unthinkable distances of trackless space and by equally great differences in evolution, conditions of life, and environment. Yet these strangers are actuated by the spirit of good faith and honor which is instilled into every worthy being by the great First Cause, in the working out of whose vast projects all things are humble instruments.

"In honor of the friendship of the two worlds, we will proceed with the ceremony.

"Richard Seaton and Martin Crane, exchange the plain rings with Dorothy Vaneman and Margaret Spencer."

They did so, and repeated, after the Karbix, simple vows of love and loyalty.

"May the First Cause smile upon this temporary marriage and render it worthy of being made permanent. As a lowly servant of the all-powerful First Cause I pronounce you two, and you two, husband and wife. But we must remember that the dull vision of mortal man cannot pierce the veil of futurity, which is as crystal to the all-beholding eye of the First Cause. Though you love each other truly, unforeseen things may come between you to mar the perfection of your happiness. Therefore a time is granted you during which you may discover whether or not your unions are perfect."

A pause ensued, then Tarnan went on:

"Martin Crane, Margaret Spencer, Richard Seaton, and Dorothy Vaneman, you are before us to take the final vows which shall bind your bodies together for life and your spirits together for eternity. Have you considered the gravity of this step sufficiently to enter into this marriage without reservation?"

"I have," solemnly replied the four, in unison.

"Exchange the jeweled rings. Do you, Richard Seaton and Dorothy Vaneman; and you, Martin Crane and Margaret Spencer; individually swear, here in the presence of the First Cause and that of the Supreme Justices of Kondal, that you will be true and loyal, each helping his chosen one in all things, great and small; that never throughout eternity, in thought or in action, will either your body or your mind or your conscious spirit stray from the path of fairness and truth and honor?"

"I do."

"I pronounce you married with the eternal marriage. Just as the faidon which you each now wear--the eternal jewel which no force of man, however applied, has yet been able to change or deform in any particular; and which continues to give off its inward light without change throughout eternity--shall endure through endless cycles of time after the metal of the ring which holds it shall have crumbled in decay: even so shall your spirits, formerly two, now one and indissoluble, progress in ever-ascending evolution throughout eternity after the base material which is your bodies shall have returned to the senseless dust from whence it arose."

* * * * *

The Karbix lowered his arms and the bridal party walked to the door through a double rank of uplifted weapons. From the chapel they were led to another room, where the contracting parties signed their names in a register. The Kofedix then brought forward two marriage certificates--heavy square plates of a brilliant purple metal, beautifully engraved in parallel columns of English and Kondalian script, and heavily bordered with precious stones. The principals and witnesses signed below each column, the signatures being deeply engraved by the royal engraver. Leaving the registry, they were escorted to the dining hall, where a truly royal repast was served. Between courses the highest nobles of the nation welcomed the visitors and wished them happiness in short but earnest addresses. After the last course had been disposed of, the Karbix rose at a sign from the Karfedix and spoke, his voice again agitated by the emotion which had puzzled his hearers during the marriage service.

"All Kondal is with us here in spirit, trying to aid us in our poor attempts to convey our welcome to these our guests, of whose friendship no greater warrant could be given than their willingness to grant us the privilege of their marriage. Not only have they given us a boon that will make their names revered throughout the nation as long as Kondal shall exist, but they have also been the means of showing us plainly that the First Cause is upon our side, that our age-old institution of honor is in truth the only foundation upon which can be built a race fitted to survive. At the same time they have been the means of showing us that our hated foe, entirely without honor, building his race upon a foundation of bloodthirsty savagery alone, is building wrongly and must perish utterly from the face of Osnome."

His hearers listened, impressed by his earnestness, but plainly not understanding his meaning.

"You do not understand?" he went on, with a deep light shining in his eyes. "It is inevitable that two peoples inhabiting worlds so widely separated as are our two should be possessed of widely-varying knowledge and abilities, and these strangers have already made it possible for us to construct engines of destruction which shall obliterate Mardonale completely...." A fierce shout of joy interrupted the speaker and the nobles sprang to their feet, saluting the visitors with upraised weapons. As soon as they had reseated themselves, the Karbix continued:

"That is the boon. The vindication of our system of evolution is easily explained. The strangers landed first upon Mardonale. Had Nalboon met them in honor, he would have gained the boon. But he, with the savagery characteristic of his evolution, attempted to kill his guests and steal their treasures, with what results you already know. We, on our part, in exchange for the few and trifling services we have been able to render them, have received even more than Nalboon would have obtained, had his plans not been nullified by their vastly superior state of evolution."

The orator seated himself and there was a deafening clamor of cheering as the nobles formed themselves into an escort of honor and conducted the two couples to their apartments.

Alone in their room, Dorothy turned to her husband with tears shining in her beautiful eyes.

"Dick, sweetheart, wasn't that the most wonderful thing that anybody ever heard of? Using the word in all its real meaning, it was indescribably grand, and that old man is simply superb. It makes me ashamed of myself to think that I was ever afraid or nervous here."

"It sure was all of that, Dottie mine, little bride of an hour. The whole thing gets right down to where a fellow lives--I've got a lump in my throat right now so big that it hurts me to think. Earthly marriages are piffling in comparison with that ceremony. It's no wonder they're happy, after taking those vows--especially as they don't have to take them until after they are sure of themselves.

"But we're sure already, sweetheart," as he embraced her with all the feeling of his nature. "Those vows are not a bit stronger than the ones we have already exchanged--bodily and mentally and spiritually we are one, now and forever."

CHAPTER XVII

Bird, Beast, or Fish?

"These jewels rather puzzle me, Dick. What are they?" asked Martin, as the four assembled, waiting for the first meal. As he spoke he held up his third finger, upon which gleamed the royal jewel of Osnome in its splendid Belcher mounting of arenak as transparent as the jewel itself and having the same intense blue color. "I know the name, 'faidon,' but that's all I seem to know."

"That's about all that anybody knows about them. It is a naturally-occurring, hundred-faceted crystal, just as you see it there--deep blue, perfectly transparent, intensely refractive, and constantly emitting that strong, blue light. It is so hard that it cannot be worked, cut, or ground. No amount of the hardest known abrasive will even roughen its surface. No blow, however great, will break it--it merely forces its way into the material of the hammer, however hard the hammer may be. No extremity of either heat or cold affects it in any degree, it is the same when in the most powerful electric arc as it is when immersed in liquid helium."

"How about acids?"

"That is what I am asking myself. Osnomians aren't much force at chemistry. I'm going to try to get hold of another one, and see if I can't analyze it, just for fun. I can't seem to convince myself that a real atomic structure could be that large."

"No, it is rather large for an atom," and turning to the two girls, "How do you like your solitaires?"

"They're perfectly beautiful, and the Tiffany mounting is exquisite," replied Dorothy, enthusiastically, "but they're so awfully big! They're as big as ten-carat diamonds, I do believe."

"Just about," replied Seaton, "but at that, they're the smallest Dunark could find. They have been kicking around for years, he says--so small that nobody wanted them. They wear big ones on their bracelets, you know. You sure will make a hit in Washington, Dottie. People will think you're wearing a bottle-stopper until they see it shining in the dark, then they'll think it's an automobile headlight. But after a few jewelers have seen these stones, one of them will be offering us five million dollars apiece for them, trying to buy them for some dizzy old dame who wants to put out the eyes of some of her social rivals. Yes? No?"

"That's about right, Dick," replied Crane, and his face wore a thoughtful look. "We can't keep it secret that we have a new jewel, since all four of us will be wearing them continuously, and anyone who knows jewels at all will recognize these as infinitely superior to any known Earthly jewel. In fact, they may get some of us into trouble, as fabulously valuable jewels usually do."

"That's true, too. So we'll let it out casually that they're as common as mud up here--that we're just wearing them for sentiment, which is true, and that we're thinking of bringing back a shipload to sell for parking lights."

"That would probably keep anyone from trying to murder our wives for their rings, at least."

"Have you read your marriage certificate, Dick?" asked Margaret.

"Not yet. Let's look at it, Dottie."

She produced the massive, heavily-jeweled document, and the auburn head and the brown one were very close to each other as they read together the English side of the certificate. Their vows were there, word for word, with their own signatures beneath them, all deeply engraved into the metal. Seaton smiled as he saw the legal form engraved below their signatures, and read aloud:

"I, the Head of the Church and the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of Kondal, upon the planet Osnome, certify that I have this day, in the city of Kondalek, of said nation and planet, joined in indissoluble bonds of matrimony, Richard Ballinger Seaton, Doctor of Philosophy, and Dorothy Lee Vaneman; Doctor of Music; both of the city of Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America, upon the planet Earth, in strict compliance with the marriage laws, both of Kondal and of the United States of America.

TARNAN."

Witnesses: ROBAN, Emperor of Kondal. TURAL, Empress of Kondal. DUNARK, Crown Prince of Kondal. SITAR, Crown Princess of Kondal. MARC C. DUQUESNE, Ph. D., Washington, D. C.

"That is SOME document," remarked Seaton. "Probably a lawyer could find fault with his phraseology, but I'll bet that this thing would hold in any court in the world. Think you'll get married again when we get back, Mart?"

Both girls protested, and Crane answered:

"No, I think not. Our ceremony would be rather an anticlimax after this one, and this one will undoubtedly prove legal. I intend to register this just as it is, and get a ruling from the courts. But it is time for breakfast. Pardon me--I should have said 'darprat,' for it certainly is not breakfast-time by Washington clocks. My watch says that it is eleven-thirty P. M."

"This system of time is funny," remarked Dorothy. "I just can't get used to having no night, and...."

"And it's such a long time between eats, as the famous governor said about the drinks," broke in Seaton.

"How did you know what I was going to say, Dick?"

"Husbandly intuition," he grinned, "aided and abetted by a normal appetite that rebels at seventeen hours between supper and breakfast, and nine hours between the other meals. Well, it's time to eat--let's go!"

* * * * *

After eating, the men hurried to the Skylark. During the sleeping-period the vessel had been banded with the copper repellers: the machine guns and instruments, including the wonderful Osnomian wireless system, had been installed; and, except for the power-bars, she was ready for a voyage. The Kondalian vessel was complete, even to the cushions, but was without instruments.

After a brief conversation with the officer in charge, Dunark turned to Seaton.

"Didn't you find that your springs couldn't stand up under the acceleration?"

"Yes, they flattened out dead."

"The Kolanix Felan, in charge of the work, thought so, and substituted our compound-compensated type, made of real spring metal, for them. They'll hold you through any acceleration you can live through."

"Thanks, that's fine. What's next, instruments?"

"Yes. I have sent a crew of men to gather up what copper they can find--you know that we use practically no metallic copper, as platinum, gold, and silver are so much better for ordinary purposes--and another to erect a copper-smelter near one of the mines which supply the city with the copper sulphate used upon our tables. While they are at work I think I will work on the instruments, if you two will be kind enough to help me."

Seaton and Crane offered to supply him with instruments from their reserve stock, but the Kofedix refused to accept them, saying that he would rather have their help in making them, so that he would thoroughly understand their functions. The electric furnaces were rapidly made ready and they set to work; Crane taking great delight in working that hitherto rare and very refractory metal, iridium, of which all the Kondalian instruments were to be made.

"They have a lot of our rare metals here, Dick."

"They sure have. I'd like to set up a laboratory and live here a few years--I'd learn something about my specialty or burst. They use gold and silver where we use copper, and platinum and its alloys where we use iron and soft steel. All their weapons are made of iridium, and all their most highly-tempered tools, such as their knives, razors, and so on, are made of opaque arenak. I suppose you've noticed the edge on your razor?"

"How could I help it? It is hard to realize that a metal can be so hard that it requires forty years on a diamond-dust abrasive machine to hone a razor--or that once honed, it shaves generation after generation of men without losing in any degree its keenness."

"I can't understand it, either--I only know that it's so. They have all our heavy metals in great abundance, and a lot more that we don't know anything about on Earth, but they apparently haven't any light metals at all. It must be that Osnome was thrown off the parent sun late, so that the light metals were all gone?"

"Something like that, possibly."

The extraordinary skill of the Kofedix made the manufacture of the instruments a short task, and after Crane had replaced the few broken instruments of the Skylark from their reserve stock, they turned their attention to the supply of copper that had been gathered. They found it enough for only two bars.

"Is this all we have?" asked Dunark, sharply.

"It is, your Highness," replied the Kolanix. "That is every scrap of metallic copper in the city."

"Oh, well, that'll be enough to last until we can smelt the rest," said Seaton. "With one bar apiece we're ready for anything Mardonale can start. Let 'em come!"

The bars were placed in the containers and both vessels were tried out, each making a perfect performance. Upon the following kokam, immediately after the first meal, the full party from the Earth boarded the Skylark and accompanied the Kofedix to the copper smelter. Dunark himself directed the work of preparing the charges and the molds, though he was continually being interrupted by wireless messages in code and by messengers bearing tidings too important to trust into the air.

"I hope you will excuse all of these delays," said Dunark, after the twentieth interruption, "but...."

"That's all right, Dunark. We know that you're a busy man."

"I can tell you about it, but I wouldn't want to tell many people. With the salt you gave us, I am preparing a power-plant that will enable us to blow Mardonale into...."

He broke off as a wireless call for help sounded. All listened intently, learning that a freight-plane was being pursued by a karlon a few hundred miles away.

"Now's the time for you to study one, Dunark!" Seaton exclaimed. "Get your gang of scientists out here while we go get him and drag him in!"

* * * * *

As Dunark sent the message, the Skylark's people hurried aboard, and Seaton drove the vessel toward the calls for help. With its great speed it reached the monster before the plane was overtaken. Focusing the attractor upon the enormous metallic beak of the karlon, Seaton threw on the power and the beast halted in midair as it was jerked backward and upward. As it saw the puny size of the attacking Skylark, it opened its cavernous mouth in a horrible roar and rushed at full speed. Seaton, unwilling to have the repellers stripped from the vessel, turned on the current actuating them. The karlon was hurled backward to the point of equilibrium of the two forces, where it struggled demoniacally.

Seaton carried his captive back to the smelter, where finally, by judicious pushing and pulling, he succeeded in turning the monster flat upon its back and pinning it to the ground in spite of its struggles to escape.

Soon the scientists arrived and studied the animal thoroughly, at as close a range as its flailing arms permitted.

"I wish we could kill him without blowing him to bits," wirelessed Dunark. "Do you know any way of doing it?"

"We could if we had a few barrels of ether, or some of our own poison gases, but they are all unknown here and it would take a long time to build the apparatus to make them. I'll see if I can't tire him out and get him that way as soon as you've studied him enough. We may be able to find out where he lives, too."

The scientists having finished their observations, Seaton jerked the animal a few miles into the air and shut off the forces acting upon it. There was a sudden crash, and the karlon, knowing that this apparently insignificant vessel was its master, turned in headlong flight.

"Have you any idea what caused the noise just then, Dick?" asked Crane; who, with characteristic imperturbability, had taken out his notebook and was making exact notes of all that transpired.

"I imagine we cracked a few of his plates," replied Seaton with a laugh, as he held the Skylark in place a few hundred feet above the fleeing animal.

Pitted for the first time in its life against an antagonist, who could both outfly and outfight it, the karlon redoubled its efforts and fled in a panic of fear. It flew back over the city of Kondalek, over the outlying country, and out over the ocean, still followed easily by the Skylark. As they neared the Mardonalian border, a fleet of warships rose to contest the entry of the monster. Seaton, not wishing to let the foe see the rejuvenated Skylark, jerked his captive high into the thin air. As soon as it was released, it headed for the ocean in an almost perpendicular dive, while Seaton focused an object-compass upon it.

"Go to it, old top," he addressed the plunging monster. "We'll follow you clear to the bottom of the ocean if you go that far!"

There was a mighty double splash as the karlon struck the water, closely followed by the Skylark. The girls gasped as the vessel plunged below the surface at such terrific speed, and seemed surprised that it had suffered no injury and that they had felt no jar. Seaton turned on the powerful searchlights and kept close enough so that he could see the monster through the transparent walls. Deeper and deeper the quarry dove, until it was plainly evident to the pursuers that it was just as much at home in the water as it was in the air. The beams of the lights revealed strange forms of life, among which were huge, staring-eyed fishes, which floundered about blindly in the unaccustomed glare. As the karlon bored still deeper, the living things became scarcer, but still occasional fleeting glimpses were obtained of the living nightmares which inhabited the oppressive depths of these strange seas. Continuing downward, the karlon plumbed the nethermost pit of the ocean and came to rest upon the bottom, stirring up a murk of ooze.

"How deep are we, Mart?"

"About four miles. I have read the pressure, but will have to calculate later exactly what depth it represents, from the gravity and density readings."

As the animal showed no sign of leaving its retreat, Seaton pulled it out with the attractor and it broke for the surface. Rising through the water at full speed, it burst into the air and soared upward to such an incredible height that Seaton was amazed.

"I wouldn't have believed that anything could fly in air this thin!" he exclaimed.

"It is thin up here," assented Crane. "Less than three pounds to the square inch. I wonder how he does it?"

"It doesn't look as though we are ever going to find out--he's sure a bear-cat!" replied Seaton, as the karlon, unable to ascend further, dropped in a slanting dive toward the lowlands of Kondal--the terrible, swampy region covered with poisonous vegetation and inhabited by frightful animals and even more frightful savages. The monster neared the ground with ever-increasing speed. Seaton, keeping close behind it, remarked to Crane:

"He'll have to flatten out pretty quick, or he'll burst something, sure."

* * * * *

But it did not flatten out. It struck the soft ground head foremost and disappeared, its tentacles apparently boring a way ahead of it.

Astonished at such an unlooked-for development, Seaton brought the Skylark to a stop and stabbed into the ground with the attractor. The first attempt brought up nothing but a pillar of muck, the second brought to light a couple of wings and one writhing arm, the third brought the whole animal, still struggling as strongly as it had in the first contest. Seaton again lifted the animal high into the air.

"If he does that again, we'll follow him."

"Will the ship stand it?" asked DuQuesne, with interest.

"Yes. The old bus wouldn't have, but this one can stand anything. We can go anywhere that thing can, that's a cinch. If we have enough power on, we probably won't even feel a jolt when we strike ground."

Seaton reduced the force acting upon the animal until just enough was left to keep the attractor upon it, and it again dived into the swamp. The Skylark followed, feeling its way in the total darkness, until the animal stopped, refusing to move in any direction, at a depth estimated by Crane to be about three-quarters of a mile. After waiting some time Seaton increased the power of the attractor and tore the karlon back to the surface and into the air, where it turned on the Skylark with redoubled fury.

"We've dug him out of his last refuge and he's fighting like a cornered rat," said Seaton as he repelled the monster to a safe distance. "He's apparently as fresh as when he started, in spite of all this playing. Talk about a game fish! He doesn't intend to run any more, though, so I guess we'll have to put him away. It's a shame to bump him off, but it's got to be done."

Crane aimed one of the heavy X-plosive bullets at the savagely-struggling monster, and the earth rocked with the concussion as the shell struck its mark. They hurried back to the smelter, where Dunark asked eagerly:

"What did you find out about it?"

"Nothing much," replied Seaton, and in a few words described the actions of the karlon. "What did your savants think of it?"

"Very little that any of us can understand in terms of any other known organism. It seems to combine all the characteristics of bird, beast, and fish, and to have within itself the possibilities of both bisexual and asexual reproduction."

"I wouldn't doubt it--it's a queer one, all right."

The copper bars were cool enough to handle, and the Skylark was loaded with five times its original supply of copper, the other vessel taking on a much smaller amount. After the Kofedix had directed the officer in charge to place the remaining bars in easily-accessible places throughout the nation, the two vessels were piloted back to the palace, arriving just in time for the last meal of the kokam.

"Well, Dunark," said Seaton after the meal was over, "I'm afraid that we must go back as soon as we can. Dorothy's parents and Martin's bankers will think they are dead by this time. We should start right now, but...."

"Oh, no, you must not do that. That would rob our people of the chance of bidding you goodbye."

"There's another reason, too. I have a mighty big favor to ask of you."

"It is granted. If man can do it, consider it done."

"Well, you know platinum is a very scarce and highly useful metal with us. I wonder if you could let us have a few tons of it? And I would like to have another faidon, too--I want to see if I can't analyze it."

"You have given us a thousand times the value of all the platinum and all the jewels your vessel can carry. As soon as the foundries are open tomorrow we will go and load up your store-rooms--or, if you wish, we will do it now."

"That isn't necessary. We may as well enjoy your hospitality for one more sleeping-period, get the platinum during the first work-period, and bid you goodbye just before the second meal. How would that be?"

"Perfectly satisfactory."

The following kokam, Dunark piloted the Skylark, with Seaton, Crane, and DuQuesne as crew, to one of the great platinum foundries. The girls remained behind to get ready for their departure, and for the great ceremony which was to precede it. The trip to the foundry was a short one, and the three scientists of Earth stared at what they saw--thousands of tons of platinum, cast into bars and piled up like pig-iron, waiting to be made into numerous articles of every-day use throughout the nation. Dunark wrote out an order, which his chief attendant handed to the officer in charge of the foundry, saying:

"Please have it loaded at once."

Seaton indicated the storage compartment into which the metal was to be carried, and a procession of slaves, two men staggering under one ingot, was soon formed between the pile and the storage room.

* * * * *

"How much are you loading on, Dunark?" asked Seaton, when the large compartment was more than half full.

"My order called for about twenty tons, in your weight, but I changed it later--we may as well fill that room full, so that the metal will not rattle around in flight. It doesn't make any difference to us, we have so much of it. It is like your gift of the salt, only vastly smaller."

"What are you going to do with it all, Dick?" asked Crane. "That is enough to break the platinum market completely."

"That's exactly what I'm going to do," returned Seaton, with a gleam in his gray eyes. "I'm going to burst this unjustifiable fad for platinum jewelry so wide open that it'll never recover, and make platinum again available for its proper uses, in laboratories and in the industries.

"You know yourself," he rushed on hotly, "that the only reason platinum is used at all for jewelry is that it is expensive. It isn't nearly so handsome as either gold or silver, and if it wasn't the most costly common metal we have, the jewelry-wearing crowd wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Useless as an ornament, it is the one absolutely indispensable laboratory metal, and literally hundreds of laboratories that need it can't have it because over half the world's supply is tied up in jeweler's windows and in useless baubles. Then, too, it is the best thing known for contact points in electrical machinery. When the Government and all the scientific societies were abjectly begging the jewelers to let loose a little of it they refused--they were selling it to profiteering spendthrifts at a hundred and fifty dollars an ounce. The condition isn't much better right now; it's a vicious circle. As long as the price stays high it will be used for jewelry, and as long as it is used for jewelry the price will stay high, and scientists will have to fight the jewelers for what little they get."

"While somewhat exaggerated, that is about the way matters stand. I will admit that I, too, am rather bitter on the subject," said Crane.

"Bitter? Of course you're bitter. Everybody is who knows anything about science and who has a brain in his head. Anybody who claims to be a scientist and yet stands for any of his folks buying platinum jewelry ought to be shot. But they'll get theirs as soon as we get back. They wouldn't let go of it before, they had too good a thing, but they'll let go now, and get their fingers burned besides. I'm going to dump this whole shipment at fifty cents a pound, and we'll take mighty good care that jewelers don't corner the supply."

"I'm with you, Dick, as usual."

Soon the storage room was filled to the ceiling with closely-stacked ingots of the precious metal, and the Skylark was driven back to the landing dock. She alighted beside Dunark's vessel, the _Kondal_, whose gorgeously-decorated crew of high officers sprang to attention as the four men stepped out. All were dressed for the ceremonial leave-taking, the three Americans wearing their spotless white, the Kondalians wearing their most resplendent trappings.

"This formal stuff sure does pull my cork!" exclaimed Seaton to Dunark. "I want to get this straight. The arrangement was that we were to be here at this time, all dressed up, and wait for the ladies, who are coming under the escort of your people?"

"Yes. Our family is to escort the ladies from the palace here. As they leave the elevator the surrounding war-vessels will salute, and after a brief ceremony you two will escort your wives into the Skylark, Doctor DuQuesne standing a little apart and following you in. The war-vessels will escort you as high as they can go, and the Kondal will accompany you as far as our most distant sun before turning back."

For a few moments Seaton nervously paced a short beat in front of the door of the space-car.

"I'm getting more fussed every second," he said abruptly, taking out his wireless instrument. "I'm going to see if they aren't about ready."

"What seems to be the trouble, Dick? Have you another hunch, or are you just rattled?" asked Crane.

"Rattled, I guess, but I sure do want to get going," he replied, as he worked the lever rapidly.

"Dottie," he sent out, and, the call being answered, "How long will you be? We're all ready and waiting, chewing our finger-nails with impatience."

"We'll soon be ready. The Karfedix is coming for us now."

Scarcely had the tiny sounder become silent when the air was shaken by an urgently-vibrated message, and every wireless sounder gave warning.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Invasion

The pulsating air and the chattering sounders were giving the same dire warning, the alarm extraordinary of invasion, of imminent and catastrophic danger from the air.

"Don't try to reach the palace. Everyone on the ground will have time enough to hide in the deep, arenak-protected pits beneath the buildings, and you would be killed by the invaders long before you could reach the palace. If we can repel the enemy and keep them from landing, the women will be perfectly safe, even though the whole city is destroyed. If they effect a landing we are lost."

"They'll not land, then," Seaton answered grimly, as he sprang into the Skylark and took his place at the board. As Crane took out his wireless, Seaton cautioned him.

"Send in English, and tell the girls not to answer, as these devils can locate the calls within a foot and will be able to attack the right spot. Just tell them we're safe in the Skylark. Tell them to sit tight while we wipe out this gang that is coming, and that we'll call them, once in a while, when we have time, during the battle."

Before Crane had finished sending the message the crescendo whine of enormous propellers was heard. Simultaneously there was a deafening concussion and one entire wing of the palace disappeared in a cloud of dust, in the midst of which could be discerned a few flying fragments. The air was filled with Mardonalian warships. They were huge vessels, each mounting hundreds of guns, and the rain of high-explosive shells was rapidly reducing the great city to a wide-spread heap of debris.

Seaton's hand was upon the lever which would hurl the Skylark upward into the fray. Crane and DuQuesne, each hard of eye and grim of jaw, were stationed at their machine-guns.

"Something's up!" exclaimed Seaton. "Look at the Kondal!"

Something had happened indeed. Dunark sat at the board, his hand upon the power lever, and each of his crew was in place, grasping his weapon, but every man was writhing in agony, unable to control his movements. As they stared, momentarily spellbound, the entire crew ceased their agonized struggles and hung, apparently lifeless, from their supports.

"They've got to 'em some way--let's go!" yelled Seaton.

As his hand tightened upon the lever, a succession of shells burst upon the dock, wrecking it completely, all three men fancied that the world had come to an end as the stream of high explosive was directed against their vessel. But the four-foot shell of arenak was impregnable, and Seaton shot the Skylark upward into the midst of the enemy fleet. The two gunners fired as fast as they could sight their weapons, and with each shot one of the great warships was blown into fragments. The Mardonalians then concentrated the fire of their entire fleet upon their tiny opponent.

From every point of the compass, from above and below, the enemy gunners directed streams of shells against the dodging vessel. The noise was more than deafening, it was one continuous, shattering explosion, and the Earth-men were surrounded by such a blaze of fire from the exploding shells that they could not see the enemy vessels. Seaton sought to dodge the shells by a long dive toward one side, only to find that dozens of new opponents had been launched against them--the deadly airplane-torpedoes of Osnome. Steered by wireless and carrying no crews, they were simply winged bombs carrying thousands of pounds of terrific electrical explosive--enough to kill the men inside the vessel by the concussion of the explosion, even should the arenak armor be strong enough to withstand the blow. Though much faster than the Osnomian vessels, they were slow beside the Skylark, and Seaton could have dodged a few of them with ease. As he dodged, however, they followed relentlessly, and in spite of those which were blown up by the gunners, their number constantly increased until Seaton thought of the repellers.

"'Nobody Holme' is right!" he exclaimed, as he threw on the power actuating the copper bands which encircled the hull in all directions. Instantly the torpedoes were hurled backward, exploding as the force struck them, and even the shells were ineffective, exploding harmlessly, as they encountered the zone of force. The noise of the awful detonations lessened markedly.

"Why the silence, I wonder?" asked Seaton, while the futile shells of the enemy continued to waste their force some hundreds of feet distant from their goal, and while Crane and DuQuesne were methodically destroying the huge vessels as fast as they could aim and fire. At every report one of the monster warships disappeared--its shattered fragments and the bodies of its crew hurtling to the ground. His voice could not be heard in even the lessened tumult, but he continued:

"It must be that our repellers have set up a partial vacuum by repelling even the air!"

* * * * *

Suddenly the shelling ceased and the Skylark was enveloped by a blinding glare from hundreds of great reflectors; an intense, searching, bluish-violet light that burned the flesh and seared through eyelids and eyeballs into the very brain.

"Ultra-violet!" yelled Seaton at the first glimpse of the light, as he threw on the power. "Shut your eyes! Turn your heads down!"

Out in space, far beyond reach of the deadly rays, the men held a short conference, then donned heavy leather-and-canvas suits, which they smeared liberally with thick red paint, and replaced the plain glasses of their helmets with heavy lenses of deep ruby glass.

"This'll stop any ultra-violet ray ever produced," exulted Seaton, as he again threw the vessel into the Mardonalian fleet. A score of the great vessels met their fate before the Skylark was located, and, although the terrible rays were again focused upon the intruder in all their intensity, the carnage continued.

In a few minutes, however, the men heard, or rather felt, a low, intense vibration, like a silent wave of sound--a vibration which smote upon the eardrums as no possible sound could smite, a vibration which racked the joints and tortured the nerves as though the whole body were disintegrating. So sudden and terrible was the effect that Seaton uttered an involuntary yelp of surprise and pain as he once more fled into the safety of space.

"What the devil was that?" demanded DuQuesne. "Was it infra-sound? I didn't suppose such waves could be produced."

"Infra-sound is right. They produce most anything here," replied Seaton, and Crane added:

"Well, about three fur suits apiece, with cotton in our ears, ought to kill any wave propagated through air."

The fur suits were donned forthwith, Seaton whispering in Crane's ear:

"I've found out something else, too. The repellers repel even the air. I'm going to shoot enough juice through them to set up a perfect vacuum outside. That'll kill those air-waves."

Scarcely were they back within range of the fleet when DuQuesne, reaching for his gun to fire the first shot, leaped backward with a yell.

"Beat it!"

Once more at a safe distance, DuQuesne explained.

"It's lucky I'm so used to handling hot stuff that from force of habit I never make close contact with anything at the first touch. That gun carried thousands of volts, with lots of amperage behind them, and if I had had a good hold on it I couldn't have let go. We'll block that game quick enough, though. Thick, dry gloves covered with rubber are all that is necessary. It's a good thing for all of us that you have those fancy condensite handles on your levers, Seaton."

"That was how they got Dunark, undoubtedly," said Crane, as he sent a brief message to the girls, assuring them that all was well, as he had been doing at every respite. "But why were we not overcome at the same time?"

"They must have had the current tuned to iridium, and had to experiment until they found the right wave for steel," Seaton explained.

"I should think our bar would have exploded, with all that current. They must have hit the copper range, too?"

Seaton frowned in thought before he answered.

"Maybe because it's induced current, and not a steady battery impulse. Anyway, it didn't. Let's go!"

"Just a minute," put in Crane. "What are they going to do next, Dick?"

"Search me. I'm not used to my new Osnomian mind yet. I recognize things all right after they happen, but I can't seem to figure ahead--it's like a dimly-remembered something that flashes up as soon as mentioned. I get too many and too new ideas at once. I know, though, that the Osnomians have defenses against all these things except this last stunt of the charged guns. That must be the new one that Mardonale stole from Kondal. The defenses are, however, purely Osnomian in character and material. As we haven't got the stuff to set them up as the Osnomians do, we'll have to do it our own way. We may be able to dope out the next one, though. Let's see, what have they given us so far?"

"We've got to hand it to them," responded DuQuesne, admiringly. "They're giving us the whole range of wave-lengths, one at a time. They've given us light, both ultra-violet and visible, sound, infra-sound, and electricity--I don't know what's left unless they give us a new kind of X-rays, or Hertzian, or infra-red heat waves, or...."

"That's it, heat!" exclaimed Seaton. "They produce heat by means of powerful wave-generators and by setting up heavy induced currents in the armor. They can melt arenak that way."

"Do you suppose we can handle the heat with our refrigerators?" asked Crane.

"Probably. We have a lot of power, and the new arenak cylinders of our compressors will stand anything. The only trouble will be in cooling the condensers. We'll run as long as we have any water in our tanks, then go dive into the ocean to cool off. We'll try it a whirl, anyway."

* * * * *

Soon the Skylark was again dealing out death and destruction in the thick of the enemy vessels, who again turned from the devastation of the helpless city to destroy this troublesome antagonist. But in spite of the utmost efforts of light-waves, sound-waves, and high-tension electricity, the space-car continued to take its terrible toll. As Seaton had foretold, the armor of the Skylark began to grow hot, and he turned on the full power of the refrigerating system. In spite of the cooling apparatus, however, the outer walls finally began to glow redly, and, although the interior was comfortably cool, the ends of the rifle-barrels, which were set flush with the surface of the revolving arenak globes which held them, softened, rendering the guns useless. The copper repellers melted and dripped off in flaming balls of molten metal, so that shells once more began to crash against the armor. DuQuesne, with no thought of quitting apparent in voice or manner, said calmly:

"Well, it looks as though they had us stopped for a few minutes. Let's go back into space and dope out something else."

Seaton, thinking intensely, saw a vast fleet of enemy reinforcements approaching, and at the same time received a wireless call directed to Dunark. It was from the grand fleet of Kondal, hastening from the bordering ocean to the defense of the city. Using Dunark's private code, Seaton told the Karbix, who was in charge of the fleet, that the enemy had a new invention which would wipe them out utterly without a chance to fight, and that he and his vessel were in control of the situation; and ordered him to see that no Kondalian ship came within battle range of a Mardonalian. He then turned to Crane and DuQuesne, his face grim and his fighting jaw set.

"I've got it doped right now. Give the Lark speed enough and she's some bullet herself. We've got four feet of arenak, they've got only an inch, and arenak doesn't even begin to soften until far above a blinding white temperature. Strap yourselves in solid, for it's going to be a rough party from now on."

They buckled their belts firmly, and Seaton, holding the bar toward their nearest antagonist, applied twenty notches of power. The Skylark darted forward and crashed completely through the great airship. Torn wide open by the forty-foot projectile, its engines wrecked and its helicopter-screws and propellers completely disabled, the helpless hulk plunged through two miles of empty air, a mass of wreckage.

[Illustration: The Skylark darted forward and crashed completely through the great airship.... She was an embodied thunderbolt; a huge, irresistible, indestructible projectile, directed by a keen brain inside....]

Darting hither and thither, the space-car tore through vessel after vessel of the Mardonalian fleet. She was an embodied thunderbolt; a huge, irresistible, indestructible projectile, directed by a keen brain inside it--the brain of Richard Seaton, roused to his highest fighting pitch and fighting for everything that man holds dear. Tortured by the terrible silent waves, which, now that the protecting vacuum had been destroyed, were only partially stopped by the fur suits; shaken and battered by the terrific impacts and the even greater shocks occurring every second as the direction of the vessel was changed; made sick and dizzy by the nauseating swings and lurches as the Skylark spun about the central chamber; Seaton's wonderful physique and his nerves of steel stood him in good stead in this, the supreme battle of his life, as with teeth tight-locked and eyes gray and hard as the fracture of high-carbon steel, he urged the Skylark on to greater and greater efforts.

Though it was impossible for the eye to follow the flight of the space-car, the mechanical sighting devices of the Mardonalian vessels kept her in as perfect focus as though she were stationary, and the great generators continued to hurl into her the full power of their death-dealing waves. The enemy guns were still spitting forth their streams of high-explosive shells, but unlike the waves, the shells moved so slowly compared to their target that only a few found their mark, and many of the vessels fell to the ground, riddled by the shells of their sister-ships.

* * * * *

With anxious eyes Seaton watched the hull of his animated cannon-ball change in color. From dull red it became cherry, and as the cherry red gave place to bright red heat, Seaton threw even more power into the bar as he muttered through his set teeth:

"Well, Seaton, old top, you've got to cut out this loafing on the job and get busy!"

In spite of his utmost exertions and in spite of the powerful ammonia plant, now exerting its full capacity, but sadly handicapped by the fact that its cooling-water was now boiling, Seaton saw the arenak shell continue to heat. The bright red was succeeded by orange, which slowly changed, first to yellow, then to light yellow, and finally to a dazzling white; through which, with the aid of his heavy red lenses, he could still see the enemy ships. After a time he noted that the color had gone down to yellow and he thrilled with exultation, knowing that he had so reduced the numbers of the enemy fleet that their wave-generators could no longer overcome his refrigerators. After a few minutes more of the awful carnage there remained only a small fraction of the proud fleet which, thousands strong, had invaded Kondal--a remnant that sought safety in flight. But even in flight, they still fought with all their weapons, and the streams of bombs dropped from their keel-batteries upon the country beneath marked the path of their retreat with a wide swath of destruction. Half inclined to let the few remaining vessels escape, Seaton's mind changed instantly as he saw the bombs spreading devastation upon the countryside, and not until the last of the Mardonalian vessels had been destroyed did he drop the Skylark into the area of ruins which had once been the palace grounds, beside the Kondal, which was still lying as it had fallen.

After several attempts to steady their whirling senses, the three men finally were able to walk, and, opening a door, they leaped out through the opening in the still glowing wall. Seaton's first act was to wireless the news to Dorothy, who replied that they were coming as fast as they could. The men then removed their helmets, revealing faces pale and drawn, and turned to the helpless space-car.

"There's no way of getting into this thing from the outside...." Seaton began, when he saw that the Kofedix and his party were beginning to revive. Soon Dunark opened the door and stumbled out.

"I have to thank you for more than my life this time," he said, his voice shaken by uncontrollable emotion as he grasped the hands of all three men. "Though unable to move, I was conscious and saw all that happened--you kept them so busy that they didn't have a chance to give us enough to kill us outright. You have saved the lives of millions of our nation and have saved Kondal itself from annihilation."

"Oh, it's not that bad," answered Seaton, uncomfortably. "Both nations have been invaded before."

"Yes--once when we developed the ultra-violet ray, once when Mardonale perfected the machine for producing the silent sound-wave, and again when we harnessed the heat-wave. But this would have been the most complete disaster in history. The other inventions were not so deadly as was this one, and there were terrible battles, from which the victors emerged so crippled that they could not completely exterminate the vanquished, who were able to re-establish themselves in the course of time. If it had not been for you, this would have been the end, as not a Kondalian soldier could move--any person touching iridium was helpless and would have been killed."

He ceased speaking and saluted as the Karfedix and his party rounded a heap of boulders. Dorothy and Margaret screamed in unison as they saw the haggard faces of their husbands, and saw their suits, dripping with a thick substance which they knew to be red, in spite of its purplish-black color. Seaton dodged nimbly as Dorothy sought to take him in her arms, and tore off his suit.

"Nothing but red paint to stop their light-rays," he reassured her as he lifted her clear from the ground in a soul-satisfying embrace. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Kondalians staring in open-mouthed amazement at the Skylark. Wheeling swiftly, he laughed as he saw a gigantic ball of frost and snow! Again donning his fur suit, he shut off the refrigerators and returned to his party, where the Karfedix gave him thanks in measured terms. As he fell silent, Dunark added:

"Thanks to you, the Mardonalian forces, instead of wiping us out, are themselves destroyed, while only a handful of our vessels have been lost, since the grand fleet could not arrive until the battle was over, and since the vessels that would have thrown themselves away were saved by your orders, which I heard. Thanks to you, we are not even crippled, though our capital is destroyed and the lives of some unfortunates, who could not reach the pits in time, have probably been lost.

"Thanks to you," he continued in a ringing voice, "and to the salt and the new source of power you have given us, Mardonale shall now be destroyed utterly!"

After sending out ships to relieve the suffering of the few wounded and the many homeless, Dunark summoned a corps of mechanics, who banded on new repellers and repaired the fused barrels of the machine-guns, all that was necessary to restore the Skylark to perfect condition.

* * * * *

Facing the party from Earth, the Karfedix stood in the ruins of his magnificent palace. Back of him were the nobles of Kondal, and still further back, in order of rank, stood a multitude of people.

"Is it permitted, oh noble Karfedo, that I reward your captive for his share in the victory?" he asked.

"It is," acquiesced Seaton and Crane, and Roban stepped up to DuQuesne and placed in his hand a weighty leather bag. He then fastened about his left wrist the Order of Kondal, the highest order of the nation.

He then clasped about Crane's wrist a heavily-jeweled, peculiarly-ornamented disk wrought of a deep ruby-red metal, supported by a heavy bracelet of the same material, the most precious metal of Osnome. At sight of the disk the nobles saluted and Seaton barely concealed a start of surprise, for it bore the royal emblem and delegated to its bearer power second only to that of the Karfedix himself.

"I bestow upon you this symbol, Karfedix Crane, in recognition of what you have this day done for Kondal. Wherever you may be upon Kondalian Osnome, which from this day henceforth shall be all Osnome, you have power as my personal representative, as my eldest son."

He drew forth a second bracelet, similar to the first except that it bore seven disks, each differently designed, which he snapped upon Seaton's wrist as the nobles knelt and the people back of them threw themselves upon their faces.

"No language spoken by man possesses words sufficiently weighty to express our indebtedness to you, Karfedix Seaton, our guest and our savior. The First Cause has willed that you should be the instrument through which Kondal is this day made supreme upon Osnome.

In small and partial recognition of that instrumentality, I bestow upon you these symbols, which proclaim you our overlord, the ultimate authority of Osnome.

While this is not the way in which I had thought to bid you farewell, the obligations which you have heaped upon us render all smaller things insignificant. When you return, as I hope and trust you soon will, the city shall be built anew and we can welcome you as befits your station."

Lifting both arms above his head he continued:

"May the great First Cause smile upon you in all your endeavors until you solve the Mystery: may your descendants soon reach the Ultimate Goal. Goodbye."

Seaton uttered a few heartfelt words in response and the party stepped backward toward the Skylark. As they reached the vessel the standing Karfedix and the ranks of kneeling nobles snapped into the double salute--truly a rare demonstration in Kondal.

"What'll we do now?" whispered Seaton.

"Bow, of course," answered Dorothy.

They bowed, deeply and slowly, and entered their vessel. As the Skylark shot into the air with the greatest acceleration that would permit its passengers to move about, the grand fleet of Kondalian warship fired a deafening salute.

* * * * *

It had been planned before the start that each person was to work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. Seaton was to drive the vessel during the first two eight-hour periods of each day. Crane was to observe the stars during the second and to drive during the third. DuQuesne was to act as observer during the first and third periods. Margaret had volunteered to assist the observer in taking his notes during her waking hours, and Dorothy appointed herself cook and household manager.

As soon as the Skylark had left Osnome, Crane told DuQuesne that he and his wife would work in the observation room until four o'clock in the afternoon, at which time the prearranged system of relief would begin, and DuQuesne retired to his room.

Crane and Margaret made their way to the darkened room which housed the instruments and seated themselves, watching intently and making no effort to conceal their emotion as first the persons beneath them, then the giant war-vessels, and finally the ruined city itself, were lost to view. Osnome slowly assumed the proportions of a large moon, grew smaller, and as it disappeared Crane began to take notes. For a few hours the seventeen suns of this strange solar system shone upon the flying space-car, after which they assumed the aspect of a widely-separated cluster of enormous stars, slowly growing smaller and smaller and shrinking closer and closer together.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, Washington time, DuQuesne relieved Crane, who made his way to the engine room.

"It is time to change shifts, Dick. You have not had your sixteen hours, but everything will be regular from now on. You two had better get some rest."

"All right," replied Seaton, as he relinquished the controls to Crane, and after bidding the new helmsman goodnight he and Dorothy went below to their cabin.

Standing at a window with their arms around each other they stared down with misty eyes at the very faint green star, which was rapidly decreasing in brilliance as the Skylark increased its already inconceivable velocity. Finally, as it disappeared altogether, Seaton turned to his wife and tenderly, lovingly, took her in his arms.

"Littlest Girl.... Sweetheart...." he whispered, and paused, overcome by the intensity of his feelings.

"I know, husband mine," she answered, while tears dimmed her glorious eyes. "It is too deep. With nothing but words, we can't say a single thing."

CHAPTER XIX

The Return to Earth

DuQuesne's first act upon gaining the privacy of his own cabin was to open the leather bag presented to him by the Karfedix. He expected to find it filled with rare metals, with perhaps some jewels, instead of which the only metal present was a heavily-insulated tube containing a full pound of metallic radium. The least valuable items in the bag were scores of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds of enormous size and of flawless perfection. Merely ornamental glass upon Osnome, Dunark knew that they were priceless upon Earth, and had acted accordingly. To this great wealth of known gems, he had added a rich and varied assortment of the rare and strange jewels peculiar to his own world, the faidon alone being omitted from the collection. DuQuesne's habitual calmness of mind almost deserted him as he classified the contents of the bag.

The radium alone was worth millions of dollars, and the scientist in him exulted that at last his brother scientists should have ample supplies of that priceless metal with which to work, even while he was rejoicing in the price he would exact for it. He took out the familiar jewels, estimating their value as he counted them--a staggering total. The bag was still half full of the strange gems, some of them glowing like miniature lamps in the dark depths, and he made no effort to appraise them. He knew that once any competent jeweler had compared their cold, hard, scintillating beauty with that of any Earthly gems, he could demand his own price.

"At last," he breathed to himself, "I will be what I have always longed to be--a money power. Now I can cut loose from that gang of crooks and go my own way."

He replaced the gems and the tube of radium in the bag, which he stowed away in one of his capacious pockets, and made his way to the galley.

* * * * *

The return voyage through space was uneventful, the Skylark constantly maintaining the same velocity with which she had started out. Several times, as the days wore on, she came within the zone of attraction of various gigantic suns, but the pilot had learned his lesson. He kept a vigilant eye upon the bar, and at the first sign of a deviation from the perpendicular he steered away, far from the source of the attraction. Not content with these precautions, the man at the board would, from time to time, shut off the power, to make sure that the space-car was not falling toward a body directly in its line of flight.

When half the distance had been covered, the bar was reversed, the travelers holding an impromptu ceremony as the great vessel spun around its center through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees. A few days later the observers began to recognize some of the fixed stars in familiar constellations and knew that the yellowish-white star directly in their line of flight was the sun of their own solar system. After a time they saw that their course, instead of being directly toward that rapidly-brightening star, was bearing upon a barely visible star a little to one side of it. Pointing their most powerful telescope toward that point of light, Crane made out a planet, half of its disk shining brightly. The girls hastened to peer through the telescope, and they grew excited as they made out the familiar outlines of the continents and oceans upon the lighted portion of the disk.

It was not long until these outlines were plainly visible to the unaided vision. The Earth appeared as a great, softly shining, greenish half-moon, with parts of its surface obscured by fleecy wisps of cloud, and with its two gleaming ice-caps making of its poles two brilliant areas of white. The returning wanderers stared at their own world with their hearts in their throats as Crane, who was at the board, increased the retarding force sufficiently to assure himself that they would not be traveling too fast to land upon the Earth.

After Dorothy and Margaret had gone to prepare a meal, DuQuesne turned to Seaton.

"Have you gentlemen decided what you intend to do with me?"

"No. We haven't discussed it yet. I can't make up my own mind what I want to do to you, except that I sure would like to get you inside a square ring with four-ounce gloves on. You have been of too much real assistance on this trip for us to see you hanged, as you deserve. On the other hand, you are altogether too much of a thorough-going scoundrel for us to let you go free. You see the fix we are in. What would you suggest?"

"Nothing," replied DuQuesne calmly. "As I am in no danger whatever of hanging, nothing you can say on that score affects me in the least. As for freeing me, you may do as you please--it makes no difference to me, one way or the other, as no jail can hold me for a day. I can say, however, that while I have made a fortune on this trip, so that I do not have to associate further with Steel unless it is to my interest to do so, I may nevertheless find it desirable at some future time to establish a monopoly of X. That would, of course, necessitate the death of yourself and Crane. In that event, or in case any other difference should arise between us, this whole affair will be as though it had never existed. It will have no weight either way, whether or not you try to hang me."

"Go as far as you like," Seaton answered cheerfully. "If we're not a match for you and your gang, on foot or in the air, in body or in mind, we'll deserve whatever we get. We can outrun you, outjump you, throw you down, or lick you; we can run faster, hit harder, dive deeper, and come up dryer, than you can. We'll play any game you want to deal, whenever you want to deal it; for fun, money, chalk, or marbles."

His brow darkened in anger as a thought struck him, and the steady gray eyes bored into the unflinching black ones as he continued, with no trace of his former levity in his voice:

"But listen to this. Anything goes as far as Martin and I personally are concerned. But I want you to know that I could be arrested for what I think of you as a man; and if any of your little schemes touch Dottie or Peggy in any way, shape or form, I'll kill you as I would a snake--or rather, I'll take you apart as I would any other piece of scientific apparatus. This isn't a threat, it's a promise. Get me?"

"Perfectly. Good-night."

For many hours the Earth had been obscured by clouds, so that the pilot had only a general idea of what part of the world was beneath them, but as they dropped rapidly downward into the twilight zone, the clouds parted and they saw that they were directly over the Panama Canal. Seaton allowed the Skylark to fall to within ten miles of the ground, when he stopped so that Martin could get his bearings and calculate the course to Washington, which would be in total darkness before their arrival.

DuQuesne had retired, cold and reticent as usual. Glancing quickly about his cabin to make sure that he had overlooked nothing he could take with him, he opened a locker, exposing to view four suits which he had made in his spare time, each adapted to a particular method of escape from the Skylark. The one he selected was of heavy canvas, braced with steel netting, equipped with helmet and air-tanks, and attached to a strong, heavy parachute. He put it on, tested all its parts, and made his way unobserved to one of the doors in the lower part of the vessel. Thus, when the chance for escape came, he was ready for it. As the Skylark paused over the Isthmus, his lips parted in a sardonic smile. He opened the door and stepped out into the air, closing the door behind him as he fell. The neutral color of the parachute was lost in the gathering twilight a few seconds after he left the vessel.

The course laid, Seaton turned almost due north and the Skylark tore through the air. After a short time, when half the ground had been covered, Seaton spoke suddenly.

"Forgot about DuQuesne, Mart. We'd better iron him, hadn't we? Then we'll decide whether we want to keep him or turn him loose."

"I will go fetch him," replied Crane, and turned to the stairs.

He returned shortly, with the news of the flight of the captive.

"Hm ... he must have made himself a parachute. I didn't think even he would tackle a sixty-thousand-foot drop. I'll tell the world that he sure has established a record. I can't say I'm sorry that he got away, though. We can get him again any time we want him, anyway, as that little object-compass in my drawer is still looking right at him," said Seaton.

"I think he earned his liberty," declared Dorothy, stoutly, and Margaret added:

"He deserves to be shot, but I'm glad he's gone. He gives me the shivers."

At the end of the calculated time they saw the lights of a large city beneath them, and Crane's fingers clenched upon Seaton's arm as he pointed downward. There were the landing-lights of Crane Field, seven peculiarly-arranged searchlights throwing their mighty beams upward into the night.

"Nine weeks, Dick," he said, unsteadily, "and Shiro would have kept them burning nine years if necessary."

The Skylark dropped easily to the ground in front of the testing shed and the wanderers leaped out, to be greeted by the half-hysterical Jap. Shiro's ready vocabulary of peculiar but sonorous words failed him completely, and he bent himself double in a bow, his yellow face wreathed in the widest possible smile. Crane, one arm around his wife, seized Shiro's hand and wrung it in silence. Seaton swept Dorothy off her feet, pressing her slender form against his powerful body. Her arms tightened about his neck as they kissed each other fervently and he whispered in her ear:

"Sweetheart wife, isn't it great to be back on our good old Earth again?"

THE END

       Skylark Three

_By_

Edward E. Smith, Ph. D.

Sequel to "The Skylark of Space"

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

To all profound thinkers in the realms of Science who may chance to read SKYLARK THREE, greetings:

I have taken certain liberties with several more or less commonly accepted theories, but I assure you that those theories have not been violated altogether in ignorance. Some of them I myself believe sound, others I consider unsound, still others are out of my line, so that I am not well enough informed upon their basic mathematical foundations to have come to any definite conclusion, one way or the other. Whether or not I consider any theory sound, I did not hesitate to disregard it, if its literal application would have interfered with the logical development of the story. In "The Skylark of Space" Mrs. Garby and I decided, after some discussion, to allow two mathematical impossibilities to stand. One of these immediately became the target of critics from Maine to California and, while no astronomer has as yet called attention to the other, I would not be surprised to hear about it, even at this late date.

While I do not wish it understood that I regard any of the major features of this story as likely to become facts in the near future--indeed, it has been my aim to portray the highly improbable--it is my belief that there is no mathematical or scientific impossibility to be found in "Skylark Three."

In fact, even though I have repeatedly violated theories in which I myself believe, I have in every case taken great pains to make certain that the most rigid mathematical analysis of which I am capable has failed to show that I have violated any known and proven scientific fact. By "fact" I do not mean the kind of reasoning, based upon assumptions later shown to be fallacious, by which it was "proved" that the transatlantic cable and the airplane were scientifically impossible. I refer to definitely known phenomena which no possible future development can change--I refer to mathematical proofs whose fundamental equations and operations involve no assumptions and contain no second-degree uncertainties.

Please bear in mind that we KNOW very little. It has been widely believed that the velocity of light is the limiting velocity, and many of our leading authorities hold this view--but it cannot be proved, and is by no means universally held. In this connection, it would appear that J. J. Thompson, in "Beyond the Electron" shows, to his own satisfaction at least, that velocities vastly greater than that of light are not only possible, but necessary to any comprehensive investigation into the nature of the electron.

We do not know the nature of light. Neither the undulatory theory nor the quantum theory are adequate to explain all observed phenomena, and they seem to be mutually exclusive, since it would seem clear by definition that no one thing can be at the same time continuous and discontinuous. We know nothing of the ether--we do not even know whether or not it exists, save as a concept of our own extremely limited intelligence. We are in total ignorance of the ultimate structure of matter, and of the arrangement and significance of those larger aggregations of matter, the galaxies. We do not know nor understand, nor can we define, even such fundamental necessities as time and space.

Why prate of "the impossible"?

Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D.

CHAPTER I

DuQuesne Goes Traveling

In the innermost private office of Steel, Brookings and DuQuesne stared at each other across the massive desk. DuQuesne's voice was cold, his black brows were drawn together.

"Get this, Brookings, and get it straight. I'm shoving off at twelve o'clock tonight. My advice to you is to lay off Richard Seaton, absolutely. Don't do a thing. _Nothing, hold everything._ Keep on holding it until I get back, no matter how long that may be," DuQuesne shot out in an icy tone.

"I am very much surprised at your change of front, Doctor. You are the last man I would have expected to be scared off after one engagement."

"Don't be any more of a fool than you have to, Brookings. There's a lot of difference between scared and knowing when you are simply wasting effort. As you remember, I tried to abduct Mrs. Seaton by picking her off with an attractor from a space-ship. I would have bet that nothing could have stopped me. Well, when they located me--probably with an automatic Osnomian ray-detector--and heated me red-hot while I was still better than two hundred miles up, I knew then and there that they had us stopped; that there was nothing we could do except go back to my plan, abandon the abduction idea, and eventually kill them all. Since my plan would take time, you objected to it, and sent an airplane to drop a five-hundred-pound bomb on them. Airplane, bomb, and all simply vanished. It didn't explode, you remember, just flashed into light and disappeared, with scarcely any noise. Then you pulled several more of your fool ideas, such as long-range bombardment, and so on. None of them worked. Still you've got the nerve to think that you can get them with ordinary gunmen! I've drawn you diagrams and shown you figures--I've told you in great detail and in one-syllable words exactly what we're up against. Now I tell you again that they've _got something_. If you had the brains of a pinhead, you would know that anything I can't do with a space-ship can't be done by a mob of ordinary gangsters. I'm telling you, Brookings, that you can't do it. My way is absolutely the only way that will work."

"But five years, Doctor!"

"I may be back in six months. But on a trip of this kind anything can happen, so I am planning on being gone five years. Even that may not be enough--I am carrying supplies for ten years, and that box of mine in the vault is not to be opened until ten years from today."

"But surely we shall be able to remove the obstructions ourselves in a few weeks. We always have."

"Oh, quit kidding yourself, Brookings! This is no time for idiocy! You stand just as much chance of killing Seaton----"

"Please, Doctor, please don't talk like that!"

"Still squeamish, eh? Your pussyfooting always did give me an acute pain. I'm for direct action, word and deed, first, last, and all the time. I repeat, you have exactly as much chance of killing Richard Seaton as a blind kitten has."

"How do you arrive at that conclusion, Doctor? You seem very fond of belittling our abilities. Personally, I think that we shall be able to attain our objectives within a few weeks--certainly long before you can possibly return from such an extended trip as you have in mind. And since you are so fond of frankness, I will say that I think that Seaton has you buffaloed, as you call it. Nine-tenths of these wonderful Osnomian things, I am assured by competent authorities, are scientifically impossible, and I think that the other one-tenth exists only in your own imagination. Seaton was lucky in that the airplane bomb was defective and exploded prematurely; and your space-ship got hot because of your injudicious speed through the atmosphere. We shall have everything settled by the time you get back."

"If you have, I'll make you a present of the controlling interest in Steel and buy myself a chair in some home for feeble-minded old women. Your ignorance and unwillingness to believe any new idea do not change the facts in any particular. Even before they went to Osnome, Seaton was hard to get, as you found out. On that trip he learned so much new stuff that it is now impossible to kill him by any ordinary means. You should realize that fact when he kills every gangster you send against him. At all events be very, _very_ careful not to kill his wife in any of your attacks, even by accident, until after you have killed him."

"Such an event would be regrettable, certainly, in that it would remove all possibility of the abduction."

"It would remove more than that. Remember the explosion in our laboratory, that blew an entire mountain into impalpable dust? Draw in your mind a nice, vivid picture of one ten times the size in each of our plants and in this building. I know that you are fool enough to go ahead with your own ideas, in spite of everything I've said; and, since I do not yet actually control Steel, I can't forbid you to, officially. But you should know that I know what I'm talking about, and I say again that you're going to make an utter fool of yourself; just because you won't believe anything possible, that hasn't been done every day for a hundred years. I wish that I could make you understand that Seaton and Crane have got something that we haven't--but for the good of our plants, and incidentally for your own, please remember one thing, anyway; for if you forget it, we won't have a plant left and you personally will be blown into a fine red mist. Whatever you start, kill Seaton first, and be absolutely certain that he is definitely, completely, finally and totally dead before you touch one of Dorothy Seaton's red hairs. As long as you only attack him personally he won't do anything but kill every man you send against him. If you kill her while he's still alive, though--Blooie!" and the saturnine scientist waved both hands in an expressive pantomime of wholesale destruction.

"Probably you are right in that," Brookings paled slightly. "Yes, Seaton would do just that. We shall be very careful, until after we succeed in removing him."

"Don't worry--you won't succeed. I shall attend to that detail myself, as soon as I get back. Seaton and Crane and their families, the directors and employees of their plants, the banks that by any possibility may harbor their notes or solutions--in short, every person and everything standing between me and a monopoly of 'X'--all shall disappear."

"That is a terrible program, Doctor. Wouldn't the late Perkins' plan of an abduction, such as I have in mind, be better, safer and quicker?"

"Yes--except for the fact that it will not work. I've talked until I'm blue in the face--I've proved to you over and over that you can't abduct her now without first killing him, and that you can't even touch him. My plan is the only one that will work. Seaton isn't the only one who learned anything--I learned a lot myself. I learned one thing in particular. Only four other inhabitants of either Earth or Osnome ever had even an inkling of it, and they died, with their brains disintegrated beyond reading. That thing is my ace in the hole. I'm going after it. When I get it, and not until then, will I be ready to take the offensive."

"You intend starting open war upon your return?"

"The war started when I tried to pick off the women with my attractor. That is why I am leaving at midnight. He always goes to bed at eleven-thirty, and I will be out of range of his object-compass before he wakes up. Seaton and I understand each other perfectly. We both know that the next time we meet one of us is going to be resolved into his component atoms, perhaps into electrons. He doesn't know that he's going to be the one, but I do. My final word to you is to lay off--if you don't, you and your 'competent authorities' are going to learn a lot."

"You do not care to inform me more fully as to your destination or your plans?"

"I do not. Goodbye."

CHAPTER II

Dunark Visits Earth

Martin Crane reclined in a massive chair, the fingers of his right hand lightly touching those of his left, listening attentively. Richard Seaton strode up and down the room before his friend, his unruly brown hair on end, speaking savagely between teeth clenched upon the stem of his reeking, battered briar, brandishing a sheaf of papers.

"Mart, we're stuck--stopped dead. If my head wasn't made of solid blue mush I'd have had a way figured out of this thing before now, but I can't. With that zone of force the Skylark would have everything imaginable--without it, we're exactly where we were before. That zone is immense, man--terrific--its possibilities are unthinkable--and I'm so cussed dumb that I can't find out how to use it intelligently--can't use it at all, for that matter. By its very nature it is impenetrable to any form of matter, however applied; and this calc here," slapping viciously the sheaf of papers containing his calculations, "shows that it must also be opaque to any wave whatever, propagated through air or through ether, clear down to cosmic rays. Behind it, we would be blind and helpless, so we can't use it at all. It drives me frantic! Think of a barrier of pure force, impalpable, immaterial, and exerted along a geometrical surface of no thickness whatever--and yet actual enough to stop even a Millikan ray that travels a hundred thousand light-years and then goes through twenty-seven feet of solid lead just like it was so much vacuum! That's what we're up against! However, I'm going to try out that model, Mart, right now. Come on, guy, snap into it! Let's get busy!"

"You are getting idiotic again, Dick," Crane rejoined calmly, without moving. "You know, even better than I do, that you are playing with the most concentrated essence of energy that the world has ever seen. That zone of force probably can be generated----"

"Probably, nothing!" barked Seaton. "It's just as evident a fact as that stool," kicking the unoffending bit of furniture half-way across the room as he spoke. "If you'd've let me, I'd've shown it to you yesterday!"

"Undoubtedly, then. Grant that it is impenetrable to all matter and to all known waves. Suppose that it should prove impenetrable also to gravitation and to magnetism? Those phenomena probably depend upon the ether, but we know nothing fundamental of their nature, nor of that of the ether. Therefore your calculations, comprehensive though they are, cannot predict the effect upon them of your zone of force. Suppose that that zone actually does set up a barrier in the ether, so that it nullifies gravitation, magnetism, and all allied phenomena; so that the power-bars, the attractors and repellers, cannot work through it? Then what? As well as showing me the zone of force, you might well have shown me yourself flying off into space, unable to use your power and helpless if you released the zone. No, we must know more of the fundamentals before you try even a small-scale experiment."

"Oh, bugs! You're carrying caution to extremes, Mart. What can happen? Even if gravitation should be nullified, I would rise only slowly, heading south the angle of our latitude--that's thirty-nine degrees--away from the perpendicular. I couldn't shoot off on a tangent, as some of these hot-heads have been claiming. Inertia would make me keep pace, approximately, with the earth in its rotation. I would rise slowly--only as fast as the tangent departs from the curvature of the earth's surface. I haven't figured out how fast that is, but it must be pretty slow."

"Pretty slow?" Crane smiled. "Figure it out."

"All right--but I'll bet it's slower than the rise of a toy balloon." Seaton threw down the papers and picked up his slide-rule, a twenty-inch trigonometrical duplex. "You'll concede that it is allowable to neglect the radial component of the orbital velocity of the earth for a first approximation, won't you--or shall I figure that in too?"

"You may ignore that factor."

"All right--let's see. Radius of rotation here in Washington would be cosine latitude times equatorial radius, approximately--call it thirty-two hundred miles. Angular velocity, fifteen degrees an hour. I want secant fifteen less one times thirty-two hundred. Right? Secant equals one over cosine--um-m-m-m--one point oh three five. Then point oh three five times thirty-two hundred. Hundred and twelve miles first hour. Velocity constant with respect to sun, accelerated respecting point of departure. Ouch! You win, Mart--I'd kinda step out! Well, how about this, then? I'll put on a vacuum suit and carry rations. Harness outside, with the same equipment I used in the test flights before we built _Skylark I--plus_ the new stuff and a coil. Then throw on the zone, and see what happens. There can't be any jar in taking off, and with that outfit I can get back O. K. if I go clear to Jupiter!"

Crane sat in silence, his keen mind considering every aspect of the motions possible, of velocity, of acceleration, of inertia. He already knew well Seaton's resourcefulness in crises and his physical and mental strength.

"As far as I can see, that might be safe," he admitted finally, "and we really should know something about it besides the theory."

"Fine, Mart--let's get busy! I'll be ready in five minutes. Yell for the girls, will you? They'd break us off at the ankles if we pull anything new without letting them in on it."

A few minutes later the "girls" strolled out into Crane Field, arms around each other--Dorothy Seaton, her gorgeous auburn hair framing violet eyes and vivid coloring; black-haired, dark-eyed Margaret Crane.

"Br-r-r, it's cold!" Dorothy shivered, wrapping her coat more closely about her. "This must be the coldest day Washington has seen for years!"

"It is cold," Margaret agreed. "I wonder what they are going to do out here, this kind of weather?"

* * * * *

As she spoke, the two men stepped out of the "testing shed"--the huge structure that housed their Osnomian-built space-cruiser, "Skylark II." Seaton waddled clumsily, wearing as he did a Crane vacuum-suit which, built of fur, canvas, metal and transparent silica, braced by steel netting and equipped with air-tanks and heaters, rendered its wearer independent of outside conditions of temperature and pressure. Outside this suit he wore a heavy harness of leather, buckled about his body, shoulders, and legs, attached to which were numerous knobs, switches, dials, bakelite cases, and other pieces of apparatus. Carried by a strong aluminum framework in turn supported by the harness, the universal bearing of a small power-bar rose directly above his grotesque-looking helmet.

"What do you think you're going to do in that thing, Dickie?" Dorothy called. Then, knowing that he could not hear her voice, she turned to Crane. "What are you letting that precious husband of mine do now, Martin? He looks as though he were up to something."

While she was speaking, Seaton had snapped the release of his face plate.

"Nothing much, Dottie. Just going to show you-all the zone of force. Mart wouldn't let me turn it on, unless I got all cocked and primed for a year's journey into space."

"Dot, what is that zone of force, anyway?" asked Margaret.

"Oh, it's something Dick got into his head during that awful fight they had on Osnome. He hasn't thought of anything else since we got back. You know how the attractors and repellers work? Well, he found out something funny about the way everything acted while the Mardonalians were bombarding them with a certain kind of a wave-length. He finally figured out the exact ray that did it, and found out that if it is made strongly enough, it acts as if a repeller and attractor were working together--only so much stronger that nothing can get through the boundary, either way--in fact, it's so strong that it cuts anything in two that's in the way. And the funny thing is that there's nothing there at all, really; but Dick says that the forces meeting there, or something, make it act as though something really important were there. See?"

"Uh-huh," assented Margaret, doubtfully, just as Crane finished the final adjustments and moved toward them. A safe distance away from Seaton, he turned and waved his hand.

Instantly Seaton disappeared from view, and around the place where he had stood there appeared a shimmering globe some twenty feet in diameter--a globe apparently a perfect spherical mirror, which darted upward and toward the south. After a moment the globe disappeared and Seaton was again seen. He was now standing upon a hemispherical mass of earth. He darted back toward the group upon the ground, while the mass of earth fell with a crash a quarter of a mile away. High above their heads the mirror again encompassed Seaton, and again shot upward and southward. Five times this maneuver was repeated before Seaton came down, landing easily in front of them and opening his helmet.

"It's just what we thought it was, only worse," he reported tersely. "Can't do a thing with it. Gravitation won't work through it--bars won't--nothing will. And dark? _Dark!_ Folks, you ain't never seen no darkness, nor heard no silence. It scared me stiff!"

"Poor little boy--afraid of the dark!" exclaimed Dorothy. "We saw absolute blackness in space."

"Not like this, you didn't. I just saw absolute darkness and heard absolute silence for the first time in my life. I never imagined anything like it--come on up with me and I'll show it to you."

"No you won't!" his wife shrieked as she retreated toward Crane. "Some other time, perhaps."

Seaton removed the harness and glanced at the spot from which he had taken off, where now appeared a hemispherical hole in the ground.

"Let's see what kind of tracks I left, Mart," and the two men bent over the depression. They saw with astonishment that the cut surface was perfectly smooth, with not even the slightest roughness or irregularity visible. Even the smallest loose grains of sand had been sheared in two along a mathematically exact hemispherical surface by the inconceivable force of the disintegrating copper bar.

"Well, that sure wins the----"

An alarm bell sounded. Without a glance around, Seaton seized Dorothy and leaped into the testing shed. Dropping her unceremoniously to the floor he stared through the telescope sight of an enormous ray-generator which had automatically aligned itself upon the distant point of liberation of intra-atomic energy which had caused the alarm to sound. One hand upon the switch, his face was hard and merciless as he waited to make sure of the identity of the approaching space-ship, before he released the frightful power of his generator upon it.

"I've been expecting DuQuesne to try it again," he gritted, striving to make out the visitor, yet more than two hundred miles distant. "He's out to get you, Dot--and this time I'm not just going to warm him up and scare him away, as I did last time. This time that misguided mutt's going to get frizzled right.... I can't locate him with this small telescope, Mart. Line him up in the big one and give me the word, will you?"

"I see him, Dick, but it is not DuQuesne's ship. It is built of transparent arenak, like the 'Kondal.' Even though it seems impossible, I believe it is the 'Kondal'."

"Maybe so, and again maybe DuQuesne built it--or stole it. On second thought, though, I don't believe that DuQuesne would be fool enough to tackle us again in the same way--but I'm taking no chances.... O. K., it is the 'Kondal,' I can see Dunark and Sitar myself, now."

The transparent vessel soon neared the field and the four Terrestrials walked out to greet their Osnomian friends. Through the arenak walls they recognized Dunark, Kofedix of Kondal, at the controls, and saw Sitar, his beautiful young queen, lying in one of the seats near the wall. She attempted a friendly greeting, but her face was strained as though she were laboring under a burden too great for her to bear.

As they watched, Dunark slipped a helmet over his head and one over Sitar's, pressed a button to open one of the doors, and supported her toward the opening.

"They mustn't come out, Dick!" exclaimed Dorothy in dismay. "They'll freeze to death in five minutes without any clothes on!"

"Yes, and Sitar can't stand up under our gravitation, either--I doubt if Dunark can, for long," and Seaton dashed toward the vessel, motioning the visitor back.

But misunderstanding the signal, Dunark came on. As he clambered heavily through the door he staggered as though under an enormous weight, and Sitar collapsed upon the frozen ground. Trying to help her, half-kneeling over her, Dunark struggled, his green skin paling to a yellowish tinge at the touch of the bitter and unexpected cold. Seaton leaped forward and gathered Sitar up in his mighty arms as though she were a child.

"Help Dunark back in, Mart," he directed crisply. "Hop in, girls--we've got to take these folks back up where they can live."

Seaton shut the door, and as everyone lay flat in the seats Crane, who had taken the controls, applied one notch of power and the huge vessel leaped upward. Miles of altitude were gained before Crane brought the cruiser to a stop and locked her in place with an anchoring attractor.

"There," he remarked calmly, "gravitation here is approximately the same as it is upon Osnome."

"Yes," put in Seaton, standing up and shedding clothing in all directions, "and I rise to remark that we'd better undress as far as the law allows--perhaps farther. I never did like Osnomian ideas of comfortable warmth, but we can endure it by peeling down to bedrock----"

* * * * *

Sitar jumped up happily, completely restored, and the three women threw their arms around each other.

"What a horrible, terrible, frightful world!" exclaimed Sitar, her eyes widening as she thought of her first experience with our earth. "Much as I love you, I shall never dare try to visit you again. I have never been able to understand why you Terrestrials wear what you call 'clothes,' nor why you are so terribly, brutally strong. Now I really know--I will feel the utterly cold and savage embrace of that awful earth of yours as long as I live!"

"Oh, it's not so bad, Sitar." Seaton, who was shaking both of Dunark's hands vigorously, assured her over his shoulder. "All depends on where you were raised. We like it that way, and Osnome gives us the pip. But you poor fish," turning again to Dunark, "with all my brains inside your skull, you should have known what you were letting yourself in for."

"That's true, after a fashion," Dunark admitted, "but your brain told me that Washington was _hot_. If I'd have thought to recalculate your actual Fahrenheit degrees into our loro ... but that figures only forty-seven and, while very cold, we could have endured it--wait a minute, I'm getting it. You have what you call 'seasons.' This, then, must be your 'winter.' Right?"

"Right the first time. That's the way your brain works behind my pan, too. I could figure anything out all right after it happened, but hardly ever beforehand--so I guess I can't blame you much, at that. But what I want to know is, how'd you get here? It would take more than my brains--you can't see our sun from anywhere near Osnome, even if you knew exactly where to look for it."

"Easy. Remember those wrecked instruments you threw out of _Skylark I_ when we built _Skylark II_?" Having every minute detail of the configuration of Seaton's brain engraved upon his own, Dunark spoke English in Seaton's own characteristic careless fashion. Only when thinking deeply or discussing abstruse matter did Seaton employ the carefully selected and precise phrasing, which he knew so well how to use. "Well, none of them was beyond repair and the juice was still on most of them. One was an object-compass bearing on the Earth. We simply fixed the bearings, put on some minor improvements, and here we are."

"Let us all sit down and be comfortable," he continued, changing into the Kondalian tongue without a break, "and I will explain why we have come. We are in most desperate need of two things which you alone can supply--salt, and that strange metal, 'X'. Salt I know you have in great abundance, but I know that you have very little of the metal. You have only the one compass upon that planet?"

"That's all--one is all we set on it. However, we've got close to half a ton of the metal on hand--you can have all you want."

"Even if I took it all, which I would not like to do, that would be less than half enough. We must have at least one of your tons, and two tons would be better."

"Two tons! Holy cat! Are you going to plate a fleet of battle cruisers?"

"More than that. We must plate an area of copper of some ten thousand square miles--in fact, the very life of our entire race depends upon it."

"It's this way," he continued, as the four earth-beings stared at him in wonder. "Shortly after you left Osnome we were invaded by the inhabitants of the third planet of our fourteenth sun. Luckily for us they landed upon Mardonale, and in less than two days there was not a single Osnomian left alive upon that half of the planet. They wiped out our grand fleet in one brief engagement, and it was only the _Kondal_ and a few more like her that enabled us to keep them from crossing the ocean. Even with our full force of these vessels, we cannot defeat them. Our regular Kondalian weapons were useless. We shot explosive copper charges against them of such size as to cause earthquakes all over Osnome, without seriously crippling their defenses. Their offensive weapons are almost irresistible--they have generators that burn arenak as though it were so much paper, and a series of deadly frequencies against which only a copper-driven ray screen is effective, and even that does not stand up long."

"How come you lasted till now, then?" asked Seaton.

"They have nothing like the _Skylark_, and no knowledge of intra-atomic energy. Therefore their space-ships are of the rocket type, and for that reason they can cross only at the exact time of conjunction, or whatever you call it--no, not conjunction, exactly, either, since the two planets do not revolve around the same sun: but when they are closest together. Our solar system is so complex, you know, that unless the trips are timed exactly, to the hour, the vessels will not be able to land upon Osnome, but will be drawn aside and be lost, if not actually drawn into the vast central sun. Although it may not have occurred to you, a little reflection will show that the inhabitants of all the central planets, such as Osnome, must perforce be absolutely ignorant of astronomy, and of all the wonders of outer space. Before your coming we knew nothing beyond our own solar system, and very little of that. We knew of the existence of only such of the closest planets as were brilliant enough to be seen in our continuous sunlight, and they were few. Immediately after your coming I gave your knowledge of astronomy to a group of our foremost physicists and mathematicians, and they have been working ceaselessly from space-ships--close enough so that observations could be recalculated to Osnome, and yet far enough away to afford perfect 'seeing,' as you call it."

"But I don't know any more about astronomy than a pig does about Sunday," protested Seaton.

"Your knowledge of details is, of course, incomplete," conceded Dunark, "but the detailed knowledge of the best of your Earthly astronomers would not help us a great deal, since we are so far removed from you in space. You, however, have a very clear and solid knowledge of the fundamentals of the science, and that is what we need, above all things."

"Well, maybe you're right, at that. I do know the general theory of the motions, and I studied some Celestial Mechanics. I'm awfully weak on advanced theory, though, as you'll find out when you get that far."

"Perhaps--but since our enemies have no knowledge of astronomy whatever, it is not surprising that their rocket-ships can be launched only at one particularly favorable time; for there are many planets and satellites, of which they can know nothing, to throw their vessels off the course.

"Some material essential to the operation of their war machinery apparently must come from their own planet, for they have ceased attacking, have dug in, and are simply holding their ground. It may be that they had not anticipated as much resistance as we could offer with space-ships and intra-atomic energy. At any rate, they have apparently saved enough of that material to enable them to hold out until the next conjunction--I cannot think of a better word for it--shall occur. Our forces are attacking constantly, with all the armament at our command, but it is certain that if the next conjunction is allowed to occur, it means the end of the entire Kondalian nation."'

"What d'you mean 'if the next conjunction is _allowed_ to occur?'" interjected Seaton. "Nobody can stop it."

"I am stopping it," Dunark stated quietly, grim purpose in every lineament. "That conjunction shall never occur. That is why I must have the vast quantities of salt and 'X'. We are building abutments of arenak upon the first satellite of our seventh planet, and upon our sixth planet itself. We shall cover them with plated active copper, and install chronometers to throw the switches at precisely the right moment. We have calculated the exact times, places, and magnitudes of the forces to be used. We shall throw the sixth planet some distance out of its orbit, and force the first satellite of the seventh planet clear out of that planet's influence. The two bodies whose motions we have thus changed will collide in such a way that the resultant body will meet the planet of our enemies in head-on collision, long before the next conjunction. The two bodies will be of almost equal masses, and will have opposite and approximately equal velocities; hence the resultant fused or gaseous mass will be practically without velocity and will fall directly into the fourteenth sun."

"Wouldn't it be easier to destroy it with an explosive copper bomb?"

"Easier, yes, but much more dangerous to the rest of our solar system. We cannot calculate exactly the effect of the collisions we are planning--but it is almost certain that an explosion of sufficient violence to destroy all life upon the planet would disturb its motion sufficiently to endanger the entire system. The way we have in mind will simply allow the planet and one satellite to drop out quietly--the other planets of the same sun will soon adjust themselves to the new conditions, and the system at large will be practically unaffected--at least, so we believe."

Seaton's eyes narrowed as his thoughts turned to the quantities of copper and "X" required and to the engineering features of the project; Crane's first thought was of the mathematics involved in a computation of that magnitude and character; Dorothy's quick reaction was one of pure horror.

"He can't, Dick! He mustn't! It would be too ghastly! It's outrageous--it's unthinkable--it's--it's--it's simply too horrible!" Her violet eyes flamed, and Margaret joined in:

"That would be awful, Martin. Think of the destruction of a whole planet--of an entire world--with all its inhabitants! It makes me shudder, even to think of it."

* * * * *

Dunark leaped to his feet, ablaze. But before he could say a word, Seaton silenced him.

"Shut up, Dunark! Pipe down! Don't say anything you'll be sorry for--let _me_ tell 'em! Close your mouth, I tell you!" as Dunark still tried to get a word in, "I tell you I'll tell 'em, and when I tell 'em they stay told! Now listen, you two girls--you're going off half-cocked and you're both full of little red ants. What do you think Dunark is up against? Sherman chirped it when he described war--and this is a real he-war; a brand totally unknown on our Earth. It isn't a question of whether or not to destroy a population--the only question is which population is to be destroyed. One of them's got to go. Remember those folks go into a war thoroughly, and there isn't a thought, even remotely resembling our conception of mercy in any of their minds on either side. If Dunark's plans go through the enemy nation will be wiped out. That is horrible, of course. But on the other hand, if we block him off from salt and 'X,' the entire Kondalian nation will be destroyed just as thoroughly and efficiently, and even more horribly--not one man, woman, or child would be spared. Which nation do you want saved? Play that over a couple of times on your adding machine, Dot, and let me know what you get."

Dorothy, taken aback, opened and closed her mouth twice before she found her voice.

"But, Dick, they couldn't possibly. Would they kill them all, Dick? Surely they wouldn't--they _couldn't_."

"Surely they would--and could. They do--it's good technique in those parts of the Galaxy. Dunark has just told us of how they killed every member of the entire race of Mardonalians, in forty hours. Kondal would go the same way. Don't kid yourself, Dimples--don't be a child. War up there is _no_ species of pink tea, believe me--half of my brain has been through thirty years of Osnomian warfare, and I know precisely what I'm talking about. Let's take a vote. Personally, I'm in favor of Osnome. Mart?"

"Osnome."

"Dottie? Peggy?" Both remained silent for some time, then Dorothy turned to Margaret.

"You tell him, Peggy--we both feel the same way."

"Dick, you know that we wouldn't want the Kondalians destroyed--but the other is so--such a--well, such an utter _shrecklichkeit_--isn't there some other way out?"

"I'm afraid not--but if there is any other possible way out, I'll do my da--to help find it," he promised. "The ayes have it. Dunark, we'll skip over to that 'X' planet and load you up."

Dunark grasped Seaton's hand. "Thanks, Dick," he said, simply. "But before you help me farther, and lest I might be in some degree sailing under false colors, I must tell you that, wearer of the seven disks though you are, Overlord of Osnome though you are, my brain brother though you are; had you decided against me, nothing but my death could have kept me away from that salt and your 'X' compass."

"Why sure," assented Seaton, in surprise. "Why not? Fair enough! Anybody would do the same--don't let that bother you."

"How is your supply of platinum?" asked Dunark.

"Mighty low. We had about decided to hop over there after some. I want some of your textbooks on electricity and so on, too. I see you brought a load of platinum with you."

"Yes, a few hundred tons. We also brought along an assortment of books I knew you would be interested in, a box of radium, a few small bags of gems of various kinds, and some of our fabrics, Sitar thought your Karfediro would like to have. While we are here, I would like to get some books on chemistry and some other things."

"We'll get you the Congressional Library, if you want it, and anything else you think you'd like. Well, gang, let's go places and do things! What to do, Mart?"

"We had better drop back to Earth, have the laborers unload the platinum, and load on the salt, books, and other things. Then both ships will go to the 'X' planet, as we will each want compasses on it, for future use. While we are loading, I should like to begin remodeling our instruments; to make them something like these; with Dunark's permission. These instruments are wonders, Dick--vastly ahead of anything I have ever seen. Come and look at them, if you want to see something really beautiful."

"Coming up. But say, Mart, while I think of it, we mustn't forget to install a zone-of-force apparatus on this boat, too. Even though we can't use it intelligently, it certainly would be a winner as a defense. We couldn't hurt anybody through it, of course, but if we should happen to be getting licked anywhere, all we'd have to do would be to wrap ourselves up in it. They couldn't touch us. Nothing in the ether spectrum is corkscrewy enough to get through it."

"That's the second idea you've had since I've known you, Dicky," Dorothy smiled at Crane. "Do you think he should be allowed to run at large, Martin?"

"That is a real idea. We may need it--you never can tell. Even if we never find any other use for the zone of force, that one is amply sufficient to justify its installation."

"Yes, it would be, for you--and I'm getting to be a regular Safety-First Simon myself, since they opened up on us. What about those instruments?"

* * * * *

The three men gathered around the instrument-board and Dunark explained the changes he had made--and to such men as Seaton and Crane it was soon evident that they were examining an installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control--a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were then exhausted to the highest attainable vacuum. Oscillation was set up by means of one carefully standardized electrical impulse, instead of by the clumsy finger-touch Seaton had used. The bearings, built of arenak and Osnomian jewels, were as strong as the axles of a truck and yet were almost perfectly frictionless.

"I like them myself," admitted Dunark. "Without a load the needles will rotate freely more than a thousand hours on the primary impulse, as against a few minutes in the old type; and under load they are many thousands of times as sensitive."

"You're a blinding flash and a deafening report, ace!" declared Seaton, enthusiastically. "That compass is as far ahead of my model as the _Skylark_ is ahead of Wright's first glider."

The other instruments were no less noteworthy. Dunark had adopted the Perkins telephone system, but had improved it until it was scarcely recognized and had made it capable of almost unlimited range. Even the guns--heavy rapid-firers, mounted in spherical bearings in the walls--were aimed and fired by remote control, from the board. He had devised full automatic steering controls; and meters and recorders for acceleration, velocity, distance, and flight-angle. He had perfected a system of periscopic vision, which enabled the pilot to see the entire outside surfaces of the shell, and to look toward any point of the heavens without interference.

"This kind of takes my eye, too, prince," Seaton said, as he seated himself, swung a large, concave disk in front of him, and experimented with levers and dials. "You certainly can't call this thing a periscope--it's no more a periscope than I am a polyp. When you look through this plate, it's better than looking out of a window--it subtends more than the angle of vision, so that you can't see anything but out-of-doors--I thought for a second I was going to fall out. What do you call 'em, Dunark?"

"Kraloto. That would be in English ... Seeing-plate? Or rather, call it 'visiplate'."

"That's a good word. Mart, take a look if you want to see a set of perfect lenses and prisms."

Crane looked into the visiplate and gasped. The vessel had disappeared--he was looking directly down upon the Earth below him!

"No trace of chromatic, spherical, or astigmatic aberration," he reported in surprise. "The refracting system is invisible--it seems as though nothing intervenes between the eye and the object. You perfected all these things since we left Osnome, Dunark? You are in a class by yourself. I could not even copy them in less than a month, and I never could have invented them."

"I did not do it alone, by any means. The Society of Instrument-Makers, of which I am only one member, installed and tested more than a hundred systems. This one represents the best features of all the systems tried. It will not be necessary for you to copy them. I brought along two complete duplicate sets for the _Skylark_, as well as a dozen or so of the compasses. I thought that perhaps these particular improvements might not have occurred to you, since you Terrestrials are not as familiar as we are with complex instrumental work."

Crane and Seaton spoke together.

"That was thoughtful of you, Dunark, and we appreciated it fully."

"That puts four more palms on your _Croix de Guerre_, ace. Thanks a lot."

"Say, Dick," called Dorothy, from her seat near the wall. "If we're going down to the ground, how about Sitar?"

"By lying down and not doing anything, and by staying in the vessel, where it is warm, she will be all right for the short time we must stay here," Dunark answered for his wife. "I will help all I can, but I do not know how much that will be."

"It isn't so bad lying down." Sitar agreed. "I don't like your Earth a bit, but I can stand it a little while. Anyway, I _must_ stand it, so why worry about it?"

"'At-a-girl!" cheered Seaton. "And as for you, Dunark, you'll pass the time just like Sitar does--lying down. If you do much chasing around down there where we live, you're apt to get your lights and liver twisted all out of shape--so you'll stay put, horizontal. We've got men enough around the shop to eat this cargo in three hours, let alone unload it. While they unload and load you up, we'll install the zone apparatus, put a compass on you, put one of yours on us, and then you can hop back up here where you're comfortable. Then as soon as we can get the 'Lark' ready for the trip, we'll jump up here and be on our way. Everything clear? Cut the rope, Mart--let the old bucket drop!"

CHAPTER III

Skylark Two Sets Out

"Say, Mart, I just got conscious! It never occurred to me until just now, as Dunark left, that I'm as good an instrument-maker as Dunark is--the same one, in fact--and I've got a hunch. You know that needle on DuQuesne hasn't been working for quite a while? Well, I don't believe it's out of commission at all. I think he's gone somewhere, so far away that it can't read on him. I'm going to house it in, re-jewel it, and find out where he is."

"An excellent idea. He has even you worrying, and as for myself----"

"Worrying! That bird is simply pulling my cork! I'm so scared he'll get Dottie, that I'm running around in circles and biting myself in the small of the back. He's got a hen on, you can bet your shirt on that--what gravels me is he's aiming at the girls, not at us or the job."

"I should say that someone had aimed at you fairly accurately, judging by the number of bullets stopped lately by that arenak armor of yours. I wish that I could take some of the strain, but they are centering all their attacks upon you."

"Yes--I can't stick my nose outside our yard without somebody throwing lead at it. It's funny, too. You're more important to the power-plant than I am."

"You should know why. They are not afraid of me. While my spirit is willing enough, it was your skill and rapidity with a pistol that frustrated four attempts at abduction in as many days. It is positively uncanny, the way you explode into action. With all my practice, I didn't even have my pistol out yesterday until it was all over. And besides Prescott's guards, we had four policemen with us--detailed to 'guard' us--because of the number of gunmen you had to kill before that!"

"It ain't practice so much, Mart--it's a gift. I've always been fast, and I react automatically. You think first, that's why you're slow. Those cops were funny. They didn't know what it was all about until it was all over--all but calling the wagon. That was the worst yet. One of their slugs struck directly in front of my left eye--it was kinda funny, at that, seeing it splash--and I thought I was inside a boiler in a riveting shop when those machine-guns cut loose. It was hectic, all right, while it lasted. But one thing I'll tell the attentive world--we're not doing all the worrying. Very few, if any, of the gangsters they send after us are getting back. Wonder what they think when they shoot at us and we don't drop?

"But I'm afraid I'm beginning to crack, Mart," Seaton went on, his voice becoming grimly earnest. "I don't like anything about this whole mess. I don't like all four of us wearing armor all the time. I don't like living constantly under guard. I don't like all this killing. And this constant menace of losing Dorothy, if I let her out of my sight for five seconds, is driving me mad. To tell you the real truth, I'm devilishly afraid that they'll figure out something that'll work. I could grab off two women, or kill two men, if they had armor and guns enough to stock a war. I believe that DuQuesne could, too--and the rest of that bunch aren't imbeciles, either, by any means. I won't feel safe until all four of us are in the _Skylark_ and a long ways from here. I'm sure glad we're pulling out; and I don't intend to come back until I get a good line on DuQuesne. He's the bird I'm going to get, and get right--and when I get him I'll tell the cock-eyed world he'll stay got. There won't be any two atoms of his entire carcass left in the same township. I meant that promise when I gave it to him!"

"He realizes that fully. He knows that it is now definitely either his life or our own, and he is really dangerous. When he took Steel over and opened war upon us, he did it with his eyes wide open. With his ideas, he must have a monopoly of 'X' or nothing; and he knows the only possible way of getting it. However, you and I both know that he would not let either one of us live, even though we surrendered."

"You chirped it! But that guy's going to find he's started something, unless I get paralysis of the intentions. Well, how about turning up a few R. P. M.? We don't want to keep Dunark waiting too long."

"There is very little to do beyond installing the new instruments; and that is nearly done. We can finish pumping out the compass _en route_. You have already installed every weapon of offense and defense known to either Earthly or Osnomian warfare, including those ray-generators and screens you moaned so about not having during the battle over Kondal. I believe that we have on board every article for which either of us has been able to imagine even the slightest use."

"Yes, we've got her so full of plunder that there's hardly room left for quarters. You ain't figuring on taking anybody but Shiro along, are you?"

"No. I suppose there is no real necessity for taking even him, but he wants very much to go, and may prove himself useful."

"I'll say he'll be useful. None of us really enjoys polishing brass or washing dishes--and besides, he's one star cook and an A-1 housekeeper."

* * * * *

The installation of the new instruments was soon completed, and while Dorothy and Margaret made last-minute preparations for departure, the men called a meeting of the managing directors and department heads of the "Seaton-Crane Co., Engineers." The chiefs gave brief reports in turn. Units Number One and Number Two of the immense new central super-power plant were in continuous operation. Number Three was almost ready to cut in. Number Four was being rushed to completion. Number Five was well under way. The research laboratory was keeping well up on its problems. Troubles were less than had been anticipated. Financially, it was a gold mine. With no expense for boilers or fuel, and thus with a relatively small investment in plant and a very small operating cost, they were selling power at one-sixth of prevailing rates, and still profits were almost paying for all new construction. With the completion of Number Five, rates would be reduced still further.

"In short, Dad, everything's slick," remarked Seaton to Mr. Vaneman, after the others had gone.

"Yes; your plan of getting the best men possible, paying them well, and giving them complete authority and sole responsibility, has worked to perfection. I have never seen an undertaking of such size go forward so smoothly and with such fine co-operation."

"That's the way we wanted it. We hand-picked the directors, and put it up to you, strictly. You did the same to the managers. Everybody knows that his end is up to him, and him alone--so he digs in."

"However, Dick, while everything at the works is so fine, when is this other thing going to break?"

"We've won all the way so far, but I'm afraid something's about due. That's the big reason I want to get Dot away for a while. You know what they're up to?"

"Too well," the older man answered. "Dottie or Mrs. Crane, or both. Her mother--she is telling her goodbye now--and I agree that the danger here is greater than out there."

"Danger out there? With the old can fixed the way she is now, Dot's a lot safer there than you are in bed. Your house might fall down, you know."

"You're probably right, son--I know you, and I know Martin Crane. Together, and in the _Skylark_, I believe you invincible."

"All set, Dick?" asked Dorothy, appearing in the doorway.

"All set. You've got the dope for Prescott and everybody Dad. We may be back in six months, or we may see something to investigate, and be gone a year or so. Don't begin to lose any sleep until after we've been out--oh, say three years. We'll make it a point to be back by then."

Farewells were said; the party embarked, and _Skylark Two_ shot upward. Seaton flipped a phone set over his head and spoke.

"Dunark!... Coming out, heading directly for 'X'.... No, better stay quite a ways off to one side when we get going good.... Yes, I'm accelerating twenty six point oh oh oh.... Yes. I'll call you now and then, until the radio waves get lost, to check the course with you. After that, keep on the last course, reverse at the calculated distance, and by the time we're pretty well slowed down, we'll feel around for each other with the compasses and go in together.... Right.... Uh-huh.... Fine! So long!"

In order that the two vessels should keep reasonably close together, it had been agreed that each should be held at an acceleration of exactly twenty-six feet per second, positive and negative. This figure represented a compromise between the gravitational forces of the two worlds upon which the different parties lived. While considerably less than the acceleration of gravitation at the surface of the Earth, the Terrestrials could readily accustom themselves to it; and it was not enough greater than that of Osnome to hamper seriously the activities of the green people.

Well clear of the Earth's influence, Seaton assured himself that everything was functioning properly, then stretched to his full height, wreathed his arms over his head, and heaved a deep sigh of relief.

"Folks," he declared, "This is the first time I've felt right since we got out of this old bottle. Why, I feel so good a cat could walk up to me and scratch me right in the eye, and I wouldn't even scratch back. Yowp! I'm a wild Siberian catamount, and this is my night to howl. Whee-ee-yerow!"

Dorothy laughed, a gay, lilting carol.

"Haven't I always told you he had cat blood in him, Peggy? Just like all tomcats, every once in a while he has to stretch his claws and yowl. But go ahead, Dickie, I like it--this is the first uproar you've made in weeks. I believe I'll join you!"

"It most certainly is a relief to get this load off our minds: I could do a little ladylike yowling myself," Margaret said; and Crane, lying completely at ease, a thin spiral of smoke curling upward from his cigarette, nodded agreement.

"Dick's yowling is quite expressive at times. All of us feel the same way, but some of us are unable to express ourselves quite so vividly. However, it is past bedtime, and we should organize our crew. Shall we do it as we did before?"

"No, it isn't necessary. Everything is automatic. The bar is held parallel to the guiding compass, and signal bells ring whenever any of the instruments show a trace of abnormal behavior. Don't forget that there is at least one meter registering and recording every factor of our flight. With this control system we can't get into any such jam as we did last trip."

"Surely you are not suggesting that we run all night with no one at the controls?"

"Exactly that. A man camping at this board is painting the lily and gilding fine gold. Awake or asleep nobody need be closer to it than is necessary to hear a bell if one should ring, and you can hear them all over the ship. Furthermore, I'll bet a hat we won't hear a signal a week. Simply as added precaution, though, I've run lines so that any time one of these signals lets go, it sounds a buzzer on the head of our bed, so I'm automatically taking the night shift. Remember, Mart, these instruments are thousands of times as sensitive as the keenest human senses--they'll spot trouble long before we could, even if we were looking right at it."

"Of course, you understand these instruments much better than I do, as yet. If you trust them, I am perfectly willing to do the same. Goodnight."

* * * * *

Seaton sat down and Dorothy nestled beside him, her head snuggled into the curve of his shoulder.

"Sleepy, cuddle-pup?"

"Heavens, no! I couldn't sleep now, lover--could you?"

"Not any. What's the use?"

His arm tightened around her. Apparently motionless to its passengers, the cruiser bored serenely on into space, with ever-mounting velocity. There was not the faintest sound, not the slightest vibration--only the peculiar violet glow surrounding the shining copper cylinder in its massive universal bearing gave any indication of the thousands of kilowatts being generated in the mighty intra-atomic power-plant. Seaton studied it thoughtfully.

"You know, if that violet aura and copper bar were a little different in shade and tone of color, they'd be just like your eyes and hair," he remarked finally.

"You burn me up, Dick!" she retorted, her entrancing low chuckle bubbling through her words. "You do say the weirdest things at times! Possibly they would--and if the moon were made of different stuff than it is and had a different color, it might be green cheese, too! What say we go over and look at the stars?"

"As you were, Rufus!" he commanded sternly. "Don't move a millimeter--you're a drive fit, right where you are. I'll get you any stars you want, and bring them right in here to you. What constellation would you like? I'll get you the Southern Cross--we never see it in Washington."

"No, I want something familiar; the Pleiades or the Big Dipper--no, get me Canis Major--'where Sirius, brightest jewel in the diadem of the firmament, holds sway'," she quoted. "There! Thought I'd forgotten all the astronomy you ever taught me, didn't you? Think you can find it?"

"Sure. Declination about minus twenty, as I remember it, and right ascension between six and seven hours. Let's see--where would that be from our course?"

He thought for a moment, manipulated several levers and dials, snapped off the lights, and swung number one exterior visiplate around, directly before their eyes.

"Oh.... Oh ... this is magnificent, Dick!" she exclaimed. "It's stupendous. It seems as though we were right out there in space itself, and not in here at all. It's ... it's just too perfectly darn wonderful!"

Although neither of them was unacquainted with interstellar space, it presents a spectacle that never fails to awe even the most seasoned observer: and no human being had ever before viewed the wonders of space from such a coign of vantage. Thus the two fell silent and awed as they gazed out into the abysmal depths of the interstellar void. The darkness of Earthly night is ameliorated by light-rays scattered by the atmosphere: the stars twinkle and scintillate and their light is diffused, because of the same medium. But here, what a contrast! They saw the utter, absolute darkness of the complete absence of all light: and upon that indescribable blackness they beheld superimposed the almost unbearable brilliance of enormous suns concentrated into mathematical points, dimensionless. Sirius blazed in blue-white splendor, dominating the lesser members of his constellation, a minute but intensely brilliant diamond upon a field of black velvet--his refulgence unmarred by any trace of scintillation or distortion.

As Seaton slowly shifted the field of vision, angling toward and across the celestial equator and the ecliptic, they beheld in turn mighty Rigel; The Belt, headed by dazzlingly brilliant-white Delta-Orionis; red Betelguese; storied Aldebaran, the friend of mariners; and the astronomically constant Pleiades.

Seaton's arm contracted, swinging Dorothy into his embrace; their lips met and held.

"Isn't it wonderful, lover," she murmured, "to be out here in space this way, together, away from all our troubles and worries? I am so happy."

"It's all of that, sweetheart mine!"

"I almost died, every time they shot at you. Suppose your armor cracked or something? I wouldn't want to go on living--I'd just naturally die!"

"I'm glad it didn't--and I'm twice as glad that they didn't succeed in grabbing you away from me...." His jaw set rigidly, his gray eyes became hard as tempered drills. "Blackie DuQuesne has something coming to him. So far, I have always paid my debts.... I shall settle with him ... IN FULL."

"That was an awfully quick change of subject," he continued, his voice changing instantly into a lighter vein, "but that's one penalty of being human. We can't live in high altitudes all our lives--if we could there would be no thrill in ascending them so often.

"Yes, we love each other just the same--more than anybody else I ever heard of." After a moment she eyed him shrewdly and continued:

"You've got something on your mind besides that tangled mop of hair, big boy. Tell it to Red-Top."

"Nothing much...."

"Come on, 'fess up--it's good for the soul. You can't fool your own wife, guy; I know your little winning ways too well."

"Let me finish, woman; I was about to bare my very soul. To resume--nothing much to go on but a hunch, but I think DuQuesne's somewhere out here in the great open spaces, where men are sometimes schemers as well as men; and if so, I'm after him--foot, horse, and marines."

"That object compass?"

"Yes. You see, I built that thing myself, and I know darn well it isn't out of order. It's still on him, but doesn't indicate. Ergo, he is too far away to reach--and with his weight, I could find him anywhere up to about one and a half light-years. If he wants to go that far away from home, where is his logical destination? It can't be anywhere but Osnome, since that is the only place we stopped at for any length of time--the only place where he could have learned anything. He's learned something, or found something useful to him there, just as we did. That is certain, since he is not the type of man to do anything without a purpose. Uncle Dudley is on his trail--and will be able to locate him pretty soon."

"When will you get that new compass-case exhausted to a skillionth of a whillimeter or something, whatever it is? I thought Dunark said it took five hundred hours of pumping to get it where he wanted it?"

"It did him--but while the Osnomians are wonders at some things, they're not so hot at others. You see, I've got three pumps on that job, in series. First, a Rodebush-Michalek super-pump[A] then, backing that, an ordinary mercury-vapor pump, and last, backing both the others, a Cenco-Hyvac motor-driven oil pump. In less than fifty hours that case will be as empty as a flapper's skull. Just to make sure of cleaning up the last infinitesimal traces, though, I'm going to flash a getter charge of tantalum in it. After that, the atmosphere in that case will be tenuous--take my word for it."

[A] J. Am. Chem. Soc. 51: 3, 750.

"I'll have to; most of that contribution to science being over my head like a circus tent. What say we let _Skylark Two_ drift by herself for a while, and catch us some of Nature's sweet restorer?"

CHAPTER IV

The Zone of Force Is Tested

Seaton strode into the control room with a small oblong box in his hand. Crane was seated at the desk, poring over an abstruse mathematical treatise in _Science_. Margaret was working upon a bit of embroidery. Dorothy, seated upon a cushion on the floor with one foot tucked under her, was reading, her hand straying from time to time to a box of chocolates conveniently near.

"Well, this is a peaceful, home-like scene--too bad to bust it up. Just finished sealing off and flashing out this case, Mart. Going to see if she'll read. Want to take a look?"

He placed the compass upon the plane table, so that its final bearing could be read upon the master circles controlled by the gyroscopes; then simultaneously started his stop-watch and pressed the button which caused a minute couple to be applied to the needle. Instantly the needle began to revolve, and for many minutes there was no apparent change in its motion in either the primary or secondary bearings.

"Do you suppose it is out of order, after all?" asked Crane, regretfully.

"I don't think so," Seaton pondered. "You see, they weren't designed to indicate such distances on such small objects as men, so I threw a million ohms in series with the impulse. That cuts down the free rotation to less than half an hour, and increases the sensitivity to the limit. There, isn't she trying to quit it?"

"Yes, it is settling down. It must be on him still." Finally the ultra-sensitive needle came to rest. When it had done so, Seaton calculated the distance, read the direction, and made a reading upon Osnome.

"He's there, all right. Bearings agree, and distances check to within a light-year, which is as close as we can hope to check on as small a mass as a man. Well, that's that--nothing to do about it until after we get there. One sure thing, Mart--we're not coming straight back home from 'X'."

"No, an investigation is indicated."

"Well, that puts me out of a job. What to do? Don't want to study, like you. Can't crochet, like Peg. Darned if I'll sit cross-legged on a pillow and eat candy, like that Titian blonde over there on the floor. I know what--I'll build me a mechanical educator and teach Shiro to talk English instead of that mess of language he indulges in. How'd that be, Mart?"

"Don't do it," put in Dorothy, positively. "He's just too perfect the way he is. Especially don't do it if he'd talk the way you do--or could you teach him to talk the way you write?"

"Ouch! That's a dirty dig. However, Mrs. Seaton, I am able and willing to defend my customary mode of speech. You realize that the spoken word is ephemeral, whereas the thought, whose nuances have once been expressed in imperishable print is not subject to revision--its crudities can never be remodeled into more subtle, more gracious shading. It is my contention that, due to these inescapable conditions, the mental effort necessitated by the employment of nice distinctions in sense and meaning of words and a slavish adherence to the dictates of the more precise grammarians should be reserved for the print...."

He broke off as Dorothy, in one lithe motion, rose and hurled her pillow at his head.

"Choke him, somebody! Perhaps you had better build it, Dick, after all."

"I believe that he would like it, Dick. He is trying hard to learn, and the continuous use of a dictionary is undoubtedly a nuisance to him."

"I'll ask him. Shiro!"

"You have call, sir?" Shiro entered the room from his galley, with his unfailing bow.

"Yes. How'd you like to learn to talk English like Crane there does--without taking lessons?"

Shiro smiled doubtfully, unable to take such a thought seriously.

"Yes, it can be done," Crane assured him. "Doctor Seaton can build a machine which will teach you all at once, if you like."

"I like, sir, enormously, yes, sir. I years study and pore, but honorable English extraordinary difference from Nipponese--no can do. Dictionary useful but ..." he flipped pages dexterously, "extremely cumbrous. If honorable Seaton can do, shall be extreme ... gratification."

He bowed again, smiled, and went out.

"I'll do just that little thing. So long, folks, I'm going up to the shop."

* * * * *

Day after day the _Skylark_ plunged through the vast emptiness of the interstellar reaches. At the end of each second she was traveling exactly twenty-six feet per second faster than she had been at its beginning; and as day after day passed, her velocity mounted into figures which became meaningless, even when expressed in thousands of miles per second. Still she seemed stationary to her occupants, and only different from a vessel motionless upon the surface of the Earth in that objects within her hull had lost three-sixteenths of their normal weight. Acceleration, too, had its effect. Only the rapidity with which the closer suns and their planets were passed gave any indication of the frightful speed at which they were being hurtled along by the inconceivable power of that disintegrating copper bar.

When the vessel was nearly half-way to "X," the bar was reversed in order to change the sign of their acceleration, and the hollow sphere spun through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees around the motionless cage which housed the enormous gyroscopes. Still apparently motionless and exactly as she had been before, the _Skylark_ was now actually traveling in a direction which seemed "down" and with a velocity which was being constantly decreased by the amount of their negative acceleration.

A few days after the bar had been reversed Seaton announced that the mechanical educator was complete, and brought it into the control room.

In appearance it was not unlike a large radio set, but it was infinitely more complex. It possessed numerous tubes, kino-lamps, and photo-electric cells, as well as many coils of peculiar design--there were dozens of dials and knobs, and a multiple set of head-harnesses.

"How can a thing like that possibly work as it does?" asked Crane. "I know that it does work, but I could scarcely believe it, even after it had educated me."

"That is nothing like the one Dunark used, Dick," objected Dorothy. "How come?"

"I'll answer you first, Dot. This is an improved model--it has quite a few gadgets of my own in it. Now, Mart, as to how it works--it isn't so funny after you understand it--it's a lot like radio in that respect. It operates on a band of frequencies lying between the longest light and heat waves and the shortest radio waves. This thing here is the generator of those waves and a very heavy power amplifier. The headsets are stereoscopic transmitters, taking or receiving a three-dimensional view. Nearly all matter is transparent to those waves; for instance bones, hair, and so on. However, cerebin, a cerebroside peculiar to the thinking structure of the brain, is opaque to them. Dunark, not knowing chemistry, didn't know why the educator worked or what it worked on--he found out by experiment that it did work; just as we found out about electricity. This three-dimensional model, or view, or whatever you want to call it, is converted into electricity in the headsets, and the resulting modulated wave goes back to the educator. There it is heterodyned with another wave--this second frequency was found after thousands of trials and is, I believe, the exact frequency existing in the optic nerves themselves--and sent to the receiving headset. Modulated as it is, and producing a three-dimensional picture, after rectification in the receiver, it reproduces exactly what has been 'viewed,' if due allowance has been made for the size and configuration of the different brains involved in the transfer. You remember a sort of flash--a sensation of seeing something--when the educator worked on you? Well, you did see it, just as though it had been transmitted to the brain by the optic nerve, but everything came at once, so the impression of sight was confused. The result in the brain, however, was clear and permanent. The only drawback is that you haven't the visual memory of what you have learned, and that sometimes makes it hard to use your knowledge. You don't know whether you know anything about a certain subject or not until after you go digging around in your brain looking for it."

"I see," said Crane, and Dorothy, the irrepressible, put in:

"Just as clear as so much mud. What are the improvements you added to the original design?"

"Well, you see, I had a big advantage in knowing that cerebrin was the substance involved, and with that knowledge I could carry matters considerably farther than Dunark could in his original model. I can transfer the thoughts of somebody else to a third party or to a record. Dunark's machine couldn't work against resistance--if the subject wasn't willing to give up his thoughts he couldn't get them. This one can take them away by force. In fact, by increasing plate and grid voltages in the amplifier, I can pretty nearly burn out a man's brain. Yesterday, I was playing with it, transferring a section of my own brain to a magnetized tape--for a permanent record, you know--and found out that above certain rather low voltages it becomes a form of torture that would make the best efforts of the old Inquisition seem like a petting party."

"Did you succeed in the transfer?" Crane was intensely interested.

"Sure. Push the button for Shiro, and we'll start something."

"Put your head against this screen," he directed when Shiro had come in, smiling and bowing as usual. "I've got to caliper your brains to do a good job."

The calipering done, he adjusted various dials and clamped the electrodes over his own head and over the heads of Crane and Shiro.

"Want to learn Japanese while we're at it, Mart? I'm going to."

"Yes, please. I tried to learn it while I was in Japan, but it was altogether too difficult to be worth while."

Seaton threw in a switch, opened it, depressed two more, opened them, and threw off the power.

"All set," he reported crisply, and barked a series of explosive syllables at Shiro, ending upon a rising note.

"Yes, sir," answered the Japanese. "You speak Nipponese as though you had never spoken any other tongue. I am very grateful to you, sir, that I may now discard my dictionary."

"How about you two girls--anything you want to learn in a hurry?"

"Not me!" declared Dorothy emphatically. "That machine is too darn weird to suit me. Besides, if I knew as much about science as you do, we'd probably fight about it."

"I do not believe I care to...." began Margaret.

She was interrupted by the penetrating sound of an alarm bell.

"That's a new note!" exclaimed Seaton, "I never heard that note before."

He stood in surprise at the board, where a brilliant purple light was flashing slowly. "Great Cat! That's a purely Osnomian war-gadget--kind of a battleship detector--shows that there's a boatload of bad news around here somewhere. Grab the visiplates quick, folks," as he rang Shiro's bell. "I'll take visiplate area one, dead ahead. Mart, take number two. Dot, three; Peg, four; Shiro, five. Look sharp!... Nothing in front. See anything, any of you?"

* * * * *

None of them could discover anything amiss, but the purple light continued to flash, and the bell to ring. Seaton cut off the bell.

"We're almost to 'X'," he thought aloud. "Can't be more than a million miles or so, and we're almost stopped. Wonder if somebody's there ahead of us? Maybe Dunark is doing this, though. I'll call him and see." He threw in a switch and said one word--"Dunark!"

"Here!" came the voice of the Kofedix from the speaker. "Are you generating?"

"No--just called to see if you were. What do you make of it?"

"Nothing as yet. Better close up?"

"Yes, edge over this way and I'll come over to meet you. Leave your negative as it is--we'll be stopped directly. Whatever it is, it's dead ahead. It's a long ways off yet, but we'd better get organized. Wouldn't talk much, either--they may intercept our wave, narrow as it is."

"Better yet, shut off your radio entirely. When we get close enough together, we'll use the hand-language. You may not know that you know it, but you do. Turn your heaviest searchlight toward me--I'll do the same."

There was a click as Dunark's power was shut off abruptly, and Seaton grinned as he cut his own.

"That's right, too, folks. In Osnomian battles we always used a sign-language when we couldn't hear anything--and that was most of the time. I know it as well as I know English, now that I am reminded of the fact."

He shifted his course to intercept that of the Osnomian vessel. After a time the watchers picked out a minute point of light, moving comparatively rapidly against the stars, and knew it to be the searchlight of the _Kondal_. Soon the two vessels were almost side by side, moving cautiously forward, and Seaton set up a sixty-inch parabolic reflector, focused upon a coil. As they went on, the purple light continued to flash more and more rapidly, but still nothing was to be seen.

"Take number six visiplate, will you, Mart? It's telescopic, equivalent to a twenty-inch refractor. I'll tell you where to look in a minute--this reflector increases the power of the regular indicator." He studied meters and adjusted dials. "Set on nineteen hours forty-three minutes, and two hundred seventy-one degrees. He's too far away yet to read exactly, but that'll put him in the field of vision."

"Is this radiation harmful?" asked Margaret.

"Not yet--it's too weak. Pretty soon we may be able to feel it; then I'll throw out a screen against it. When it's strong enough, it's pretty deadly stuff. See anything, Mart?"

"I see something, but it is very indistinct. It is moving in sharper now. Yes, it is a space-ship, shaped like a dirigible airship."

"See it yet, Dunark?" Seaton signaled.

"Just sighted it. Ready to attack?"

"I am not. I'm going to run. Let's go, and go fast!"

Dunark signaled violently, and Seaton shook his head time after time, stubbornly.

"A difficulty?" asked Crane.

"Yes. He wants to go jump on it, but I'm not looking for trouble with any such craft as that--it must be a thousand feet long and is certainly neither Terrestrial nor Osnomian. I say beat it while we're all in one piece. How about it?"

"Absolutely," concurred Crane and both women.

The bar was reversed and the _Skylark_ leaped away. The _Kondal_ followed, although the observers could see that Dunark was raging. Seaton swung number six visiplate around, looked once, and switched on the radio.

"Well, Dunark," he said grimly. "You get your wish. That bird is coming out, with at least twice the acceleration we could get with both motors full on. He saw us all the time, and was waiting for us."

"Go on--get away if you can. You can stand a higher acceleration than we can. We'll hold him as long as possible."

"I would, if it would do any good, but it won't. He's so much faster than we are that he could catch us anyway, if he wanted to, no matter how much of a start we had--and it looks now as though he wanted us. Two of us stand a lot better chance than one of licking him if he's looking for trouble. Spread out a mile or two, and pretend this is all the speed we've got. What'll we give him first?"

"Give him everything at once. Rays six, seven, eight, nine, and ten...." Crane, with Seaton, began making contacts, rapidly but with precision. "Heat wave two-seven. Induction, five-eight. Oscillation, everything under point oh six three. All the explosive copper we can get in. Right?"

"Right--and if worse comes to worst, remember the zone of force. Let him shoot first, because he may be peaceable--but it doesn't look like olive branches to me."

"Got both your screens out?"

"Yes. Mart, you might take number two visiplate and work the guns--I'll handle the rest of this stuff. Better strap yourselves in solid, folks--this may develop into a kind of rough party, by the looks of things right now."

* * * * *

As he spoke, a pyrotechnic display enveloped the entire ship as a radiation from the foreign vessel struck the other neutralizing screen and dissipated its force harmlessly in the ether. Instantly Seaton threw on the full power of his refrigerating system and shot in the master switch that actuated the complex offensive armament of his dreadnought of the skies. An intense, livid violet glow hid completely main and auxiliary power bars, and long flashes leaped between metallic objects in all parts of the vessel. The passengers felt each hair striving to stand on end as the very air became more and more highly charged--and this was but the slight corona-loss of the frightful stream of destruction being hurled at the other space-cruiser, now scarcely a mile away!

Seaton stared into number one visiplate, manipulating levers and dials as he drove the _Skylark_ hither and yon, dodging frantically, the while the automatic focusing devices remained centered upon the enemy and the enormous generators continued to pour forth their deadly frequencies. The bars glowed more fiercely as they were advanced to full working load--the stranger was one blaze of incandescent ionization, but she still fought on; and Seaton noticed that the pyrometers recording the temperature of the shell were mounting rapidly, in spite of the refrigerators.

"Dunark, put everything you've got upon one spot--right on the end of his nose!"

As the first shell struck the mark, Seaton concentrated every force at his command upon the designated point. The air in the _Skylark_ crackled and hissed and intense violet flames leaped from the bars as they were driven almost to the point of disruption. From the forward end of the strange craft there erupted prominence after prominence of searing, unbearable flame as the terrific charges of explosive copper struck the mark and exploded, liberating instantaneously their millions upon millions of kilowatt-hours of intra-atomic energy. Each prominence enveloped all three of the fighting vessels and extended for hundreds of miles out into space--but still the enemy warship continued to hurl forth solid and vibratory destruction.

A brilliant orange light flared upon the panel, and Seaton gasped as he swung his visiplate upon his defenses, which he had supposed impregnable. His outer screen was already down, although its mighty copper generator was exerting its utmost power. Black areas had already appeared and were spreading rapidly, where there should have been only incandescent radiance; and the inner screen was even now radiating far into the ultra-violet and was certainly doomed. Knowing as he did the stupendous power driving those screens, he knew that there were superhuman and inconceivable forces being directed against them, and his right hand flashed to the switch controlling the zone of force. Fast as he was, much happened in the mere moment that passed before his flying hand could close the switch. In the last infinitesimal instant of time before the zone closed in, a gaping black hole appeared in the incandescence of the inner screen, and a small portion of a ray of energy so stupendous as to be palpable, struck, like a tangible projectile, the exposed flank of the _Skylark_. Instantly the refractory arenak turned an intense, dazzling white and more than a foot of the forty-eight-inch skin of the vessel melted away, like snow before an oxy-acetylene flame: melting and flying away in molten globes and sparkling gases--the refrigerating coils lining the hull were of no avail against the concentrated energy of that titanic thrust. As Seaton shut off his power, intense darkness and utter silence closed in, and he snapped on the lights.

"They take one trick!" he blazed, his eyes almost emitting sparks, and leaped for the generators. He had forgotten the efforts of the zone of force, however, and only sprawled grotesquely in the air until he floated within reach of a line.

"Hold everything, Dick!" Crane snapped, as Seaton bent over one of the bars. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to put as heavy bars in these ray-generators as they'll stand and go out and get that bird. We can't lick him with Osnomian rays or with our explosive copper, but I can carve that sausage into slices with a zone of force, and I'm going to do it."

"Steady, old man--take it easy. I see your point, but remember that you must release the zone of force before you can use it as a weapon. Furthermore, you must discover his exact location, and must get close enough to him to use the zone as a weapon, all without its protection. Can those ray-screens be made sufficiently powerful to withstand the beam they employed last, even for a second?"

"Hm ... m ... m. Never thought of that, Mart," Seaton replied, the fire dying out of his eyes. "Wonder how long the battle lasted?"

"Eight and two-tenths seconds, from first to last, but they had had that heavy ray in action only a fraction of one second when you cut in the zone of force. Either they underestimated our strength at first, or else it required about eight seconds to tune in their heavy generators--probably the former."

"But we've _got_ to do something, man! We can't just sit here and twiddle our thumbs!"

"Why, and why not? That course seems eminently wise and proper. In fact, at the present time, thumb-twiddling is distinctly indicated."

"Oh, you're full of little red ants! We can't do a thing with that zone on--and you say just sit here. Suppose they know all about that zone of force? Suppose they can crack it? Suppose they ram us?"

"I shall take up your objections in order," Crane had lighted a cigarette and was smoking meditatively. "First, they may or may not know about it. At present, that point is immaterial. Second, whether or not they know about it, it is almost a certainty that they cannot crack it. It had been up for more than three minutes, and they have undoubtedly concentrated everything possible upon us during that time. It is still standing. I really expected it to go down in the first few seconds, but now that it has held this long it will, in all probability, continue to hold indefinitely. Third, they most certainly will not ram us, for several reasons. They probably have encountered few, if any, foreign vessels able to stand against them for a minute, and will act accordingly. Then, too, it is probably safe to assume that their vessel is damaged, to some slight extent at least; for I do not believe that any possible armament could withstand the forces you directed against them and escape entirely unscathed. Finally, if they did ram us, what would happen? Would we feel the shock? That barrier in the ether seems impervious, and if so, it could not transmit a blow. I do not see exactly how it would affect the ship dealing the blow. You are the one who works out the new problems in unexplored mathematics--some time you must take a few months off and work it out."

"Yes, it would take that long, too, I guess--but you're right, he can't hurt us. That's using the old bean, Mart! I was going off half-cocked again, darn it! I'll pipe down, and we'll go into a huddle."

* * * * *

Seaton noticed that Dorothy's face was white and that she was fighting for self-control. Drawing himself over to her, he picked her up in a tight embrace.

"Cheer up, Red-Top! This man's war ain't started yet!"

"Not started? What do you mean? Haven't you and Martin just been admitting to each other that you can't do anything? Doesn't that mean that we are beaten?"

"Beaten! Us? How do you get that way? Not on your sweet young life!" he ejaculated, and the surprise on his face was so manifest that she recovered instantly. "We've just dug a hole and pulled the hole in after us, that's all! When we get everything doped out to suit us, we'll snap out of it and that bird'll think he's been petting a wildcat!"

"Mart, you're the thinking end of this partnership," he continued, thoughtfully. "You've got the analytical mind and the judicial disposition, and can think circles around me. From what little you've seen of those folks, tell me who, what, and where they are. I'm getting the germ of an idea, and maybe we can make it work."

"I will try it." Crane paused. "They are, of course, neither from the Earth nor from Osnome. It is also evident that they have solved the secret of intra-atomic energy. Their vessels are not propelled as ours are--they have so perfected that force that it acts upon every particle of the structure and its contents...."

"How do you figure that?" blurted Seaton.

"Because of the acceleration they can stand. Nothing even semi-human, and probably nothing living, could endure it otherwise. Right?"

"Yes--I never thought of that."

"Furthermore, they are far from home, for if they were from anywhere nearby, the Osnomians would have known of them--particularly since it is evident from the size of the vessel that it is not a recent development with them, as it is with us. Since the green system is close to the center of the Galaxy, it seems reasonable, as a working hypothesis, to assume that they are from some system far from the center, perhaps close to the outer edge. They are very evidently of a high degree of intelligence. They are also highly treacherous and merciless...."

"Why?" asked Dorothy, who was listening eagerly.

"I deduce those characteristics from their unprovoked attack upon peaceful ships, vastly smaller and supposedly of inferior armament; and also from the nature of that attack. This vessel is probably a scout or an exploring ship, since it seems to be alone. It is not altogether beyond the bounds of reason to imagine it upon a voyage of discovery, in search of new planets to be subjugated and colonized...."

"That's a sweet picture of our future neighbors--but I guess you're hitting the old nail on the head, at that."

"If these deductions are anywhere nearly correct, they are terrible neighbors. For my next point, are we justified in assuming that they do or do not know about the zone of force?"

"That's a hard one. Knowing what they evidently do know, it's hard to see how they could have missed it. And yet, if they had known about it for a long time, wouldn't they be able to get through it? Of course it may be a real and total barrier in the ether--in that case they'd know that they couldn't do a thing as long as we keep it on. Take your choice, but I believe that they know about it, and know more than we do--that it is a total barrier set up in the ether."

"I agree with you, and we shall proceed upon that assumption. They know, then, that neither they nor we can do anything as long as we maintain the zone--that it is a stalemate. They also know that it takes an enormous amount of power to keep the zone in place. Now we have gone as far as we can go upon the meager data we have--considerably farther than we really are justified in going. We must now try to come to some conclusion concerning their present activities. If our ideas as to their natures are even approximately correct, they are waiting, probably fairly close at hand, until we shall be compelled to release the zone, no matter how long that period of waiting shall be. They know, of course, from our small size, that we cannot carry enough copper to maintain it indefinitely, as they could. Does that sound reasonable?"

"I check you to nineteen decimal places, Mart, and from your ideas I'm getting surer and surer that we can pull their corks. I can get into action in a hurry when I have to, and my idea now is to wait until they relax a trifle, and then slip a fast one over on them. One more bubble out of the old think-tank and I'll let you off for the day. At what time will their vigilance be at lowest ebb? That's a poser, I'll admit, but the answer to it may answer everything--the first shot will, of course, be the best chance we'll ever have."

"Yes, we should succeed in the first attempt. We have very little information to guide us in answering that question." He studied the problem for many minutes before he resumed, "I should say that for a time they would keep all their rays and other weapons in action against the zone of force, expecting us to release it immediately. Then, knowing that they were wasting power uselessly, they would cease attacking, but would be very watchful, with every eye fastened upon us and with every weapon ready for instant use. After this period of vigilance, regular ship's routine would be resumed. Half the force, probably, would go off duty--for, if they are even remotely like any organic beings with which we are familiar, they require sleep or its equivalent at intervals. The men on duty--the normal force, that is--would be doubly careful for a time. Then habit will assert itself, if we have done nothing to create suspicion, and their watchfulness will relax to the point of ordinary careful observation. Toward the end of their watch, because of the strain of the battle and because of the unusually long period of duty, they will become careless, and their vigilance will be considerably below normal. But the exact time of all these things depends entirely upon their conception of time, concerning which we have no information whatever. Though it is purely a speculation, based upon Earthly and Osnomian experience, I should say that after twelve or thirteen hours would come the time for us to make the attack."

"That's good enough for me. Fine, Mart, and thanks. You've probably saved the lives of the party. We will now sleep for eleven or twelve hours."

"Sleep, Dick! How could you?" Dorothy exclaimed.

CHAPTER V

First Blood

The next twelve hours dragged with terrible slowness. Sleep was impossible and eating was difficult, even though all knew that they would have need of the full measure of their strength. Seaton set up various combinations of switching devices connected to electrical timers, and spent hours trying, with all his marvelous quickness of muscular control, to cut shorter and ever shorter the time between the opening and the closing of the switch. At last he arranged a powerful electro-magnetic device so that one impulse would both open and close the switch, with an open period of one one-thousandth of a second. Only then was he satisfied.

"A thousandth is enough to give us a look around, due to persistence of vision; and it is short enough so that they won't see it unless they have a recording observer on us. Even if they still have rays on us, they can't possibly neutralize our screens in that short an exposure. All right, gang? We'll take five visiplates and cover the sphere. If any of you get a glimpse of him, mark the exact spot and outline on the glass. All set?"

He pressed the button. The stars flashed in the black void for an instant, then were again shut out.

"Here he is, Dick!" shrieked Margaret. "Right here--he covered almost half the visiplate!"

She outlined for him, as nearly as she could, the exact position of the object she had seen, and he calculated rapidly.

"Fine business!" he exulted. "He's within half a mile of us, three-quarters on--perfect! I thought he'd be so far away that I'd have to take photographs to locate him. He hasn't a single ray on us, either. That bird's goose is cooked right now, folks, unless every man on watch has his hand right on the controls of a generator and can get into action in less than a tenth of a second! Hang on, gang, I'm going to step on the gas!"

After making sure that everyone was fastened immovably in their seats he strapped himself in the pilot's seat, then set the bar toward the strange vessel and applied fully one-third of its full power. The _Skylark_, of course, did not move. Then, with bewildering rapidity, he went into action; face glued to the visiplate, hands moving faster than the eye could follow--the left closing and opening the switch controlling the zone of force, the right swinging the steering controls to all points of the sphere. The mighty vessel staggered this way and that, jerking and straining terribly as the zone was thrown on and off, lurching sickeningly about the central bearing as the gigantic power of the driving bar was exerted, now in one direction, now in another. After a second or two of this mad gyration, Seaton shut off the power. He then released the zone, after assuring himself that both inner and outer screens were operating at the highest possible rating.

"There, that'll hold 'em for a while, I guess. This battle was even shorter than the other one--and a lot more decisive. Let's turn on the flood-lights and see what the pieces look like."

The lights revealed that the zone of force had indeed sliced the enemy vessel into pieces. No fragment was large enough to be navigable or dangerous and each was sharply cut, as though sheared from its neighbor by some gigantic curved blade. Dorothy sobbed with relief in Seaton's arms as Crane, with one arm around his wife, grasped his hand.

"That was flawless, Dick. As an exhibition of perfect co-ordination and instantaneous timing under extreme physical difficulties, I have never seen its equal."

"You certainly saved all our lives," Margaret added.

"Only fifty-fifty, Peg," Seaton protested, and blushed vividly. "Mart did most of it, you know. I'd have gummed up everything back there if he had let me. Let's see what we can find out about them."

He touched the lever and the _Skylark_ moved slowly toward the wreckage, the scattered fragments of which were beginning to move toward and around each other because of their mutual gravitational forces. Snapping on a searchlight, he swung its beam around, and as it settled upon one of the larger sections he saw a group of hooded figures; some of them upon the metal, others floating slowly toward it through space.

"Poor devils--they didn't have a chance," he remarked regretfully. "However, it was either they or we--look out! Sweet spirits of niter!"

He leaped back to the controls and the others were hurled bodily to the floor as he applied the power--for at a signal each of the hooded figures had leveled a tube and once more the outer screen had flamed into incandescence.

As the _Skylark_ leaped away, Seaton focussed an attractor upon the one who had apparently signaled the attack. Rolling the vessel over in a short loop, so that the captive was hurled off into space upon the other side, he snatched the tube from the figure's grasp with one auxiliary attractor, and anchored head and limbs with others, so that the prisoner could scarcely move a muscle. Then, while Crane and the women scrambled up off the floor and hurried to the visiplates, Seaton cut in rays six, two-seven, and five-eight. Ray six, "the softener," was a band of frequencies extending from violet far up into the ultra-violet. When driven with sufficient power, this ray destroyed eyesight and nervous tissue, and its power increased still further, actually loosened the molecular structure of matter. Ray two-seven was operated in a range of frequencies far below the visible red. It was pure heat--under its action matter became hotter and hotter as long as it was applied, the upper limit being only the theoretical maximum of temperature. Ray five-eight was high-tension, high-frequency alternating current. Any conductor in its path behaved precisely as it would in the Ajax-Northrup induction furnace, which can boil platinum in ten seconds! These three rays composed the beam which Seaton directed upon the mass of metal from which the enemy had elected to continue the battle--and behind each ray, instead of the small energy at the command of its Osnomian inventor, were the untold millions of kilowatts developed by a one-hundred-pound bar of disintegrating copper!

* * * * *

There ensued a brief but appalling demonstration of the terrible effectiveness of those Osnomian weapons against anything not protected by ultra-powered ray screens. Metal and men--if men they were--literally vanished. One moment they were outlined starkly in the beam; there was a moment of searing, coruscating, blinding light--the next moment the beam bored on into the void, unimpeded. Nothing was visible save an occasional tiny flash, as some condensed or solidified droplet of the volatilized metal re-entered the path of that ravening beam.

"We'll see if there's any more of them loose," Seaton remarked, as he shut off the force and probed into the wreckage with a searchlight.

No sign of life or of activity was revealed, and the light was turned upon the captive. He was held motionless in the invisible grip of the attractors, at the point where the force of those peculiar magnets was exactly balanced by the outward thrust of the repellers. By manipulating the attractor holding it, Seaton brought the strange tubular weapon into the control-room through a small air-lock in the wall and examined it curiously, but did not touch it.

"I never heard of a hand-ray before, so I guess I won't play with it much until after I learn something about it."

"So you have taken a captive?" asked Margaret. "What are you going to do with him?"

"I'm going to drag him in here and read his mind. He's one of the officers of that ship, I believe, and I'm going to find out how to build one exactly like it. This old can is now as obsolete as a 1920 flivver, and I'm going to make us a later model. How about it, Mart, don't we want something really up-to-date if we're going to keep on space-hopping?"

"We certainty do. Those denizens seem to be particularly venomous, and we will not be safe unless we have the most powerful and most efficient space-ship possible. However, that fellow may be dangerous, even now--in fact, it is practically certain that he is."

"You chirped it, ace. I'd much rather touch a pound of dry nitrogen iodide. I've got him spread-eagled so that he can't destroy his brain until after we've read it, though, so there's no particular hurry about him. We'll leave him out there for a while, to waste his sweetness on the desert air. Let's all look around for the _Kondal_. I sure hope they didn't get her in that fracas."

They diffused the rays of eight giant searchlights into a vertical fan, and with it swept slowly through almost a semi-circle before anything was seen. Then there was revealed a cluster of cylindrical objects amid a mass of wreckage, which Crane recognized at once.

"The _Kondal_ is gone, Dick. There is what is left of her, and most of her cargo of salt, in jute bags."

As he spoke, a series of green flashes played upon the bags, and Seaton yelled in relief.

"They got the ship all right, but Dunark and Sitar got away--they're still with their salt!"

The _Skylark_ moved over to the wreck and Seaton, relinquishing the controls to Crane, donned a vacuum suit, entered the main air-lock and snapped on the motor which sealed off the lock, pumped the air into a pressure-tank, and opened the outside door. He threw a light line to the two figures and pushed himself lightly toward them. He then talked briefly to Dunark in the hand-language, and handed the end of the line to Sitar, who held it while the two men explored the fragments of the strange vessel, gathering up various things of interest as they came upon them.

Back in the control-room, Dunark and Sitar let their pressure decrease gradually to that of the terrestrial vessel and removed the face-plates from their helmets.

"Again, oh Karfedo of Earth, we thank you for our lives," Dunark began, gasping for breath, when Seaton leaped to the air-gauge with a quick apology.

"Never thought of the effect our atmospheric pressure would have on you two. We can stand yours all right, but you'd pretty nearly pass out on ours. There, that'll suit you better. Didn't you throw out your zone of force?"

"Yes, as soon as I saw that our screens were not going to hold." The Osnomians' labored breathing became normal as the air-pressure increased to a value only a little below that of the dense atmosphere of their native planet. "I then increased the power of the screens to the extreme limit and opened the zone for a moment to see how the screens would hold with the added power. That instant was enough. In that period a concentrated beam, such as I had no idea could ever be generated, went through the outer and inner screens as though they were not there, through the four-foot arenak of the hull, through the entire central installation, and through the hull on the other side. Sitar and I were wearing suits...."

"Say, Mart, that's one bet we overlooked. It's a good idea, too--those strangers wore them all the time as regular equipment, apparently. Next time we get into a jam, be sure we do it; they might come in handy. Excuse me, Dunark--go ahead."

"We had suits on, so as soon as the ray was shut off, which was almost instantly, I phoned the crew to jump, and we leaped out through the hole in the hull. The air rushing out gave us an impetus that carried us many miles out into space, and it required many hours for the slight attraction of the mass here to draw us back to it. We just got back a few minutes ago. That air-blast is probably what saved us, as they destroyed our vessel with atomic bombs and hunted down the four men of our crew, who stayed comparatively close to the scene. They rayed you for about an hour with the most stupendous beams imaginable--no such generators have ever been considered possible of construction--but couldn't make any impression upon you. Then they shut off their power and stood by, waiting. I wasn't looking at you when you released your zone. One moment it was there, and the next, the stranger had been cut in pieces. The rest you know."

"We're sure glad you two got away, Dunark. Well, Mart, what say we drag that guy in and give him the once-over?"

* * * * *

Seaton swung the attractors holding the prisoner until they were in line with the main air-lock, then reduced the power of the repellers. As he approached the lock various controls were actuated, and soon the stranger stood in the control room, held immovable against one wall, while Crane, with a 0.50-caliber elephant gun, stood against the other.

"Perhaps you girls should go somewhere else," suggested Crane.

"Not on your life!" protested Dorothy, who, eyes wide and flushed with excitement, stood near a door, with a heavy automatic pistol in her hand. "I wouldn't miss this for a farm!"

"Got him solid," declared Seaton, after a careful inspection of the various attractors and repellers he had bearing upon the prisoner, "Now let's get him out of that suit. No--better read his air first, temperature and pressure--might analyze it, too."

Nothing could be seen of the person of the stranger, since he was encased in vacuum armor, but it was plainly evident that he was very short and immensely broad and thick. By means of hollow needles forced through the leather-like material of the suit Seaton drew off a sample of the atmosphere within, into an Orsat apparatus, while Crane made pressure and temperature readings.

"Temperature, one hundred ten degrees. Pressure, twenty-eight pounds--about the same as ours is, now that we have stepped it up to keep the Osnomians from suffering."

Seaton soon reported that the atmosphere was quite similar to that of the _Skylark_, except that it was much higher in carbon dioxide and carried an extremely high percentage of water vapor. He took up a pair of heavy shears and laid the suit open full length, on both sides, knowing that the powerful attractors would hold the stranger immovable. He then wrenched off the helmet and cast the whole suit aside, revealing the enemy officer, clad in a tunic of scarlet silk.

He was less than five feet tall. His legs were merely blocks, fully as great in diameter as they were in length, supporting a torso of Herculean dimensions. His arms were as large as a strong man's thigh and hung almost to the floor. His astounding shoulders, fully a yard across, merged into and supported an enormous head. The being possessed recognizable nose, ears, and mouth; and the great domed forehead and huge cranium bespoke an immense and a highly developed brain.

But it was the eyes of this strange creature that fixed and held the attention. Large they were, and black--the dull, opaque, lusterless black of platinum sponge. The pupils were a brighter black, and in them flamed ruby lights: pitiless, mocking, cold. Plainly to be read in those sinister depths were the untold wisdom of unthinkable age, sheer ruthlessness, mighty power, and ferocity unrelieved. His baleful gaze swept from one member of the party to another, and to meet the glare of those eyes was to receive a tangible physical blow--it was actually ponderable force; that of embodied hardness and of ruthlessness incarnate, generated in that merciless brain and hurled forth through those flame-shot, Stygian orbs.

"If you don't need us for anything, Dick, I think Peggy and I will go upstairs," Dorothy broke the long silence.

"Good idea, Dot. This isn't going to be pretty to watch--or to do, either, for that matter."

"If I stay here another minute I'll see that thing as long as I live; and I might be very ill. Goodbye," and heartless and bloodthirsty Osnomian though she was, Sitar had gone to join the two Terrestrial women.

"I didn't want to say much before the girls, but I want to check a couple of ideas with you two. Don't you think it's a safe bet that this bird reported back to his headquarters?"

"I have been thinking that very thing," Crane spoke gravely, and Dunark nodded agreement. "Any race capable of developing such a vessel as this would almost certainly have developed systems of communication in proportion."

"That's the way I doped it out--and that's why I'm going to read his mind, if I have to burn out his brain to do it. We've got to know how far away from home he is, whether he has turned in any report about us, and all about it. Also, I'm going to get the plans, power, and armament of their most modern ships, if he knows them, so that your gang, Dunark, can build us one like them; because the next boat that tackles us will be warned and we won't be able to take it by surprise. We won't stand a chance in the _Skylark_. With a ship like theirs, however, we can run--or we can fight, if we have to. Any other ideas, fellows?"

* * * * *

As neither Crane nor Dunark had any other suggestions to offer, Seaton brought out the mechanical educator, watching the creature's eyes narrowly. As he placed one headset over that motionless head the captive sneered in pure contempt, but when the case was opened and the array of tubes and transformers was revealed, that expression disappeared; and when he added a super-power stage by cutting in a heavy-duty transformer and a five-kilowatt transmitting tube, Seaton thought that he saw an instantaneously suppressed flicker of doubt or fear.

"That headset thing was child's play to him, but he doesn't like the looks of this other stuff at all. I don't blame him a bit--I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of this hook-up myself. I'm going to put him on the recorder and on the visualizer," Seaton continued as he connected spools of wire and tape, lamps, and lenses in an intricate system and donned a headset. "I'd hate to have much of that brain in my own skull--afraid I'd bite myself. I'm just going to look on, and when I see anything I want, I'll grab it and put it into my own brain. I'm starting off easy, not using the big tube."

He closed several switches, lights flashed, and the wires and tapes began to feed through the magnets.

"Well, I've got his language, folks, he seemed to want me to have it. It's got a lot of stuff in it that I can't understand yet, though, so guess I'll give him some English."

He changed several connections and the captive spoke, in a profoundly deep bass voice.

"You may as well discontinue your attempt, for you will gain no information from me. That machine of yours was out of date with us thousands of years ago."

"Save your breath or talk sense," said Seaton, coldly. "I gave you English so that you can give me the information I want. You already know what it is. When you get ready to talk, say so, or throw it on the screen of your own accord. If you don't, I'll put on enough voltage to burn your brain out. Remember, I can read your dead brain as well as though it were alive, but I want your thoughts, as well as your knowledge, and I'm going to have them. If you give them voluntarily, I will tinker up a lifeboat that you can navigate back to your own world and let you go; if you resist I intend getting them anyway and you shall not leave this vessel alive. You may take your choice."

"You are childish, and that machine is impotent against my will. I could have defied it a hundred years ago, when I was barely a grown man. Know you, American, that we supermen of the Fenachrone are as far above any of the other and lesser breeds of beings who spawn in their millions in their countless myriads of races upon the numberless planets of the Universe as you are above the inert metal from which this, your ship, was built. The Universe is ours, and in due course we shall take it--just as in due course I shall take this vessel. Do your worst; I shall not speak." The creature's eyes flamed, hurling a wave of hypnotic command through Seaton's eyes and deep into his brain. Seaton's very senses reeled for an instant under the impact of that awful mental force; but after a short, intensely bitter struggle he threw off the spell.

"That was close, fellow, but you didn't quite ring the bell," he said grimly, staring directly into those unholy eyes. "I may rate pretty low mentally, but I can't be hypnotized into turning you loose. Also I can give you cards and spades in certain other lines which I am about to demonstrate. Being superman didn't keep the rest of your men from going out in my ray, and being a superman isn't going to save your brain. I am not depending upon my intellectual or mental force--I've got an ace in the hole in the shape of five thousand volts to apply to the most delicate centers of your brain. Start giving me what I want, and start quick, or I'll tear it out of you."

The giant did not answer, merely glared defiance and bitter hate.

"Take it, then!" Seaton snapped, and cut in the super-power stage and began turning dials and knobs, exploring that strange mind for the particular area in which he was most interested. He soon found it, and cut in the visualizer--the stereographic device, in parallel with Solon's own brain recorder, which projected a three-dimensional picture into the "viewing-area" or dark space of the cabinet. Crane and Dunark, tense and silent, looked on in strained suspense as, minute after minute, the silent battle of wills raged. Upon one side was a horrible and gigantic brain, of undreamed of power; upon the other side a strong man, fighting for all that life holds dear, wielding against that monstrous and frightful brain a weapon wrought of high-tension electricity, applied with all the skill that earthly and Osnomian science could devise.

Seaton crouched over the amplifier, his jaw set and every muscle taut, his eyes leaping from one meter to another, his right hand slowly turning up the potentiometer which was driving more and ever more of the searing, torturing output of his super-power tube into that stubborn brain. The captive was standing utterly rigid, eyes closed, every sense and faculty mustered to resist that cruelly penetrant attack upon the very innermost recesses of his mind. Crane and Dunark scarcely breathed as the three-dimensional picture in the visualizer varied from a blank to the hazy outlines of a giant space-cruiser. It faded out as the unknown exerted himself to withstand that poignant inquisition, only to come back in, clearer than before, as Seaton advanced the potentiometer still farther. Finally, flesh and blood could no longer resist that lethal probe and the picture became sharp and clear. It showed the captain--for he was no less an officer than the commander of the vessel--at a great council table, seated, together with many other officers, upon very low, enormously strong metal stools. They were receiving orders from their Emperor; orders plainly understood by Crane and the Osnomian alike, for thought needs no translation.

"Gentlemen of the Navy," the ruler spoke solemnly, "Our preliminary expedition, returned some time ago, achieved its every aim, and we are now ready to begin fulfilling our destiny, the Conquest of the Universe. This Galaxy comes first. Our base of operations will be the largest planet of that group of brilliant green suns, for they can be seen from any point in the Galaxy and are almost in the exact center of it. Our astronomers," here the captain's thoughts shifted briefly to an observatory far out in space for perfect seeing, and portrayed a reflecting telescope with a mirror five miles in diameter, capable of penetrating unimaginable myriads of light-years into space, "have tabulated all the suns, planets, and satellites belonging to this Galaxy, and each of you has been given a complete chart and assigned a certain area which he is to explore. Remember, gentlemen, that this first major expedition is to be purely one of exploration; the one of conquest will set out after you have returned with complete information. You will each report by torpedo every tenth of the year. We do not anticipate any serious difficulty, as we are of course the highest type of life in the Universe; nevertheless, in the unlikely event of trouble, report it. We shall do the rest. In conclusion, I warn you again--let no people know that we exist. Make no conquests, and destroy all who by any chance may see you. Gentlemen, go with power."

The captain embarked in a small airboat and was shot to his vessel. He took his station at an immense control board and the warship shot off instantly, with unthinkable velocity, and with not the slightest physical shock.

At this point Seaton made the captain take them all over the ship. They noted its construction, its power-plant, its controls--every minute detail of structure, operation, and maintenance was taken from the captain's mind and was both recorded and visualized.

* * * * *

The journey seemed to be a very long one, but finally the cluster of green suns became visible and the Fenachrone began to explore the solar systems in the area assigned to that particular vessel. Hardly had the survey started, however, when the two globular space-cruisers were detected and located. The captain stopped the ship briefly, then attacked. They watched the attack, and saw the destruction of the _Kondal_. They looked on while the captain read the brain of one of Dunark's crew, gleaning from it all the facts concerning the two space-ships, and thought with him that the two absentees from the _Kondal_ would drift back in a few hours, and would be disposed of in due course. They learned that these things were automatically impressed upon the torpedo next to issue, as was every detail of everything that happened in and around the vessel. They watched him impress a thought of his own upon the record--"the inhabitants of planet three of sun six four seven three Pilarone show unusual development and may cause trouble, as they have already brought knowledge of the metal of power and of the impenetrable shield to the Central System, which is to be our base. Recommend volatilization of this planet by vessel sent on special mission." They saw the raying of the _Skylark_. They sensed him issue commands:

"Ray it for a time; he will probably open the shield for a moment, as the other one did," then, after a time skipped over by the mind under examination. "Cease raying--no use wasting power. He must open eventually, as he runs out of power. Stand by and destroy him when he opens."

The scene shifted. The captain was asleep and was awakened by an alarm gong--only to find himself floating in a mass of wreckage. Making his way to the fragment of his vessel containing the torpedo port, he released the messenger, which flew, with ever-increasing velocity, back to the capital city of the Fenachrone, carrying with it a record of everything that had happened.

"That's what I want," thought Seaton. "Those torpedoes went home, fast. I want to know how far they have to go and how long it'll take them to get there. You know what distance a parsec is, since it is purely a mathematical concept; and you must have a watch or some similar instrument with which we can translate your years into ours. I don't want to have to kill you, fellow, and if you'll give up even now I'll spare you. I'll get it anyway, you know--and you also know that a few hundred volts more will kill you."

They saw the thought received, and saw its answer: "You shall learn no more. This is the most important of all, and I shall hold it to disintegration and beyond."

Seaton advanced the potentiometer still farther, and the brain picture waxed and waned, strengthened and faded. Finally, however, it was revealed by flashes that the torpedo had about a hundred and fifty-five thousand parsecs to go and that it would take two-tenths of a year to make the journey; that the warships which would come in answer to the message were as fast as the torpedo; that he did indeed have in his suit a watch--a device of seven dials, each turning ten times as fast as its successor; and that one turn of the slowest dial measured one year of his time. Seaton instantly threw off his headset and opened the power switch.

"Grab a stopwatch quick, Mart!" he called, as he leaped to the discarded vacuum suit and searched out the peculiar timepiece. They noted the exact time consumed by one complete revolution of one of the dials, and calculated rapidly.

"Better than I thought!" exclaimed Seaton. "That makes his year about four hundred ten of our days. That gives us eighty-two days before the torpedo gets there--longer than I'd dared hope. We've got to fight, too, not run. They figure on getting the _Skylark_, then volatilizing our world. Well, we can take time enough to grab off an absolutely complete record of this guy's brain. We'll need it for what's coming, and I'm going to get it, if I have to kill him to do it."

He resumed his place at the educator, turned on the power, and a shadow passed over his face.

"Poor devil, he's conked out--couldn't stand the gaff," he remarked, half-regretfully. "However that makes it easy to get what we want, and we'd have had to kill him anyway, I guess--Bad as it is, I'd hate to bump him off in cold blood."

He threaded new spools into the machine, and for three hours, mile after mile of tape sped between the magnets as Seaton explored every recess of that monstrous, yet stupendous brain.

"Well, that's that," he declared finally, as, the last bit of information gleaned and recorded upon the flying tape, he removed the body of the Fenachrone captain into space and rayed it out of existence. "Now what to do?"

"How can we get this salt to Osnome?" asked Dunark whose thoughts were never far from that store of the precious chemical. "You are already crowded, and Sitar and I will crowd you still more. You have no room for additional cargo, and yet much valuable time would be lost in going to Osnome for another vessel."

"Yes, and we've got to get a lot of 'X', too. Guess we'll have to take time to get another vessel. I'd like to drag in the pieces of that ship, too--his instruments and a lot of the parts could be used."

"Why not do it all at once?" suggested Crane. "We can start that whole mass toward Osnome by drawing it behind us until such a velocity has been attained that it will reach there at the desired time. We could then go to 'X,' and overtake this material near the green system."

"Right you are, ace--that's a sound idea. But say, Dunark, it wouldn't be good technique for you to eat our food for any length of time. While we're figuring this out you'd better hop over there and bring over enough to last you two until we get you home. Give it to Shiro--after a couple of lessons, you'll find he'll be as good as any of your cooks."

* * * * *

Faster and faster the _Skylark_ flew, pulling behind her the mass of wreckage, held by every available attractor. When the calculated velocity had been attained, the attractors were shut off and the vessel darted away toward that planet, still in the Carboniferous Age, which possessed at least one solid ledge of metallic "X," the rarest of all earthly metals. As the automatic controls held the cruiser upon her course, the six wanderers sat long in discussion as to what should be done, what could be done, to avert the threatened destruction of all the civilization of the Galaxy except the monstrous and unspeakable culture of the Fenachrone. Nearing their destination, Seaton rose to his feet.

"Well, folks, it's like this. We've got our backs to the wall. Dunark has troubles of his own--if the Third Planet doesn't get him the Fenachrone will, and the Third Planet is the more pressing danger. That lets him out. We've got nearly six months before the Fenachrone can get back here...."

"But how can they possibly find us here, or wherever we'll be by that time, Dick?" asked Dorothy. "The battle was a long way from here."

"With that much start they probably couldn't find us," Seaton replied soberly. "It's the world I'm thinking about. They've got to be stopped, and stopped cold--and we've got only six months to do it in.... Osnome's got the best tools and the fastest workmen I know of...." his voice died away in thought.

"That sort of thing is in your department, Dick."

Crane was calm and judicial as always. "I will, of course, do anything I can. But you probably have a plan of campaign already laid out?"

"After a fashion. We've got to find out how to work through this zone of force or we're sunk without a trace. Even with rays, screens, and ships equal to theirs, we couldn't keep them from sending a vessel to destroy the earth; and they'd probably get us too, eventually. They've got a lot of stuff we don't know about, of course, since I took only one man's mind. While he was a very able man, he didn't know all that all the rest of them do, any more than any one man has all the earthly science known. Absolutely our only chance is to control that zone--it's the only thing they haven't got. Of course, it may be impossible, but I won't believe that, until I've exhausted a lot of possibilities. Dunark, can you spare a crew to build us a duplicate of that Fenachrone ship, besides those you are going to build for yourself?"

"Certainly. I will be only too glad to do so."

"Well, then, while Dunark is doing that, I suggest that we go to this Third Planet, abduct a few of their leading scientists, and read their minds. Then do the same, visiting every other highly advanced planet we can locate. There is a good chance that, by combining the best points of the warfares of many worlds, we can evolve something that will enable us to turn back these invaders."

"Why not send a copper torpedo to destroy their entire planet?" suggested Dunark.

"Wouldn't work. Their detecting screens would locate it a thousand million miles off in space, and they would ray it. With a zone of force that would get through their screens, that would be the first thing I'd do. You see, every thought comes back to that zone. We've got to get through it some way."

The course alarm sounded, and they saw that a planet lay directly in their path. It was "X," and enough negative acceleration was applied to make an easy landing possible.

"Isn't it going to be a long, slow job, chopping off two tons of that metal and fighting away those terrible animals besides?" asked Margaret.

"It'll take about a millionth of a second, Peg. I'm going to bite it off with the zone, just as I took that bite out of our field. The rotation of the planet will throw us away from the surface, then we'll release the zone and drag our prey off with us. See?"

The _Skylark_ descended rapidly toward that well-remembered ledge of metal to which the object compass had led them.

"This is exactly where we landed before," Margaret commented in surprise, and Dorothy added:

"Yes, and there's that horrible tree that ate the dinosaur or whatever it was. I thought you blew it up for me, Dick?"

"I did, Dottie--blew it into atoms. Must be a good location for carnivorous trees--and they must grow awfully fast, too. As to its being the same place, Peg--sure it is. That's what object compasses are for."

Everything appeared as it had been at the time of their first visit. The rank Carboniferous vegetation, intensely, vividly green, was motionless in the still, hot, heavy air; the living nightmares inhabiting that primitive world were lying in the cooler depths of the jungle, sheltered from the torrid rays of that strange and fervent sun.

"How about it, Dot? Want to see some of your little friends again? If you do, I'll give them a shot and bring them out."

"Heavens, no! I saw them once--if I never see them again, that will be twenty minutes too soon!"

"All right--we'll grab us a piece of this ledge and beat it."

Seaton lowered the vessel to the ledge, focussed the main anchoring attractor upon it, and threw on the zone of force. Almost immediately he released the zone, pointed the bar parallel to the compass bearing upon Osnome, and slowly applied the power.

"How much did you take, anyway?" asked Dunark in amazement. "It looks bigger than the _Skylark_!"

"It is; considerably bigger. Thought we might as well take enough while we're here, so I set the zone for a seventy-five-foot radius. It's probably of the order of magnitude of half a million tons, since the stuff weighs more than half a ton to the cubic foot. However, we can handle it as easily as we could a smaller bite, and that much mass will help us hold that other stuff together when we catch up with it."

* * * * *

The voyage to Osnome was uneventful. They overtook the wreckage, true to schedule, as they were approaching the green system, and attached it to the mass of metal behind them by means of attractors.

"Where'll we land this junk, Dunark?" asked Seaton, as Osnome grew large beneath them. "We'll hold this lump of metal and the fragment of the ship carrying the salt; and we'll be able to hold some of the most important of the other stuff. But a lot of it is bound to get away from us--and the Lord help anybody who's under it when it comes down! You might yell for help--and say, you might ask somebody to have that astronomical data ready for us as soon as we land."

"The parade ground will be empty now, so we will land there," Dunark replied. "We should be able to land everything in a field of that size, I should think." He touched the sender at his belt, and in the general code notified the city of their arrival and warned everyone to keep away from the parade ground. He then sent several messages in the official code, concluding by asking that one or two space-ships come out and help lower the burden to the ground. As the peculiar, pulsating chatter of the Osnomian telegraph died out, Seaton called for help.

"Come here, you two, and grab some of these attractors. I need about twelve hands to keep this plunder in the straight and narrow path."

The course had been carefully laid, with allowance for the various velocities and forces involved, to follow the easiest path to the Kondalian parade ground. The hemisphere of "X" and the fragment of the _Kondal_ which bore the salt were held immovably in place by the main attractor and one auxiliary; and many other auxiliaries held sections of the Fenachrone vessel. However, the resistance of the air seriously affected the trajectory of many of the irregularly shaped smaller masses of metal, and all three men were kept busy flicking attractors right and left; capturing those strays which threatened to veer off into the streets or upon the buildings of the Kondalian capital city, and shifting from one piece to another so that none should fall freely. Two sister-ships of the _Kondal_ appeared as if by magic in answer to Dunark's call, and their attractors aided greatly in handling the unruly collection of wreckage. A few of the smaller sections and a shower of debris fell clear, however, in spite of all efforts, and their approach was heralded by a meteoric display unprecedented in that world of continuous daylight.

As the three vessels with their cumbersome convoy dropped down into the lower atmosphere, the guns of the city roared a welcome; banners and pennons waved; the air became riotous with color from hundreds of projectors and odorous with a bewildering variety of scents; while all around them played numberless aircraft of all descriptions and sizes. The space below them was carefully avoided, but on all sides and above them the air was so full that it seemed marvelous that no collision occurred. Tiny one-man helicopters, little more than single chairs flying about; beautiful pleasure-planes, soaring and wheeling; immense multiplane liners and giant helicopter freighters--everything in the air found occasion to fly as near as possible to the Skylark in order to dip their flags in salute to Dunark, their Kofedix, and to Seaton, the wearer of the seven disks--their revered Overlord.

Finally the freight was landed without serious mishap and the _Skylark_ leaped to the landing dock upon the palace roof, where the royal family and many nobles were waiting, in full panoply of glittering harness. Dunark and Sitar disembarked and the four others stepped out and stood at attention as Seaton addressed Roban, the Karfedix.

"Sir, we greet you, but we cannot stop, even for a moment. You know that only the most urgent necessity would make us forego the pleasure of a brief rest beneath your roof--the Kofedix will presently give you the measure of that dire need. We shall endeavor to return soon. Greetings, and, for a time, farewell."

"Overlord, we greet you, and trust that soon we may entertain you and profit from your companionship. For what you have done, we thank you. May the great First Cause smile upon you until your return. Farewell."

CHAPTER VI

The Peace Conference

"Here's a chart of the green system, Mart, with all the motions and the rest of the dope that they've been able to get. How'd it be for you to navigate us over to the third planet of the fourteenth sun?"

"While you build a Fenachrone super-generator?"

"Right, the first time. Your deducer is hitting on all eight, as usual. That big ray is hot stuff, and their ray-screen is something to write home about, too."

"How can their rays be any hotter than ours, Dick?" Dorothy asked curiously. "I thought you said we had the very last word in rays."

"I thought we had, but those birds we met back there spoke a couple of later words. Their rays work on an entirely different system than the one we use. They generate an extremely short carrier wave, like the Millikan cosmic ray, by recombining some of the electrons and protons of their disintegrating metal, and upon this wave they impose a pure heat frequency of terrific power. The Millikan rays will penetrate anything except a special ray screen or a zone of force, and carry with them--somewhat as radio frequencies carry sound frequencies--the heat rays, which volatilize anything they touch. Their ray screens are a lot better than ours, too--they generate the entire spectrum. It's a sweet system and when we revamp ours so as to be just like it, we'll be able to talk turkey to those folks on the third planet."

"How long will it take you to build it?" asked Crane, who, dexterously turning the pages of "Vega's Handbuch" was calculating their course.

"A day or so--maybe less. I've got all the stuff and with my Osnomian tools it won't take long. If you find you'll get there before I get done, you'll have to loaf a while--kill a little time."

"Are you going to connect the power plant to operate on the entire vessel and all its contents?"

"No--can't do it without redesigning the whole thing and that's hardly worth while for the short time we'll use this old bus."

Building those generators would have been a long and difficult task for a corps of earthly mechanics and electricians, but to Seaton it was merely a job. The "shop" had been enlarged and had been filled to capacity with Osnomian machinery; machine tools that were capable of performing automatically and with the utmost precision and speed any conceivable mechanical operation. He put a dozen of them to work, and before the vessel reached its destination, the new offensive and defensive weapons had been installed and thoroughly tested. He had added a third screen-generator, so that now, in addition to the four-foot hull of arenak and the repellers, warding off any material projectile, the Skylark was also protected by an outer, an intermediate, and an inner ray-screen; each driven by the super-power of a four-hundred-pound bar and each covering the entire spectrum--capable of neutralizing any dangerous frequency known to those master-scientists, the Fenachrone.

As the _Skylark_ approached the planet, Seaton swung number six visiplate upon it, and directed their flight toward a great army base. Darting down upon it, he snatched an officer into the airlock, closed the door, and leaped back into space. He brought the captive into the control room pinioned by auxiliary attractors, and relieved him of his weapons. He then rapidly read his mind, encountering no noticeable resistance, released the attractors, and addressed him in his own language.

"Please be seated, lieutenant," Seaton said courteously, motioning him to one of the seats. "We come in peace. Please pardon my discourtesy in handling you, but it was necessary in order to learn your language and thus to get in touch with your commanding officer."

The officer, overcome with astonishment that he had not been killed instantly, sank into the seat indicated, without a reply, and Seaton went on:

"Please be kind enough to signal your commanding officer that we are coming down at once, for a peace conference. By the way, I can read your signals, and will send them myself if necessary."

The stranger worked an instrument attached to his harness briefly, and the _Skylark_ descended slowly toward the fortress.

"I know, of course, that your vessels will attack," Seaton remarked, as he noted a crafty gleam in the eyes of the officer. "I intend to let them use all their power for a time, to prove to them the impotence of their weapons. After that, I shall tell you what to say to them."

"Do you think this is altogether safe, Dick?" asked Crane as they saw a fleet of gigantic airships soaring upward to meet them.

"Nothing sure but death and taxes," returned Seaton cheerfully, "but don't forget that we've got Fenachrone armament now, instead of Osnomian. I'm betting that they can't begin to drive their rays through even our outer screen. And even if our outer screen should begin to go into the violet--I don't think it will even go cherry-red--out goes our zone of force and we automatically go up where no possible airship can reach. Since their only space-ships are rocket driven, and of practically no maneuverability, they stand a big chance of getting to us. Anyway, we must get in touch with them, to find out if they know anything we don't, and this is the only way I know of to do it. Besides, I want to head Dunark off from wrecking this world. They're exactly the same kind of folks he is, you notice, and I don't like civil war. Any suggestions? Keep an eye on that bird, then, Mart, and we'll go down."

* * * * *

The _Skylark_ dropped down into the midst of the fleet, which instantly turned against her the full force of their giant guns and their immense ray batteries. Seaton held the _Skylark_ motionless, staring into his visiplate, his right hand grasping the zone-switch.

"The outer screen isn't even getting warm!" he exulted after a moment. The repellers were hurling the shells back long before they reached even the outer screen, and they were exploding harmlessly in the air. The full power of the ray-generators, too, which had been so destructive to the Osnomian defenses, were only sufficient to bring the outer screen to a dull red glow. After fifteen minutes of passive acceptance of all the airships could do, Seaton spoke to the captive.

"Sir, please signal the commanding officer of vessel seven-two-four that I am going to cut it in two in the middle. Have him remove all men in that part of the ship to the ends, and have parachutes in readiness, as I do not wish to cause any loss of life."

The signal was sent, and, as the officer was already daunted by the fact that their utmost efforts could not even make the strangers' screens radiate, it was obeyed. Seaton then threw on the frightful power of the Fenachrone super-generators. The defensive screens of the doomed warship flashed once--a sparkling, coruscating display of incandescent brilliance--and in the same instant went down. Simultaneously the entire midsection of the vessel exploded into light and disappeared; completely volatilized.

"Sir, please signal the entire fleet to cease action, and to follow me down. If they do not do so, I will destroy the rest of them."

The _Skylark_ dropped to the ground, followed by the fleet of warships, who settled in a ring about her--inactive, but ready.

"Will you please loan me your sending instrument, sir?" Seaton asked. "From this point on I can carry on negotiations better direct than through you."

The lieutenant found his voice as he surrendered the instrument.

"Sir, are you the Overlord of Osnome, of whom we have heard? We had supposed that one was a mythical character, but you must be he--no one else would spare lives that he could take, and the Overlord is the only being reputed to have a skin the color of yours."

"Yes, lieutenant, I am the Overlord--and I have decided to become the Overlord of the entire green system, as well as of Osnome."

He then sent out a call to the commander-in-chief of all the armies of the planet, informing him that he was coming to visit him at once, and the _Skylark_ tore through the air to the capital city. No sooner had the earthly vessel alighted upon the palace grounds than she was surrounded by a ring of warships who, however, made no offensive move. Seaton again used the telegraph.

"Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the planet Urvania; greetings from the Overlord of this solar system. I invite you to come into my vessel, unarmed and alone, for a conference. I come in peace and, peace or war as you decide, no harm shall come to you, until after you have returned to your own command. Think well before you reply."

"If I refuse?"

"I shall destroy one of the vessels surrounding me, and shall continue to destroy them, one every ten seconds, until you agree to come. If you still do not agree. I shall destroy all the armed forces upon this planet, then destroy all your people who are at present upon Osnome. I wish to avoid bloodshed and destruction, but I can and I will do as I have said."

"I will come."

The general came out upon the field unarmed, escorted by a company of soldiers. A hundred feet from the vessel he halted the guards and came on alone, erect and soldierly. Seaton met him at the door and invited him to be seated.

"What can you have to say to me?" the general demanded, disregarding the invitation.

"Many things. First, let me say that you are not only a brave man; you are a wise general--your visit to me proves it."

"It is a sign of weakness, but I believed when I heard those reports, and still believe, that a refusal would have resulted in a heavy loss of our men," was the General's reply.

"It would have," said Seaton. "I repeat that your act was not weakness, but wisdom. The second thing I have to say is that I had not planned on taking any active part in the management of things, either upon Osnome or upon this planet, until I learned of a catastrophe that is threatening all the civilization in this Galaxy--thus threatening my own distant world as well as those of this solar system. Third, only by superior force can I make either your race or the Osnomians listen to reason sufficiently to unite against a common foe. You have been reared in unreasoning hatred for so many generations that your minds are warped. For that reason I have assumed control of this entire system, and shall give you your choice between co-operating with us or being rendered incapable of molesting us while our attention is occupied by this threatened invasion."

"We will have no traffic with the enemy whatever," said the general. "This is final."

"You just think so. Here is a mathematical statement of what is going to happen to your world, unless I intervene." He handed the general a drawing of Dunark's plan and described it in detail. "That is the answer of the Osnomians to your invasion of their planet. I do not want this world destroyed, but if you refuse to make common cause with us against a common foe, it may be necessary. Have you forces at your command sufficient to frustrate this plan?"

"No; but I cannot really believe that such a deflection of celestial bodies is possible. Possible or not, you realize that I could not yield to empty threats."

"Of course not," said Seaton, "but you were wise enough to refuse to sacrifice a few ships and men in a useless struggle against my overwhelming armament, therefore you are certainly wise enough to refuse to sacrifice your entire race. However, before you come to any definite conclusion, I will show you what threatens the Galaxy."

* * * * *

He handed the other a headset and ran through the section of the record showing the plans of the invaders. He then ran a few sections showing the irresistible power at the command of the Fenachrone.

"That is what awaits us all unless we combine against them."

"What are your requirements?" the general asked.

"I request immediate withdrawal of all your armed forces now upon Osnome and full co-operation with me in this coming war against the invaders. In return, I will give you the secrets I have just given the Osnomians--the power and the offensive and defensive weapons of this vessel."

"The Osnomians are now building vessels such as this one?" asked the general.

"They are building vessels a hundred times the size of this one, with the same armament."

"For myself, I would agree to your terms. However, the word of the Emperor is law."

"I understand," replied Seaton. "Would you be willing to seek an immediate audience with him? I would suggest that both you and he accompany me, and we shall hold a peace conference with the Osnomian Emperor and Commander-in-Chief upon this vessel. We shall be gone less than a day."

"I shall do so at once."

"You may accompany your general, lieutenant. Again I ask pardon for my necessary rudeness."

As the Urvanian officers hurried toward the palace, the other Terrestrials, who had been listening in from another room, entered.

"It sounded as though you convinced him, Dick; but that language is nothing like Kondalian. Why don't you teach it to us? Teach it to Shiro, too, so he can cook for, and talk to, our distinguished guests intelligently, if they're going back with us."

As he connected up the educator, Seaton explained what had happened, and concluded:

"I want to stop this civil war, keep Dunark from destroying this planet, preserve Osnome for Osnomians, and make them all co-operate with us against the Fenachrone. That's one tall order, since these folks haven't the remotest notion of anything except killing."

A company of soldiers approached, and Dorothy got up hastily.

"Stick around, folks. We can all talk to them."

"I believe that it would be better for you to be alone," Crane decided, after a moment's thought. "They are used to autocratic power, and can understand nothing but one-man control. The girls and I will keep out of it."

"That might be better at that," and Seaton went to the door to welcome the guests. Seaton instructed them to lie flat, and put on all the acceleration they could bear. It was not long until they were back in Kondal, where Roban, the Karfedix, and Tarnan, the Karbix, accepted Seaton's invitation and entered the Skylark, unarmed. Back out in space, the vessel stationary, Seaton introduced the emperors and commanders-in-chief to each other--introductions which were acknowledged almost imperceptibly. He then gave each a headset, and ran the complete record of the Fenachrone brain.

"Stop!" shouted Roban, after only a moment. "Would you, the Overlord of Osnome, reveal such secrets as this to the arch-enemies of Osnome?"

"I would. I have taken over the Overlordship of the entire green system for the duration of this emergency, and I do not want two of its planets engaged in civil war."

The record finished, Seaton tried for some time to bring the four green warriors to his way of thinking, but in vain. Roban and Tarnan remained contemptuous. They would have thrown themselves upon him, but for the knowledge that no fifty unarmed men of the green race could have overcome his strength--to them supernatural. The two Urvanians were equally obdurate. This soft earth-being had given them everything; they had given him nothing and would give him nothing. Finally Seaton rose to his full height and stared at them in turn, wrath and determination blazing in his eyes.

"I have brought you four together, here in a neutral vessel in neutral space, to bring about peace between you. I have shown you the benefits to be derived from the peaceful pursuit of science, knowledge, and power, instead of continuing this utter economic waste of continual war. You all close your senses to reason. You of Osnome accuse me of being an ingrate and a traitor; you of Urvania consider me a soft-headed, sentimental weakling, who may safely be disregarded--all because I think the welfare of the numberless peoples of the Universe more important than your narrow-minded, stubborn, selfish vanity. Think what you please. If brute force is your only logic, know now that I can, and will, use brute force. Here are the seven disks," and he placed the bracelet upon Roban's knee.

"If you four leaders are short-sighted enough to place your petty enmity before the good of all civilization, I am done with you forever. I have deliberately given Urvanians precisely the same information that I have given the Osnomians--no more and no less. I have given neither of you all that I know, and I shall know much more than I do now, before the time of the conquest shall have arrived. Unless you four men, here and now, renounce this war and agree to a perpetual peace between your worlds, I shall leave you to your mutual destruction. You do not yet realize the power of the weapons I have given you. When you do realize it, you will know that mutual destruction is inevitable if you continue this internecine war. I shall continue upon other worlds my search for the one secret standing between me and a complete mastery of power. That I shall find that secret I am confident; and, having found it, I shall, without your aid, destroy the Fenachrone.

"You have several times remarked with sneers that you are not to be swayed by empty threats. What I am about to say is no empty threat--it is a most solemn promise, given by one who has both the will and the power to fulfill his every given word. Now listen carefully to this, my final utterance. If you continue this warfare and if the victor should not be utterly destroyed in its course, I swear as I stand here, by the great First Cause, that I shall myself wipe out every trace of the surviving nation as soon as the Fenachrone shall have been obliterated. Work with each other and me and we all may live--fight on and both your nations, to the last person, will most certainly die. Decide now which it is to be. I have spoken."

* * * * *

Roban took up the bracelet and clasped it again about Seaton's arm, saying, "You are more than ever our Overlord. You are wiser than are we, and stronger. Issue your commands and they shall be obeyed."

"Why did not you say those things first, Overlord?" asked the Urvanian emperor, as he saluted and smiled. "We could not in honor submit to a weakling, no matter what the fate in store. Having convinced us of your strength, there can be no disgrace in fighting beneath your screens. An armlet of seven symbols shall be cast and ready for you when you next visit us. Roban of Osnome, you are my brother."

The two emperors saluted each other and stared eye to eye for a long moment, and Seaton knew that the perpetual peace had been signed. Then all four spoke, in unison:

"Overlord, we await your commands."

"Dunark of Osnome is already informed as to what Osnome is to do. Say to him that it will not be necessary for him to build the vessel for me; the Urvanians will do that. Urvan of Urvania, you will accompany Roban to Osnome, where you two will order instant cessation of hostilities. Osnome has many ships of this type, and upon some of them you will return your every soldier and engine of war to your own planet. As soon as possible you will build for me a vessel like that of the Fenachrone, except that it shall be ten times as large, in every dimension, and except that every instrument, control, and weapon is to be left out."

"Left out? It shall be so built--but of what use will it be?"

"The empty spaces shall be filled after I have returned from my quest. You will build this vessel of dagal. You will also instruct the Osnomian commander in the manufacture of that metal, which is so much more resistant than their arenak."

"But, Overlord, we have...."

"I have just brought immense stores of the precious chemical and of the metal of power to Osnome. They will share it with you. I also advise you to build for yourselves many ships like those of the Fenachrone, with which to do battle with the invaders, in case I should fail in my quest. You will, of course, see to it that there will be a corps of your most efficient mechanics and artisans within call at all times in case I should return and have sudden need for them."

"All these things shall be done."

The conference ended, the four nobles were quickly landed upon Osnome and once more the _Skylark_ traveled out into her element, the total vacuum and absolute zero of the outer void, with Crane at the controls.

"You certainly sounded savage, Dick. I almost thought you really meant it!" Dorothy chuckled.

"I did mean it, Dot. Those fellows are mighty keen on detecting bluffs. If I hadn't meant it, and if they hadn't known that I meant it, I'd never have got away with it."

"But you _couldn't_ have meant it, Dick! You wouldn't have destroyed the Osnomians, surely--you know you wouldn't."

"No, but I would have destroyed what was left of the Urvanians, and all five of us knew exactly how it would have turned out and exactly what I would have done about it--that's why they all pulled in their horns."

"I don't know what would have happened," interjected Margaret. "What would have?"

"With this new stuff the Urvanians would have wiped the Osnomians out. They are an older race, and so much better in science and mechanics that the Osnomians wouldn't have stood much chance, and knew it. Incidentally, that's why I'm having them build our new ship. They'll put a lot of stuff into it that Dunark's men would miss--maybe some stuff that even the Fenachrone haven't got. However, though it might seem that the Urvanians had all the best of it, Urvan knew that I had something up my sleeve besides my bare arm--and he knew that I'd clean up what there was left of his race if they polished off the Osnomians."

"What a frightful chance you were taking, Dick!" gasped Dorothy.

"You have to be hard to handle those folks--and believe me, I was a forty-minute egg right then. They have such a peculiar mental and moral slant that we can hardly understand them at all. This idea of co-operation is so new to them that it actually dazed all four of them even to consider it."

"Do you suppose they will fight, anyway?" asked Crane.

"Absolutely not. Both nations have an inflexible code of honor, such as it is, and lying is against both codes. That's one thing I like about them--I'm sort of honest myself, and with either of these races you need nothing signed or guaranteed."

"What next, Dick?"

"Now the real trouble begins. Mart, oil up the massive old intellect. Have you found the answer to the problem?"

"What problem?" asked Dorothy. "You didn't tell us anything about a problem."

"No, I told Mart. I want the best physicist in this entire solar system--and since there are only one hundred and twenty-five planets around these seventeen suns, it should be simple to yon phenomenal brain. In fact, I expect to hear him say 'elementary, my dear Watson, elementary'!"

"Hardly that, Dick, but I have found out a few things. There are some eighty planets which are probably habitable for beings like us. Other things being equal, it seems reasonable to assume that the older the sun, the longer its planets have been habitable, and therefore the older and more intelligent the life...."

"'Ha! ha! It was elementary,' says Sherlock." Seaton interrupted. "You're heading directly at that largest, oldest, and most intelligent planet, then, I take it, where I can catch me my physicist?"

"Not directly at it, no. I am heading for the place where it will be when we reach it. That is elementary."

"Ouch! That got to me, Mart, right where I live. I'll be good."

"But you are getting ahead of me, Dick--it is not as simple as you have assumed from what I have said so far. The Osnomian astronomers have done wonders in the short time they have had, but their data, particularly on the planets of the outer suns, is as yet necessarily very incomplete. Since the furthermost outer sun is probably the oldest, it is the one in which we are most interested. It has seven planets, four of which are probably habitable, as far as temperature and atmosphere are concerned. However, nothing exact is yet known of their masses, motions, or places. Therefore I have laid our course to intercept the closest one to us, as nearly as I can from what meager data we have. If it should prove to be inhabited by intelligent beings, they can probably give us more exact information concerning their neighboring planets. That is the best I can do."

"That's a darn fine best, old top--narrowing down to four from a hundred and twenty-five. Well, until we get there, what to do? Let's sing us a song, to keep our fearless quartette in good voice."

"Before you do anything," said Margaret seriously, "I would like to know if you really think there is a chance of defeating those monsters."

* * * * *

"In all seriousness, I do. In fact, I am quite confident of it. If we had two years, I know that we could lick them cold; and by stepping on the gas I believe we can get the dope in less than the six months we have to work in."

"I know that you are serious, Dick. Now you know that I do not want to discourage any one, but I can see small basis for optimism," Crane spoke slowly and thoughtfully. "I hope that you will be able to control the zone of force--but you are not studying it yourself. You seem to be certain that somewhere in this system there is a race who already knows all about it. I would like to know your reasons for thinking that such a race exists."

"They may not be upon this system; they may have been outsiders, as we are--but I have reasons for believing them to be natives of this system, since they were green. You are as familiar with Osnomian mythology as I am--you girls in particular have read Osnomian legends to Osnomian children for hours. Also identically the same legends prevail upon Urvania. I read them in that lieutenant's brain--in fact, I looked for them. You also know that every folk-legend has some basis, however tenuous, in fact. Now, Dottie, tell about the battle of the gods, when Osnome was a pup."

"The gods came down from the sky," Dorothy recited. "They were green, as were men. They wore invisible armor of polished metal, which appeared and disappeared. They stayed inside the armor and fought outside it with swords and lances of fire. Men who fought against them cut them through and through with swords, and they struck the men with lances of flame so that they were stunned. So the gods fought in days long gone and vanished in their invisible armor, and----"

"That's enough," interrupted Seaton. "The little red-haired girl has her lesson perfectly. Get it, Mart?"

"No, I cannot say that I do."

"Why, it doesn't even make sense!" exclaimed Margaret.

"All right, I'll elucidate. Listen!" and Seaton's voice grew tense with earnestness. "Visitors came down out of space. They were green. They wore zones of force, which they flashed on and off. They stayed inside the zones and projected their images outside, and used rays _through the zones_. Men who fought against the images cut them through and through with swords, but could not harm them since they were not actual substance; and the images directed rays against the men so that they were stunned. So the visitors fought in days long gone, and vanished in their zones of force. How does that sound?"

"You have the most stupendous imagination the world has ever seen--but there may be some slight basis of fact there, after all," said Crane, slowly.

"I'm convinced of it, for one reason in particular. Notice that it says specifically that the visitors stunned the natives. Now that thought is absolutely foreign to all Osnomian nature--when they strike they kill, and always have. Now if that myth has come down through so many generations without having that 'stunned' changed to 'killed', I'm willing to bet a few weeks of time that the rest of it came down fairly straight, too. Of course, what they had may not have been the zone of force as we know it, but it must have been a ray of some kind--and believe me, that was one educated ray. Somebody sure had something, even 'way back in those days. And if they had anything at all back there, they must know a lot by now. That's why I want to look 'em up."

"But suppose they want to kill us off at sight?" objected Dorothy. "They might be able to do it, mightn't they?"

"Sure, but they probably wouldn't want to--any more than you would step on an ant who asked you to help him move a twig. That's about how much ahead of us they probably are. Of course, we struck a pure mentality once, who came darn near dematerializing us entirely, but I'm betting that these folks haven't got that far along yet. By the way, I've got a hunch about those pure intellectuals."

"Oh, tell us about it!" laughed Margaret. "Your hunches are the world's greatest brainstorms!"

"Well, I pumped out and rejeweled the compass we put on that funny planet--as a last resort, I thought we might maybe visit them and ask that bozo we had the argument with to help us out. I think he--or it--would show us everything about the zone of force we want to know. I don't think that we'd be dematerialized, either, because the situation would give him something more to think about for another thousand cycles; and thinking seemed to be his main object in life. However, to get back to the subject, I found that even with the new power of the compass the entire planet was still out of reach. Unless they've dematerialized it, that means about ten billion light-years as an absolute minimum. Think about that for a minute!... I've just got a kind of a hunch that maybe they don't belong in this Galaxy at all--that they might be from some other Galaxy, planet and all; just riding around on it, as we are riding in the _Skylark_. Is the idea conceivable to a sane mind, or not?"

"Not!" decided Dorothy, promptly. "We'd better go to bed. One more such idea, in progression with the last two you've had, would certainly give you a compound fracture of the skull. 'Night, Cranes."

CHAPTER VII

DuQuesne's Voyage

Far from our solar system a cigar-shaped space-car slackened its terrific acceleration to a point at which human beings could walk, and two men got up, exercised vigorously to restore the circulation to their numbed bodies, and went into the galley to prepare their meal--the first since leaving the Earth some eight hours or more before.

Because of the long and arduous journey he had decided upon, DuQuesne had had to abandon his custom of working alone, and had studied all the available men with great care before selecting his companion and relief pilot. He finally had chosen "Baby Doll" Loring--so called because of his curly yellow hair, his pink and white complexion, his guileless blue eyes, his slight form of rather less than medium height. But never did outward attributes more belie the inner man! The yellow curls covered a brain agile, keen, and hard; the girlish complexion neither paled nor reddened under stress; the wide blue eyes had glanced along the barrels of so many lethal weapons, that in various localities the noose yawned for him; the slender body was built of rawhide and whalebone, and responded instantly to the dictates of that ruthless brain. Under the protection of Steel he flourished, and in return for that protection he performed, quietly and with neatness and despatch, such odd jobs as were in his line, with which he was commissioned.

When they were seated at an excellent breakfast of ham and eggs, buttered toast, and strong, aromatic coffee, DuQuesne broke the long silence.

"Do you want to know where we are?"

"I'd say we were a long way from home, by the way this elevator of yours has been climbing all night."

"We are a good many million miles from the Earth, and we are getting farther away at a rate that would have to be measured in millions of miles per second." DuQuesne, watching the other narrowly as he made this startling announcement and remembering the effect of a similar one upon Perkins, saw with approval that the coffee-cup in midair did not pause or waver in its course. Loring noted the bouquet of his beverage and took an appreciative sip before he replied.

"You certainly can make coffee, Doctor; and good coffee is nine-tenths of a good breakfast. As to where we are--that's all right with me. I can stand it if you can."

"Don't you want to know where we're going, and why?"

"I've been thinking about that. Before we started I didn't want to know anything, because what a man doesn't know he can't be accused of spilling in case of a leak. Now that we are on our way, though, maybe I should know enough about things to act intelligently, if something unforeseen should develop. If you'd rather keep it dark and give me orders when necessary, that's all right with me, too. It's your party, you know."

"I brought you along because one man can't stay on duty twenty-four hours a day, continuously. Since you are in as deep as you can get, and since this trip is dangerous, you should know everything there is to know. You are one of the higher-ups now, anyway: and we understand each other thoroughly, I believe?"

"I believe so."

Back in the bow control-room DuQuesne applied more power, but not enough to render movement impossible.

"You don't have to drive her as hard all the way, then, as you did last night?"

"No, I'm out of range of Seaton's instrument now, and we don't have to kill ourselves. High acceleration is punishment for anyone and we must keep ourselves fit. To begin with, I suppose that you are curious about that object-compass?"

"That and other things."

"An object-compass is a needle of specially-treated copper, so activated that it points always toward one certain object, after being once set upon it. Seaton undoubtedly has one upon me; but, sensitive as they are, they can't hold on a mass as small as a man at this distance. That was why we left at midnight, after he had gone to bed--so that we'd be out of range before he woke up. I wanted to lose him, as he might interfere if he knew where I was going. Now I'll go back to the beginning and tell you the whole story."

* * * * *

Tersely, but vividly, he recounted the tale of the interstellar cruise, the voyage of the _Skylark of Space_. When he had finished, Loring smoked for a few minutes in silence.

"There's a lot of stuff there that's hard to understand all at once. Do you mind if I ask a few foolish questions, to get things straightened out in my mind?"

"Go ahead--ask as many as you want to. It is hard to understand a lot of that Osnomian stuff--a man can't get it all at once."

"Osnome is so far away--how are you going to find it?"

"With one of the object-compasses I mentioned. I had planned on navigating from notes I took on the trip back to the Earth, but it wasn't necessary. They tried to keep me from finding out anything, but I learned all about the compasses, built a few of them in their own shop, and set one on Osnome. I had it, among other things, in my pocket when I landed. In fact, the control of that explosive copper bullet is the only thing they had that I wasn't able to get--and I'll get that on this trip."

"What is that arenak armor they're wearing?"

"Arenak is a synthetic metal, almost perfectly transparent. It has practically the same refractive index as air, therefore it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible. It's about five hundred times as strong as chrome-vanadium steel, and even when you've got it to the yield-point, it doesn't break, but stretches out and snaps back, like rubber, with the strength unimpaired. It's the most wonderful thing I saw on the whole trip. They make complete suits of it. Of course they aren't very comfortable, but since they are only a tenth of an inch they can be worn."

"And a tenth of an inch of that stuff will stop a steel-nosed machine-gun bullet?"

"Stop it! A tenth of an inch of arenak is harder to pierce than fifty inches of our hardest, toughest armor steel. A sixteenth-inch armor-piercing projectile couldn't get through it. It's hard to believe, but nevertheless it's a fact. The only way to kill Seaton with a gun would be to use one heavy enough so that the shock of the impact would kill him--and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he had his armor anchored with an attractor against that very contingency. Even if he hasn't, you can imagine the chance of getting action against him with a gun of that size."

"Yes, I've heard that he is fast."

"That doesn't tell half of it. You know that I'm handy with a gun myself?"

"You're faster than I am, and that's saying something. You're chain lightning."

"Well, Seaton is at least that much faster than I am. You've never seen him work--I have. On that Osnomian dock he shot twice before I started, and shot twice to my once from then on. I must have been shooting a quarter of a second after he had his side all cleaned up. To make it worse I missed once with my left hand--he didn't. There's absolutely no use tackling Richard Seaton without an Osnomian ray-generator or something better; but, as you know, Brookings always has been and always will be a fool. He won't believe anything new until after he has actually been shown. Well, I imagine he will be shown plenty by this evening."

"Well, I'll never tackle him with heat. How does he get that way?"

"He's naturally fast, and has practiced sleight-of-hand work ever since he was a kid. He's one of the best amateur magicians in the country, and I will say that his ability along that line has come in handy for him more than once."

"I see where you're right in wanting to get something, since we have only ordinary weapons and they have all that stuff. This trip is to get a little something for ourselves, I take it?"

"Exactly, and you know enough now to understand what we are out here to get for ourselves. You have guessed that we are headed for Osnome?"

"I suspected it. However, if you were going only to Osnome, you would have gone alone; so I also suspect that that's only half of it. I have no idea what it is, but you've got something else on your mind."

"You're right--I knew you were keen. When I was on Osnome I found out something that only four other men--all--dead--ever knew. There is a race of men far ahead of the Osnomians in science, particularly in warfare. They live a long way beyond Osnome. It is my plan to steal an Osnomian airship and mount all its ray screens, generators, guns, and everything else, upon this ship, or else convert their vessel into a space-ship. Instead of using their ordinary power, however, we will do as Seaton did, and use intra-atomic power, which is practically infinite. Then we'll have everything Seaton's got, but that isn't enough. I want enough more than he's got to wipe him out. Therefore, after we get a ship armed to suit us, we'll visit this strange planet and either come to terms with them or else steal a ship from them. Then we'll have their stuff and that of the Osnomians, as well as our own. Seaton won't last long after that."

"Do you mind if I ask how you got that dope?"

"Not at all. Except when right with Seaton I could do pretty much as I pleased, and I used to take long walks for exercise. The Osnomians tired very easily, being so weak, and because of the light gravity of the planet, I had to do a lot of work or walking to keep in any kind of condition at all. I learned Kondalian quickly, and got so friendly with the guards, that pretty soon they quit trying to keep me in sight, but waited at the edge of the palace grounds until I came back and joined them.

"Well, on one trip I was fifteen miles or so from the city when an airship crashed down in a woods about half a mile from me. It was in an uninhabited district and nobody else saw it. I went over to investigate, thinking probably I could find out something useful. It had the whole front end cut or broken off, and that made me curious, because no imaginable fall will break an arenak hull. I walked in through the hole and saw that it was one of their fighting tenders--a combination warship and repair shop, with all of the stuff in it that I've been telling you about. The generators were mostly burned out and the propelling and lifting motors were out of commission. I prowled around, getting acquainted with it, and found a lot of useful instruments and, best of all, one of Dunark's new mechanical educators, with complete instructions for its use. Also, I found three bodies, and thought I'd try it out...."

"Just a minute. Only three bodies on a warship? And what good could a mechanical educator do you if the men were all dead?"

"Three is all I found then, but there was another one. Three men and a captain compose an Osnomian crew for any ordinary vessel. Everything is automatic, you, know. As for the men being dead, that doesn't make any difference--you can read their brains just the same, if they haven't been dead too long. However, when I tried to read theirs, I found only blanks--their brains had been destroyed so that nobody could read them. That did look funny, so I ransacked the ship from truck to keelson, and finally found another body, wearing an air-helmet, in a sort of closet off the control room. I put the educator on it...."

"This is getting good. It sounds like a page of the old 'Arabian Nights' that I used to read when I was a boy. You know, it really isn't surprising that Brookings didn't believe a lot of this stuff."

"As I have said, a lot of it is hard to understand, but I'm going to show it to you--all that, and more."

"Oh, I believe it, all right. After riding in this boat and looking out of the windows, I'll believe anything. Reading a dead man's brain is steep, though."

"I'll let you do it after we get there. I don't understand exactly how it works, myself, but I know how to operate one. Well, I found out that this man's brain was in good shape, and I got a shock when I read it. Here's what he had been through. They had been flying very high on their way to the front when their ship was seized by an invisible force and thrown upward. He must have thought faster than the others, because he put on an air-helmet and dived into this locker where he hid under a pile of gear, fixing things so that he could see out through the transparent arenak of the wall. No sooner was he hidden that the front end of the ship went up in a blaze of light, in spite of their ray screens going full blast. They were up so high by that time that when the bow was burned off the other three fainted from lack of air. Then their generators went out, and pretty soon two peculiar-looking strangers entered. They were wearing vacuum suits and were very short and stocky, giving the impression of enormous strength. They brought an educator of their own with them and read the brains of the three men. Then they dropped the ship a few thousand feet and revived the three with a drink of something out of a flask."

"Must have been different from the kind handled by most booties I know, then. The stuff we've been getting lately would make a man more unconscious than ever."

"Some powerful drug, probably, but the Osnomian didn't know anything about it. After the men were revived, the strangers, apparently from sheer cruelty and love of torturing their victims, informed them in the Osnomian language that they were from another world, on the far edge of the Galaxy. They even told them, knowing that the Osnomians knew nothing of astronomy, exactly where they were from. Then they went on to say that they wanted the entire green system for themselves, and that in something like two years of our time they were going to wipe out all the present inhabitants of the system and take it over, as a base for further operations. After that they amused themselves by describing exactly the kinds of death and destruction they were going to use. They described most of it in great detail. It's too involved to tell you about now, but they've got rays, generators, and screens that even the Osnomians never heard of. And of course they've got intra-atomic energy the same as we have. After telling them all this and watching them suffer, they put a machine on their heads and they dropped dead. That's probably what disintegrated their brains. Then they looked the ship over rather casually, as though they didn't see anything they were interested in; crippled the motors; and went away. The vessel was then released, and crashed. This man, of course, was killed by the fall. I buried the men--I didn't want anybody else reading that brain--hid some of the stuff I wanted most, and camouflaged the ship so that I'm fairly sure that it's there yet. I decided then to make this trip."

"I see." Loring's mind was grappling with these new and strange facts. "That news is staggering, Doctor. Think of it. Everybody thinks our own world is everything there is!"

"Our world is simply a grain of dust in the Universe. Most people know it, academically, but very few ever give the fact any actual consideration. But now that you've had a little time to get used to the idea of there being other worlds, and some of them as far ahead of us in science as we are ahead of the monkeys, what do you think of it?"

"I agree with you, that we've got their stuff," said Loring. "However, it occurs to me as a possibility that they may have so much stuff that we won't be able to make the approach. However, if the Osnomian fittings we're going to get are as good as you say they are, I think that two such men as you and I can get at least a lunch while any other crew, no matter who they are, are getting a square meal."

"I like your style, Loring. You and I will have the world eating out of our hands shortly after we get back. As far as actual procedure over there is concerned, of course, I haven't made any definite plans. We'll have to size up the situation after we get there before we can know exactly what we'll have to do. However, we are not coming back empty-handed."

"You said something, Chief!" and the two men, so startlingly unlike physically, but so alike inwardly, shook hands in token of their mutual dedication to a single purpose.

* * * * *

Loring was then instructed in the simple navigation of the ship of space, and thereafter the two men took their regular shifts at the controls. In due time they approached Osnome, and DuQuesne studied the planet carefully through a telescope before he ventured down into the atmosphere.

"This half of it used to be Mardonale. I suppose it's all Kondal now. No, there's a war on down there yet--at least, there's a disturbance of some kind, and on this planet that means war."

"What are you looking for, exactly?" asked Loring, who was also examining the terrain with a telescope.

"They've got some spherical space-ships, like Seaton's. I know they had one, and they've probably built more of them since that time. Their airships can't touch us, but those ball-shaped cruisers would be pure poison for us, the way we are fixed now. Can you see any of them?"

"Not yet. Too far away to make out details. They're certainly having a hot time down there, though, in that one spot."

They dropped lower, toward the stronghold which was being so stubbornly defended by the inhabitants of the third planet of the fourteenth sun, and so savagely attacked by the Kondalian forces.

"There, we can see what they're doing now," and DuQuesne anchored the vessel with an attractor. "I want to see if they've got many of those space-ships in action, and you will want to see what war is like, when it is fought by people, who have been making war steadily for ten thousand years."

Poised at the limit of clear visibility, the two men studied the incessant battle being waged beneath them. They saw not one, but fully a thousand of the globular craft high in the air and grouped in a great circle around an immense fortification upon the ground below. They saw no airships in the line of battle, but noticed that many such vessels were flying to and from the front, apparently carrying supplies. The fortress was an immense dome of some glassy, transparent material, partially covered with slag, through which they saw that the central space was occupied by orderly groups of barracks, and that round the circumference were arranged gigantic generators, projectors, and other machinery at whose purposes they could not even guess. From the base of the dome a twenty-mile-wide apron of the same glassy substance spread over the ground, and above this apron and around the dome were thrown the mighty defensive ray-screens, visible now and then in scintillating violet splendor as one of the copper-driven Kondalian projectors sought in vain for an opening. But the Earth-men saw with surprise that the main attack was not being directed at the dome; that only an occasional ray was thrown against it in order to make the defenders keep their screens up continuously. The edge of the apron was bearing the brunt of that vicious and never-ceasing attack, and most concerned the desperate defense.

For miles beyond that edge, and as deep under it as frightful rays and enormous charges of explosive copper could penetrate, the ground was one seething, flaming volcano of molten and incandescent lava; lava constantly being volatilized by the unimaginable heat of those rays and being hurled for miles in all directions by the inconceivable power of those explosive copper projectiles--the heaviest projectiles that could be used without endangering the planet itself--being directed under the exposed edge of that unbreakable apron, which was in actuality anchored to the solid core of the planet itself; lava flowing into and filling up the vast craters caused by the explosions. The attack seemed fiercest at certain points, perhaps a quarter of a mile apart around the circle, and after a time the watchers perceived that at those points, under the edge of the apron, in that indescribable inferno of boiling lava, destructive rays, and disintegrating copper, there were enemy machines at work. These machines were strengthening the protecting apron and extending it, very slowly, but ever wider and ever deeper as the ground under it and before it was volatilized or hurled away by the awful forces of the Kondalian attack. So much destruction had already been wrought that the edge of the apron and its molten moat were already fully a mile below the normal level of that cratered, torn, and tortured plain.

Now and then one of the mechanical moles would cease its labors, overcome by the concentrated fury of destruction centered upon it. Its shattered remnants would be withdrawn and shortly, repaired or replaced, it would be back at work. But it was not the defenders who had suffered most heavily. The fortress was literally ringed about with the shattered remnants of airships, and the riddled hulls of more than a few of those mighty globular cruisers of the void bore mute testimony to the deadliness and efficiency of the warfare of the invaders.

Even as they watched, one of the spheres, unable for some reason to maintain its screens or overcome by the awful forces playing upon it, flared from white into and through the violet and was hurled upward as though shot from the mouth of some Brobdingnagian howitzer. A door opened, and from its flaming interior four figures leaped out into the air, followed by a puff of orange-colored smoke. At the first sign of trouble, the ship next it in line leaped in front of it and the four figures floated gently to the ground, supported by friendly attractors and protected from enemy rays by the bulk and by the screens of the rescuing vessel. Two great airships soared upward from back of the lines and hauled the disabled vessel to the ground by means of their powerful attractors. The two observers saw with amazement that after brief attention from an ant-like ground-crew, the original four men climbed back into their warship and she again shot into the fray, apparently as good as ever.

"What do you know about that!" exclaimed DuQuesne. "That gives me an idea, Loring. They must get to them that way fairly often, to judge by the teamwork they use when it does happen. How about waiting until they disable another one like that, and then grabbing it while its in the air, deserted and unable to fight back? One of those ships is worth a thousand of this one, even if we had everything known to the Osnomians."

"That's a real idea--those boats certainly are brutes for punishment," agreed Loring, and as both men again settled down to watch the battle, he went on: "So this is war out this way? You're right. Seaton, with half this stuff, could whip the combined armies and navies of the world. I don't blame Brookings much, though, at that--nobody could believe half of this unless they could actually see it, as we are doing."

"I can't understand it," DuQuesne frowned as he considered the situation. "The attackers are Kondalians, all right--those ships are developments of the _Skylark_--but I don't get that fort at all. Wonder if it can be the strangers already? Don't think so--they aren't due for a couple of years yet, and I don't think the Kondalians could stand against them a minute. It must be what is left of Mardonale, although I never heard of anything like that. Probably it is some new invention they dug up at the last minute. That's it, I guess," and his brow cleared. "It couldn't be anything else."

* * * * *

They waited long for the incident to be repeated, and finally their patience was rewarded. When the next vessel was disabled and hurled upward by the concentration of enemy forces, DuQuesne darted down, seized it with his most powerful attractor, and whisked it away into space at such a velocity that to the eyes of the Kordalians it simply disappeared. He took the disabled warship far out into space and allowed it to cool off for a long time before deciding that it was safe to board it. Through the transparent walls they could see no sign of life, and DuQuesne donned a vacuum suit and stepped into the airlock. As Loring held the steel vessel close to the stranger, DuQuesne leaped lightly through the open door into the interior. Shutting the door, he opened an auxiliary air-tank, adjusting the gauge to one atmosphere as he did so. The pressure normal, he divested himself of the suit and made a thorough examination of the vessel. He then signaled Loring to follow him, and soon both ships were over Kondal, so high as to be invisible from the ground. Plunging the vessel like a bullet towards the grove in which he had left the Kondalian airship, he slowed abruptly just in time to make a safe landing. As he stepped out upon Osnomian soil, Loring landed the Earthly ship hardly less skillfully.

"This saves us a lot of trouble, Loring. This is undoubtedly one of the finest space-ships of the Universe, and just about ready for anything."

"How did they get to it?"

"One of the screen generators apparently weakened a trifle, probably from weeks of continuous use. That let some of the rays come through; everything got hot, and the crew had to jump or roast. Nothing is hurt, though, as the ship was thrown up and out of range before the arenak melted at all. The copper repellers are gone, of course, and most of the bars that were in use are melted down, but there was enough of the main bar left to drive the ship and we can replace the melted stuff easily enough. Nothing else was hurt, as there's absolutely nothing in the structure of these vessels that can be burned. Even the insulation in the coils and generators has a melting-point higher than that of porcelain. And not all the copper was melted, either. Some of these storerooms are lined with two feet of insulation and are piled full of bars and explosive ammunition."

"What was the smoke we saw, then?"

"That was their food-supply. It's cooked to an ash, and their water was all boiled away through the safety-valves. Those rays certainly can put out a lot of heat in a second or two!"

"Can the two of us put on those copper repeller-bands? This ship must be seventy-five feet in diameter."

"Yes, it's a lot bigger than the _Skylark_ was. It's one of their latest models, or it wouldn't have been on the front line. As to banding on the repellers--that's easy. That airship is half full of metal-working machinery that can do everything but talk. I know how to use most of it, from seeing it in use, and we can figure out the rest."

In that unfrequented spot there was little danger of detection from the air. And none whatsoever of detection from the ground--of ground-travel upon Osnome there is none. Nevertheless, the two men camouflaged the vessels so that they were visible only to keen and direct scrutiny, and drove their task through to completion on the shortest possible time. The copper repellers were banded on, and much additional machinery was installed in the already well-equipped shop. This done, they transferred to their warship food, water, bedding, instruments, and everything else they needed or wanted from their own ship and from the disabled Kondalian airship. They made a last tour of inspection to be sure they had overlooked nothing useful, then embarked.

"Think anybody will find those ships? They could get a good line on what we've done."

"Probably, eventually, Loring, so we'd better destroy them. We'd better take a short hop first, though, to test everything out. Since you're not familiar with the controls of a ship of this type, you need practise. Shoot us up around that moon over there and bring us back to this spot."

"She's a sweet-handling boat--easy like a bicycle," declared Loring as he brought the vessel lightly to a landing upon their return. "We can burn the old one up now. We'll never need her again, any more than a snake needs his last year's skin."

"She's good, all right. Those two hulks must be put out of existence, but we shouldn't do it here. The rays would set the woods afire, and the metal would condense all around. We don't want to leave any tracks, so we'd better pull them out into space to destroy them. We could turn them loose, and as you've never worked a ray, it'll be good practice for you. Also, I want you to see for yourself just what our best armour-plate amounts to compared with arenak."

When they towed the two vessels far out into space, Loring put into practise the instruction he had received from DuQuesne concerning the complex armament of their vessel. He swung the beam-projector upon the Kondalian airship, pressed the connectors of the softener ray, the heat ray, and the induction ray, and threw the master switch. Almost instantly the entire hull became blinding white, but it was several seconds before the extremely refractory material began to volatilize. Though the metal was less than an inch think, it retained its shape and strength stubbornly, and only slowly did it disappear in flaming, flaring gusts of incandescent gas.

"There, you've seen what an inch of arenak is like," said DuQuesne when the destruction was complete. "Now shine it on that sixty-inch chrome-vanadium armor hull of our old bus and see what happens."

Loring did so. As the beam touched it, the steel disappeared in one flare of radiance--as he swung the projector in one flashing arc from the stem to the stern there was nothing left. Loring, swinging the beam, whistled in amazement.

"Wow! What a difference! And this ship of ours has a skin of arenak six feet thick!"

"Yes. Now you understand why I didn't want to argue with anybody out here as long as we were in our steel ship."

"I understand, all right; but I can't understand the power of these rays. Suppose I had had all twenty of them on instead of only three?"

"In that case, I think that we could have whipped even the short, thick strangers."

"You and me both. But say, every ship's got to have a name. This new one of ours is such a sweet, harmless, inoffensive little thing, we'd better name her the _Violet_, hadn't we?"

* * * * *

DuQuesne started the _Violet_ off in the direction of the solar system occupied by the warlike strangers, but he did not hurry. He and Loring practiced incessantly for days at the controls, darting here and there, putting on terrific acceleration until the indicators showed a velocity of hundreds of thousand of miles per second, then reversing the acceleration until the velocity was zero. They studied the controls and alarm system until each knew perfectly every instrument, every tiny light, and the tone of each bell. They practiced with the rays, singly and in combination, with the visiplates, and with the many levers and dials, until each was so familiar with the complex installation that his handling of every control had become automatic. Not until then did DuQuesne give the word to start out in earnest toward their goal, at an unthinkable distance.

They had not been under way long when an alarm bell sounded its warning and a brilliant green light began flashing upon the board.

"Hm ... m," DuQuesne frowned as he reversed the bar. "Outside intra-atomic energy detector. Somebody's using power out here. Direction, about dead ahead--straight down. Let's see if we can see anything."

He swung number six, the telescopic visiplate, into connection. After what seemed to them a long time they saw a sudden sharp flash, apparently an immense distance ahead, and simultaneously three more alarm bells rang and three colored lights flashed briefly.

"Somebody got quite a jolt then. Three rays in action at once for three or four seconds," reported DuQuesne, as he applied still more negative acceleration.

"I'd like to know what this is all about!" he exclaimed after a time, as they saw a subdued glow, which lasted a minute or two. As the warning light was flashing more and more slowly and with diminishing intensity, the _Violet_ was once more put upon her course. As she proceeded, however, the warnings of the liberation of intra-atomic energy grew stronger and stronger, and both men scanned their path intensely for a sight of the source of the disturbance, while their velocity was cut to only a few hundred miles an hour. Suddenly the indicator swerved and pointed behind them, showing that they had passed the object, whatever it was. DuQuesne instantly applied power and snapped on a small searchlight.

"If it's so small that we couldn't see it when we passed it, it's nothing to be afraid of. We'll be able to find it with a light."

After some search, they saw an object floating in space-apparently a vacuum suit!

"Shall one of us get in the airlock, or shall we bring it in with an attractor?" asked Loring.

"An attractor, by all means. Two or three of them, in fact, to spread-eagle whatever it is. Never take any chances. It's probably an Osnomian, but you never can tell. It may be one of those other people. We know they were around here a few weeks ago, and they're the only ones I know of that have intra-atomic power besides us and the Osnomians."

"That's no Osnomian," he continued, as the stranger was drawn into the airlock. "He's big enough around for four Osnomians, and very short. We'll take no chances at all with that fellow."

The captive was brought into the control room pinioned head, hand, and foot with attractors and repellers, before DuQuesne approached him. He then read the temperature and pressure of the stranger's air-supply, and allowed the surplus air to escape slowly before removing the stranger's suit and revealing one of the Fenachrone--eyes closed, unconscious or dead.

DuQuesne leaped for the educator and handed Loring a headset.

"Put this on quick. He may be only unconscious, and we might not be able to get a thing from him if he were awake."

Loring donned the headset, still staring at the monstrous form with amazement, not unmixed with awe, while DuQuesne, paying no attention to anything except the knowledge he was seeking, manipulated the controls of the instrument. His first quest was for the weapons and armament of the vessel. In this he was disappointed, as he learned that the stranger was one of the navigating engineers, and as such, had no detailed knowledge of the matters of prime importance to the inquisitor. He did have a complete knowledge of the marvelous Fenachrone propulsion system, however, and this DuQuesne carefully transferred to his own brain. He then rapidly explored other regions of that fearsome organ of thought.

As the gigantic and inhuman brain was spread before them, DuQuesne and Loring read not only the language, customs, and culture of the Fenachrone, but all their plans for the future, as well as the events of the past. Plainly in his mind they perceived how he had been cast adrift in the emptiness of the void. They saw the Fenachrone cruiser lying in wait for the two globular vessels. Looking through an extraordinarily powerful telescope with the eyes of their prisoner, they saw them approach, all unsuspecting. DuQuesne recognized all five persons in the _Skylark_ and Dunark and Sitar in the Kondal; such was that unearthly optical instrument and so clear was the impression upon the mind before him. They saw the attack and the battle. They saw the _Skylark_ throw off her zone of force and attack; saw this one survivor standing directly in line with a huge projector-spring, and saw the spring severed by the zone. The free end, under its thousands of pounds of tension, had struck the being upon the side of the head, and the force of the blow, only partially blocked by the heavy helmet, had hurled him out through the yawning gap in the wall and hundreds of miles out into space.

Suddenly the clear view of the brain of the Fenachrone became blurred and meaningless and the flow of knowledge ceased--the prisoner had regained consciousness and was trying with all his gigantic strength to break from those intangible bonds that held him. So powerful were the forces upon him, however, that only a few twitching muscles gave evidence that he was struggling at all. Glancing about him he recognized the attractors and repellers bearing upon him, ceased his efforts to escape, and hurled the full power of his baleful gaze into the black eyes so close to his own. But DuQuesne's mind, always under perfect control and now amply reenforced by a considerable proportion of the stranger's own knowledge and power, did not waver under the force of even that hypnotic glare.

"It is useless, as you observe," he said coldly, in the stranger's own tongue, and sneered. "You are perfectly helpless. Unlike you of the Fenachrone, however, men of my race do not always kill strangers at sight, merely because they are strangers. I will spare your life, if you can give me anything of enough value to me to make extra time and trouble worth while."

"You read my mind while I could not resist your childish efforts. I will have no traffic whatever with you who have destroyed my vessel. If you have mentality enough to understand any portion of my mind--which I doubt--you already know the fate in store for you. Do with me what you will." This from the stranger.

* * * * *

DuQuesne pondered long before he replied; considering whether it was to his advantage to inform this stranger of the facts. Finally he decided.

"Sir, neither I nor this vessel had anything to do with the destruction of your warship. Our detectors discovered you floating in empty space; we stopped and rescued you from death. We have seen nothing else, save what we saw pictured in your own brain. I know that, in common with all of your race, you possess neither conscience nor honor, as we understand the terms. An automatic liar by instinct and training whenever you think lies will best serve your purpose, you may yet have intelligence enough to recognize simple truth when you hear it. You already have observed that we are of the same race as those who destroyed your vessel, and have assumed that we are with them. In that you are wrong. It is true that I am acquainted with those others, but they are my enemies. I am here to kill them, not to aid them. You have already helped me in one way--I know as much as does my enemy concerning the impenetrable shield of force. If I will return you unharmed to your own planet, will you assist me in stealing one of your ships of space, so that I may destroy that Earth-vessel?"

The Fenachrone, paying no attention to DuQuesne's barbed comments concerning his honor and veracity, did not hesitate an instant in his reply.

"I will not. We supermen of the Fenachrone will allow no vessel of ours, with its secrets unknown to any others of the Universe, to fall into the hands of any of the lesser breeds of men."

"Well, you didn't try to lie that time, anyway," said DuQuesne, "but think a minute. Seaton, my enemy, already has one of your vessels--don't think he is too much of a fool to put it back together and to learn its every secret. Then, too, remember that I have your mind, and can get along without you; even though I am willing to admit that you could be of enough help to me so that I would save your life in exchange for that help. Also remember that, superman though you may be, your mentality cannot cope with the forces I have bearing upon you. Neither will your being a superman enable your body to retain life after I have pushed you through yonder door, dressed as you are in a silken tunic."

"I have the normal love of life," was the reply, "but some things cannot be done, even with life at stake. Stealing a vessel of the Fenachrone is one of those things. I can, however, do this much--if you will return me to my own planet, you two shall be received as guests aboard one of our vessels and shall be allowed to witness the vengeance of the Fenachrone upon your enemy. Then you shall be returned to your vessel and allowed to depart unharmed."

"Now you are lying by rote--I know just what you'd do," said DuQuesne. "Get that idea out of your head right now. The attractors now holding you will not be released until after you have told all. Then, and then only, will we try to discover a way of returning you to your own world safely, and yet in a manner which will in no way jeopardize my own safety. Incidentally, I warn you that the first sign of an attempt to play false with me in any way will mean your instant death."

The prisoner remained silent, analyzing every feature of the situation, and DuQuesne continued, coldly:

"Here's something else for you to think about. If you are unwilling to help us, what is to prevent me from killing you, and then hunting up Seaton and making peace with him for the duration of this forthcoming war? With the fragments of your vessel, which he has; with my knowledge of your mind, reenforced by your own dead brain; and with the vast resources of all the planets of the green system; there is no doubt that the plans of the Fenachrone will be seriously interfered with. Myriads of your race will certainly lose their lives, and it is quite possible that your entire race would be destroyed. Understand that I care nothing for the green system. You are welcome to it if you do as I ask. If you do not, I shall warn them and help them simply to protect my world, which is now my own personal property."

"In return for our armament and equipment, you promise not to warn the green system against us? The death of your enemy takes first place in your mind?" The stranger spoke thoughtfully. "In that I understand your viewpoint thoroughly. But, after I have remodeled your power-plant into ours and have piloted you to our planet, what assurance have I that you will liberate me, as you have said?"

"None whatever--I have made and am asking no promises, since I cannot expect you to trust me, any more than I can trust you. Enough of this argument! I am master here, and I am dictating terms. We can get along without you. Therefore you must decide quickly whether you would rather die suddenly and surely, here in space and right now, or help us as I demand and live until you get back home--enjoying meanwhile your life and whatever chance you think you may have of being liberated within the atmosphere of your own planet."

"Just a minute, Chief!" Loring said, in English, his back to the prisoner. "Wouldn't we gain more by killing him and going back to Seaton and the green system, as you suggested?"

"No." DuQuesne also turned away, to shield his features from the mind-reading gaze of the Fenachrone. "That was pure bluff. I don't want to get within a million miles of Seaton until after we have the armament of this fellow's ships. I couldn't make peace with Seaton now, even if I wanted to--and I haven't the slightest intention of trying. I intend killing him on sight. Here's what we're going to do. First, we'll get what we came after. Then we'll find the _Skylark_ and blow her clear out of space, and take over the pieces of that Fenachrone ship. After that we'll head for the green system, and with their own stuff and what we'll give them, they'll be able to give those fiends a hot reception. By the time they finally destroy the Osnomians--if they do--we'll have the world ready for them." He turned to the Fenachrone. "What is your decision?"

"I submit, in the hope that you will keep your promise, since there is no alternative but death," and the awful creature, still loosely held by the attractors and carefully watched by DuQuesne and Loring, fairly tore into the task of rebuilding the Osnomian power-plant into the space-annihilating drive of the Fenachrone--for he well knew one fact that DuQuesne's hurried inspection had failed to glean from the labyrinthine intricacies of that fearsome brain: that once within the detector screens of that distant solar system these Earth-beings would be utterly helpless before the forces which would inevitably be turned upon them. Also, he realized that time was precious, and resolved to drive the _Violet_ so unmercifully that she would overtake that fleeing torpedo, now many hours upon its way--the torpedo bearing news, for the first time in Fenachrone history, of the overwhelming defeat and capture of one of its mighty engines of interstellar war.

In a very short time, considering the complexity of the undertaking, the conversion of the power-plant was done and the repellers, already supposed the ultimate in protection, were reenforced by a ten-thousand-pound mass of activated copper, effective for untold millions of miles. Their monstrous pilot then set the bar and advanced both levers of the dual power control out to the extreme limit of their travel.

There was no sense of motion or of acceleration, since the new system of propulsion acted upon every molecule of matter within the radius of activity of the bar, which had been set to include the entire hull. The passengers felt only the utter lack of all weight and the other peculiar sensations with which they were already familiar, as each had had previous experience of free motion in space. But in spite of the lack of apparent motion, the _Violet_ was now leaping through the unfathomable depths of interstellar space with the unthinkable speed of five times the velocity of light!

CHAPTER VIII

The Porpoise-Men of Dasor

"How long do you figure it's going to take us to get there, Mart?" Seaton asked from a corner, where he was bending over his apparatus-table.

"About three days at this acceleration. I set it at what I thought the safe maximum for the girls. Should we increase it?"

"Probably not--three days isn't bad. Anyway, to save even one day we'd have to more than double the acceleration, and none of us could do anything, so we'd better let it ride. How're you making it, Peg?"

"I'm getting used to weighing a ton now. My knees buckled only once this morning from my forgetting to watch them when I tried to walk. Don't let me interfere, though! if I am slowing us down, I'll go to bed and stay there!"

"It'd hardly pay," said Seaton. "We can use the time to good advantage. Look here, Mart--I've been looking over this stuff I got out of their ship and here's something I know you'll eat up. They refer to it as a chart, but it's three-dimensional and almost incredible. I can't say that I understand it, but I get an awful kick out of looking at it. I've been studying it a couple of hours, and haven't started yet. I haven't found our solar system, the green one, or their own. It's too heavy to move around now, because of the acceleration we're using--come on over here and give it a look."

The "chart" was a strip of some parchment-like material, or film, apparently miles in length, wound upon reels at each end of the machine. One section of the film was always under the viewing mechanism--an optical system projecting an undistorted image into a visiplate plate somewhat similar to their own--and at the touch of a lever, a small atomic motor turned the reels and moved the film through the projector.

It was not an ordinary star-chart: it was three-dimensional, ultra-stereoscopic. The eye did not perceive a flat surface, but beheld an actual, extremely narrow wedge of space as seen from the center of the galaxy. Each of the closer stars was seen in its true position in space and in its true perspective, and each was clearly identified by number. In the background were faint stars and nebulous masses of light, too distant to be resolved into separate stars--a true representation of the actual sky. As both men stared, fascinated, into the visiplate, Seaton touched the lever and they apparently traveled directly along the center line of that ever-widening wedge. As they proceeded, the nearer stars grew brighter and larger, soon becoming suns, with their planets and then the satellites of the planets plainly visible, and finally passing out of the picture behind the observers. The fainter stars became bright, grew into suns and solar systems, and were passed in turn. The chart unrolled, and the nebulous masses of light were approached, became composed of faint stars, which developed as had the others, and were passed.

Finally, when the picture filled the entire visiplate, they arrived at the outermost edge of the galaxy. No more stars were visible: they saw empty space stretching for inconceivably vast distances before them. But beyond that indescribable and incomprehensible vacuum they saw faint lenticular bodies of light, which were also named, and which each man knew to be other galaxies, charted and named by the almost unlimited power of the Fenachrone astronomers, but not as yet explored. As the magic scroll unrolled still farther, they found themselves back in the center of the galaxy, starting outward in the wedge adjacent to the one which they had just traversed. Seaton cut off the motor and wiped his forehead.

"Wouldn't that break you off at the ankles, Mart? Did you ever conceive the possibility of such a thing?

"It would, and I did not. There are literally miles and miles of film in each of those reels, and I see that there is a magazine full of reels in the cabinet. There must be an index or a master-chart."

"Yeah, there's a book in this slot here," said Seaton, "but we don't know any of their names or numbers--wait a minute! How did he report our Earth on that torpedo? Planet number three of sun six four something Pilarone, wasn't it? I'll get the record.

"Six four seven three Pilarone, it was."

"Pilarone ... let's see...." Seaton studied the index volume. "Reel twenty, scene fifty-one, I'd translate it."

They found the reel, and "scene fifty-one" did indeed show that section of space in which our solar system is. Seaton stopped the chart when star six four seven three was at its closest range, and there was our sun; with its nine planets and their many satellites accurately shown and correctly described.

"They know their stuff, all right--you've got to hand it to 'em. I've been straightening out that brain record--cutting out the hazy stretches and getting his knowledge straightened out so we can use it, and there's a lot of this kind of stuff in the record you can get. Suppose that you can figure out exactly where he comes from with this dope and with his brain record?"

"Certainly. I may be able to get more complete information upon the green system than the Osnomians have, which will be very useful indeed. You are right--I am intensely interested in this material, and if you do not care particularly about studying it any more at this time, I believe that I should begin to study it now."

"Hop to it. I'm going to study that record some more. No human brain can take it all, I'm afraid, especially all at once, but I'm going to kinda peck around the edges and get me some dope that I want pretty badly. We got a lot of stuff from that wampus."

About sixty hours out, Dorothy, who had been observing the planet through number six visiplate, called Seaton away from the Fenachrone brain-record, upon which he was still concentrating.

"Come here a minute, Dickie! Haven't you got that knowledge all packed away in your skull yet?"

"I'll say I haven't. That bird's brain would make a dozen of mine, and it was loaded until the scuppers were awash. I'm just nibbling around the edges yet."

"I've always heard that the capacity of even the human brain was almost infinite. Isn't that true?" asked Margaret.

"Maybe it is, if the knowledge were built up gradually over generations. I think maybe I can get most of this stuff into my peanut brain so I can use it, but it's going to be an awful job."

"Is their brain really as far ahead of ours as I gathered from what I saw of it?" asked Crane.

"It sure is," replied Seaton, "as far as knowledge and intelligence are concerned, but they have nothing else in common with us. They don't belong to the genus 'homo' at all, really. Instead of having a common ancestor with the anthropoids, as they say we had, they evolved from a genus which combined the worst traits of the cat tribe and the carnivorous lizards--the most savage and bloodthirsty branches of the animal kingdom--and instead of getting better as they went along, they got worse, in that respect at least. But they sure do know something. When you get a month or so to spare, you want to put on this harness and grab his knowledge, being very careful to steer clear of his mental traits and so on. Then, when we get back to the Earth, we'll simply tear it apart and rebuild it. You'll know what I mean when you get this stuff transplanted into your own skull. But to cut out the lecture, what's on your mind, Dottie Dimple?"

"This planet Martin picked out is all wet, literally. The visibility is fine--very few clouds--but this whole half of it is solid ocean. If there are any islands, even, they're mighty small."

* * * * *

All four looked into the receiver. With the great magnification employed, the planet almost filled the visiplate. There were a few fleecy wisps of cloud, but the entire surface upon which they gazed was one sheet of the now familiar deep and glorious blue peculiar to the waters of that cuprous solar system, with no markings whatever.

"What d'you make of it, Mart? That's water all right--copper-sulphate solution, just like the Osnomian and Urvanian oceans--and nothing else visible. How big would an island have to be for us to see it from here?"

"So much depends upon the contour and nature of the island, that it is hard to say. If it were low and heavily covered with their green-blue vegetation, we might not be able to see even a rather large one, whereas if it were hilly and bare, we could probably see one only a few miles in diameter."

"Well, one good thing, anyway, we're approaching it from the central sun, and almost in line with their own sun, so it's daylight all over it. As it turns and as we get closer, we'll see what we can see. Better take turns watching it, hadn't we?" asked Seaton.

It was decided, and while the _Skylark_ was still some distance away, several small islands became visible, and the period of rotation of the planet was determined to be in the neighborhood of fifty hours. Margaret, then at the controls, picked out the largest island visible and directed the bar toward it. As they dropped down close to their objective, they found that the air was of the same composition as that of Osnome, but had a pressure of seventy-eight centimeters of mercury, and that the surface gravity of the planet was ninety-five hundredths that of the Earth.

"Fine business!" exulted Seaton. "Just about like home, but I don't see much of any place to land without getting wet, do you? Those reflectors are probably solar generators, and they cover the whole island except for that lagoon right under us."

The island, perhaps ten miles long and half that in width, was entirely covered with great parabolic reflectors, arranged so closely together that little could be seen between them. Each reflector apparently focussed upon an object in the center, a helix which seemed to writhe luridly in that flaming focus, glowing with a nacreous, opalescent green light.

"Well, nothing much to see there--let's go down," remarked Seaton as he shot the _Skylark_ over to the edge of the island and down to the surface of the water. But here again nothing was to be seen of the land itself. The wall was one vertical plate of seamless metal, supporting huge metal guides, between which floated metal pontoons. From these gigantic floats metal girders and trusses went through slots in the wall into the darkness of the interior. Close scrutiny revealed that the large floats were rising steadily, although very slowly; while smaller floats bobbed up and down upon each passing wave.

"Solar generators, tide-motors, and wave-motors, all at once!" ejaculated Seaton. "_Some_ power-plant! Folks, I'm going to take a look at that if I have to drill in with a ray!"

They circumnavigated the island without revealing any door or other opening--the entire thirty miles was one stupendous battery of the generators. Back at the starting point, the _Skylark_ hopped over the structure and down to the surface of the small central lagoon previously noticed. Close to the water, it was seen that there was plenty of room for the vessel to move about beneath the roof of reflectors, and that the island was one solid stand of tide-motors. At one end of the lagoon was an open metal structure, the only building visible, and Seaton brought the space-cruiser up to it and through the huge opening--for door there was none. The interior of the room was lighted by long, tubular lights running around in front of the walls, which were veritable switchboards. Row after row and tier upon tier stood the instruments, plainly electrical meters of enormous capacity and equally plainly in full operation, but no wiring or bus-bar could be seen. Before each row of instruments there was a narrow walk, with steps leading down into the water of the lagoon. Every part of the great room was plainly visible, and not a living being was even watching that vast instrument-board.

"What do you make of it, Dick?" asked Crane, slowly.

"No wiring--tight beam transmission. The Fenachrone do it with two matched-frequency separable units. Millions and millions of kilowatts there, if I'm any judge. Absolutely automatic too, or else----" Seaton's voice died away.

"Or else what?" asked Dorothy.

"Just a hunch. I wouldn't wonder if----"

"Hold it, Dicky! Remember I had to put you to bed after that last hunch you had!"

"Here it is, anyway. Mart, what would be the logical line of evolution when the planet has become so old that all the land has been eroded to a level below that of the ocean? You picked us out an old one, all right--so old that there's no land left. Would a highly civilized people revert to fish? That seems like a backward move to me, but what other answer is possible?"

"Probably not to true fishes--although they might easily develop some fish-like traits. I do not believe, however, that they would go back to gills or to cold blood."

"What _are_ you two saying?" interrupted Margaret. "Do you mean to say that you think _fish_ live here instead of people, and that _fish_ did all this?" as she waved her hand at the complicated machinery about them.

"Not fish exactly, no." Crane paused in thought. "Merely a people who have adjusted themselves to their environment through conscious or natural selection. We had a talk about this very thing in our first trip, shortly after I met you. Remember? I commented on the fact that there must be life throughout the Universe, much of it that we could not understand; and you replied that there would be no reason to suppose them awful because incomprehensible. That may be the case here."

"Well, I'm going to find out," declared Seaton, as he appeared with a box full of coils, tubes, and other apparatus.

"How?" asked Dorothy, curiously.

"Fix me up a detector and follow up one of those beams. Find its frequency and direction, first, you know, then pick it up outside and follow it to where it's going. It'll go through anything, of course, but I can trap off enough of it to follow it, even if it's tight enough to choke itself," said Seaton.

"That's one thing I got from that brain record."

* * * * *

He worked deftly and rapidly, and soon was rewarded by a flaring crimson color in his detector when it was located in one certain position in front of one of the meters. Noting the bearing on the great circles, he then moved the _Skylark_ along that exact line, over the reflectors, and out beyond the island, where he allowed the vessel to settle directly downwards.

"Now folks, if I've done this just right, we'll get a red flash directly."

As he spoke the detector again burst into crimson light, and he set the bar into the line and applied a little power, keeping the light at its reddest while the other three looked on in fascinated interest.

"This beam is on something that's moving, Mart--can't take my eyes off it for a second or I'll lose it entirely. See where we're going, will you?"

"We are about to strike the water," replied Crane quietly.

"The water!" exclaimed Margaret.

"Fair enough--why not?"

"Oh, that's right--I forgot that the _Skylark_ is as good a submarine as she is an airship."

Crane pointed number six visiplate directly into the line of flight and started into the dark water.

"Mow deep are we, Mart?" asked Seaton after a time.

"Only about a hundred feet, and we do not seem to be getting any deeper."

"That's good. Afraid this beam might be going to a station on the other side of the planet--through the ground. If so, we'd have had to go back and trace another. We can follow it any distance under water, but not through rock. Need a light?"

"Not unless we go deeper."

For two hours Seaton held the detector upon that tight beam of energy, traveling at a hundred miles an hour, the highest speed he could use and still hold the beam.

"I'd like to be up above watching us. I bet we're making the water boil behind us," remarked Dorothy.

"Yeah, we're kicking up quite a wake, I guess. It sure takes power to drive the old can through this wetness."

"Slow down!" commanded Crane. "I see a submarine ahead. I thought it might be a whale at first, but it is a boat and it is what we are aiming for. You are constantly swinging with it, keeping it exactly in the line."

"O.K." Seaton reduced the power and swung the visiplate over in front of him, whereupon the detector lamp went out. "It's a relief to follow something I can see, instead of trying to guess which way that beam's going to wiggle next. Lead on, Macduff--I'm right on your tail!"

The _Skylark_ fell in behind the submersible craft, close enough to keep it plainly visible in the telescopic visiplate. Finally the stranger stopped and rose to the surface between two rows of submerged pontoons which, row upon row, extended in every direction as far as the telescope could reach.

"Well, Dot, we're where we're going, wherever that is."

"What do you suppose it is? It looks like a floating isleport, like what it told about in that wild-story magazine you read so much."

"Maybe--but if so they can't be fish," answered Seaton. "Let's go--I want to look it over," and water flew in all directions as the _Skylark_ burst out of the ocean and leaped into the air far above what was in truth a floating city.

Rectangular in shape, it appeared to be about six miles long and four wide. It was roofed with solar generators like those covering the island just visited, but the machines were not spaced quite so closely together, and there were numerous open lagoons. The water around the entire city was covered with wave-motors. From their great height the visitors could see an occasional submarine moving slowly under the city, and frequently small surface craft dashed across the lagoons. As they watched, a seaplane with short, thick wings curved like those of a gull, rose from one of the lagoons and shot away over the water.

"Quite a place," remarked Seaton as he swung a visiplate upon one of the lagoons. "Submarines, speedboats, and fast seaplanes. Fish or not, they're not so slow. I'm going to grab off one of those folks and see how much they know. Wonder if they're peaceable or warlike?"

"They look peaceable, but you know the proverb," Crane cautioned his impetuous friend.

"Yes, and I'm going to be timid like a mice," Seaton returned as the _Skylark_ dropped rapidly toward a lagoon near the edge of the island.

"You ought to put that in a gag book, Dick," Dorothy chuckled. "You forget all about being timid until an hour afterwards."

"Watch me, Red-top! If they even point a finger at us, I'm going to run a million miles a minute."

No hostile demonstration was made as they dropped lower and lower, however, and Seaton, with one hand upon the switch actuating the zone of force, slowly lowered the vessel down past the reflectors and to the surface of the water. Through the visiplate he saw the crowd of people coming toward them--some swimming in the lagoon, some walking along narrow runways. They seemed to be of all sizes, and unarmed.

"I believe they're perfectly peaceable, and just curious, Mart. I've already got the repellers on close range--believe I'll cut them off altogether."

"How about the ray-screens?"

"All three full out. They don't interfere with anything solid, though, and won't hurt anything. They'll stop any ray attack and this arenak hull will stop anything else we are apt to get there. Watch this board, will you, and I'll see if I can't negotiate with them."

Seaton opened the door. As he did so, a number of the smaller beings dived headlong into the water, and a submarine rose quietly to the surface less than fifty feet away with a peculiar tubular weapon and a huge ray-generator trained upon the _Skylark_. Seaton stood motionless, his right hand raised in the universal sign of peace, his left holding at his hip an automatic pistol charged with X-plosive shells--while Crane, at the controls, had the Fenachrone super-generator in line, and his hand lay upon the switch, whose closing would volatilize the submarine and cut an incandescent path of destruction through the city lengthwise.

* * * * *

After a moment of inaction, a hatch opened, a man stepped out upon the deck of the submarine, and the two tried to converse, but with no success. Seaton then brought out the mechanical educator, held it up for the other's inspection, and waved an invitation to come aboard. Instantly the other dived, and came to the surface immediately below Seaton, who assisted him into the _Skylark_. Tall and heavy as Seaton was, the stranger was half a head taller and almost twice as heavy. His thick skin was of the characteristic Osnomian green and his eyes were the usual black, but he had no hair whatever. His shoulders, though broad and enormously strong, were very sloping, and his powerful arms were little more than half as long as would have been expected had they belonged to a human being of his size. The hands and feet were very large and very broad, and the fingers and toes were heavily webbed. His high domed forehead appeared even higher because of the total lack of hair, otherwise his features were regular and well-proportioned. He carried himself easily and gracefully, and yet with the dignity of one accustomed to command as he stepped into the control room and saluted gravely the three other Earth-beings. He glanced quickly around the room, and showed unmistakable pleasure as he saw the power-plant of the cruiser of space. Languages were soon exchanged and the stranger spoke, in a bass voice vastly deeper than Seaton's own.

"In the name of our city and planet--I may say in the name of our solar system, for you are very evidently from one other than our green system--I greet you. I would offer you refreshment, as is our custom, but I fear that your chemistry is but ill adapted to our customary fare. If there be aught in which we can be of assistance to you, our resources are at your disposal--but before you leave us, I shall wish to ask from you a great gift."

"Sir, we thank you. We are in search of knowledge concerning forces which we cannot as yet control. From the power systems you employ, and from what I have learned of the composition of your suns and planets, I assume you have none of the metal of power, and it is a quantity of that element that is your greatest need?"

"Yes. Power is our only lack. We generate all we can with the materials and knowledge at our disposal, but we never have enough. Our development is hindered, our birth-rate must be held down to a minimum, many new cities which we need cannot be built and many new projects cannot be started, all for lack of power. For one gram of that metal I see plated upon that copper cylinder, of whose very existence no scientist upon Dasor has had even an inkling, we would do almost anything. In fact, if all else failed, I would be tempted to attack you, did I not know that our utmost power could not penetrate even your outer screen, and that you could volatilize the entire planet if you so desired."

"Great Cat!" In his surprise Seaton lapsed from the formal language he had been employing. "Have you figured us all out already, from a standing start?"

"We know electricity, chemistry, physics, and mathematics fairly well. You see, our race is many millions of years older than is yours."

"You're the man I've been looking for, I guess," said Seaton. "We have enough of this metal with us so that we can spare you some as well as not. But before you get it, I'll introduce you. Folks, this is Sacner Carfon, Chief of the Council of the planet Dasor. They saw us all the time, and when we headed for this, the Sixth City, he came over from the capital, or First City, in the flagship of his police fleet, to welcome us or to fight us, as we pleased. Carfon, this is Martin Crane--or say, better than introductions, put on the headsets, everybody, and get acquainted right."

Acquaintance made and the apparatus put away, Seaton went to one of the store-rooms and brought out a lump of "X," weighing about a hundred pounds.

"There's enough to build power-plants from now on. It would save time if you were to dismiss your submarine. With you to pilot us, we can take you back to the First City a lot faster than your vessel can travel."

Carfon took a miniature transmitter from a pouch under his arm and spoke briefly, then gave Seaton the course. In a few minutes, the First City was reached, and the _Skylark_ descended rapidly to the surface of a lagoon at one end of the city. Short as had been the time consumed by their journey from the Sixth City, they found a curious and excited crowd awaiting them. The central portion of the lagoon was almost covered by the small surface craft, while the sides, separated from the sidewalks by the curbs, were full of swimmers. The peculiar Dasorian equivalents of whistles, bells, and gongs were making a deafening uproar, and the crowd was yelling and cheering in much the same fashion as do earthly crowds upon similar occasions. Seaton stopped the _Skylark_ and took his wife by the shoulder, swinging her around in front of the visiplate.

"Look at that, Dot. Talk about rapid transit! They could give the New York subway a flying start and beat them hands down!"

* * * * *

Dorothy looked into the visiplate and gasped. Six metal pipes, one above the other, ran above and parallel to each sidewalk-lane of water. The pipes were full of ocean water, water racing along at fully fifty miles an hour and discharging, each stream a small waterfall, into the lagoon. Each pipe was lighted in the interior, and each was full of people, heads almost touching feet, unconcernedly being borne along, completely immersed in that mad current. As the passenger saw daylight and felt the stream begin to drop, he righted himself, apparently selecting an objective point, and rode the current down into the ocean. A few quick strokes, and he was either at the surface or upon one of the flights of stairs leading up to the platform. Many of the travelers did not even move as they left the orifice. If they happened to be on their backs, they entered the ocean backward and did not bother about righting themselves or about selecting a destination until they were many feet below the surface.

"Good heavens, Dick! They'll kill themselves or drown!"

"Not these birds. Notice their skins? They've got a hide like a walrus, and a terrific layer of subcutaneous fat. Even their heads are protected that way--you could hardly hit one of them enough with a baseball bat to hurt him. And as for drowning--they can out-swim a fish, and can stay under water almost an hour without coming up for air. Even one of those youngsters can swim the full length of the city without taking a breath."

"How do you get that velocity of flow, Carfon?" asked Crane.

"By means of pumps. These channels run all over the city, and the amount of water running in each tube and the number of tubes in use are regulated automatically by the amount of traffic. When any section of tube is empty of people, no water flows through it. This was necessary in order to save power. At each intersection there are four stand pipes and automatic swim-counters that regulate the volume of water and the number of tubes in use. This is ordinarily a quiet pool, as it is in a residence section, and this channel--our channels correspond to your streets, you know--has only six tubes each way. If you will look on the other side of the channel, you will see the intake end of the tubes going down-town."

Seaton swung the visiplate around and they saw six rapidly-moving stairways, each crowded with people, leading from the ocean level up to the top of a tall metal tower. As the passengers reached the top of the flight they were catapulted head-first into the chamber leading to the tube below.

"Well, that is some system for handling people!" exclaimed Seaton. "What's the capacity of the system?"

"When running full pressure, six tubes will handle five thousand people a minute. It is only very rarely, on such occasions as this, that they are ever loaded to capacity. Some of the channels in the middle of the city have as many as twenty tubes, so that it is always possible to go from one end of the city to the other in less than ten minutes."

"Don't they ever jam?" asked Dorothy curiously. "I've been lost more than once in the New York subway, and been in some perfectly frightful jams, too--and they weren't moving ten thousand people a minute either."

"No jams ever have occurred. The tubes are perfectly smooth and well-lighted, and all turns and intersections are rounded. The controlling machines allow only so many persons to enter any tube--if more should try to enter than can be carried comfortably, the surplus passengers are slid off down a chute to the swim-ways, or sidewalks, and may either wait a while or swim to the next intersection."

"That looks like quite a jam down there now." Seaton pointed to the receiving pool, which was now one solid mass except for the space kept clear by the six mighty streams of humanity-laden water.

"If the newcomers can't find room to come to the surface they'll swim over to some other pool." Carfon shrugged indifferently. "My residence is the fifth cubicle on the right side of this channel. Our custom demands that you accept the hospitality of my home, if only for a moment and only for a beaker of distilled water. Any ordinary visitor could be received in my office, but you must enter my home."

Seaton steered the _Skylark_ carefully, surrounded as she was by a tightly packed crowd of swimmers, to the indicated dwelling, and anchored her so that one of the doors was close to a flight of steps leading from the corner of the building down into the water. Carfon stepped out, opened the door of his house, and preceded his guests within. The room was large and square, and built of a synthetic, non-corroding metal, as was the entire city. The walls were tastefully decorated with striking geometrical designs in many-colored metal, and upon the floor was a softly woven rug. Three doors leading into other rooms could be seen, and strange pieces of furniture stood here and there. In the center of the floor-space was a circular opening some four feet in diameter, and there, only a few inches below the level of the floor, was the surface of the ocean.

Carfon introduced his guests to his wife--a feminine replica of himself, although she was not of quite such heroic proportions.

"I don't suppose that Seven is far away, is he?" Carfon asked of the woman.

"Probably he is outside, near the flying ball. If he has not been touching it ever since it came down, it is only because someone stronger than he pushed him aside. You know how boys are," turning to Dorothy with a smile as she spoke, "boy nature is probably universal."

"Pardon my curiosity, but why 'Seven'?" asked Dorothy, as she returned the smile.

"He is the two thousand three hundred and forty-seventh Sacner Carfon in direct male line of descent," she explained. "But perhaps Six has not explained these things to you. Our population must not be allowed to increase, therefore each couple can have only two children. It is customary for the boy to be born first, and is given the name of his father. The girl is younger, and is given her mother's name."

"That will now be changed," said Carfon feelingly. "These visitors have given us the secret of power, and we shall be able to build new cities and populate Dasor as she should he populated."

"Really?----" She checked herself, but a flame leaped to her eyes, and her voice was none too steady as she addressed the visitors. "For that we Dasorians thank you more than words can express. Perhaps you strangers do not know what it means to want a dozen children with every fiber of your being and to be allowed to have only two--we do, all too well--I will call Seven."

She pressed a button, and up out of the opening in the middle of the floor there shot a half-grown boy, swimming so rapidly that he scarcely touched the coaming as he came to his feet. He glanced at the four visitors, then ran up to Seaton and Crane.

"Please, sirs, may I ride, just a little short ride, in your vessel before you go away?" This was said in their language.

"Seven!" boomed Carfon sternly, and the exuberant youth subsided.

"Pardon me, sirs, but I was so excited----"

"All right, son, no harm done at all. You bet you'll have a ride in the _Skylark_ if your parents will let you." He turned to Carfon. "I'm not so far beyond that stage myself that I'm not in sympathy with him. Neither are you, unless I'm badly mistaken."

"I am very glad that you feel as you do. He would be delighted to accompany us down to the office, and it will be something to remember all the rest of his life."

"You have a little girl, too?" Dorothy asked the woman.

"Yes--would you like to see her? She is asleep now," and without waiting for an answer, the proud Dasorian mother led the way into a bedroom--a bedroom without beds, for Dasorians sleep floating in thermostatically controlled tanks, buoyed up in water of the temperature they like best, in a fashion that no Earthly springs and mattresses can approach. In a small tank in a corner reposed a baby, apparently about a year old, over whom Dorothy and Margaret made the usual feminine ceremony of delight and approbation.

* * * * *

Back in the living room, after an animated conversation in which much information was exchanged concerning the two planets and their races of peoples, Carfon drew six metal goblets of distilled water and passed them around. Standing in a circle, the six touched goblets and drank.

They then embarked, and while Crane steered the _Skylark_ slowly along the channel toward the offices of the Council, and while Dorothy and Margaret showed the eager Seven all over the vessel, Seaton explained to Carfon the danger that threatened the Universe, what he had done, and what he was attempting to do.

"Doctor Seaton, I wish to apologize to you," the Dasorian said when Seaton had done. "Since you are evidently still land animals, I had supposed you of inferior intelligence. It is true that your younger civilization is deficient in certain respects, but you have shown a depth of vision, a sheer power of imagination and grasp, that no member of our older civilization could approach. I believe that you are right in your conclusions. We have no such rays nor forces upon this planet, and never have had; but the sixth planet of our own sun has. Less than fifty of your years ago, when I was but a small boy, such a projection visited my father. It offered to 'rescue' us from our watery planet, and to show us how to build rocket-ships to move us to Three, which is half land, inhabited by lower animals."

"And he didn't accept?"

"Certainly not. Then as now our sole lack was power, and the strangers did not show us how to increase our supply. Perhaps they had more power than we, perhaps, because of the difficulty of communication, our want was not made clear to them. But, of course, we did not want to move to Three, and we had already had rocket-ships for hundreds of generations. We have never been able to reach Six with them, but we visited Three long ago; and every one who went there came back as soon as he could. We detest land. It is hard, barren, unfriendly. We have everything, here upon Dasor. Food is plentiful, synthetic or natural, as we prefer. Our watery planet supplies our every need and wish, with one exception; and now that we are assured of power, even that one exception vanishes, and Dasor becomes a very Paradise. We can now lead our natural lives, work and play to our fullest capacity--we would not trade our world for all the rest of the Universe."

"I never thought of it in that way, but you're right, at that," Seaton conceded. "You are ideally suited to your environment. But how do I get to planet Six? Its distance is terrific, even as cosmic distances go. You won't have any night until Dasor swings outside the orbit of your sun, and until then Six will be invisible, even to our most powerful telescope."

"I do not know, myself," answered Carfon, "but I will send out a call for the chief astronomer. He will meet us, and give you a chart and the exact course."

At the office, the earthly visitors were welcomed formally by the Council--the nine men in control of the entire planet. The ceremony over and their course carefully plotted, Carfon stood at the door of the _Skylark_ a moment before it closed.

"We thank you with all force, Earthmen, for what you have done for us this day. Please remember, and believe that this is no idle word--if we can assist you in any way in this conflict which is to come, the resources of this planet are at your disposal. We join Osnome and the other planets of this system in declaring you, Doctor Seaton, our Overlord."

CHAPTER IX

The Welcome to Norlamin

The _Skylark_ was now days upon her way toward the sixth planet, Seaton gave the visiplates and the instrument board his customary careful scrutiny and rejoined the others.

"Still talking about the human fish, Dottie Dimple?" he asked, as he stoked his villainous pipe. "Peculiar tribe of porpoises, but I'm strong for 'em. They're the most like our own kind of folks, as far as ideas go, of anybody we've seen yet--in fact, they're more like us than a lot of human beings we all know."

"I like them immensely----"

"You couldn't like 'em any other way, their size----"

"Terrible, Dick, terrible! Easy as I am, I can't stand for any such joke as that was going to be. But really, I think they're just perfectly fine, in spite of their being so funny-looking. Mrs. Carfon is just simply sweet, even if she does look like a walrus, and that cute little seal of a baby was just too perfectly cunning for words. That boy Seven is keen as mustard, too."

"He should be," put in Crane, dryly. "He probably has as much intelligence now as any one of us."

"Do you think so?" asked Margaret. "He acted like any other boy, but he did seem to understand things remarkably well."

"He would--they're 'way ahead of us in most things." Seaton glanced at the two women quizzically and turned to Crane. "And as for their being bald, this was one time, Mart, when those two phenomenal heads of hair our two little girl-friends are so proud of didn't make any kind of hit at all. They probably regard that black thatch of Peg's and Dot's auburn mop as relics of a barbarous and prehistoric age--about as we would regard the hirsute hide of a Neanderthal man."

"That may be so, too," Dorothy replied, unconcernedly, "but we aren't planning on living there, so why worry about it? I like them, anyway, and I believe that they like us."

"They acted that way. But say, Mart, if that planet is so old that all their land area has been eroded away, how come they've got so much water left? And they've got quite an atmosphere, too."

"The air-pressure," said Crane, "while greater than that now obtaining upon Earth, was probably of the order of magnitude of three meters of mercury, originally. As to the erosion, they might have had more water to begin with than our Earth had."

"Yeah, that'd account for it, all right," said Dorothy.

"There's one thing I want to ask you two scientists," Margaret said. "Everywhere we've gone, except on that one world that Dick thinks is a wandering planet, we've found the intelligent life quite remarkably like human beings. How do you account for that?"

"There, Mart, is one for the massive old bean to concentrate on," challenged Seaton: then, as Crane considered the question in silence for some time he went on: "I'll answer it myself, then, by asking another. Why not? Why shouldn't they be? Remember, man is the highest form of earthly life--at least, in our own opinion and as far as we know. In our wanderings, we have picked out planets quite similar to our own in point of atmosphere and temperature and, within narrow limits, of mass as well. It stands to reason that under such similarity of conditions, there would be a certain similarity of results. How about it, Mart? Reasonable?"

"It seems plausible, in a way," conceded Crane, "but it probably is not universally true."

"Sure not--couldn't be, hardly. No doubt we could find a lot of worlds inhabited by all kinds of intelligent things--freaks that we can't even begin to imagine now--but they probably would be occupying planets entirely different from ours in some essential feature of atmosphere, temperature, or mass."

"But the Fenachrone world is entirely different," Dorothy argued, "and they're more or less human--they're bipeds, anyway, with recognizable features. I've been studying that record with you, you know, and their world has so much more mass than ours that their gravitation is simply frightful!"

"That much difference is comparatively slight, not a real fundamental difference. I meant a hundred or so times either way--greater or less. And even their gravitation has modified their structure a lot--suppose it had been fifty times as great as it is? What would they have been like? Also, their atmosphere is very similar to ours in composition, and their temperature is bearable. It is my opinion that atmosphere and temperature have more to do with evolution than anything else, and that the mass of the planet runs a poor third."

"You may be right," admitted Crane, "but it seems to me that you are arguing from insufficient premises."

"Sure I am--almost no premises at all. I would be just about as well justified in deducing the structure of a range of mountains from a superficial study of three pebbles picked up in a creek near them. However, we can get an idea some time, when we have a lot of time."

"How?"

"Remember that planet we struck on the first trip, that had an atmosphere composed mostly of gaseous chlorin? In our ignorance we assumed that life there was impossible, and didn't stop. Well, it may be just as well that we didn't. If we go back there, protected as we are with our rays and stuff, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find life there, and lots of it--and I've got a hunch that it'll be a form of life that'd make your grandfather's whiskers curl right up into a ball!"

"You do get the weirdest ideas, Dick!" protested Dorothy. "I hope you aren't planning on exploring it, just to prove your point?"

"Never thought of it before. Can't do it now, anyway--got our hands full already. However, after we get this Fenachrone mess cleaned up we'll have to do just that little thing, won't we, Mart? As that intellectual guy said while he was insisting upon dematerializing us, 'Science demands it.'"

"By all means. We should be in a position to make contributions to science in fields as yet untouched. Most assuredly we shall investigate those points."

"Then they'll go alone, won't they, Peggy?"

"Absolutely! We've seen some pretty middling horrible things already, and if these two men of ours call the frightful things we have seen normal, and are planning on deliberately hunting up things that even they will consider monstrous, you and I most certainly shall stay at home!"

"Yeah? You say it easy. Bounce back, Peg, you've struck a rubber fence! Rufus, you red-headed little fraud, you know you wouldn't let me go to the corner store after a can of tobacco without insisting on tagging along!"

"You're a...." began Dorothy hotly, but broke off in amazement and gasped, "For Heaven's sake, what was that?"

"What was what? It missed me."

"It went right through you! It was a kind of funny little cloud, like smoke or something. It came right through the ceiling like a flash--went right through you and on down through the floor. There it comes back again!"

* * * * *

Before their staring eyes a vague, nebulous something moved rapidly upward through the floor and passed upward through the ceiling. Dorothy leaped to Seaton's side and he put his arm around her reassuringly.

"'Sall right folks--I know what that thing is."

"Well, shoot it, quick!" Dorothy implored.

"It's one of those projections from where we're heading for, trying to get our range; and it's the most welcome sight these weary old eyes have rested upon for full many a long and dreary moon. They've probably located us from our power-plant rays. We're an awful long ways off yet, though, and going like a streak of greased lightning, so they're having trouble in holding us. They're friendly, we already know that--they probably want to talk to us. It'd make it easier for them if we'd shut off our power and drift at constant velocity, but we'd use up valuable time and throw our calculations all out of whack. We'll let them try to match our acceleration If they can do that, they're good."

The apparition reappeared, oscillating back and forth irregularly--passing through the arenak walls, through the furniture and the instrument boards, and even through the mighty power-plant itself, as though nothing was there. Eventually, however, it remained stationary a foot or so above the floor of the control-room. Then it began to increase in density until apparently a man stood before them. His skin, like that of all the inhabitants of the planets of the green suns, was green. He was tall and well-proportioned when judged by Earthly standards, except for his head, which was overly large, and which was particularly massive above the eyes and backward from the ears. He was evidently of great age, for what little of his face was visible was seamed and wrinkled, and his long, thick mane of hair and his square-cut, yard-long beard were a dazzling white, only faintly tinged with green.

While not in any sense transparent, nor even translucent, it was evident that the apparition before them was not composed of flesh and blood. He looked at each of the four Earth-beings intensely for a moment, then pointed toward the table upon which stood the mechanical educator, and Seaton placed it in front of the peculiar visitor. As Seaton donned a headset and handed one to the stranger, the latter stared at him, impressing upon his consciousness that he was to be given a knowledge of English. Seaton pressed the lever, receiving as he did so a sensation of an unbroken calm, a serenity profound and untroubled, and the projection spoke.

"Dr. Seaton, Mr. Crane, and ladies--welcome to Norlamin, the planet toward which you are now flying. We have been awaiting you for more than five thousand years of your time. It has been a mathematical certainty--it has been graven upon the very Sphere itself--that in time someone would come to us from without this system, bringing a portion, however small, of Rovolon--of the metal of power, of which there is not even the most minute trace in our entire solar system. For more than five thousand years our instruments have been set to detect the vibrations which would herald the advent of the user of that metal. Now you have come, and I perceive that you have vast stores of it. Being yourselves seekers after truth, you will share it with us gladly as we will instruct you in many things you wish to know. Allow me to operate the educator--I would gaze into your minds and reveal my own to your sight. But first I must tell you that your machine is too rudimentary to work at all well, and with your permission I shall make certain minor alterations."

Seaton nodded permission, and from the eyes and from the hands of the figure there leaped visible streams of force, which seized the transformers, coils and tubes, and reformed and reconnected them, under Seaton's bulging eyes, into an entirely different mechanism.

"Oh, I see!" he gasped. "Say, what are you anyway?"

"Pardon me; in my eagerness I became forgetful. I am Orlon, the First of Astronomy of Norlamin, in my observatory upon the surface of the planet. This that you see is simply my projection, composed of forces for which you have no name in your language. You can cut it off, if you wish, with your ray-screens, which even I can see are of a surprisingly high order of efficiency. There, this educator will now work very well. Please put on the remodeled headsets, all four of you."

They did so, and the rays of force moved levers, switches, and dials as positively as human hands could have moved them, and with infinitely greater speed and precision. As the dials moved, each brain received clearly and plainly a knowledge of the customs, language, and manners of the inhabitants of Norlamin. Each mind became suffused with a vast, immeasurable peace, calm power, and a depth and breadth of mental vision theretofore undreamed of. Looking deep into his mind they sensed a quiet, placid certainty, beheld power and knowledge to them illimitable, perceived depths of wisdom to them unfathomable.

Then from his mind into theirs there flowed smoothly a mighty stream of comprehension of cosmic phenomena. They hazily saw infinitely small units grouped into planetary formations to form practically dimensionless particles. These particles in turn grouped to form slightly larger ones, and after a long succession of such grouping they knew that the comparatively gigantic aggregates which then held their attention were in reality electrons and protons, the smallest units recognized by Earthly science. They clearly understood the combination of these electrons and protons into atoms. They perceived plainly the way in which atoms build up molecules, and comprehended the molecular structure of matter. In mathematical thoughts, only dimly grasped even by Seaton and Crane, were laid before them the fundamental laws of physics, of electricity, of gravitation, and of chemistry. They saw globular aggregations of matter, the suns and their planets, comprising solar systems; saw solar systems, in accordance with those immutable laws, grouped into galaxies, galaxies in turn--here the flow was suddenly shut off as though a valve had been closed, and the astronomer spoke.

"Pardon me. Your brains should be stored only with the material you desire most and can use to the best advantage, for your mental capacity is even more limited than my own. Please understand that I speak in no derogatory sense; it is only that your race has many thousands of generations to go before your minds should be stored with knowledge indiscriminately. We ourselves have not yet reached that stage, and we are perhaps millions of years older than you. And yet," he continued musingly, "I envy you. Knowledge is, of course, relative, and I can know _so_ little! Time and space have yielded not an iota of their mystery to our most penetrant minds. And whether we delve baffled into the unknown smallness of the small, or whether we peer, blind and helpless, into the unknown largeness of the large, it is the same--infinity is comprehensible only to the Infinite One: the all-shaping Force directing and controlling the Universe and the unknowable Sphere. The more we know, the vaster the virgin fields of investigation open to us, and the more infinitesimal becomes our knowledge. But I am perhaps keeping you from more important activities. As you approach Norlamin more nearly, I shall guide you to my observatory. I am glad indeed that it is in my lifetime that you have come to us, and I await anxiously the opportunity of greeting you in the flesh. The years remaining to me of this cycle of existence are few, and I had almost ceased hoping to witness your coming."

* * * * *

The projection vanished instantaneously, and the four stared at each other in an incredulous daze of astonishment. Seaton finally broke the stunned silence. "Well, I'll be kicked to death by little red spiders!" he ejaculated. "Mart, did you see what I saw, or did I get tight on something without knowing it? That sure burned me up--it breaks me right off at the ankles, just to think of it!"

Crane walked to the educator in silence. He examined it, felt the changed coils and transformers, and gently shook the new insulating base of the great power-tube. Still in silence he turned his back, walked around the instrument board, read the meters, then went back and again inspected the educator.

"It was real, and not a higher development of hypnotism, as at first I thought it must be," he reported seriously. "Hypnotism, if sufficiently advanced, might have affected us in that fashion, even to teaching us all a strange language, but by no possibility could it have had such an effect upon copper, steel, bakelite, and glass. It was certainly real, and while I cannot begin to understand it, I will say that your imagination has certainly vindicated itself. A race of beings, who can do such things as that, can do almost anything--you have been right, from the start."

"Then you can beat those horrible Fenachrone, after all!" cried Dorothy, and threw herself into her husband's arms.

"Do you remember, Dick, that I hailed you once as Columbus at San Salvador?" asked Margaret unsteadily from Crane's encircling arm. "What could a man be called who from the sheer depths of his imagination called forth the means of saving from destruction all the civilization of millions of entire worlds?"

"Don't talk that way, please, folks," Seaton was plainly very uncomfortable. He blushed intensely, the burning red tide rising in waves up to his hair as he wriggled in embarrassment, like any schoolboy. "Mart's done most of it, anyway, you know; and even at that, we ain't out of the woods yet, by forty-seven rows of apple trees."

"You will admit, will you not, that we can see our way out of the woods, at least, and that you yourself feel rather relieved?" asked Crane.

"I think we'll be able to pull their corks now, all right, after we get some dope. It's a cinch they've either got the stuff we need or know how to get it--and if that zone is impenetrable, I'll bet they'll be able to dope out something just as good. Relieved? That doesn't half tell it, guy--I feel as if I had just pitched off the Old Man of the Sea who's been sitting on my neck! What say you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we'll sing us a little song? I feel kind of relieved--they had me worried some--it's the first time I've felt like singing since we cut that warship up."

Dorothy brought out her "fiddle"--the magnificent Stradivarius, formerly Crane's, which he had given her--Margaret her guitar, and they sang one rollicking number after another. Though by no means a Metropolitan Opera quartette, their voices were all better than mediocre, and they had sung together so much that they harmonized readily.

"Why don't you play us some real music, Dottie?" asked Margaret, after a time. "You haven't practiced for ages."

"I haven't felt like playing lately, but I do now," and Dorothy stood up and swept the bow over the strings. Doctor of Music in violin, an accomplished musician, playing upon one of the finest instruments the world has ever known, she was lifted out of herself by relief from the dread of the Fenachrone invasion and that splendid violin expressed every subtle nuance of her thought.

She played rhapsodies and paeans, and solos by the great masters. She played vivacious dances, then "Traumerei" and "Liebestraum." At last she swept into the immortal "Meditation," and as the last note died away Seaton held out his arms.

"You're a blinding flash and a deafening report, Dottie Dimple, and I love you," he declared--and his eyes and his arms spoke volumes that his light utterance had left unsaid.

* * * * *

Norlamin close enough so that its image almost filled number six visiplate, the four wanderers studied it with interest. Partially obscured by clouds and with its polar regions two glaring caps of snow--they would be green in a few months, when the planet would swing inside the orbit of its sun around the vast central luminary of that complex solar system--it made a magnificent picture. They saw sparkling blue oceans and huge green continents of unfamiliar outlines. So terrific was the velocity of the space-cruiser, that the image grew larger as they watched it, and soon the field of vision could not contain the image of the whole disk.

"Well, I expect Orlon'll be showing up pretty quick now," remarked Seaton; and it was not long until the projection appeared in the air of the control room.

"Hail, Terrestrials!" he greeted them. "With your permission, I shall direct your flight."

Permission granted, the figure floated across the room to the board and the rays of force centered the visiplate, changed the direction of the bar a trifle, decreased slightly their negative acceleration, and directed a stream of force upon the steering mechanism.

"We shall alight upon the grounds of my observatory upon Norlamin in seven thousand four hundred twenty-eight seconds," he announced presently. "The observatory will be upon the dark side of Norlamin when we arrive, but I have a force operating upon the steering mechanism which will guide the vessel along the required curved path. I shall remain with you until we land, and we may converse upon any topic of most interest to you."

"We've got a topic of interest, all right. That's what we came out here for. But it would take too long to tell you about it--I'll show you!"

He brought out the magnetic brain record, threaded it into the machine and handed the astronomer a head-set. Orlon put it on, touched the lever, and for an hour there was unbroken silence as the monstrous brain of the menace was studied by the equally capable intellect of the Norlaminian scientist. There was no pause in the motion of the magnetic tape, no repetition--Orlon's brain absorbed the information as fast as it could be sent, and understood that frightful mind in every particular.

As the end of the tape was reached and the awful record ended, a shadow passed over Orlon's face.

"Truly a depraved evolution--it is sad to contemplate such a perversion of a really excellent brain. They have power, even as you have, and they have the will to destroy, which is a thing that I cannot understand. However, if it is graven upon the Sphere that we are to pass, it means only that upon the next plane we shall continue our searches--let us hope with better tools and with greater understanding than we now possess."

"'Smatter?" snapped Seaton gravely. "Going to take it lying down, without putting up any fight at all?"

"What can we do? Violence is contrary to our very natures. No man of Norlamin could offer any but passive resistance."

"You can do a lot if you will. Put on that headset again and get my plan, offering any suggestions your far abler brain may suggest."

As the human scientist poured his plan of battle into the brain of the astronomer, Orlon's face cleared.

"It is graven upon the Sphere that the Fenachrone shall pass," he said finally. "What you ask of us we can do. I have only a general knowledge of rays, as they are not in the province of the Orlon family; but the student Rovol, of the family Rovol of Rays, has all present knowledge of such phenomena. Tomorrow I will bring you together, and I have little doubt that he will be able, with the help of your metal of power, to solve your problem."

"I don't quite understand what you said about a whole family studying one subject, and yet having only one student in it," said Dorothy, in perplexity.

"A little explanation is perhaps necessary," replied Orlon. "First, you must know that every man of Norlamin is a student, and most of us are students of science. With us, 'labor' means mental effort, that is, study. We perform no physical or manual labor save for exercise, as all our mechanical work is done by forces. This state of things having endured for many thousands of years, it long ago became evident that specialization was necessary in order to avoid duplication of effort and to insure complete coverage of the field. Soon afterward, it was discovered that very little progress was being made in any branch, because so much was known that it took practically a lifetime to review that which had already been accomplished, even in a narrow and highly specialized field. Many points were studied for years before it was discovered that the identical work had been done before, and either forgotten or overlooked. To remedy this condition the mechanical educator had to be developed. Once it was perfected a new system was begun. One man was assigned to each small subdivision of scientific endeavor, to study it intensively. When he became old, each man chose a successor--usually a son--and transferred his own knowledge to the younger student. He also made a complete record of his own brain, in much the same way as you have recorded the brain of the Fenachrone upon your metallic tape. These records are all stored in a great central library, as permanent references.

"All these things being true, now a young person may need only finish an elementary education--just enough to learn to think, which takes only about twenty-five or thirty years--and then he is ready to begin actual work. When that time comes, he receives in one day all the knowledge of his specialty which has been accumulated by his predecessors during many thousands of years of intensive study."

"Whew!" Seaton whistled, "no wonder you folks know something! With that start, I believe I might know something myself! As an astronomer, you may be interested in this star-chart and stuff--or do you know all about that already?"

"No, the Fenachrone are far ahead of us in that subject, because of their observatories out in open space and because of their gigantic reflectors, which cannot be used through any atmosphere. We are further hampered in having darkness for only a few hours at a time and only in the winter, when our planet is outside the orbit of our sun around the great central sun of our entire system. However, with the Rovolon you have brought us, we shall have real observatories far out in space; and for that I personally will be indebted to you more than I can ever express. As for the chart, I hope to have the pleasure of examining it while you are conferring with Rovol of Rays."

"How many families are working on rays--just one?"

"One upon each kind of ray. That is, each of the ray families knows a great deal about all kinds of vibrations of the ether, but is specializing upon one narrow field. Take, for instance, the rays you are most interested in; those able to penetrate a zone of force. From my own very slight and general knowledge I know that it would of necessity be a ray of the fifth order. These rays are very new--they have been under investigation only a few hundred years--and the Rovol is the only student who would be at all well informed upon them. Shall I explain the orders of rays more fully than I did by means of the educator?"

"Please. You assumed that we knew more than we do, so a little explanation would help."

"All ordinary vibrations--that is, all molecular and material ones, such as light, heat, electricity, radio, and the like--were arbitrarily called waves of the first order; in order to distinguish them from waves of the second order, which are given off by particles of the second order, which you know as protons and electrons, in their combination to form atoms. Your scientist Millikan discovered these rays for you, and in your language they are known as Millikan, or Cosmic, rays.

* * * * *

"Some time later, when sub-electrons were identified the rays given off by their combination into electrons, or by the disruption of electrons, were called rays of the third order. These rays are most interesting and most useful; in fact, they do all our mechanical work. They as a class are called protelectricity, and bear the same relation to ordinary electricity that electricity does to torque--both are pure energy, and they are inter-convertible. Unlike electricity, however, it may be converted into many different forms by fields of force, in a way comparable to that in which white light is resolved into colors by a prism--or rather, more like the way alternating current is changed to direct current by a motor-generator set, with attendant changes in properties. There is a complete spectrum of more than five hundred factors, each as different from the others as red is different from green.

"Continuing farther, particles of the fourth order give rays of the fourth order; those of the fifth, rays of the fifth order. Fourth-order rays have been investigated quite thoroughly, but only mathematically and theoretically, as they are of excessively short wave-length and are capable of being generated only by the breaking down of matter itself into the corresponding particles. However, it has been shown that they are quite similar to protelectricity in their general behavior. Thus, the power that propels your space-vessel, your attractors, your repellers, your object-compass, your zone of force--all these things are simply a few of the many hundreds of wave-bands of the fourth order, all of which you doubtless would have worked out for yourselves in time. Very little is known, even in theory, of the rays of the fifth order, although they have been shown to exist."

"For a man having no knowledge, you seem to know a lot about rays. How about the fifth order--is that as far as they go?"

"My knowledge is slight and very general; only such as I must have in order to understand my own subject. The fifth order certainly is not the end--it is probably scarcely a beginning. We think now that the orders extend to infinite smallness, just as the galaxies are grouped into larger aggregations, which are probably in their turn only tiny units in a scheme infinitely large.

"Over six thousand years ago the last third order rays were worked out; and certain peculiarities in their behavior led the then Rovol to suspect the existence of the fourth order. Successive generations of the Rovol proved their existence, determined the conditions of their liberation, and found that this metal of power was the only catalyst able to decompose matter and thus liberate the rays. This metal, which was called Rovolon after the Rovol, was first described upon theoretical grounds and later was found, by spectroscopy, in certain stars, notably in one star only eight light-years away, but not even the most infinitesimal trace of it exists in our entire solar system. Since these discoveries, the many Rovol have been perfecting the theory of the fourth order, beginning that of the fifth, and waiting for your coming. The present Rovol, like myself and many others whose work is almost at a standstill, is waiting with all-consuming interest to greet you, as soon as the _Skylark_ can be landed upon our planet."

"Neither your rocket-ships nor your projections could get you any Rovolon?"

"No. Every hundred years or so someone develops a new type of rocket that he thinks may stand a slight chance of making the journey, but not one of these venturesome youths has as yet returned. Either that sun has no planets or else the rocket-ships have failed. Our projections are useless, as they can be driven only a very short distance upon our present carrier wave. With a carrier of the fifth order we could drive a projection to any point in the galaxy, since its velocity would be millions of times that of light and the power necessary reduced accordingly--but as I have said before, such waves cannot be generated without metal Rovolon."

"I hate to break this up--I'd like to listen to you talk for a week--but we're going to land pretty quick, and it looks as though we were going to land pretty hard."

"We will land soon, but not hard," replied Orlon confidently, and the landing was as he had foretold. The _Skylark_ was falling with an ever-decreasing velocity, but so fast was the descent that it seemed to the watchers as though they must crash through the roof of the huge brilliantly lighted building upon which they were dropping and bury themselves many feet in the ground beneath it. But they did not strike the observatory. So incredibly accurate were the calculations of the Norlaminian astronomer and so inhumanly precise were the controls he had set upon their bar, that, as they touched the ground after barely clearing the domed roof and he shut off their power, the passengers felt only a sudden decrease in acceleration, like that following the coming to rest of a rapidly moving elevator, after it has completed a downward journey.

"I shall join you in person very shortly," Orlon said, and the projection vanished.

"Well, we're here, folks, on another new world. Not quite as thrilling as the first one was, is it?" and Seaton stepped toward the door.

"How about the air composition, density, gravity, temperature, and so on?" asked Crane. "Perhaps we should make a few tests."

"Didn't you get that on the educator? Thought you did. Gravity a little less than seven-tenths. Air composition, same as Osnome and Dasor. Pressure, half-way between Earth and Osnome. Temperature, like Osnome most of the time, but fairly comfortable in the winter. Snow now at the poles, but this observatory is only ten degrees from the equator. They don't wear clothes enough to flag a hand-car with here, either, except when they have to. Let's go!"

He opened the door and the four travelers stepped out upon a close-cropped lawn--a turf whose blue-green softness would shame an Oriental rug. The landscape was illuminated by a soft and mellow, yet intense green light which emanated from no visible source. As they paused and glanced about them, they saw that the _Skylark_ had alighted in the exact center of a circular enclosure a hundred yards in diameter, walled by row upon row of shrubbery, statuary, and fountains, all bathed in ever-changing billows of light. At only one point was the circle broken. There the walls did not come together, but continued on to border a lane leading up to the massive structure of cream-and-green marble, topped by its enormous, glassy dome--the observatory of Orlon.

"Welcome to Norlamin, Terrestrials," the deep, calm voice of the astronomer greeted them, and Orlon in the flesh shook hands cordially in the American fashion with each of them in turn, and placed around each neck a crystal chain from which depended a small Norlaminian chronometer-radiophone. Behind him there stood four other old men.

"These men are already acquainted with each of you, but you do not as yet know them. I present Fodan, Chief of the Five of Norlamin. Rovol, about whom you know. Astron, the First of Energy. Satrazon, the First of Chemistry."

Orlon fell in beside Seaton and the party turned toward the observatory. As they walked along the Earth-people stared, held by the unearthly beauty of the grounds. The hedge of shrubbery, from ten to twenty feet high, and which shut out all sight of everything outside it, was one mass of vivid green and flaring crimson leaves; each leaf and twig groomed meticulously into its precise place in a fantastic geometrical scheme. Just inside this boundary there stood a ring of statues of heroic size. Some of them were single figures of men and women; some were busts; some were groups in natural or allegorical poses--all were done with consummate skill and feeling. Between the statues there were fountains, magnificent bronze and glass groups of the strange aquatic denizens of this strange planet, bathed in geometrically shaped sprays, screens, and columns of water. Winding around between the statues and the fountains there was a moving, scintillating wall, and upon the waters and upon the wall there played torrents of color, cataracts of harmoniously blended light. Reds, blues, yellows, greens--every color of their peculiar green spectrum and every conceivable combination of those colors writhed and flamed in ineffable splendor upon those deep and living screens of falling water and upon that shimmering wall.

As they entered the lane, Seaton saw with amazement that what he had supposed a wall, now close at hand, was not a wall at all. It was composed of myriads of individual sparkling jewels, of every known color, for the most part self-luminous; and each gem, apparently entirely unsupported, was dashing in and out and along among its fellows, weaving and darting here and there, flying at headlong speed along an extremely tortuous, but evidently carefully calculated course.

"What can that be, anyway, Dick?" whispered Dorothy, and Seaton turned to his guide.

"Pardon my curiosity, Orlon, but would you mind explaining the why of that moving wall? We don't get it."

"Not at all. This garden has been the private retreat of the family of Orlon for many thousands of years, and women of our house have been beautifying it since its inception. You may have observed that the statuary is very old. No such work has been done for ages. Modern art has developed along the lines of color and motion, hence the lighting effects and the tapestry wall. Each gem is held upon the end of a minute pencil of force, and all the pencils are controlled by a machine which has a key for every jewel in the wall."

Crane, the methodical, stared at the innumerable flashing jewels and asked, "It must have taken a prodigious amount of time to complete such an undertaking?"

"It is far from complete; in fact, it is scarcely begun. It was started only about four hundred years ago."

"_Four hundred years!_" exclaimed Dorothy. "Do you live that long? How long will it take to finish it, and what will it be like when it is done?"

"No, none of us live longer than about one hundred and sixty years--at about that age most of us decide to pass. When this tapestry wall is finished, it will not be simply form and color, as it is now. It will be a portrayal of the history of Norlamin from the first cooling of the planet. It will, in all probability, require thousands of years for its completion. You see, time is of little importance to us, and workmanship is everything. My companion will continue working upon it until we decide to pass; my son's companion may continue it. In any event, many generations of the women of the Orlon will work upon it until it is complete. When it is done, it will be a thing of beauty as long as Norlamin shall endure."

"But suppose that your son's wife isn't that kind of an artist? Suppose she should want to do music or painting or something else?" asked Dorothy, curiously.

"That is quite possible; for, fortunately, our art is not yet entirely intellectual, as is our music. There are many unfinished artistic projects in the house of Orlon, and if the companion of my son should not find one to her liking, she will be at liberty to continue anything else she may have begun, or to start an entirely new project of her own."

"You have a family, then?" asked Margaret, "I'm afraid I didn't understand things very well when you gave them to us over the educator."

"I sent things too fast for you, not knowing that your educator was new to you; a thing with which you were not thoroughly familiar. I will therefore explain some things in language, since you are not familiar with the mechanism of thought transference. The Five, a self-perpetuating body, do what governing is necessary for the entire planet. Their decrees are founded upon self-evident truth, and are therefore the law. Population is regulated according to the needs of the planet, and since much work is now in progress, an increase in population was recommended by the Five. My companion and I therefore had three children, instead of the customary two. By lot it fell to us to have two boys and one girl. One of the boys will assume my duties when I pass; the other will take over a part of some branch of science that has grown too complex for one man to handle as a specialist should. In fact, he has already chosen his specialty and been accepted for it--he is to be the nine hundred and sixty-seventh of Chemistry, the student of the asymmetric carbon atom, which will thus be his specialty from this time henceforth.

"It was learned long ago that the most perfect children were born of parents in the full prime of mental life, that is, at one hundred years of age. Therefore, with us each generation covers one hundred years. The first twenty-five years of a child's life are spent at home with his parents, during which time he acquires his elementary education in the common schools. Then boys and girls alike move to the Country of Youth, where they spend another twenty-five years. There they develop their brains and initiative by conducting any researches they choose. Most of us, at that age, solve all the riddles of the Universe, only to discover later that our solutions have been fallacious. However, much really excellent work is done in the Country of Youth, primarily because of the new and unprejudiced viewpoints of the virgin minds there at work. In that country also each finds his life's companion, the one necessary to round out mere existence into a perfection of living that no person, man or woman, can ever know alone. I need not speak to you of the wonders of love or of the completion and fullness of life that it brings, for all four of you, children though you are, know love in full measure.

"At fifty years of age the man, now mentally mature, is recalled to his family home, as his father's brain is now losing some of its vigor and keenness. The father then turns over his work to the son by means of the educator--and when the weight of the accumulated knowledge of a hundred thousand generations of research is impressed upon the son's brain, his play is over."

"What does the father do then?"

"Having made his brain record, about which I have told you, he and his companion--for she has in similar fashion turned over her work to her successor--retire to the Country of Age, where they rest and relax after their century of effort. They do whatever they care to do, for as long as they please to do it. Finally, after assuring themselves that all is well with the children, they decide that they are ready for the Change. Then, side by side as they have labored, they pass."

Now at the door of the observatory, Dorothy paused and shrank back against Seaton, her eyes widening as she stared at Orlon.

"No, daughter, why should we fear the Change?" he answered her unspoken question, calm serenity in every inflection of his quiet voice. "The life-principle is unknowable to the finite mind, as is the All-Controlling Force. But even though we know nothing of the sublime goal toward which it is tending, any person ripe for the Change can, and of course does, liberate the life-principle so that its progress may be unimpeded."

* * * * *

In a spacious room of the observatory, in which the Terrestrials and their Norlaminian hosts had been long engaged in study and discussion, Seaton finally rose and extended a hand toward his wife.

"Well, that's that, then, Orlon, I guess. We've been thirty hours without sleep, and for us that's a long time. I'm getting so dopey I can't think a lick. We'd better go back to the _Skylark_ and turn in, and after we've slept nine hours or so I'll go over to Rovol's laboratory and Crane'll come back here to you."

"You need not return to your vessel," said Orlon. "I know that its somewhat cramped quarters have become irksome. Apartments have been prepared here for you. We shall have a meal here together, and then we shall retire, to meet again tomorrow."

As he spoke, a tray laden with appetizing dishes appeared in the air in front of each person. As Seaton resumed his seat the tray followed him, remaining always in the most convenient position.

Crane glanced at Seaton questioningly, and Satrazon, the First of Chemistry, answered his thought before he could voice it.

"The food before you, unlike that which is before us of Norlamin, is wholesome for you. It contains no copper, no arsenic, no heavy metals--in short, nothing in the least harmful to your chemistry. It is balanced as to carbohydrates, proteins, fats and sugars, and contains the due proportion of each of the various accessory nutritional factors. You will also find the flavors are agreeable to each of you."

"Synthetic, eh? You've got us analyzed," Seaton stated, rather than asked, as with knife and fork he attacked the thick, rare, and beautifully broiled steak which, with its mushrooms and other delicate trimmings, lay upon his rigid although unsupported tray--noticing as he did so that the Norlaminians ate with tools entirely different from those they had supplied to their Earthly guests.

"Entirely synthetic," Satrazon made answer, "except for the sodium chloride necessary. As you already know, sodium and chlorin are very rare throughout our system, therefore the force upon the food-supply took from your vessel the amount of salt required for the formula. We have been unable to synthesize atoms, for the same reason that the labors of so many others have been hindered--because of the lack of Rovolon. Now, however, my science shall progress as it should; and for that I join with my fellow scientists in giving you thanks for the service you have rendered us."

"We thank you instead," replied Seaton, "for the service we have been able to do you is slight indeed compared to what you are giving us in return. But it seems that you speak quite impersonally of the force upon the food supply. Did you yourself direct the preparation of these meats and vegetables?"

"Oh, no. I merely analyzed your tissues, surveyed the food-supplies you carried, discovered your individual preferences, and set up the necessary integrals in the mechanism. The forces did the rest, and will continue to do so as long as you remain upon this planet."

"Fruit salad always my favorite dish," Dorothy said, after a couple of bites, "and this one is just too perfectly divine! It doesn't taste like any other fruit I ever ate, either--I think it must be the same ambrosia that the old pagan gods used to eat."

"If all you did was to set up the integrals, how do you know what you are going to have for the next meal?" asked Crane.

"We have no idea what the form, flavor, or consistency of any dish will be," was the surprising answer. "We know only that the flavor will be agreeable and that it will agree with the form and consistency of the substance, and that the composition will be well-balanced chemically. You see, all the details of flavor, form, texture, and so on are controlled by a device something like one of your kaleidoscopes. The integrals render impossible any unwholesome, unpleasant, or unbalanced combination of any nature, and everything else is left to the mechanism, which operates upon pure chance."

"Some system, I'd rise to remark," and Seaton, with the others, resumed his vigorous attack upon the long-delayed supper.

The meal over, the Earthly visitors were shown to their rooms, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER X

Norlaminian Science

Breakfast over, Seaton watched intently as his tray, laden with empty containers, floated away from him and disappeared into an opening in the wall.

"How do you do it, Orlon?" he asked, curiously. "I can hardly believe it, even after seeing it done."

"Each tray is carried upon the end of a beam or rod of force, and supported rigidly by it. Since the beam is tuned to the individual wave of the instrument you wear upon your chest, your tray is, of course, placed in front of you, at a predetermined distance, as soon as the sending force is actuated. When you have finished your meal, the beam is shortened. Thus the tray is drawn back to the food laboratory, where other forces cleanse and sterilize the various utensils and place them in readiness for the next meal. It would be an easy matter to have this same mechanism place your meals before you wherever you may go upon this planet, provided only that a clear path can be plotted from the laboratory to your person."

"Thanks, but it wouldn't pay. No telling where we'd be. Besides, we'd better eat in the _Skylark_ most of the time, to keep our cook good-natured. Well, I see Rovol's got his boat here for me, so guess I'd better turn up a few r. p. m. Coming along, Dot, or have you got something else on your mind?"

"I'm going to leave you for a while. I can't really understand even a radio, and just thinking about those funny, complicated rays and things you are going after makes me dizzy in the head. Mrs. Orlon is going to take us over to the Country of Youth--she says Margaret and I can play around with her daughter and her bunch and have a good time while you scientists are doing your stuff."

"All right. 'Bye till tonight," and Seaton stepped out into the grounds, where the First of Rays was waiting.

The flier was a torpedo-shaped craft of some transparent, glassy material, completely enclosed except for one circular opening or doorway. From the midsection, which was about five feet in diameter and provided with heavily-cushioned seats capable of carrying four passengers in comfort, the hull tapered down smoothly to a needle point at each end. As Seaton entered and settled himself into the cushions, Rovol touched a lever. Instantly a transparent door slid across the opening, locking itself into position flush with the surface of the hull, and the flier darted into the air and away. For a few minutes there was silence, as Seaton studied the terrain beneath them. Fields or cities there were none; the land was covered with dense forests and vast meadows, with here and there great buildings surrounded by gracious, park-like areas. Rovol finally broke the silence.

"I understand your problem, I believe, since Orlon has transferred to me all the thoughts he had from you. With the aid of the Rovolon you have brought us, I am confident that we shall be able to work out a satisfactory solution of the various problems involved. It will take us some few minutes to traverse the distance to my laboratory, and if there are any matters upon which your mind is not quite clear, I shall try to clarify them."

"That's letting me down easy," Seaton grinned, "but you don't need to be afraid of hurting my feelings--I know just exactly how ignorant and dumb I am compared to you. There's a lot of things I don't get at all. First, and nearest, this airboat. It has no power-plant at all. I assume that it, like so many other things hereabouts, is riding on the end of a rod of force?"

"Exactly. The beam is generated and maintained in my laboratory. All that is here in the flier is a small sender, for remote control."

"How do you obtain your power?" asked Seaton. "Solar generators and tide motors? I know that all your work is done by protelectricity, but Orlon did not inform us as to the sources."

"We have not used such inefficient generators for many thousands of years. Long ago it was shown by research that these rays were constantly being generated in abundance in outer space, and that they could be collected upon spherical condensers and transmitted without loss to the surface of the planet by means of matched and synchronized crystals. Several millions of these condensers have been built and thrown out to become tiny satellites of Norlamin."

"How did you get them far enough out?"

"The first ones were forced out to the required distance upon beams of force produced by the conversion of electricity, which was in turn produced from turbines, solar motors, and tide motors. With a few of them out, however, it was easy to obtain sufficient power to send out more; and now, whenever one of us requires more power than he has at his disposal, he merely sends out such additional collectors as he needs."

"Now about those fifth-order rays, which will penetrate a zone of force. I am told that they are not ether waves at all?"

"They are not ether waves. The fourth order rays, of which the theory has been completely worked out, are the shortest vibrations that can be propagated through the ether; for the ether itself is not a continuous medium. We do not know its nature exactly, but it is an actual substance, and is composed of discrete particles of the fourth order. Now the zone of force, which is itself a fourth-order phenomenon, sets up a condition of stasis in the particles composing the ether. These particles are relatively so coarse, that rays and particles of the fifth order will pass through the fixed zone without retardation. Therefore, if there is anything between the particles of the ether--this matter is being debated hotly among us at the present time--it must be a sub-ether, if I may use that term. We have never been able to investigate any of these things experimentally, not even such a coarse aggregation as is the ether; but now, having Rovolon, it will not be many thousands of years until we shall have extended our knowledge many orders farther, in both directions."

"Just how will Rovolon help you?"

"It will enable us to generate a force of the ninth magnitude--that much power is necessary to set up what you have so aptly named a zone of force--and will give us a source of fourth, fifth, and probably higher orders of rays which, if they are generated in space at all, are beyond our present reach. The zone of force is necessary to shield certain items of equipment from ether vibrations; as any such vibration inside the controlling fields of force renders observation or control of the higher orders of rays impossible."

"Hm ... m, I see--I'm learning something," Seaton replied cordially. "Just as the higher-powered a radio set is, the more perfect must be its shielding?"

"Yes. Just as a trace of any gas will destroy the usefulness of your most sensitive vacuum tubes, and just as imperfect shielding will allow interfering waves to enter sensitive electrical apparatus--in that same fashion will even the slightest ether vibration interfere with the operation of the extremely sensitive fields and lenses of force which must be used in controlling forces of the higher orders."

"You haven't tested the theory of the fourth order yet, have you?"

"No, but that is unnecessary. The theory of the fourth order is not really theory at all--it is mathematical fact. Although we have never been able to generate them, we know exactly the forces you use in your ship of space, and we can tell you of some thousands of others more or less similar and also highly useful forces which you have not yet discovered, but are allowing to go to waste. We know exactly what they are, how to liberate and control them, and how to use them. In fact, in the work which we are to begin today, we shall use but little ordinary power: almost all our work will be done by fourth-order forces, liberated from copper by means of the Rovolon you have given me. But here we are at my laboratory. You already know that the best way to learn is by doing, and we shall begin at once."

* * * * *

The flier alighted upon a lawn quite similar to the one before the observatory of Orlon, and the scientist led his Earthly guest through the main entrance of the imposing structure of vari-colored marble and gleaming metal and into the vast, glass-lined room that was his laboratory. Great benches lined the walls, and there were hundreds of dials, meters, tubes, transformers and other instruments, whose uses Seaton could not even guess.

Rovol first donned a suit of transparent, flexible material, of a deep golden color, instructing Seaton to do the same; explaining that much of the work would be with dangerous frequencies and with high pressures, and that the suits were not only absolute insulators against electricity, heat, and sound, but were also ray-filters proof against any harmful radiations. As each helmet was equipped with radiophones, conversation was not interfered with in the least.

Rovol took up a tiny flash-pencil, and with it deftly cut off a bit of Rovolon, almost microscopic in size. This he placed upon a great block of burnished copper, and upon it played a force. As he manipulated two levers, two more beams of force flattened out the particle of metal, spread it out over the copper, and forced it into the surface of the block until the thin coating was at every point in molecular contact with the copper beneath it--a perfect job of plating, and one done in the twinkling of an eye. He then cut out a piece of the treated copper the size of a pea, and other forces rapidly built around it a structure of coils and metallic tubes. This apparatus he suspended in the air at the extremity of a small beam of force. The block of copper was next cut in two, and Rovol's fingers moved rapidly over the keys of a machine which resembled slightly an overgrown and exceedingly complicated book-keeping machine. Streams and pencils of force flashed and crackled, and Seaton saw raw materials transformed into a complete power-plant, in its center the two-hundred-pound lump of plated copper, where an instant before there had been only empty space upon the massive metal bench. Rovol's hands moved rapidly from keys to dials and back, and suddenly a zone of force, as large as a basketball appeared around the apparatus poised in the air.

"But it'll fly off and we can't stop it with anything," Seaton protested, and it did indeed dart rapidly upward.

The old man shook his head as he manipulated still more controls, and Seaton gasped as nine stupendous beams of force hurled themselves upon that brilliant spherical mirror of pure energy, seized it in mid-flight, and shaped it resistlessly, under his bulging eyes, into a complex geometrical figure of precisely the desired form.

Lurid violet light filled the room, and Seaton turned towards the bar. That two-hundred-pound mass of copper was shrinking visibly, second by second, so vast were the forces being drawn from it, and the searing, blinding light would have been intolerable but for the protective color-filters of his helmet. Tremendous flashes of lightning ripped and tore from the relief-points of the bench to the ground-rods, which flared at blue-white temperature under the incessant impacts. Knowing that this corona-loss was but an infinitesimal fraction of the power being used, Seaton's very mind staggered as he strove to understand the magnitude of the forces at work upon that stubborn sphere of energy.

The aged scientist used no tools whatever, as we understand the term. His laboratory was a power-house; at his command were the stupendous forces of a battery of planetoid accumulators, and added to these were the fourth-order, ninth-magnitude forces of the disintegrating copper bar. Electricity, protelectricity, and fourth-order rays, under millions upon millions of kilovolts of pressure, leaped to do the bidding of that wonderful brain, stored with the accumulated knowledge of countless thousands of years of scientific research. Watching the ancient physicist work, Seaton compared himself to a schoolboy mixing chemicals indiscriminately and ignorantly, with no knowledge whatever of their properties, occasionally obtaining a reaction by pure chance. Whereas he had worked with intra-atomic energy schoolboy fashion, the master craftsman before him knew every reagent, every reaction, and worked with known and thoroughly familiar agencies to bring about his exactly predetermined ends--just as calmly certain of the results as Seaton himself would have been in his own laboratory, mixing equivalent quantities of solutions of barium chloride and of sulphuric acid to obtain a precipitate of barium sulphate.

Hour after hour Rovol labored on, oblivious to the passage of time in his zeal of accomplishment, the while carefully instructing Seaton, who watched every step with intense interest and did everything possible for him to do. Bit by bit a towering structure arose in the middle of the laboratory. A metal foundation supported a massive compound bearing, which in turn carried a tubular network of latticed metal, mounted like an immense telescope. Near the upper, outer end of this openwork tube a group of nine forces held the field of force rigidly in place in its axis; at the lower extremity were mounted seats for two operators and the control panels necessary for the operation of the intricate system of forces and motors which would actuate and control that gigantic projector. Immense hour and declination circles could be read by optical systems from the operators' seats--circles fully forty feet in diameter, graduated with incredible delicacy and accuracy into decimal fractions of seconds of arc, and each driven by variable-speed motors through gear-trains and connections having no backlash whatever.

While Rovol was working upon one of the last instruments to be installed upon the controlling panel a mellow note sounded throughout the building, and he immediately ceased his labors and opened the master-switches of his power plants.

"You have done well, youngster," he congratulated his helper, as he began to take off his protective covering, "Without your aid I could not have accomplished nearly this much during one period of labor. The periods of exercise and of relaxation are at hand--let us return to the house of Orlon, where we all shall gather to relax and to refresh ourselves for the labors of tomorrow."

"But it's almost done!" protested Seaton. "Let's finish it up and shoot a little juice through it, just to try it out."

"There speaks the rashness and impatience of youth," rejoined the scientist, calmly removing the younger man's suit and leading him out to the waiting airboat. "I read in your mind that you are often guilty of laboring continuously until your brain loses its keen edge. Learn now, once and for all, that such conduct is worse than foolish--it is criminal. We have labored the full period. Laboring for more than that length of time without recuperation results in a loss of power which, if persisted in, wreaks permanent injury to the mind; and by it you gain nothing. We have more than ample time to do that which must be done--the fifth-order projector shall be completed before the warning torpedo shall have reached the planet of the Fenachrone--therefore over-exertion is unwarranted. As for testing, know now that only mechanisms built by bunglers require testing. Properly built machines work properly."

"But I'd have liked to see it work just once, anyway," lamented Seaton as the small airship tore through the air on its way back to the observatory.

"You must cultivate calmness, my son, and the art of relaxation. With those qualities your race can easily double its present span of useful life. Physical exercise to maintain the bodily tissues at their best, and mental relaxation following mental toil--these things are the secrets of a long and productive life. Why attempt to do more than can be accomplished efficiently? There is always tomorrow. I am more interested in that which we are now building than you can possibly be, since many generations of the Rovol have anticipated its construction; yet I realize that in the interest of our welfare and for the progress of civilization, today's labors must not be prolonged beyond today's period of work. Furthermore, you yourself realize that there is no optimum point at which any task may be interrupted. Short of final completion of any project, one point is the same as any other. Had we continued, we would have wished to continue still farther, and so on without end."

"You're probably right, at that," the impetuous chemist conceded, as their craft came to earth before the observatory.

* * * * *

Crane and Orlon were already in the common room, as were the scientists Seaton already knew, as well as a group of women and children still strangers to the Terrestrials. In a few minutes Orlon's companion, a dignified, white-haired woman, entered; accompanied by Dorothy, Margaret, and a laughing, boisterous group of men and women from the Country of Youth. Introductions over, Seaton turned to Crane.

"How's every little thing, Mart?"

"Very well indeed. We are building an observatory in space--or rather, Orlon is building it and I am doing what little I can to help him. In a few days we shall be able to locate the system of the Fenachrone. How is your work progressing?"

"Smoother than a kitten's ear. Got the fourth-order projector about done. We're going to project a fourth-order force out to grab us some dense material, a pretty close approach to pure neutronium. There's nothing dense enough around here, even in the core of the central sun, so we're going out to a white dwarf star--one a good deal like the companion star to Sirius in Canis Major--get some material of the proper density from its core, and convert our sender into a fifth-order machine. Then we can really get busy--go places and do things."

"Neutronium? Pure mass?" queried Crane, "I have been under the impression that it does not exist. Of what use can such a substance be to you?"

"Can't get pure neutronium, of course--couldn't use it if we could. What we need and are going to get is a material of about two and a half million specific gravity. Got to have it for lenses and controls for the fifth-order forces. Those rays go right through anything less dense without measurable refraction. But I see Rovol's giving me a nasty look. He's my boss on this job, and I imagine this kind of talk's barred during the period of relaxation, as being work. That so, chief?"

"You know that it is barred, you incorrigible young cub!" answered Rovol, with a smile.

"All right, boss; one more little infraction and I'll shut up like a clam. I'd like to know what the girls have been doing."

"We've been having a wonderful time!" Dorothy declared. "We've been designing fabrics and ornaments and jewels and things. Wait 'til you see 'em!"

"Fine! All right, Orlon, it's your party--what to do?"

"This is the time of exercise. We have many forms, most of which are unfamiliar to you. You all swim, however, and as that is one of the best of exercises, I suggest that we all swim."

"Lead us to it!" Seaton exclaimed, then his voice changed abruptly. "Wait a minute--I don't know about our swimming in copper sulphate solution."

"We swim in fresh water as often as in salt, and the pool is now filled with distilled water."

The Terrestrials quickly donned their bathing suits and all went through the observatory and down a winding path, bordered with the peculiarly beautiful scarlet and green shrubbery, to the "pool"--an artificial lake covering a hundred acres, its polished metal bottom and sides strikingly decorated with jewels and glittering tiles in tasteful yet contrasting inlaid designs. Any desired depth of water was available and plainly marked, from the fenced-off shallows where the smallest children splashed to the forty feet of liquid crystal which received the diver who cared to try his skill from one of the many spring-boards, flying rings, and catapults which rose high into the air a short distance away from the entrance.

Orlon and the others of the older generation plunged into the water without ado and struck out for the other shore, using a fast double-overarm stroke. Swimming in a wide circle they came out upon the apparatus and went through a series of methodical dives and gymnastic performances. It was evident that they swam, as Orlon had intimated, for exercise. To them, exercise was a necessary form of labor--labor which they performed thoroughly and well--but nothing to call forth the whole-souled enthusiasm they displayed in their chosen fields of mental effort.

The visitors from the Country of Youth, however, locked arms and sprang to surround the four Terrestrials, crying, "Let's do a group dive!"

"I don't believe that I can swim well enough to enjoy what's coming," whispered Margaret to Crane, and they slipped into the pool and turned around to watch. Seaton and Dorothy, both strong swimmers, locked arms and laughed as they were encircled by the green phalanx and swept out to the end of a dock-like structure and upon a catapult.

* * * * *

"Hold tight, everybody!" someone yelled, and interlaced, straining arms and legs held the green and white bodies in one motionless group as a gigantic force hurled them fifty feet into the air and out over the deepest part of the pool. There was a mighty splash and a miniature tidal wave as that mass of humanity struck the water. Many feet they went down before the cordon was broken and the individual units came to the surface. Then pandemonium reigned. Vigorous informal games, having to do with floating and sinking balls and effigies: pushball, in which the players never seemed to know, or to care, upon which side they were playing; water-fights and ducking contests.... A green mermaid, having felt the incredible power of Seaton's arms as he tossed her lightly away from a goal he was temporarily defending, put both her small hands around his biceps wonderingly, amazed at a strength unknown and impossible upon her world; then playfully tried to push him under. Failing, she called for help.

"He's needed a good ducking for ages!" Dorothy cried, and she and several other girls threw themselves upon him. Over and around him the lithe forms flashed, while the rest of the young people splashed water impartially over all the combatants and cheered them on. In the midst of the battle the signal sounded to end the period of exercise.

"Saved by the bell," Seaton laughed as, thoroughly ducked and almost half drowned, he was allowed to swim ashore.

When all had returned to the common room of the observatory and had seated themselves, Orlon took out his miniature ray-projector, no larger than a fountain pen, and flashed it briefly upon one of the hundreds of button-like lenses upon the wall. Instantly each chair converted itself into a form-fitting divan, inviting complete repose.

"I believe that you of Earth would perhaps enjoy some of our music during this, the period of relaxation and repose--it is so different from your own," Orlon remarked, as he again manipulated his tiny force-tube.

* * * * *

Every light was extinguished and there was felt a profoundly deep vibration--a note so low as to be palpable rather than audible; and simultaneously the utter darkness was relieved by a tinge of red so dark as to be barely perceptible, while a peculiar somber fragrance pervaded the atmosphere. The music rapidly ran the gamut to the limit of audibility and, in the same tempo, the lights traversed the visible spectrum and disappeared. Then came a crashing chord and a vivid flare of blended light; ushering in an indescribable symphony of sound and color, accompanied by a slower succession of shifting, blending odors.

The quality of tone was now that of a gigantic orchestra, now that of a full brass band, now that of a single unknown instrument--as though the composer had had at his command every overtone capable of being produced by any possible instrument, and with them had woven a veritable tapestry of melody upon an incredibly complex loom of sound. As went the harmony, so the play of light accompanied it. Neither music nor illumination came from any apparent source; they simply pervaded the entire room. When the music was fast--and certain passages were of a rapidity impossible for any human fingers to attain--the lights flashed in vivid, tiny pencils, intersecting each other in sharply drawn, brilliant figures, which changed with dizzying speed; when the tempo was slow, the beams were soft and broad, blending into each other to form sinuous, indefinite, writhing patterns, whose very vagueness was infinitely soothing.

"What do you think of it, Mrs. Seaton?" Orlon asked.

"Marvelous!" breathed Dorothy, awed. "I never imagined anything like it. I can't begin to tell you how much I like it. I never dreamed of such absolute perfection of execution, and the way the lighting accompanies the theme is just too perfectly wonderful for words! It was incredibly brilliant."

"Brilliant--yes. Perfectly executed--yes. But I notice that you say nothing of depth of feeling or of emotional appeal." Dorothy blushed uncomfortably and started to say something, but Orlon silenced her and continued: "You need not apologize. I had a reason for speaking as I did, for in you I recognize a real musician, and our music is indeed entirely soulless. That is the result of our ancient civilization. We are so old that our music is purely intellectual, entirely mechanical, instead of emotional. It is perfect, but, like most of our other arts, it is almost completely without feeling."

"But your statues are wonderful!"

"As I told you, those statues were made myriads of years ago. At that time we also had real music, but, unlike statuary, music at that time could not be preserved for posterity. That is another thing you have given us. Attend!"

At one end of the room, as upon a three-dimensional screen, the four Terrestrials saw themselves seated in the control-room of the _Skylark_. They saw and heard Margaret take up her guitar, and strike four sonorous chords in "A." Then, as if they had been there in person, they heard themselves sing "The Bull-Frog" and all the other songs they had sung, far off in space. They heard Margaret suggest that Dorothy play some "real music," and heard Seaton's comments upon the quartette.

"In that, youngster, you were entirely wrong," said Orlon, stopping the reproduction for a moment. "The entire planet was listening to you very attentively--we were enjoying it as no music has been enjoyed for thousands of years."

"The whole planet!" gasped Margaret. "Were you broadcasting it? How could you?"

"Easy," grinned Seaton. "They can do most anything with these rays of theirs."

"When you have time, in some period of labor, we would appreciate it very much if you four would sing for us again, would give us more of your vast store of youthful music, for we can now preserve it exactly as it is sung. But much as we enjoyed the quartette, Mrs. Seaton, it was your work upon the violin that took us by storm. Beginning with tomorrow, my companion intends to have you spend as many periods as you will, playing for our records. We shall now have your music."

"If you like it so well, wouldn't you rather I'd play you something I hadn't played before?"

"That is labor. We could not...."

"Piffle!" Dorothy interrupted. "Don't you see that I could really play right now, with somebody to listen, who really enjoys music; whereas, if I tried to play in front of a record, I'd be perfectly mechanical?"

"'At-a-girl, Dot! I'll get your fiddle."

"Keep your seat, son," instructed Orlon, as the case containing the Stradivarius appeared before Dorothy, borne by a pencil of force. "While that temperament is incomprehensible to every one of us, it is undoubtedly true that the artistic mind does work in that manner. We listen."

Dorothy swept into "The Melody in F," and as the poignantly beautiful strains poured forth from that wonderful violin, she knew that she had her audience with her. Though so intellectual that they themselves were incapable of producing music of real depth of feeling, they could understand and could enjoy such music with an appreciation impossible to a people of lesser mental attainments; and their profound enjoyment of her playing, burned into her mind by the telepathic, almost hypnotic power of the Norlaminian mentality, raised her to heights of power she had never before attained. Playing as one inspired, she went through one tremendous solo after another--holding her listeners spellbound, urged on by their intense feeling to carry them further and ever further into the realm of pure emotional harmony. The bell which ordinarily signaled the end of the period of relaxation did not sound; for the first time in thousands of years the planet of Norlamin deserted its rigid schedule of life--to listen to one Earth-woman, pouring out her very soul upon her incomparable violin.

The final note of "Memories" died away in a diminuendo wail, and the musician almost collapsed into Seaton's arms. The profound silence, more impressive far than any possible applause, was soon broken by Dorothy.

"There--I'm all right now, Dick. I was about out of control for a minute. I wish they could have had that on a recorder--I'll never be able to play like that again if I live to be a thousand years old."

"It is on record, daughter. Every note and every inflection is preserved, precisely as you played it," Orlon assured her. "That is our only excuse for allowing you to continue as you did, almost to the point of exhaustion. While we cannot really understand an artistic mind of the peculiar type to which yours belongs, yet we realized that each time you play you are doing something that no one, not even yourself, can ever do again in precisely the same subtle fashion. Therefore we allowed, in fact encouraged, you to go on as long as that creative impulse should endure--not merely for our pleasure in hearing it, great though that pleasure was, but in the hope that our workers in music could, by a careful analysis of your product, determine quantitatively the exact vibrations or overtones which make the difference between emotional and intellectual music."

CHAPTER XI

Into a Sun

As Rovol and Seaton approached the physics laboratory at the beginning of the period of labor, another small airboat occupied by one man drew up beside them and followed them to the ground. The stranger, another white-bearded ancient, greeted Rovol cordially and was introduced to Seaton as "Caslor, the First of Mechanism."

"Truly, this is a high point in the course of Norlaminian science, my young friend," Caslor acknowledged the introduction smilingly. "You have enabled us to put into practice many things which our ancestors studied in theory for many a wearisome cycle of time." Turning to Rovol, he went on: "I understand that you require a particularly precise directional mechanism? I know well that it must indeed be one of exceeding precision and delicacy, for the controls you yourself have built are able to hold upon any point, however moving, within the limits of our immediate solar system."

"We require controls a million times as delicate as any I have constructed," said Rovol, "therefore I have called your surpassing skill into co-operation. It is senseless for me to attempt a task in which I would be doomed to failure. We intend to send out a fifth-order projection, something none of our ancestors ever even dreamed of, which, with its inconceivable velocity of propagation, will enable us to explore any region in the galaxy as quickly as we now visit our closest sister planet. Knowing the dimensions of this, our galaxy, you can readily understand the exact degree of precision required to hold upon a point at its outermost edge."

"Truly, a problem worthy of any man's brain," Caslor replied after a moment's thought. "Those small circles," pointing to the forty-foot hour and declination circles which Seaton had thought the ultimate in precise measurement of angular magnitudes, "are of course useless. I shall have to construct large and accurate circles, and in order to produce the slow and fast motions of the required nature, without creep, slip, play, or backlash, I shall require a pure torque, capable of being increased by infinitesimal increments.... Pure torque."

He thought deeply for a time, then went on: "No gear-train or chain mechanism can be built of sufficient tightness, since in any mechanism there is some freedom of motion, however slight, and for this purpose the director must have no freedom of motion whatever. We must have a pure torque--and the only possible force answering our requirements is the four hundred sixty-seventh band of the fourth order. I shall therefore be compelled to develop that band. The director must, of course, have a full equatorial mounting, with circles some two hundred and fifty feet in diameter. Must your projector tube be longer than that, for correct design?"

"That length will be ample."

"The mounting must be capable of rotation through the full circle of arc in either plane, and must be driven in precisely the motion required to neutralize the motion of our planet, which, as you know, is somewhat irregular. Additional fast and slow motions must, of course, be provided to rotate the mechanism upon each graduated circle at the will of the operator. It is my idea to make the outer supporting tube quite large, so that you will have full freedom with your inner, or projector tube proper. It seems to me that dimensions X37 B42 J867 would perhaps be as good as any."

"Perfectly satisfactory. You have the apparatus well in mind."

"These things will consume some time. How soon will you require this mechanism?" asked Caslor.

"We also have much to do. Two periods of labor, let us say: or, if you require them, three."

"It is well. Two periods will be ample time: I was afraid that you might need it today, and the work cannot be accomplished in one period of labor. The mounting will, of course, be prepared in the Area of Experiment. Farewell."

"You aren't going to build the final projector here, then?" Seaton asked as Caslor's flier disappeared.

"We shall build it here, then transport it to the Area, where its dirigible housing will be ready to receive it. All mechanisms of that type are set up there. Not only is the location convenient to all interested, but there are to be found all necessary tools, equipment and material. Also, and not least important for such long-range work as we contemplate, the entire Area of Experiment is anchored immovably to the solid crust of the planet, so that there can be not even the slightest vibration to affect the direction of our beams of force, which must, of course, be very long."

He closed the master switches of his power-plants and the two resumed work where they had left off. The control panel was soon finished. Rovol then plated an immense cylinder of copper and placed it in the power-plant. He next set up an entirely new system of refractory relief-points and installed additional ground-rods, sealed through the floor and extending deep into the ground below, explaining as he worked.

"You see, son, we must lose one one-thousandth of one per cent of our total energy, and provision must be made for its dissipation in order to avoid destruction of the laboratory. These air-gap resistances are the simplest means of disposing of the wasted power."

"I get you--but say, how about disposing of it when we get the thing in a ship out in space? We picked up pretty heavy charges in the _Skylark_--so heavy that I had to hold up several times in the ionized layer of an atmosphere while they faded--and this outfit will burn up tons of copper where the old ones used ounces."

"In the projected space-vessel we shall install converters to utilize all the energy, so that there will be no loss whatever. Since such converters must be designed and built especially for each installation, and since they require a high degree of precision, it is not worth while to construct them for a purely temporary mechanism, such as this one."

* * * * *

The walls of the laboratory were opened, ventilating blowers were built, and refrigerating coils were set up everywhere, even in the tubular structure and behind the visiplates. After assuring themselves that everything combustible had been removed, the two scientists put on under their helmets, goggles whose protecting lenses could be built up to any desired thickness. Rovol then threw a switch, and a hemisphere of flaming golden radiance surrounded the laboratory and extended for miles upon all sides.

"I get most of the stuff you've pulled so far, but why such a light?" asked Seaton.

"As a warning. This entire area will be filled with dangerous frequencies, and that light is a warning for all uninsulated persons to give our theater of operations a wide berth."

"I see. What next?"

"All that remains to be done is to take our lens-material and go," replied Rovol, as he took from a cupboard the largest faidon that Seaton had ever seen.

"Oh, that's what you're going to use! You know, I've been wondering about that stuff. I took one back with me to the Earth to experiment on. I gave it everything I could think of and couldn't touch it. I couldn't even make it change its temperature. What is it, anyway?"

"It is not matter at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. It is almost pure crystallized energy. You have, of course, noticed that it looks transparent, but that it is not. You cannot see into its substance a millionth of a micron--the illusion of transparency being purely a surface phenomenon, and peculiar to this one form of substance. I have told you that the ether is a fourth-order substance--this also is a fourth-order substance, but it is crystalline, whereas the ether is probably fluid and amorphous. You might call this faidon crystallized ether without being far wrong."

"But it should weigh tons, and it is hardly heavier than air--or no, wait a minute. Gravitation is also a fourth-order phenomenon, so it might not weigh anything at all--but it would have terrific mass--or would it, not having protons? Crystallized ether would displace fluid ether, so it might--I'll give up! It's too deep for me!" said Seaton.

"Its theory is abstruse, and I cannot explain it to you any more fully than I have, until after we have given you a knowledge of the fourth and fifth orders. Pure fourth-order material would be without weight and without mass; but these crystals as they are found are not absolutely pure. In crystallizing from the magma, they entrapped sufficient numbers of particles of the higher orders to give them the characteristics which you have observed. The impurities, however, are not sufficient in quantity to offer a point of attack to any ordinary reagent."

"But how could such material possibly be formed?"

"It could be formed only in some such gigantic cosmic body as this, our green system, formed incalculable ages ago, when all the mass comprising it existed as one colossal sun. Picture for yourself the condition in the center of that sun. It has attained the theoretical maximum of temperature--some seventy million of your centigrade degrees--the electrons have been stripped from the protons until the entire central core is one solid ball of neutronium and can be compressed no more without destruction of the protons themselves. Still the pressure increases. The temperature, already at the theoretical maximum, can no longer increase. What happens?"

"Disruption."

"Precisely. And just at the instant of disruption, during the very instant of generation of the frightful forces that are to hurl suns, planets and satellites millions of miles out into space--in that instant of time, as a result of those unimaginable temperatures and pressures, the faidon comes into being. It can be formed only by the absolute maximum of temperature and at a pressure which can exist only momentarily, even in the largest conceivable masses."

"Then how can you make a lens of it? It must be impossible to work it in any way."

"It cannot be worked in any ordinary way, but we shall take this crystal into the depths of that white dwarf star, into a region in which obtain pressures and temperatures only less than those giving it birth. There we shall play forces upon it which, under those conditions, will be able to work it quite readily."

"Hm--m--m. I want to see that! Let's go!"

They seated themselves at the panels, and Rovol began to manipulate keys, levers and dials. Instantly a complex structure of visible force--rods, beams and flat areas of flaming scarlet energy--appeared at the end of the tubular, telescope-like network.

"Why red?"

"Merely to render them visible. One cannot work well with invisible tools, hence I have imposed a colored light frequency upon the invisible frequencies of the forces. We will have an assortment of colors if you prefer," and as he spoke each ray assumed a different color, so that the end of the projector was almost lost beneath a riot of color.

The structure of force, which Seaton knew was the secondary projector, swung around as if sentient, and a lurid green ray extended itself, picked up the faidon, and lengthened out, hurling the jewel a thousand yards out through the open side of the laboratory. Rovol moved more controls and the structure again righted itself, swinging back into perfect alignment with the tube and carrying the faidon upon its extremity, a thousand yards beyond the roof of the laboratory.

"We are now ready to start our projection. Be sure your suit and goggles are perfectly tight. We must see what we are doing, so the light-rays must be heterodyned upon our carrier wave. Therefore the laboratory and all its neighborhood will be flooded with dangerous frequencies from the sun we are to visit, as well as with those from our own generators."

"O. K., chief! All tight here. You say it's ten light-years to that star. How long's it going to take us to get there?"

"About ten minutes. We could travel that far in less than ten seconds but for the fact that we must take the faidon with us. Slight as is its mass, it will require much energy in its acceleration. Our projections, of course, have no mass, and will require only the energy of propagation."

Rovol flicked a finger, a massive pair of plunger switches shot into their sockets, and Seaton, seated at his board and staring into his visiplate, was astounded to find that he apparently possessed a dual personality. He _knew_ that he was seated motionless in the operator's chair in the base of the rigidly anchored primary projector, and by taking his eyes away from the visiplate before him, he could see that nothing in the laboratory had changed, except that the pyrotechnic display from the power-bar was of unusual intensity. Yet, looking into the visiplate, he was out in space _in person_, hurtling through space at a pace beside which the best effort of the _Skylark_ seemed the veriest crawl. Swinging his controls to look backward, he gasped as he saw, so stupendous was their velocity, that the green system was only barely discernible as a faint green star!

* * * * *

Again looking forward, it seemed as though a fierce white star had separated from the immovable firmament and was now so close to the structure of force in which he was riding that it was already showing a disk perceptible to the unaided eye. A few moments more and the violet-white splendor became so intense that the watchers began to build up, layer by layer, the protective goggles before their eyes. As they approached still closer, falling with their unthinkable velocity into that incandescent inferno, a sight was revealed to their eyes such as man had never before been privileged to gaze upon. They were falling into a white dwarf star, could see everything visible during such an unheard-of journey, and would live to remember what they had seen! They saw the magnificent spectacle of solar prominences shooting hundreds of thousands of miles into space, and directly in their path they saw an immense sunspot, a combined volcanic eruption and cyclonic storm in a gaseous-liquid medium of blinding incandescence.

"Better dodge that spot, hadn't we, ace? Mightn't it be generating interfering fourth-order frequencies?" cried Seaton.

"It is undoubtedly generating fourth-order rays, but nothing can interfere with us, since we are controlling every component of our beam from Norlamin."

Seaton gripped his hand-rail violently and involuntarily drew himself together into the smallest possible compass as, with their awful speed unchecked, they plunged through that flaming, incandescent photosphere and on, straight down, into the unexplored, unimaginable interior of that frightful and searing orb. Through the protecting goggles, now a full four inches of that peculiar, golden, shielding metal, Seaton could see the structure of force in which he was, and could also see the faidon--in outline, as transparent diamonds are visible in equally transparent water. Their apparent motion slowed rapidly and the material about them thickened and became more and more opaque. The faidon drew back toward them until it was actually touching the projector, and eddy currents and striae became visible in the mass about them as their progress grew slower and slower.

"'Smatter? Something gone screwy?" demanded Seaton.

"Not at all, everything is working perfectly. The substance is now so dense that it is becoming opaque to rays of the fourth order, so that we are now partially displacing the medium instead of moving through it without friction. At the point where we can barely see to work; that is, when the fourth-order rays will be so retarded that they can no longer carry the heterodyned light waves without complete distortion, we shall stop automatically, as the material at that depth will have the required density to refract the fifth-order rays to the correct degree."

"How can our foundations stand it?" asked Seaton. "This stuff must be a hundred times as dense as platinum already, and we must he pushing a horrible load in going through it."

"We are exerting no force whatever upon our foundations nor upon Norlamin. The force is transmitted without loss from the power-plant in our laboratory to this secondary projector here inside the star, where it is liberated in the correct band to pull us through the mass, using all the mass ahead of us as anchorage. When we wish to return, we shall simply change the pull into a push. Ah! we are now at a standstill--now comes the most important moment of the entire project!"

All apparent motion had ceased, and Seaton could see only dimly the outlines of the faidon, now directly before his eyes. The structure of force slowly warped around until its front portion held the faidon as in a vise. Rovol pressed a lever and behind them, in the laboratory, four enormous plunger switches drove home. A plane of pure energy, flaming radiantly even in the indescribable incandescence of the core of that seething star, bisected the faidon neatly, and ten gigantic beams, five upon each half of the jewel, rapidly molded two sections of a geometrically-perfect hollow lens. The two sections were then brought together by the closing of the jaws of the mighty vise, their edges in exact alignment. Instantly the plane and the beams of energy became transformed into two terrific opposing tubes of force--vibrant, glowing tubes, whose edges in contact coincided with the almost invisible seam between the two halves of the lens.

Like a welding arc raised to the _nth_ power these two immeasurable and irresistible forces met exactly in opposition--a meeting of such incredible violence that seismic disturbances occurred throughout the entire mass of that dense, violet-white star. Sunspots of unprecedented size appeared, prominences erupted to hundreds of times their normal distances, and although the two scientists deep in the core of the tormented star were unaware of what was happening upon its surface, convulsion after Titanic convulsion wracked the mighty globe, and enormous masses of molten and gaseous material were riven from it and hurled far out into space--masses which would in time become planets of that youthful and turbulent luminary.

Seaton felt his air-supply grow hot. Suddenly it became icy cold, and knowing that Rovol had energized the refrigerator system, Seaton turned away from the fascinating welding operation for a quick look around the laboratory. As he did so, he realized Rovol's vast knowledge and understood the reason for the new system of relief-points and ground-rods, as well as the necessity for the all-embracing scheme of refrigeration.

Even through the practically opaque goggles he could see that the laboratory was one mass of genuine lightning. Not only from the relief-points, but from every metallic corner and protuberance the pent-up losses from the disintegrating bar were hurling themselves upon the flaring, blue-white, rapidly-volatilizing ground-rods; and the very air of the room, renewed second by second though it was by the powerful blowers, was beginning to take on the pearly luster of the highly-ionized corona. The bar was plainly visible, a scintillating demon of pure violet radiance, and a momentary spasm of fear seized him as he saw how rapidly that great mass of copper was shrinking--fear that their power would be exhausted with their task still uncompleted.

But the calculations of the aged physicist had been accurate. The lens was completed with some hundreds of pounds of copper to spare, and that geometrical form, with its precious content of semi-neutronium, was following the secondary projector back toward the green system. Rovol left his seat, discarded his armor, and signaled Seaton to do the same.

"I've got to hand it to you, ace--you sure are a blinding flash and a deafening report!" Seaton exclaimed, writhing out of his insulating suit. "I feel as though I'd been pulled half-way through a knot-hole and riveted over on both ends! How big a lens did you make, anyway? Looked as though it would hold a couple of liters; maybe three."

"Its contents are almost exactly three liters."

"Hm--m--m. Seven and a half million kilograms--say eight thousand tons. _Some_ mass, I'd say, to put into a gallon jug. Of course, being inside the faidon, it won't have any weight, but it'll have all its full quota of inertia. That's why you're taking so long to bring it in, of course."

"Yes. The projector will now bring it here into the laboratory without any further attention from us. The period of labor is about to end, and tomorrow we shall find the lens awaiting us when we arrive to begin work."

"How about cooling it off? It had a temperature of something like forty million degree centigrade before you started working on it; and when you got done with it, it was hot."

"You're forgetting again, son. Remember that the hot, dense material is entirely enclosed in an envelope impervious to all vibrations longer than those of the fifth order. You could put your hand upon it now, without receiving any sensation either of heat, or of cold."

"Yeah, that's right, too. I noticed that I could take a faidon right out of an electric arc and it wouldn't even be warm. I couldn't explain why it was, but I see now. So that stuff inside that lens will always stay as hot as it is right now! Zowie! Here's hoping she never explodes! Well, there's the bell--for once in my life, I'm all ready to quit when the whistle blows," and arm in arm the young Terrestrial chemist and the aged Norlaminian physicist strolled out to their waiting airboat.

CHAPTER XII

Flying Visits--Via Projection

"Well, what to do?" asked Seaton as he and Rovol entered the laboratory, "Tear down this fourth-order projector and tackle the big job? I see the lens is here, on schedule, so we can hop right into it."

"We shall have further use for this mechanism. We shall need at least one more lens of this dense material, and other scientists also may have need of one or two. Then, too, the new projector must be so large that it cannot be erected in this room."

As he spoke, Rovol seated himself at his control-desk and ran his fingers lightly over the keys. The entire wall of the laboratory disappeared, hundreds of beams of force darted here and there, seizing and working raw materials, and in the portal there grew up, to Seaton's amazement, a keyboard and panel installation such as the Earth-man, in his wildest moments, had never imagined. Bank upon bank of typewriter-like keys; row upon row of keys, pedals, and stops resembling somewhat those of the console of a gigantic pipe-organ; panel upon panel of meters, switches, and dials--all arranged about two deeply-cushioned chairs and within reach of their occupants.

"Whew! That looks like the combined mince-pie nightmares of a whole flock of linotype operators, pipe-organists, and hard-boiled radio hams!" exclaimed Seaton when the installation was complete. "Now that you've got it, what are you going to do with it?"

"There is not a control system in Norlamin adequate for the task we face, since the problem of the projection of rays of the fifth order has heretofore been of only academic interest. Therefore it becomes necessary to construct such a control. This mechanism will, I am confident, have a sufficiently wide range of application to perform any operation we shall require of it."

"It sure looks as though it could do almost anything, provided the man behind it knows how to play a tune on it--but if that rumble seat is for me, you'd better count me out right now. I followed you for about fifteen seconds, then lost you completely; and now I'm sunk without a trace," said Seaton.

"That is, of course, true, and is a point I was careless enough to overlook." Rovol thought for a moment, then got up, crossed the room to his control desk, and continued, "We shall dismantle the machine and rebuild it at once."

"Oh no--too much work!" protested Seaton, "You've got it about done, haven't you?"

"It is hardly started. Two hundred thousand bands of force must be linked to it, each in its proper place, and it is necessary that you should understand thoroughly every detail of this entire projector," Rovol answered.

"Why? I'm not ashamed to admit that I haven't got brains enough to understand a thing like that."

"You have sufficient brain capacity; it is merely undeveloped. There are two reasons why you must be as familiar with the operation of this mechanism as you are with the operation of one of your Earthly automobiles. The first is that a similar control is to be installed in your new space-vessel, since by its use you can attain a perfection of handling impossible by any other system. The second, and more important reason, is that neither I nor any other man of Norlamin could compel himself, by any force of will, to direct a ray that would take away the life of any fellow-man."

While Rovol was speaking, he reversed his rays, and soon the component parts of the new control had been disassembled and piled in orderly array about the room.

"Hm--m--m. Never thought of that. It's right too," mused Seaton. "How're you going to get it into my thick skull--with an educator?"

"Exactly," and Rovol sent a beam of force after his highly developed educational mechanism. Dials and electrodes were adjusted, connections were established, and the beams and pencils of force began to reconstruct the great central controlling device. But this time, instead of being merely a bewildered spectator, Seaton was an active participant in the work. As each key and meter was wrought and mounted, there were indelibly impressed upon his brain the exact reason for and function of the part, and later, when the control itself was finished and the seemingly interminable task of connecting it up to the output force-bands of the transformers had begun, he had a complete understanding of everything with which he was working, and understood all the means by which the ends he had so long desired were to be attained. For to the ancient scientist the tasks he was then performing were the merest routine, to be performed in reflex fashion, and he devoted most of his attention to transferring from his own brain to that of his young assistant as much of his stupendous knowledge as the smaller brain of the Terrestrial was capable of absorbing. More and more rapidly as the work progressed the mighty flood of knowledge poured into Seaton's mind. After an hour or so, when enough connections had been made so that automatic forces could be so directed as to finish the job, Rovol and Seaton left the laboratory and went into the living room. As they walked, the educator accompanied them, borne upon its beam of force.

"Your brain is behaving very nicely indeed," said Rovol, "much better than I would have thought possible from its size. In fact, it may be possible for me to transfer to you all the knowledge I have which might be of use to you. That is why I took you away from the laboratory. What do you think of the idea?"

"Our psychologists have always maintained that none of us ever uses more than a minute fraction of the actual capacity of his brain," Seaton replied after a moment's thought. "If you think you can give me even a percentage of your knowledge without killing me, go to it--I'm for it, strong!"

"Knowing that you would be, I have already requested Drasnik, the First of Psychology, to come here, and he has just arrived," answered Rovol. And as he spoke, that personage entered the room.

When the facts had been set before him, the psychologist nodded his head

"That is quite possible," he said with enthusiasm, "and I will be only too glad to assist in such an operation."

"But listen!" protested Seaton, "You'll probably change my whole personality! Rovol's brain is three times the size of mine."

"Tut-tut--nothing of the kind," Drasnik reproved him. "As you have said, you are using only a minute portion of the active mass of your brain. The same thing is true with us--many millions of cycles would have to pass before we would be able to fill the brains we now have."

"Then why are your brains so large?"

"Merely a provision of Nature that no possible accession of knowledge shall find her storehouse too small," replied Drasnik, positively. "Ready?"

All three donned the headsets and a wave of mental force swept into Seaton's mind, a wave of such power that the Terrestrial's every sense wilted under the impact. He did not faint, he did not lose consciousness--he simply lost all control of every nerve and fiber as his entire brain passed into the control of the immense mentality of the First of Psychology and became a purely receptive, plastic medium upon which to impress the knowledge of the aged physicist.

* * * * *

Hour after hour the transfer continued, Seaton lying limp as though lifeless, the two Norlaminians tense and rigid, every faculty concentrated upon the ignorant, virgin brain exposed to their gaze. Finally the operation was complete and Seaton, released from the weird, hypnotic grip of that stupendous mind, gasped, shook himself, and writhed to his feet.

"Great Cat!" he exclaimed, his eyes wide with astonishment. "I wouldn't have believed there was as much to know in the entire Universe as I know right now, and I know it as well as I ever knew elementary algebra. Thanks, fellows, a million times--but say, did you leave any open spaces for more? In one way, I seem to know less than I did before, there's so much more to find out. Can I learn anything more, or did you fill me up to capacity?"

The psychologist, who had been listening to the exuberant youth with undisguised pleasure, spoke calmly.

"The mere fact that you appreciate your comparative ignorance shows that you are still capable of learning. Your capacity to learn is greater than it ever was before, even though the waste space has been reduced. Much to our surprise, Rovol and I gave you all of his knowledge that would be of any use to you, and some of my own, and still theoretically you can add to it more than nine times the total of your present knowledge."

The psychologist departed, and Rovol and Seaton returned to the laboratory, where the forces were still merrily at work. There was nothing that could be done to hasten the connecting, and it was late in the following period of labor before they could begin the actual construction of the projector. Once started, however, it progressed with amazing rapidity. Now understanding the system, it did not seem strange to Seaton that he should merely actuate a certain combination of forces when he desired a certain operation performed; nor did it seem unusual or worthy of comment that one flick of his finger over that switchboard would send a force a distance of hundreds of miles to a factory where other forces were busily at work, to seize a hundred angle-bars of transparent purple metal that were to form the backbone of the fifth-order projector. Nor did it seem peculiar that the same force, with no further instruction, should bring these hundred bars back to him, in a high loop through the atmosphere; should deposit them gently in a convenient space near the site of operations; and then should disappear as though it had never existed! With such tools as that, it was a matter of only a few hours before the projector was done--a task that would have required years of planning and building upon Earth.

Two hundred and fifty feet it towered above their heads, a tubular network of braced and latticed bars of purple metal, fifty feet in diameter at the base and tapering smoothly to a diameter of about ten feet at the top. Built of a metal thousands of times as strong and hard as steel, it was not cumbersome in appearance, and yet was strong enough to be absolutely rigid. Ten enormous supporting forces held the lens of neutronium immovable in the exact center of the upper end; at intervals down the shaft similar forces held variously-shaped lenses and prisms formed from zones of force; in the center of the bottom or floor of the towering structure was the double controlling system, with a universal visiplate facing each operator.

"Well, Rovol, that's that," remarked Seaton as the last connection was made. "What say we hop in and give the baby a ride over to the Area of Experiment? Caslor must have the mounting done, and we've got time enough left in this period to try her out."

"In a moment. I am setting the fourth-order projector to go out to the dwarf star after an additional supply of neutronium."

Seaton, knowing from the data of their first journey, that the controls could be so set as to duplicate their feat in every particular without supervision, stepped into his seat in the new controller, pressed a key, and spoke.

"Hi, Dottie, what's on your mind?"

"Nothing much," Dorothy's clear voice answered. "Got it done and can I see it?"

"Sure--sit tight and I'll send a boat after you."

As he spoke, Rovol's flier darted into the air and away; and in two minutes it returned, slowing abruptly as it landed. Dorothy stepped out, radiant, and returned Seaton's enthusiastic caresses with equal fervor before she spoke.

"Lover, I'm afraid you violated all known speed laws getting me over here. Aren't you afraid of getting pinched?"

"Nope--not here. Besides, I didn't want to keep Rovol waiting--we're all ready to go. Hop in here with me, this left-hand control's mine."

Rovol entered the tube, took his place, and waved his hand. Seaton's hands swept over the keys and the whole gigantic structure wafted into the air. Still upright, it was borne upon immense rods of force toward the Area of Experiment, which was soon reached. Covered as the Area was with fantastic equipment, there was no doubt as to their destination, for in plain sight, dominating all the lesser instruments, there rose a stupendous telescopic mounting, with an enormous hollow tube of metallic lattice-work which could be intended for nothing else than their projector. Approaching it carefully, Seaton deftly guided the projector lengthwise into that hollow receptacle and anchored it in the exact optical axis. Flashing beams of force made short work of welding the two tubes together immovably with angles and lattices of the same purple metal, the terminals of the variable-speed motors were attached to the controllers, and everything was in readiness for the first trial.

"What special instructions do we need to run it, if any?" Seaton asked of the First of Mechanism, who had lifted himself up into the projector.

"Very little. This motor governs the hour motion, that one the right ascension. The potentiometers regulate the degree of vernier action--any ratio is possible, from direct drive up to more than a hundred million complete revolutions of that graduated dial to give you one second of arc."

"Plenty fine, I'd say. Thanks a lot, ace. Whither away, Rovol--any choice?"

"Anywhere you please, son, since this is merely a try-out."

"O. K. We'll hop over and tell Dunark hello."

The tube swung around into line with that distant planet and Seaton stepped down hard, upon a pedal. Instantly they seemed infinite myriads of miles out in space, the green system barely visible as a faint green star behind them.

"Wow, that ray's fast!" exclaimed the pilot, ruefully. "I overshot about a thousand light years. We'll try again, with considerably less power," and he rearranged and reset the dials and meters before him. Adjustment after adjustment and many reductions in power had to be made before the projection ceased leaping millions of miles at a touch, but finally the operators became familiar with the new technique and the ray became manageable. Soon they were hovering above what had been Mardonal, and saw that all signs of warfare had disappeared. Slowly turning the controls, Seaton flashed the projection over the girdling Osnomian sea and guided it through the impregnable metal walls of the palace into the throne room of Roban, where they saw the Emperor, Tarnan the Karbix, and Dunark in close conference.

"Well, here we are," remarked Seaton. "Now we'll put on a little visibility and give the natives a treat."

"Sh-sh," whispered Dorothy, "they'll hear you, Dick--we're intruding shamefully."

"No, they won't hear us, because I haven't heterodyned the audio in on the wave yet. And as for intruding, that's exactly what we came over here for."

* * * * *

He imposed the audio system upon the inconceivably high frequency of their carrier wave and spoke in the Osnomian tongue.

"Greetings, Roban, Dunark, and Tarnan, from Seaton." All three jumped to their feet, amazed, staring about the empty room as Seaton went on, "I am not here in person. I am simply sending you my projection. Just a moment and I will put on a little visibility."

He brought more forces into play, and solid images of force appeared in the great hall; images of the three occupants of the controller. Introductions and greetings over, Seaton spoke briefly and to the point.

"We've got everything we came after--much more than I had any idea we could get. You need have no more fear of the Fenachrone--we have found a science superior to theirs. But much remains to be done, and we have none too much time; therefore I have come to you with certain requests."

"The Overlord has but to command," replied Roban.

"Not command, since we are all working together for a common cause. In the name of that cause, Dunark, I ask you to come to me at once, accompanied by Tarnan and any others you may select. You will be piloted by a ray which we shall set upon your controls. Upon your way here you will visit the First City of Dasor, another planet, where you will pick up Sacner Carfon, who will be awaiting you there."

"As you direct, so it shall be," and Seaton flashed the projector to the neighboring planet of Urvania. There he found that the gigantic space-cruiser he had ordered had been completed, and requested Urvan and his commander-in-chief to tow it to Norlamin, piloted by a ray. He then jumped to Dasor, there interviewing Carfon and being assured of the full co-operation of the porpoise-men.

"Well, that's that, folks," said Seaton as he shut off the power. "We can't do much more for a few days, until the gang gets here for the council of war. How'd it be, Rovol, for me to practice with this outfit while you are finishing up the odds and ends you want to clean up? You might suggest to Orlon, too, that it'd be a good deed for him to pilot those folks over here."

As Rovol wafted himself to the ground from their lofty station, Crane and Margaret appeared and were lifted up to the place formerly occupied by the physicist.

"How's tricks, Mart? I hear you're quite an astronomer?" said Seaton.

"Yes, thanks to Orlon and the First of Psychology. He seemed quite interested in increasing our Earthly knowledge. I certainly know much more than I had ever hoped to know of anything."

"Yeah, you can pilot us to the Fenachrone system now without any trouble. You also absorbed some ethnology and kindred sciences. What d'you think--with Dunark and Urvan, do we know enough to go ahead or should we take a chance on holding things up while we get acquainted with some of the other peoples of these planets of the green system?"

"Delay is dangerous, as our time is already short," Crane replied after a time. "We know enough, I believe; and furthermore, any additional assistance is problematical; in fact, it is more than doubtful. The Norlaminians have surveyed the system rather thoroughly, and no other planet seems to have inhabitants who have even approached the development attained here."

"Right--that's the way I dope it, exactly. We'll wait until the gang assembles, then go over the top. In the meantime, I called you over to take a ride in this projector--it's a darb. I'd like to shoot for the Fenachrone system first, but I don't quite dare to."

"Don't _dare_ to? You?" scoffed Margaret. "How come?"

"Cancel the 'dare'--change it to 'prefer not to.' Why? Because while they can't work through a zone of force, some of their real scientists--and they have lots of them, not like the bull-headed soldier we captured--may well be able to detect a fifth-order ray--even if they can't work with them intelligently--and if they detected our ray, it'd put them on guard."

"You are exactly right, Dick," agreed Crane. "And there speaks the Norlaminian physicist, and not my old and reckless playmate Richard Seaton."

"Oh, I don't know--I told you I was getting timid as a mouse. But let's not sit here twiddling our thumbs--let's go places and do things. Whither away? I want a destination a good ways off, not something in our own back yard."

"Go back home, of course, stupe," put in Dorothy, "do you have to be told every little thing?"

"Sure--never thought of that," and Seaton, after a moment's rapid mental arithmetic, swung the great tube around, rapidly adjusted a few dials, and stepped down upon a pedal. There was a fleeting instant of unthinkable velocity; then they found themselves poised somewhere in space.

"Well, wonder how far I missed it on my first shot?" Seaton's crisp voice broke the stunned silence. "Guess that's our sun, over to the left, ain't it, Mart?"

"Yes. You were about right for distance, and within a few tenths of a light-year laterally. That is fairly close, I should have said."

"Rotten, for these controls. Except for the effect of relative proper motions, which I can't calculate yet for lack of data. I should be able to hit a gnat right in the left eye at this range--and the difference in proper motions couldn't have thrown me off more than a few hundred feet. Nope, I was too anxious--hurried too much on the settings of the slow verniers. I'll snap back and try it again."

He adjusted the verniers very carefully, and again threw on the power. Again there was the sensation of the barest perceptible moment of unimaginable speed, and they were in the air some fifty feet above the ground of Crane Field, almost above the testing shed. Seaton rapidly adjusted the variable-speed motors until they were perfectly stationary, relative to the surface of the earth.

"You are improving," commended Crane.

"Yeah--that's more like it. Guess maybe I can learn in time to shoot this gun. Well, let's go down."

They dropped through the roof into the laboratory where Maxwell, now in charge of the place, was watching a reaction and occasionally taking notes.

"Hi, Max! Seaton speaking, on a television. Got your range?"

"Exactly, Chief, apparently. I can hear you perfectly, but can't see anything," Maxwell stared about the empty laboratory.

"You will in a minute. I knew I had you, but didn't want to scare you out of a year's growth," and Seaton thickened the image until they were plainly visible.

"Please call Mr. Vaneman on the phone and tell him you're in touch with us," directed Seaton as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "Better yet, after you've broken it to them gently, Dot can talk to them, then we'll go over and see 'em."

The connection established, Dorothy's image floated up to the telephone and apparently spoke.

"Mother? This is the weirdest thing you ever imagined. We're not really here at all you know--we're actually here in Norlamin--no, I mean Dick's just sending a kind of a talking picture of us to see you on earth here.... Oh, no, I don't know anything about it--it's like a talkie sent by radio, only worse, because I am saying this myself right now, without any rehearsal or anything ... we didn't want to burst in on you without warning, because you'd be sure to think you were seeing actual ghosts, and we're not dead the least bit ... we're having the most perfectly gorgeous time you ever imagined.... Oh, I'm so excited I can't explain anything, even if I knew anything about it to explain. We'll all four of us be over there in about a second and tell you all about it. 'Bye!"

Indeed, it was even less than a second--Mrs. Vaneman was still in the act of hanging up the receiver when the image materialized in the living room of Dorothy's girlhood home.

"Hello, mother and dad," Seaton's voice was cheerful but matter-of-fact. "I'll thicken this up so you can see us better in a minute. But don't think that we are flesh and blood. You'll see simply three-dimensional talking pictures of ourselves, transmitted by radio."

For a long time Mr. and Mrs. Vaneman chatted with the four visitors from so far away in space, while Seaton gloried in the working of that marvelous projector.

"Well, our time's about up," Seaton finally ended the visit. "The quitting-whistle's going to blow in five minutes, and they don't like overtime work here where we are. We'll drop in and see you again maybe, sometime before we come back."

"Do you know yet when you are coming back?" asked Mrs. Vaneman.

"Not an idea in the world, mother, any more than we had when we started. But we're getting along fine, having the time of our lives, and are learning a lot besides. So-long!" and Seaton clicked off the power.

* * * * *

As they descended from the projector and walked toward the waiting airboat, Seaton fell in beside Rovol.

"You know they've got our new cruiser built of dagal, and are bringing it over here. Dagal's good stuff, but it isn't as good as your purple metal, inoson, which is the theoretical ultimate in strength possible for any material possessing molecular structure. Why wouldn't it be a sound idea to flash it into inoson when it gets here?"

"That would be an excellent idea, and we shall do so. It also has occurred to me that Caslor of Mechanism, Astron of Energy, Satrazon of Chemistry, myself, and one of two others, should collaborate in installing a very complete fifth-order projector in the new _Skylark_, as well as any other equipment which may seem desirable. The security of the Universe may depend upon the abilities and qualities of you Terrestrials and your vessel, and therefore _nothing_ should be left undone which it is possible for us to do."

"You chirped something then, old scout--thanks. You might do that, while I attend to such preliminaries as wiping out the Fenachrone fleet."

In due time the reinforcements from the other planets arrived, and the mammoth space-cruiser attracted attention even before it landed, so enormous was she in comparison with the tiny vessels having her in tow. Resting upon the ground, it seemed absurd that such a structure could possibly move under her own power. For two miles that enormous mass of metal extended over the country-side, and while it was very narrow for its length, still its fifteen hundred feet of diameter dwarfed everything near by. But Rovol and his aged co-workers smiled happily as they saw it, erected their keyboards, and set to work with a will.

Meanwhile a group had gathered about a conference table--a group such as had never before been seen together upon any world. There was Fodan, the ancient Chief of the Five of Norlamin, huge-headed, with his leonine mane and flowing beard of white. There were Dunark and Tarnan of Osnome and Urvan of Urvania--smooth-faced and keen, utterly implacable and ruthless in war. There was Sacner Carfon Twenty Three Forty Six, the immense, porpoise-like, hairless Dasorian. There were Seaton and Crane, representatives of our own Earthly civilization.

Seaton opened the meeting by handing each man a headset and running a reel showing the plans of the Fenachrone; not only as he had secured them from the captain of the marauding vessel, but also everything the First of Psychology had deduced from his own study of that inhuman brain. He then removed the reel and gave them the tentative plans of battle. Headsets removed, he threw the meeting open for discussion--and discussion there was in plenty. Each man had ideas, which were thrown upon the table and studied, for the most part calmly and dispassionately. The conference continued until only one point was left, upon which argument waxed so hot that everyone seemed shouting at once.

"Order!" commanded Seaton, banging his fist upon the table. "Osnome and Urvania wish to strike without warning, Norlamin and Dasor insist upon a formal declaration of war. Earth has the deciding vote. Mart, how do we vote on this?"

"I vote for formal warning, for two reasons, one of which I believe will convince even Dunark. First, because it is the fair thing to do--which reason is, of course, the one actuating the Norlaminians, but which would not be considered by Osnome, nor even remotely understood by the Fenachrone. Second, I am certain that the Fenachrone will merely be enraged by the warning and will defy us. Then what will they do? You have already said that you have been able to locate only a few of their exploring warships. As soon as we declare war upon them they will almost certainly send out torpedoes to every one of their ships of war. We can then follow the torpedoes with our rays, and thus will be enabled to find and to destroy their vessels."

"That settles that," declared the chairman as a shout of agreement arose. "We shall now adjourn to the projector and send the warning. I have a ray upon the torpedo, announcing the destruction by us of their vessel, and that torpedo will arrive at its destination in less than an hour. It seems to me that we should make our announcement immediately after their ruler has received the news of their first defeat."

In the projector, where they were joined by Rovol, Orlon, and several others of the various "Firsts" of Norlamin, they flashed out to the flying torpedo, and Seaton grinned at Crane as their fifth-order carrier beam went through the far-flung detector screens of the Fenachrone without setting up the slightest reaction. In the wake of that speeding messenger they flew through a warm, foggy, dense atmosphere, through a receiving trap in the wall of a gigantic conical structure, and on into the telegraph room. They saw the operator remove spools of tape from the torpedo and attach them to a magnetic sender--heard him speak.

"Pardon, your majesty--we have just received a first-degree emergency torpedo from flagship Y427W of fleet 42. In readiness."

"Put it on, here in the council chamber," a deep voice snapped.

"If he's broadcasting it, we're in for a spell of hunting," Seaton remarked. "Nope, he's putting it on a tight beam--that's fine, we can chase it up," and with a narrow detector beam he traced the invisible transmission beam into the council room.

"'Sfunny. This place seems awfully familiar--I'd swear I'd seen it before, lots of times--seems like I've been in it, more than once," Seaton remarked, puzzled, as he looked around the somber room, with its dull, paneled metal walls covered with charts, maps, screens, and speakers; and with its low, massive furniture. "Oh, sure, I'm familiar with it from studying the brain of that Fenachrone captain. Well, while His Nibs is absorbing the bad news, we'll go over this once more. You, Carfon, having the biggest voice of any of us ever heard uttering intelligible language, are to give the speech. You know about what to say. When I say 'go ahead' do your stuff. Now, everybody else, listen. While he's talking I've got to have audio waves heterodyned both ways in the circuit, and they'll be able to hear any noise any of us make--so all of us except Carfon want to keep absolutely quiet, no matter what happens or what we see. As soon as he's done I'll cut off the audio sending and say something to let you all know we're off the air. Got it?"

"One point has occurred to me about handling the warning," boomed Carfon. "If it should be delivered from apparently empty air, directly at those we wish to address, it would give the enemy an insight into our methods, which might be undesirable."

"H--m--m. Never thought of that ... it sure would, and it would be undesirable," agreed Seaton. "Let's see ... we can get away from that by broadcasting it. They have a very complete system of speakers, but no matter how many private-band speakers a man may have, he always has one on the general wave, which is used for very important announcements of wide interest. I'll broadcast you on that wave, so that every general-wave speaker on the planet will be energized. That way, it'll look as if we're shooting from a distance. You might talk accordingly."

"If we have a minute more, there's something I would like to ask," Dunark broke the ensuing silence. "Here we are, seeing everything that is happening there. Walls, planets, even suns, do not bar our vision, because of the fifth-order carrier wave. I understand that, partially. But how can we see anything there? I always thought that I knew something about rays, but I see that I do not. The light-rays must be released, or deheterodyned, close to the object viewed, with nothing opaque to light intervening. They must then be reflected from the object seen, must be gathered together, again heterodyned upon the fifth-order carrier, and retransmitted back to us. And there is neither receiver nor transmitter at the other end. How can you do all that from our end?"

"We don't," Seaton assured him. "At the other end there are all the things you mentioned, and a lot more besides. Our secondary projector out there is composed of forces, visible or invisible, as we please. Part of those forces comprise the receiving, viewing, and sending instruments. They are not material, it is true, but they are nevertheless fully as actual, and far more efficient, than any other system of radio, television, or telephone in existence anywhere else. It is force, you know, that makes radio or television work--the actual copper, insulation, and other matter serve only to guide and to control the various forces employed. The Norlaminian scientists have found out how to direct and control pure forces without using the cumbersome and hindering material substance...."

He broke off as the record from the torpedo stopped suddenly and the operator's voice came through a speaker.

"General Fenimol! Scoutship K3296, patrolling the detector zone, wishes to give you an urgent emergency report. I told them that you were in council with the Emperor, and they instructed me to interrupt it, no matter how important the council may be. They have on board a survivor of the Y427W, and have captured and killed two men of the same race as those who destroyed our vessel. They say that you will want their report without an instant's delay."

"We do!" barked the general, at a sign from his ruler. "Put it on here. Run the rest of the torpedo report immediately afterward."

In the projector, Seaton stared at Crane a moment, then a light of understanding spread over his features.

"DuQuesne, of course--I'll bet a hat no other Terrestrial is this far from home. I can't help feeling sorry for the poor devil--he's a darn good man gone wrong--but we'd have had to kill him ourselves before we got done with him; so it's probably as well they got him. Pin your ears back, everybody, and watch close--we want to get this, all of it."

CHAPTER XIII

The Declaration of War

The capital city of the Fenachrone lay in a jungle plain surrounded by towering hills. A perfect circle of immense diameter, its buildings of uniform height, of identical design, and constructed of the same dull gray, translucent metal, were arranged in concentric circles, like the annular rings seen upon the stump of a tree. Between each ring of buildings and the one next inside it there were lagoons, lawns and groves--lagoons of tepid, sullenly-steaming water; lawns which were veritable carpets of lush, rank rushes and of dank mosses; groves of palms, gigantic ferns, bamboos, and numerous tropical growths unknown to Earthly botany. At the very edge of the city began jungle unrelieved and primeval; the impenetrable, unconquerable jungle, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there. Wind there was none, nor sunshine. Only occasionally was the sun of that reeking world visible through the omnipresent fog, a pale, wan disk; always the atmosphere was one of oppressive, hot, humid vapor. In the exact center of the city rose an immense structure, a terraced cone of buildings, as though immense disks of smaller and smaller diameter had been piled one upon the other. In these apartments dwelt the nobility and the high officials of the Fenachrone. In the highest disk of all, invisible always from the surface of the planet because of the all-enshrouding mist, were the apartments of the Emperor of that monstrous race.

Seated upon low, heavily-built metal stools about the great table in the council-room were Fenor, Emperor of the Fenachrone; Fenimol, his General-in-Command, and the full Council of Eleven of the planet. Being projected in the air before them was a three-dimensional moving, talking picture--the report of the sole survivor of the warship that had attacked the _Skylark II_. In exact accordance with the facts as the engineer knew them, the details of the battle and complete information concerning the conquerors were shown. As vividly as though the scene were being re-enacted before their eyes they saw the captive revive in the _Violet_, and heard the conversation between the engineer, DuQuesne, and Loring.

In the _Violet_ they sped for days and weeks, with ever-mounting velocity, toward the system of the Fenachrone. Finally, power reversed, they approached it, saw the planet looming large, and passed within the detector screen.

DuQuesne tightened the controls of the attractors, which had never been entirely released from their prisoner, thus again pinning the Fenachrone helplessly against the wall.

"Just to be sure you don't try to start something," he explained coldly. "You have done well so far, but I'll run things myself from now on, so that you can't steer us into a trap. Now tell me exactly how to go about getting one of your vessels. After we get it, I'll see about letting you go."

"Fools, you are too late! You would have been too late, even had you killed me out there in space and had fled at your utmost acceleration. Did you but know it, you are as dead, even now--our patrol is upon you!"

DuQuesne whirled, snarling, and his automatic and that of Loring were leaping out when an awful acceleration threw them flat upon the floor, a magnetic force snatched away their weapons, and a heat-ray reduced them to two small piles of gray ash. Immediately thereafter a beam of force from the patrolling cruiser neutralized the retractors bearing upon the captive, and he was transferred to the rescuing vessel.

The emergency report ended, and with a brief "Torpedo message from flagship Y427W resumed at point of interruption," the report from the ill-fated vessel continued the story of its own destruction, but added little in the already complete knowledge of the disaster.

Fenor of the Fenachrone leaped up from the table, his terrible, flame-shot eyes glaring venomously--teetering in Berserk rage upon his block-like legs--but he did not for one second take his full attention from the report until it had been completed. Then he seized the nearest object, which happened to be his chair, and with all his enormous strength hurled it across the floor, where it lay, a tattered, twisted, shapeless mass of metal.

"Thus shall we treat the entire race of the accursed beings who have done this!" he stormed, his heavy voice reverberating throughout the room. "Torture, dismemberment and annihilation to every...."

"Fenor of the Fenachrone!" a tremendous voice, a full octave lower than Fenor's own terrific bass, and of ear-shattering volume and timbre in that dense atmosphere boomed from the general-wave speaker, its deafening roar drowning out Fenor's raging voice and every other lesser sound.

"Fenor of the Fenachrone! I know that you hear, for every general-wave speaker upon your reeking planet is voicing my words. Listen well, for this warning shall not be repeated. I am speaking by and with the authority of the Overlord of the Green System, which you know as the Central System of this, our Galaxy. Upon some of our many planets there are those who wished to destroy you without warning and out of hand, but the Overlord has ruled that you may continue to live provided you heed these, his commands, which he has instructed me to lay upon you.

"You must forthwith abandon forever your vainglorious and senseless scheme of universal conquest. You must immediately withdraw your every vessel to within the boundaries of your solar system, and you must keep them there henceforth.

"You are allowed five minutes to decide whether or not you will obey these commands. If no answer has been received at the end of the calculated time the Overlord will know that you have defied him, and your entire race shall perish utterly. Well he knows that your very existence is an affront to all real civilization, but he holds that even such vileness incarnate, as are the Fenachrone, may perchance have some obscure place in the Great Scheme of Things, and he will not destroy you if you are content to remain in your proper place, upon your own dank and steaming world. Through me, the two thousand three hundred and forty-sixth Sacner Carfon of Dasor, the Overlord has given you your first, last and only warning. Heed its every word, or consider it the formal declaration of a war of utter and complete extinction!"

* * * * *

The awful voice ceased and pandemonium reigned in the council hall. Obeying a common impulse, each Fenachrone leaped to his feet, raised his huge arms aloft, and roared out rage and defiance. Fenor snapped a command, and the others fell silent as he began howling out orders.

"Operator! Send recall torpedoes instantly to every outlying vessel!" He scuttled over to one of the private-band speakers. "X-794-PW! Radio general call for all vessels above E blank E to concentrate on battle stations! Throw out full-power defensive screens, and send the full series of detector screens out to the limit! Guards and patrols on invasion plan XB-218!"

"The immediate steps are taken, gentlemen!" He turned to the Council, his rage unabated. "Never before have we supermen of the Fenachrone been so insulted and so belittled! That upstart Overlord will regret that warning to the instant of his death, which shall be exquisitely postponed. All you of the Council know your duties in such a time as this--you are excused to perform them. General Fenimol, you will stay with me--we shall consider together such other details as require attention."

After the others had left the room Fenor turned to the general.

"Have you any immediate suggestions?"

"I would suggest sending at once for Ravindau, the Chief of the Laboratories of Science. He certainly heard the warning, and may be able to cast some light upon how it could have been sent, and from what point it came."

The Emperor spoke into another sender, and soon the scientist entered, carrying in his hand a small instrument upon which a blue light blazed.

"Do not talk here, there is grave danger of being overheard by that self-styled Overlord," he directed tersely, and led the way into a ray-proof compartment of his private laboratory, several floors below.

"It may interest you to know that you have sealed the doom of our planet and of all the Fenachrone upon it," Ravindau spoke savagely.

"Dare you speak thus to me, your sovereign?" roared Fenor.

"I dare so," replied the other, coldly. "When all the civilization of a planet has been given to destruction by the unreasoning stupidity and insatiable rapacity of its royalty, allegiance to such royalty is at an end. SIT DOWN!" he thundered as Fenor sprang to his feet. "You are no longer in your throne-room, surrounded by servile guards and by automatic rays. You are in MY laboratory, and by a movement of my finger I can hurl you into eternity!"

The general, aware now that the warning was of much more serious import than he had suspected, broke into the acrimonious debate.

"Never mind questions of royalty!" he snapped. "The safety of the race is paramount. Am I to understand that the situation is really grave?"

"It is worse than grave--it is desperate. The only hope for even ultimate triumph is for as many of us as possible to flee instantly clear out of the Galaxy, in the hope that we may escape the certain destruction to be dealt out to us by the Overlord of the Green System."

"You speak folly, surely," returned Fenimol. "Our science is--must be--superior to any other in the Universe?"

"So thought I until this warning came in and I had an opportunity to study it. Then I knew that we are opposed by a science immeasurably higher than our own."

"Such vermin as those two whom one of our smallest scouts captured without a battle, vessel and all? In what respects is their science even comparable to ours?"

"Not those vermin, no. The one who calls himself the Overlord. That one is our master. He can penetrate the impenetrable shield of force and can operate mechanisms of pure force behind it; he can heterodyne, transmit, and use the infra-rays, of whose very existence we were in doubt until recently! While that warning was being delivered he was, in all probability, watching you and listening to you, face to face. You in your ignorance supposed his warning borne by the ether, and thought therefore he must be close to this system. He is very probably at home in the Central System, and is at this moment preparing the forces he intends to hurl against us."

The Emperor fell back into his seat, all his pomposity gone, but the general stiffened eagerly and went straight to the point.

"How do you know these things?"

"Largely by deduction. We of the school of science have cautioned you repeatedly to postpone the Day of Conquest until we should have mastered the secrets of sub-rays and of infra-rays. Unheeding, you of war have gone ahead with your plans, while we of science have continued to study. We know a little of the sub-rays, which we use every day, and practically nothing of the infra-rays. Some time ago I developed a detector for infra-rays, which come to us from outer space in small quantities and which are also liberated by our power-plants. It has been regarded as a scientific curiosity only, but this day it proved of real value. This instrument in my hand is such a detector. At normal impacts of infra-rays its light is blue, as you see it now. Some time before the warning sounded it turned a brilliant red, indicating that an intense source of infra-rays was operating in the neighborhood. By plotting lines of force I located the source as being in the air of the council hall, almost directly above the table of state. Therefore the carrier wave must have come through our whole system of screens without so much as giving an alarm. That fact alone proves it to have been an infra-ray. Furthermore, it carried through those screens and released in the council room a system of forces of great complexity, as is shown by their ability to broadcast from those pure forces without material aid a modulated wave in the exact frequency required to energize our general speakers.

"As soon as I perceived these facts I threw about the council room a screen of force entirely impervious to anything longer than ultra-rays. The warning continued, and I then knew that our fears were only too well grounded--that there is in this Galaxy somewhere a race vastly superior to ours in science and that our destruction is a matter of hours, perhaps of minutes."

"Are these ultra-rays, then, of such a dangerous character?" asked the general. "I had supposed them to be of such infinitely high frequency that they could be of no practical use whatever."

* * * * *

"I have been trying for years to learn something of their nature, but beyond working out a method for their detection and a method of possible analysis that may or may not succeed I can do nothing with them. It is perfectly evident, however, that they lie below the level of the ether, and therefore have a velocity of propagation infinitely greater than that of light. You may see for yourself, then, that to a science able to guide and control them, to make them act as carrier waves for any other desired frequency--to do all of which the Overlord has this day shown himself capable--they should theoretically afford weapons before which our every defense would be precisely as efficacious as so much vacuum. Think a moment! You know that we know nothing fundamental concerning even our servants, the sub-rays. If we really knew them we could utilize them in thousands of ways as yet unknown to us. We work with the merest handful of forces, empirically, while it is practically certain that the enemy has at his command the entire spectrum, visible and invisible, embracing untold thousands of bands of unknown but terrific potentiality."

"But he spoke of a calculated time necessary before our answer could be received. They must, then, be using vibrations in the ether."

"Not necessarily--not even probably. Would we ourselves reveal unnecessarily to an enemy the possession of such rays? Do not be childish. No, Fenimol, and you, Fenor of the Fenachrone, instant and headlong flight is our only hope of present salvation and of ultimate triumph--flight to a far distant Galaxy, since upon no point in this one shall we be safe from the infra-beams of that self-styled Overlord."

"You snivelling coward! You pusillanimous bookworm!" Fenor had regained his customary spirit as the scientist explained upon what grounds his fears were based. "Upon such a tenuous fabric of evidence would you have such a people as ours turn tail like beaten hounds? Because, forsooth, you detect a peculiar vibration in the air, will you have it that we are to be invaded and destroyed forthwith by a race of supernatural ability? Bah! Your calamity-howling clan has delayed the Day of Conquest from year to year--I more than half believe that you yourself or some other treacherous poltroon of your ignominious breed prepared and sent that warning, in a weak and rat-brained attempt to frighten us into again postponing the Day of Conquest! Know now, spineless weakling, that the time is ripe, and that the Fenachrone in their might are about to strike. But you, foul traducer of your emperor, shall die the death of the cur you are!" The hand within his tunic moved and a vibrator burst into operation.

"Coward I may be, and pusillanimous, and other things as well," the scientist replied stonily, "but, unlike you, I am not a fool. These walls, this very atmosphere, are fields of force that will transmit no rays directed by you. You weak-minded scion of a depraved and obscene house--arrogant, overbearing, rapacious, ignorant--your brain is too feeble to realize that you are clutching at the Universe hundreds of years before the time has come. You by your overweening pride and folly have doomed our beloved planet--the most perfect planet in the Galaxy in its grateful warmth and wonderful dampness and fogginess--and our entire race to certain destruction. Therefore you, fool and dolt that you are, shall die--for too long already have you ruled." He flicked a finger and the body of the monarch shuddered as though an intolerable current of electricity had traversed it, collapsed and lay still.

"It was necessary to destroy this that was our ruler," Ravindau explained to the general. "I have long known that you are not in favor of such precipitate action in the Conquest: hence all this talking upon my part. You know that I hold the honor of Fenachrone dear, and that all my plans are for the ultimate triumph of our race?"

"Yes, and I begin to suspect that those plans have not been made since the warning was received."

"My plans have been made for many years; and ever since an immediate Conquest was decided upon I have been assembling and organizing the means to put them into effect. I would have left this planet in any event shortly after the departure of the grand fleet upon its final expedition--Fenor's senseless defiance of the Overlord has only made it necessary for me to expedite my leave-taking."

"What do you intend to do?"

"I have a vessel twice as large as the largest warship Fenor boasted; completely provisioned, armed, and powered for a cruise of one hundred years at high acceleration. It is hidden in a remote fastness of the jungle. I am placing in that vessel a group of the finest, brainiest, most highly advanced and intelligent of our men and women, with their children. We shall journey at our highest speed to a certain distant Galaxy, where we shall seek out a planet similar in atmosphere, temperature, and mass to the one upon which we now dwell. There we shall multiply and continue our studies; and from that planet, in that day when we shall have attained sufficient knowledge, there shall descend upon the Central System of this Galaxy the vengeance of the Fenachrone. That vengeance will be all the sweeter for the fact that it shall have been delayed."

"But how about libraries, apparatus and equipment? Suppose that we do not live long enough to perfect that knowledge? And with only one vessel and a handful of men we could not cope with that accursed Overlord and his navies of the void."

"Libraries are aboard, so are much apparatus and equipment. What we cannot take with us we can build. As for the knowledge I mentioned, it may not be attained in your lifetime nor in mine. But the racial memory of the Fenachrone is long, as you know; and even if the necessary problems are not solved until our descendants are sufficiently numerous to populate an entire planet, yet will those descendants wreak the vengeance of the Fenachrone upon the races of that hated one, the Overlord, before they go on with the Conquest of the Universe. Many questions will arise, of course; but they shall be solved. Enough! Time passes rapidly, and all too long have I talked. I am using this time upon you because in my organization there is no soldier, and the Fenachrone of the future will need your great knowledge of warfare. Are you going with us?"

"Yes."

"Very well." Ravindau led the general through a door and into an airboat lying upon the terrace outside the laboratory. "Drive us at speed to your home, where we shall pick up your family."

Fenimol took the controls and laid a ray to his home--a ray serving a double purpose. It held the vessel upon its predetermined course through that thick and sticky fog and also rendered collision impossible, since any two of these controller rays repelled each other to such a degree that no two vessels could take paths which would bring them together. Some such provision had been found necessary ages ago, for all Fenachrone craft were provided with the same space-annihilating drive, to which any comprehensible distance was but a journey of a few moments, and at that frightful velocity collision meant annihilation.

"I understand that you could not take any one of the military into your confidence until you were ready to put your plans into effect," the general conceded. "How long will it take you to get ready to leave? You have said that haste is imperative, and I therefore assume that you have already warned the other members of the expedition."

"I flashed the emergency signal before I joined you and Fenor in the council room. Each man of the organization has received that signal, wherever he may have been, and by this time most of them, with their families, are on the way to the hidden cruiser. We shall leave this planet in fifteen minutes from now at most--I dare not stay an instant longer than is absolutely necessary."

The members of the general's family were bundled, amazed, into the airboat, which immediately flew along a ray laid by Ravindau to the secret rendezvous.

In a remote and desolate part of the planet, concealed in the depths of the towering jungle growth, a mammoth space-cruiser was receiving her complement of passengers. Airboats, flying at their terrific velocity through the heavy, steaming fog as closely-spaced as their controller rays would permit, flashed signals along their guiding beams, dove into the apparently impenetrable jungle, and added their passengers to the throng pouring into the great vessel.

* * * * *

As the minute of departure drew near, the feeling of tension aboard the cruiser increased and vigilance was raised to the maximum. None of the passengers had been allowed senders of any description, and now even the hair-line beams guiding the airboats were cut off, and received only when the proper code signal was heard. The doors were shut, no one was allowed outside, and everything was held in readiness for instant flight at the least alarm. Finally a scientist and his family arrived from the opposite side of the planet--the last members of the organization--and, twenty-seven minutes after Ravindau had flashed his signal, the prow of that mighty space-ship reared toward the perpendicular, poising its massive length at the predetermined angle. There it halted momentarily, then disappeared utterly, only a vast column of tortured and shattered vegetation, torn from the ground and carried for miles upward into the air by the vacuum of its wake, remaining to indicate the path taken by the flying projectile.

Hour after hour the Fenachrone vessel bored on, with its frightful and ever-increasing velocity, through the ever-thinning stars, but it was not until the last star had been passed, until everything before them was entirely devoid of light, and until the Galaxy behind them began to take on a well-defined lenticular aspect, that Ravindau would consent to leave the controls and to seek his hard-earned rest.

Day after day and week after week went by, and the Fenachrone vessel still held the rate of motion with which she had started out. Ravindau and Fenimol sat in the control cabin, staring out through the visiplates, abstracted. There was no need of staring, and they were not really looking, for there was nothing at which to look. Outside the transparent metal hull of that monster of the trackless void, there was nothing visible. The Galaxy of which our Earth is an infinitesimal mote, the Galaxy which former astronomers considered the Universe, was so far behind that its immeasurable diameter was too small to affect the vision of the unaided eye. Other Galaxies lay at even greater distances away on either side. The Galaxy toward which they were making their stupendous flight was as yet untold millions of light-years distant. Nothing was visible--before their gaze stretched an infinity of emptiness. No stars, no nebul, no meteoric matter, nor even the smallest particle of cosmic dust--absolutely empty space. Absolute vacuum and absolute zero. Absolute nothingness--a concept intrinsically impossible for the most highly trained human mind to grasp.

Conscienceless and heartless monstrosities though they both were, by heredity and training, the immensity of the appalling lack of anything tangible oppressed them. Ravindau was stern and serious, Fenimol moody. Finally the latter spoke.

"It would be endurable if we knew what had happened, or if we ever could know definitely, one way or the other, whether all this was necessary."

"We shall know, general, definitely. I am certain in my own mind, but after a time, when we have settled upon our new home and when the Overlord shall have relaxed his vigilance, you shall come back to the solar system of the Fenachrone in this vessel or a similar one. I know what you shall find--but the trip shall be made, and you shall yourself see what was once our home planet, a seething sun, second only in brilliance to the parent sun about which she shall still be revolving."

"Are we safe, even now--what of possible pursuit?" asked Fenimol, and the monstrous, flame-shot wells of black that were Ravindau's eyes almost emitted tangible fires as he made reply:

"We are far from safe, but we grow stronger minute by minute. Fifty of the greatest minds our world has ever known have been working from the moment of our departure upon a line of investigation suggested to me by certain things my instruments recorded during the visit of the self-styled Overlord. I cannot say anything yet: even to you--except that the Day of Conquest may not be so far in the future as we have supposed."

CHAPTER XIV

Interstellar Extermination

"I hate to leave this meeting--it's great stuff" remarked Seaton as he flashed down to the torpedo room at Fenor's command to send recall messages to all outlying vessels, "but this machine isn't designed to let me be in more than two places at once. Wish it were--maybe after this fracas is over we'll be able to incorporate something like that into it."

The chief operator touched a lever and the chair upon which he sat, with all its control panels, slid rapidly across the floor toward an apparently blank wall. As he reached it, a port opened a metal scroll appeared, containing the numbers and last reported positions of all Fenachrone vessels outside the detector zone, and a vast magazine of torpedoes came up through the floor, with an automatic loader to place a torpedo under the operator's hand the instant its predecessor had been launched.

"Get Peg here quick, Mart--we need a stenographer. Till she gets here, see what you can do in getting those first numbers before they roll off the end of the scroll. No, hold it--as you were! I've got controls enough to put the whole thing on a recorder, so we can study it at our leisure."

Haste was indeed necessary for the operator worked with uncanny quickness of hand. One fleeting glance at the scroll, a lightning adjustment of dials in the torpedo, a touch upon a tiny button, and a messenger was upon its way. But quick as he was, Seaton's flying fingers kept up with him, and before each torpedo disappeared through the ether gate there was fastened upon it a fifth-order tracer ray that would never leave it until the force had been disconnected at the gigantic control board of the Norlaminian projector. One flying minute passed during which seventy torpedoes had been launched, before Seaton spoke.

"Wonder how many ships they've got out, anyway? Didn't get any idea from the brain-record. Anyway, Rovol, it might be a sound idea for you to install me some more tracer rays on this board, I've got only a couple of hundred, and that may not be enough--and I've got both hands full."

Rovol seated himself beside the younger man, like one organist joining another at the console of a tremendous organ. Seaton's nimble fingers would flash here and there, depressing keys and manipulating controls until he had exactly the required combination of forces centered upon the torpedo next to issue. He then would press a tiny switch and upon a panel full of red-topped, numbered plungers; the one next in series would drive home, transferring to itself the assembled beam and releasing the keys for the assembly of other forces. Rovol's fingers were also flying, but the forces he directed were seizing and shaping material, as well as other forces. The Norlaminian physicist, set up one integral, stepped upon a pedal, and a new red-topped stop precisely like the others and numbered in order, appeared as though by magic upon the panel at Seaton's left hand. Rovol then leaned back in his seat--but the red-topped stops continued to appear, at the rate of exactly seventy per minute, upon the panel, which increased in width sufficiently to accommodate another row as soon as a row was completed.

Rovol bent a quizzical glance upon the younger scientist, who blushed a fiery red, rapidly set up another integral, then also leaned back in his place, while his face burned deeper than before.

"That is better, son. Never forget that it is a waste of energy to do the same thing twice with your hands and that if you know precisely what is to be done, you need not do it with your hands at all. Forces are tireless, and they neither slip nor make mistakes."

"Thanks, Rovol--I'll bet this lesson will make it stick in my mind, too."

"You are not thoroughly accustomed to using all your knowledge as yet. That will come with practice, however, and in a few weeks you will be as thoroughly at home with forces as I am."

"Hope so, Chief, but it looks like a tall order to me."

Finally the last torpedo was dispatched, the tube closed, and Seaton moved the projection back up into the council chamber, finding it empty.

"Well, the conference is over--besides, we've got more important fish to fry. War has been declared, on both sides, and we've got to get busy. They've got nine hundred and six vessels out, and every one of them has got to go to Davy Jones' locker before we can sleep sound of nights. My first job'll have to be untangling those nine oh six forces, getting lines on each one of them, and seeing if I can project straight enough to find the ships before the torpedoes overtake them. Mart, you and Orlon, the astronomer, had better dope out the last reported positions of each of those vessels, so we'll know about where to hunt for them. Rovol, you might send out a detector screen a few light years in diameter, to be sure none of them slips a fast one over on us. By starting it right here and expanding it gradually, you can be sure that no Fenachrone is inside it. Then we'll find a hunk of copper on that planet somewhere, plate it with some of their own 'X' metal, and blow them into Kingdom Come."

"May I venture a suggestion?" asked Drasnik, the First of Psychology.

"Absolutely--nothing you've said so far has been idle chatter."

"You know, of course, that there are real scientists among the Fenachrone; and you yourself have suggested that while they cannot penetrate the zone of force nor use fifth-order rays, yet they might know about them in theory, might even be able to know when they were being used--detect them, in other words. Let us assume that such a scientist did detect your rays while you were there a short time ago. What would he do?"

"Search me.... I bite, what would he do?"

"He might do any one of several things, but if I read their nature aright, such a one would gather up a few men and women--as many as he could--and migrate to another planet. For he would of course grasp instantly the fact that you had used fifth-order rays as carrier waves, and would be able to deduce your ability to destroy. He would also realize that in the brief time allowed him, he could not hope to learn to control those unknown forces; and with his terribly savage and vengeful nature and intense pride of race, he would take every possible step both to perpetuate his race and to obtain revenge. Am I right?"

* * * * *

Seaton swung to his controls savagely, and manipulated dials and keys rapidly.

"Right as rain, Drasnik. There--I've thrown around them a fifth-order detector screen, that they can't possibly neutralize. Anything that goes out through it will have a tracer slapped onto it. But say, it's been half an hour since war was declared--suppose we're too late? Maybe some of them have got away already, and if one couple of 'em has beat us to it, we'll have the whole thing to do over again a thousand years or so from now. You've got the massive intellect, Drasnik. What can we do about it? We can't throw a detector screen all over the Galaxy."

"I would suggest that since you have now guarded against further exodus, it is necessary to destroy the planet for a time. Rovol and his co-workers have the other projector nearly done. Let them project me to the world of the Fenachrone, where I shall conduct a thorough mental investigation. By the time you have taken care of the raiding vessels, I believe that I shall have been able to learn everything we need to know."

"Fine--hop to it, and may there be lots of bubbles in your think-tank. Anybody else know of any other loop-holes I've left open?"

No other suggestions were made, and each man bent to his particular task. Crane at the star-chart of the Galaxy and Orlon at the Fenachrone operator's dispatching scroll rapidly worked out the approximate positions of the Fenachrone vessels, and marked them with tiny green lights in a vast model of the Galaxy which they had already caused forces to erect in the air of the projector's base. It was soon learned that a few of the ships were exploring quite close to their home system; so close that the torpedoes, with their unthinkable acceleration, would reach them within a few hours. Ascertaining the stop-number of the tracer ray upon the torpedo which should first reach its destination, Seaton followed it from the stop upon his panel out to the flying messenger. Now moving with a velocity many times that of light, it was, of course, invisible to direct vision; but to the light waves heterodyned upon the fifth-order projector rays, it was as plainly visible as though it were stationary. Lining up the path of the projectile accurately, he then projected himself forward in that exact line, with a flat detector-screen thrown out for half a light year upon each side of him. Setting the controls, he flashed ahead, the detector stopping him the instant that the invisible barrier encountered the power-plant of the exploring raider. An oscillator sounded a shrill and rising note, and Seaton slowly shifted his controls until he stood in the control room of the enemy vessel.

The Fenachrone ship, a thousand feet long and more than a hundred feet in diameter, was tearing through space toward a brilliant blue-white star. Her crew were at battle stations, her navigating officers peering intently into the operating visiplates, all oblivious to the fact that a stranger stood in their very midst.

"Well, here's the first one, gang," said Seaton, "I hate like sin to do this--it's altogether too much like pushing baby chickens into a creek to suit me, but it's a dirty job that's got to be done."

As one man, Orlon and the other remaining Norlaminians leaped out of the projector and floated to the ground below.

"I expected that," remarked Seaton. "They can't even think of a thing like this without getting the blue willies--I don't blame them much, at that. How about you, Carfon? You can be excused if you like."

"I want to watch those forces at work. I do not enjoy destruction, but like you, I can make myself endure it."

Dunark, the fierce and bloodthirsty Osnomian prince, leaped to his feet, his eyes flashing.

"That's one thing I never could get about you, Dick!" he exclaimed in English. "How a man with your brains can be so soft--so sloppily sentimental, gets clear past me. You remind me of a bowl of mush--you wade around in slush clear to your ears. Faugh! It's their lives or ours! Tell me what button to push and I'll be only too glad to push it. I wanted to blow up Urvania and you wouldn't let me; I haven't killed an enemy for ages, and that's my trade. Cut out the sob-sister act and for Cat's sake, let's get busy!"

"'At-a-boy, Dunark! That's tellin' 'im! But it's all right with me--I'll be glad to let you do it. When I say 'shoot' throw in that plunger there--number sixty-three."

Seaton manipulated controls until two electrodes of force were clamped in place, one at either end of the huge power-bar of the enemy vessel; adjusted rheostats and forces to send a disintegrating current through that massive copper cylinder, and gave the word. Dunark threw in the switch with a vicious thrust, as though it were an actual sword which he was thrusting through the vitals of one of the awesome crew, and the very Universe exploded around them--exploded into one mad, searing coruscation of blinding, dazzling light as the gigantic cylinder of copper resolved itself instantaneously into the pure energy from which its metal originally had come into being.

Seaton and Dunark staggered back from the visiplates, blinded by the intolerable glare of light, and even Crane, working at his model of the galaxy, blinked at the intensity of the radiation. Many minutes passed before the two men could see through their tortured eyes.

"Zowie! That was fierce!" exclaimed Seaton, when a slowly-returning perception of things other than dizzy spirals and balls of flame assured him that his eyesight was not permanently gone. "It's nothing but my own fool carelessness, too. I should have known that with all the light frequencies in heterodyne for visibility, enough of that same stuff would leak through to make strong medicine on these visiplates--for I knew that that bar weighed a hundred tons and would liberate energy enough to volatilize our Earth and blow the by-products clear to Arcturus. How're you coming, Dunark? See anything yet?"

"Coming along O. K. now, I guess--but I thought for a few minutes I'd been bloody well jobbed."

"I'll do better next time. I'll cut out the visible spectrum before the flash, and convert and reconvert the infra-red. That'll let us see what happens, without the direct effect of the glare--won't burn our eyes out. What's my force number on the next nearest one, Mart?"

"Twenty-nine."

* * * * *

Seaton fastened a detector ray upon stop twenty-nine of the tracer-ray panel and followed its beam of force out to the torpedo hastening upon its way toward the next doomed cruiser. Flashing ahead in its line as he had done before, he located the vessel and clamped the electrodes of force upon the prodigious driving bar. Again, as Dunark drove home the detonating switch, there was a frightful explosion and a wild glare of frenzied incandescence far out in that desolate region of interstellar space; but this time the eyes behind the visiplates were not torn by the high frequencies, everything that happened was plainly visible. One instant, there was an immense space-cruiser boring on through the void upon its horrid mission, with its full complement of the hellish Fenachrone performing their routine tasks. The next instant there was a flash of light extending for thousands upon untold thousands of miles in every direction. That flare of light vanished as rapidly as it had appeared--instantaneously--and throughout the entire neighborhood of the place where the Fenachrone cruiser had been, there was nothing. Not a plate nor a girder, not a fragment, not the most minute particle nor droplet of disrupted metal nor of condensed vapor. So terrific, so incredibly and incomprehensibly vast were the forces liberated by that mass of copper in its instantaneous decomposition, that every atom of substance in that great vessel had gone with the power-bar--had been resolved into radiations which would at some distant time and in some far-off solitude unite with other radiations, again to form matter, and thus obey Nature's immutable cyclic law.

Thus vessel after vessel was destroyed of that haughty fleet which until now had never suffered a reverse and a little green light in the galactic model winked out and flashed back in rosy pink as each menace was removed. In a few hours the space surrounding the system of the Fenachrone was clear; then progress slackened as it became harder and harder to locate each vessel as the distance between it and its torpedo increased. Time after time Seaton would stab forward with his detector screen extended to its utmost possible spread, upon the most carefully plotted prolongation of the line of the torpedo's flight, only to have the projection flash far beyond the vessel's furthest possible position without a reaction from the far-flung screen. Then he would go back to the torpedo, make a minute alteration in his line, and again flash forward, only to miss it again. Finally, after thirty fruitless attempts to bring his detector screen into contact with the nearest Fenachrone ship, he gave up the attempt, rammed his battered, reeking briar full of the rank blend that was his favorite smoke, and strode up and down the floor of the projector base--his eyes unseeing, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, his jaw thrust forward, clamped upon the stem of his pipe, emitting dense, blue clouds of strangling vapor.

"The maestro is thinking, I perceive," remarked Dorothy, sweetly, entering the projector from an airboat. "You must all be blind, I guess--you no hear the bell blow, what? I've come after you--it's time to eat!"

"'At-a-girl, Dot--never miss the eats! Thanks," and Seaton put his problem away, with perceptible effort.

"This is going to be a job, Mart," he went back to it as soon as they were seated in the airboat, flying toward "home." "I can nail them, with an increasing shift in azimuth, up to about thirty thousand light-years, but after that it gets awfully hard to get the right shift, and up around a hundred thousand it seems to be darn near impossible--gets to be pure guesswork. It can't be the controls, because they can hold a point rigidly at five hundred thousand. Of course, we've got a pretty short back-line to sight on, but the shift is more than a hundred times as great as the possible error in backsight could account for, and there's apparently nothing either regular or systematic about it that I can figure out. But.... I don't know.... Space is curved in the fourth dimension, of course.... I wonder if ... hm--m--m." He fell silent and Crane made a rapid signal to Dorothy, who was opening her mouth to say something. She shut it, feeling ridiculous, and nothing was said until they had disembarked at their destination.

"Did you solve the puzzle, Dickie?"

"Don't think so--got myself in deeper than ever, I'm afraid," he answered, then went on, thinking aloud rather than addressing any one in particular:

"Space is curved in the fourth dimension, and fifth-order rays, with their velocity, may not follow the same path in that dimension that light does--in fact, they do not. If that path is to be plotted it requires the solution of five simultaneous equations, each complete and general, and each of the fifth degree, and also an exponential series with the unknown in the final exponent, before the fourth-dimensional concept can be derived ... hm--m--m. No use--we've struck something that not even Norlaminian theory can handle."

"You surprise me." Crane said. "I supposed that they had everything worked out."

"Not on fifth-order stuff--it's new, you know. It begins to look as though we'd have to stick around until every one of those torpedoes gets somewhere near its mother-ship. Hate to do it, too--it'll take six months, at least, to reach the vessels clear across the Galaxy. I'll put it up to the gang at dinner--guess they'll let me talk business a couple of minutes overtime, especially after they find out what I've got to say."

He explained the phenomenon to an interested group of white-bearded scientists as they ate. Rovol, to Seaton's surprise, was elated and enthusiastic.

"Wonderful, my boy!" he breathed. "Marvelous! A perfect subject for years after year of deepest study and the most profound thought. Perfect!"

"But what can we _do_ about it?" asked Seaton, exasperated. "We don't want to hang around here twiddling our thumbs for a year waiting for those torpedoes to get to wherever they're going!"

"We can do nothing but wait and study. That problem is one of splendid difficulty, as you yourself realize. Its solution may well be a matter of lifetimes instead of years. But what is a year, more or less? You can destroy the Fenachrone eventually, so be content."

"But content is just exactly what I'm _not_!" declared Seaton, emphatically. "I want to do it, and do it _now_!"

"Perhaps I might volunteer a suggestion," said Caslor, diffidently; and as both Rovol and Seaton looked at him in surprise he went on: "Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean concerning the mathematical problem in discussion, about which I am entirely ignorant. But has it occurred to you that those torpedoes are not intelligent entities, acting upon their own volition and steering themselves as a result of their own ordered mental processes? No, they are mechanisms, in my own province, and I venture to say with the utmost confidence that they are guided to their destinations by streamers of force of some nature, emanating from the vessels upon whose tracks they are."

"'Nobody Holme' is right!" exclaimed Seaton, tapping his temple with an admonitory forefinger. "'Sright, ace--I thought maybe I'd quit using my head for nothing but a hatrack now, but I guess that's all it's good for, yet. Thanks a lot for the idea--that gives me something I can get my teeth into, and now that Rovol's got a problem to work on for the next century or so, everybody's happy."

"How does that help matters?" asked Crane in wonder. "Of course it is not surprising that no lines of force were visible, but I thought that your detectors screens would have found them if any such guiding beams had been present."

"The ordinary bands, if of sufficient power, yes. But there are many possible tracer rays not reactive to a screen such as I was using. It was very light and weak, designed for terrific velocity and for instantaneous automatic arrest when in contact with the enormous forces of a power bar. It wouldn't react at all to the minute energy of the kind of beams they'd be most likely to use for that work. Caslor's certainly right. They're steering their torpedoes with tracer rays of almost infinitesimal power, amplified in the torpedoes themselves--that's the way I'd do it myself. It may take a little while to rig up the apparatus, but we'll get it--and then we'll run those birds ragged--so fast that their ankles'll catch fire--and won't need the fourth-dimensional correction after all."

* * * * *

When the bell announced the beginning of the following period of labor, Seaton and his co-workers were in the Area of Experiment waiting, and the work was soon under way.

"How are you going about this, Dick?" asked Crane.

"Going to examine the nose of one of those torpedoes first, and see what it actually works on. Then build me a tracer detector that'll pick it up at high velocity. Beats the band, doesn't it, that neither Rovol nor I, who should have thought of it first, ever did see anything as plain as that? That those things are following a ray?"

"That is easily explained, and is no more than natural. Both of you were not only devoting all your thoughts to the curvature of space, but were also too close to the problem--like the man in the woods, who cannot see the forest because of the trees."

"Yeah, may be something in that, too. Plain enough, when Caslor showed it to us," said Seaton.

While he was talking, Seaton had projected himself into the torpedo he had lined up so many times the previous day. With the automatic motions set to hold him stationary in the tiny instrument compartment of the craft, now traveling at a velocity many times that of light, he set to work. A glance located the detector mechanism, a set of short-wave coils and amplifiers, and a brief study made plain to him the principles underlying the directional loop finders and the controls which guided the flying shell along the path of the tracer ray. He then built a detector structure of pure force immediately in front of the torpedo, and varied the frequency of his own apparatus until a meter upon one of the panels before his eyes informed him that his detector was in perfect resonance with the frequency of the tracer ray. He then moved ahead of the torpedo, along the guiding ray.

"Guiding it, eh?" Dunark congratulated him.

"Kinda. My directors out there aren't quite so hot, though. I'm a trifle shy on control somewhere, so much so that if I put on anywhere near full velocity, I lose the ray. Think I can clear that up with a little experimenting, though."

He fingered controls lightly, depressed a few more keys, and set one vernier, already at a ratio of a million to one, down to ten million. He then stepped up his velocity, and found that the guides worked well up to a speed much greater than any ever reached by Fenachrone vessels or torpedoes, but failed utterly to hold the ray at anything approaching the full velocity possible to his fifth-order projector. After hours and days of work and study--in the course of which hundreds of the Fenachrone vessels were destroyed--after employing all the resources of his mind, now stored with the knowledge of rays accumulated by hundreds of generations of highly-trained research specialists in rays, he became convinced that it was an inherent impossibility to trace any ether wave with the velocity he desired.

"Can't be done, I guess, Mart," he confessed, ruefully. "You see, it works fine up to a certain point; but beyond that, nothing doing. I've just found out why--and in so doing, I think I've made a contribution to science. At velocities well below that of light, light-waves are shifted a minute amount, you know. At the velocity of light, and up to a velocity not even approached by the Fenachrone vessels on their longest trips, the distortion is still not serious--no matter how fast we want to travel in the _Skylark_, I think I can guarantee that we will still be able to see things. That is to be expected from the generally-accepted idea that the apparent velocity of any ether vibration is independent of the velocity of either source or receiver. However, that relationship fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order rays. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn't be too bad, but when I get up to about one per cent of the velocity I want to use, I can't calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That's another problem for Rovol to chew on, for another hundred years."

"That will, of course, slow up the work of clearing the Galaxy of the Fenachrone, but at the same time I see nothing about which to be alarmed," Crane replied. "You are working very much faster than you could have done by waiting for the torpedoes to arrive. The present condition is very satisfactory, I should say," and he waved his hand at the galactic model, in nearly three-fourths of whose volume the green lights had been replaced by pink ones.

"Yeah, pretty fair as far as that goes--we'll clean up in ten days or so--but I hate to be licked. Well, I might as well quit sobbing and get busy!"

In due time the nine hundred and sixth Fenachrone vessel was checked off on the model, and the two Terrestrials went in search of Drasnik, whom they found in his study, summing up and analyzing a mass of data, facts, and ideas which were being projected in the air around him.

"Well, our first job's done," Seaton stated. "What do you know that you feel like passing around?"

"My investigation is practically complete," replied the First of Psychology, gravely. "I have explored many Fenachrone minds, and without exception I have found them chambers of horror of a kind unimaginable to one of us. However, you are not interested in their psychology, but in facts bearing upon your problem. While such facts were scarce, I did discover a few interesting items. I spied upon them in public and in their most private haunts. I analyzed them individually and collectively, and from the few known facts and from the great deal of guesswork and conjecture there available to me, I have formulated a theory. I shall first give you the known facts. Their scientists cannot direct nor control any ray not propagated through ether, but they can detect one such frequency or band of frequencies which they call 'infra-rays' and which are probably the fifth-order rays, since they lie in the first level below the ether. The detector proper is a type of lamp, which gives a blue light at the ordinary intensity of such rays as would come from space or from an ordinary power plant, but gives a red light under strong excitation."

"Uh-huh, I get that O. K.," said Seaton. "Rovol's great-great-great-grandfather had 'em--I know all about 'em," Seaton encouraged Drasnik, who had paused, with a questioning glance. "I know exactly how and why such a detector works. We gave 'em an alarm, all right. Even though we were working on a tight beam from here to there, our secondary projector there was radiating enough to affect every such detector within a thousand miles."

* * * * *

Drasnik continued: "Another significant fact is that a great many persons--I learned of some five hundred, and there were probably many more--have disappeared without explanation and without leaving a trace; and it seems that they disappeared very shortly after our communication was delivered. One of these was Fenor, the Emperor. His family remain, however, and his son is not only ruling in his stead, but is carrying out his father's policies. The other disappearances are all alike and are peculiar in certain respects. First, every man who vanished belonged to the Party of Postponement--the minority party of the Fenachrone, who believe that the time for the Conquest has not yet come. Second, every one of them was a leader in thought in some field of usefulness, and every such field is represented by at least one disappearance--even the army, as General Fenimol, the Commander-in-Chief, and his whole family, are among the absentees. Third, and most remarkable, each such disappearance included an entire family, clear down to children and grand-children, however young. Another fact is that the Fenachrone Department of Navigation keeps a very close check upon all vessels, particularly vessels capable of navigating outer space. Every vessel built must be registered, and its location is always known from its individual tracer ray. No Fenachrone vessel is missing."

"I also sifted a mass of gossip and conjecture, some of which may bear upon the subject. One belief is that all the persons were put to death by Fenor's secret service, and that the Emperor was assassinated in revenge. The most widespread belief, however, is that they have fled. Some hold that they are in hiding in some remote shelter in the jungle, arguing that the rigid registration of all vessels renders a journey of any great length impossible and that the detector screens would have given warning of any vessel leaving the planet. Others think that persons as powerful as Fenimol and Ravindau could have built any vessel they chose with neither the knowledge nor consent of the Department of Navigation, or that they could have stolen a Navy vessel, destroying its records; and that Ravindau certainly could have so neutralized the screens that they would have given no alarm. These believe that the absent ones have migrated to some other solar system or to some other planet of the same sun. One old general loudly gave it as his opinion that the cowardly traitors had probably fled clear out of the Galaxy, and that it would be a good thing to send the rest of the Party of Postponement after them. There, in brief, are the salient points of my investigation in so far as it concerns your immediate problem."

"A good many straws pointing this way and that," commented Seaton. "However, we know that the 'postponers' are just as rabid on the idea of conquering the Universe as the others are--only they are a lot more cautious and won't take even a gambler's chance of a defeat. But you've formed a theory--what is it, Drasnik?"

"From my analysis of these facts and conjectures, in conjunction with certain purely psychological indices which we need not take time to go into now, I am certain that they have left their solar system, probably in an immense vessel built a long time ago and held in readiness for just such an emergency. I am not certain of their destination, but it is my opinion that they have left this Galaxy, and are planning upon starting anew upon some suitable planet in some other Galaxy, from which, at some future date, the Conquest of the Universe shall proceed as it was originally planned."

"Great balls of fire!" blurted Seaton. "They couldn't--not in a million years!" He thought a moment, then continued more slowly: "But they could--and, with their dispositions, they probably would. You're one hundred per cent. right, Drasnik. We've got a real job of hunting on our hands now. So-long, and thanks a lot."

Back in the projector Seaton prowled about in brown abstraction, his villainous pipe poisoning the circumambient air, while Crane sat, quiet and self-possessed as always, waiting for the nimble brain of his friend to find a way over, around, or through the obstacle confronting them.

"Got it, Mart!" Seaton yelled, darting to the board and setting up one integral after another. "If they did leave the planet in a ship, we'll be able to watch them go--and we'll see what they did, anyway, no matter what it was!"

"How? They've been gone almost a month already," protested Crane.

"We know within half an hour the exact time of their departure. We'll simply go out the distance light has traveled since that time, gather in the rays given off, amplify them a few billion times, and take a look at whatever went on."

"But we have no idea of what region of the planet to study, or whether it was night or day at the point of departure when they left."

"We'll get the council room, and trace events from there. Day or night makes no difference--we'll have to use infra-red anyway, because of the fog, and that's almost as good at night as in the daytime. There is no such thing as absolute darkness upon any planet, anyway, and we've got power enough to make anything visible that happened there, night or day. Mart, I've got power enough here to see and to photograph the actual construction of the pyramids of Egypt in that same way--and they were built thousands of years ago!"

"Heavens, what astounding possibilities!" breathed Crane. "Why, you could...."

"Yeah, I could do a lot of things," Seaton interrupted him rudely, "but right now we've got other fish to fry. I've just got the city we visited, at about the time we were there. General Fenimol, who disappeared, must be in the council room down here right now. I'll retard our projection, so that time will apparently pass more quickly, and we'll duck down there and see what actually did happen. I can heterodyne, combine, and recombine just as though we were watching the actual scene--it's more complicated, of course, since I have to follow it and amplify it too, but it works out all right."

"This is unbelievable, Dick. Think of actually seeing something that really happened in the past!"

"Yeah, it's kinda strong, all right. As Dot would say, it's just too perfectly darn outrageous. But we're doing it, ain't we? I know just how, and why. When we get some time I'll shoot the method into your brain. Well, here we are!"

* * * * *

Peering into the visiplates, the two men were poised above the immense central cone of the capital city of the Fenachrone. Viewing with infra-red light as they were, the fog presented no obstacle and the indescribable beauty of the city of concentric rings and the wonderfully luxuriant jungle growth were clearly visible. They plunged down into the council chamber, and saw Fenor, Ravindau, and Fenimol deep in conversation.

"With all the other feats of skill and sorcery you have accomplished, why don't you reconstruct their speech, also?" asked Crane, with a challenging glance.

"Well, old Doubting Thomas, it might not be absolutely impossible, at that. It would mean two projectors, however, due to the difference in speed of sound-waves and light-waves. Theoretically, sound-waves also extend to an infinite distance, but I don't believe that any possible detector and amplifier could reconstruct a voice more than an hour or so after it had spoken. It might, though--we'll have to try it some time, and see. You're fairly good at lip-reading, as I remember it. Get as much of it as you can, will you?"

As though they were watching the scene itself as it happened--which, in a sense, they were--they saw everything that had occurred. They saw Fenor die, saw the general's family board the airboat, saw the orderly embarkation of Ravindau's organization. Finally they saw the stupendous take-off of the first inter-galactic cruiser, and with that take-off, Seaton went into action. Faster and faster he drove that fifth-order beam along the track of the fugitive, until a speed was attained beyond which his detecting converters could not hold the ether-rays they were following. For many minutes Seaton stared intently into the visiplate, plotting lines and calculating forces, then he swung around to Crane.

"Well, Mart, noble old bean, solving the disappearances was easier than I thought it would be; but the situation as regards wiping out the last of the Fenachrone is getting no better, fast."

"I glean from the instruments that they are heading straight out into space away from the Galaxy, and I assume that they are using their utmost acceleration?"

"I'll say they're traveling! They're out in absolute space, you know, with nothing in the way and with no intention of reversing their power or slowing down--they must've had absolute top acceleration on every minute since they left. Anyway, they're so far out already that I couldn't hold even a detector on them, let alone a force that I can control. Well, let's snap into it, fellow--on our way!"

"Just a minute, Dick. Take it easy, what are your plans?"

"Plans! Why worry about plans? Blow up that planet before any more of 'em get away, and then chase that boat clear to Andromeda, if necessary. Let's go!"

"Calm down and be reasonable--you are getting hysterical again. They have a maximum acceleration of five times the velocity of light. So have we, exactly, since we adopted their own drive. Now if our acceleration is the same as theirs, and they have a month's start, how long will it take us to catch them?"

"Right again. Mart--I sure was going off half-cocked again," Seaton conceded ruefully, after a moment's thought. "They'd always be going a million or so times as fast as we would be, and getting further ahead of us in geometrical ratio. What's your idea?"

"I agree with you that the time has come to destroy the planet of Fenachrone. As for pursuing that vessel through intergalactic space, that is your problem. You must figure out some method of increasing our acceleration. Highly efficient as is this system of propulsion, it seems to me that the knowledge of the Norlaminians should be able to improve it in some detail. Even a slight increase in acceleration would enable us to overtake them eventually."

"Hm--m--m." Seaton, no longer impetuous, was thinking deeply. "How far are we apt to have to go?"

"Until we get close enough to them to use your rays--say half a million light-years."

"But surely they'll stop, some time?"

"Of course, but not necessarily for many years. They are powered and provisioned for a hundred years, you remember, and are going to 'a distant galaxy.' Such a one as Ravindau would not have specified a _distant_ Galaxy idly, and the very closest Galaxies are so far away that even the Fenachrone astronomers, with their reflecting mirrors five miles in diameter, could form only the very roughest approximations of the true distances."

"Our astronomers are all wet in their guesses, then?"

"Their estimates are, without exception, far below the true values. They are not even of the correct order of magnitude.'"

"Well, then, let's mop up on that planet. Then we'll go places and do things."

Seaton had already located the magazines in which the power bars of the Fenachrone war-vessels were stored, and it was a short task to erect a secondary projector of force in the Fenachrone atmosphere. Working out of that projector, beams of force seized one of the immense cylinders of plated copper and at Seaton's direction transported it rapidly to one of the poles of the planet, where electrodes of force were clamped upon it. In a similar fashion seventeen more of the frightful bombs were placed, equidistant over the surface of the world of the Fenachrone, so that when they were simultaneously exploded, the downward forces would be certain to meet sufficient resistance to assure complete demolition of the entire globe. Everything in readiness, Seaton's hand went to the plunger switch and closed upon it. Then, his face white and wet, he dropped his hand.

"No use, Mart--I can't do it. It pulls my cork. I know darn well you can't either--I'll yell for help."

"Have you got it on the infra-red?" asked Dunark calmly, as he shot up into the projector in reply to Seaton's call. "I want to see this, all of it."

"It's on--you're welcome to it," and, as the Terrestrials turned away, the whole projector base was illuminated by a flare of intense, though subdued light. For several minutes Dunark stared into the visiplate, savage satisfaction in every line of his fierce green face as he surveyed the havoc wrought by those eighteen enormous charges of incredible explosive.

"A nice job of clean-up, Dick," the Osnomian prince reported, turning away from the visiplate. "It made a sun of it--the original sun is now quite a splendid double star. Everything was volatized, clear out, far beyond their outermost screen."

"It had to be done, of course--it was either them or else all the rest of the Universe," Season said, jerkily. "However, even that fact doesn't make it go down easy. Well, we're done with this projector. From now on it's strictly up to us and _Skylark Three_. Let's beat it over there and see if they've got her done yet--they were due to finish up today, you know."

* * * * *

It was a silent group who embarked in the little airboat. Half way to their destination, however, Seaton came out of his blue mood with a yell.

"Mart, I've got it! We can give the _Lark_ a lot more acceleration than they are getting--and won't need the assistance of all the minds of Norlamin, either."

"How?"

"By using one of the very heavy metals for fuel. The intensity of the power liberated is a function of atomic weight, or atomic number, and density; but the fact of liberation depends upon atomic configuration--a fact which you and I figured out long ago. However, our figuring didn't go far enough--it couldn't: we didn't know anything then. Copper happens to be the most efficient of the few metals which can be decomposed at all under ordinary excitation--that is, by using an ordinary coil, such as we and the Fenachrone both use. But by using special exciters, sending out all the orders of rays necessary to initiate the disruptive processes, we can use any metal we want to. Osnome has unlimited quantities of the heaviest metals, including radium and uranium. Of course we can't use radium and live--but we can and will use uranium, and that will give us something like four times the acceleration possible with copper. Dunark, what say you snap over there and smelt us a cubic mile of uranium? No--hold it--I'll put a flock of forces on the job. They'll do it quicker, and I'll make 'em deliver the goods. They'll deliver 'em fast, too, believe us--we'll see to that with a ten-ton bar. The uranium bars'll be ready to load tomorrow, and we'll have enough power to chase those birds all the rest of our lives!"

Returning to the projector, Seaton actuated the complex system of forces required for the smelting and transportation of the enormous amount of metal necessary, and as the three men again boarded their aerial conveyance, the power-bar in the projector behind them flared into violet incandescence under the load already put upon it by the new uranium mine in distant Osnome.

The _Skylark_ lay stretched out over two miles of country, exactly as they had last seen her, but now, instead of being water-white, the ten-thousand-foot cruiser of the void was one jointless, seamless structure of sparkling, transparent, purple inoson. Entering one of the open doors, they stepped into an elevator and were whisked upward into the control room, in which a dozen of the aged, white-bearded students of Norlamin were grouped about a banked and tiered mass of keyboards, which Seaton knew must be the operating mechanism of the extraordinarily complete fifth-order projector he had been promised.

"Ah, youngsters, you are just in time. Everything is complete and we are just about to begin loading."

"Sorry, Rovol, but we'll have to make a couple of changes--have to rebuild the exciter or build another one," and Seaton rapidly related what they had learned, and what they had decided to do.

"Of course, uranium is a much more efficient source of power," agreed Rovol, "and you are to be congratulated for thinking of it. It perhaps would not have occurred to one of us, since the heavy metals of that highly efficient group are very rare here. Building a new exciter for uranium is a simple task, and the converters for the corona-loss will, of course, require no change, since their action depends only upon the frequency of the emitted losses, not upon their magnitude."

"Hadn't you suspected that some of the Fenachrone might be going to lead us a life-long chase?" asked Dunark curiously.

"We have not given the matter a thought, my son," the Chief of the Five made answer. "As your years increase, you will learn not to anticipate trouble and worry. Had we thought and worried over the matter before the time had arrived, you will note that it would have been pain wasted, for our young friend Seaton has avoided that difficulty in a truly scholarly fashion."

"All set, then, Rovol?" asked Seaton, when the forces flying from the projector had built the compound exciter which would make possible the disruption of the atoms of uranium. "The metal, enough of it to fill all the spare space in the hull, will be here tomorrow. You might give Crane and me the method of operating this projector, which I see is vastly more complex even than the one in the Area of Experiment."

"It is the most complete thing ever seen upon Norlamin," replied Rovol with a smile. "Each of us installed everything in it that he could conceive of ever being of the slightest use, and since our combined knowledge covers a large field, the projector is accordingly quite comprehensive."

Multiple headsets were donned, and from each of the Norlaminian brains there poured into the minds of the two Terrestrials a complete and minute knowledge of every possible application of the stupendous force-control banked in all its massed intricacy before them.

"Well, that's some outfit!" exulted Seaton in pleased astonishment as the instructions were concluded. "It can do anything but lay an egg--and I'm not a darn bit sure that we couldn't make it do that! Well, let's call the girls and show them around this thing that's going to be their home for quite a while."

While they were waiting, Dunark led Seaton aside.

"Dick, will you need me on this trip?" he asked. "Of course I knew there was something on your mind when you didn't send me home when you let Urvan, Carfon and the others go back."

"No, we're going it alone--unless you want to come along. I did want you to stick around until I got to a good chance to talk to you alone--now will be a good a time as any. You and I have traded brains, and besides, we've been through quite a lot of grief together, here and there--I want to apologize to you for not passing along to you all this stuff I've been getting here. In fact, I really wish I didn't have to have it myself. Get me?"

"Got you? I'm 'way ahead of you! Don't want it, not any part of it--that's why I've stayed away from any chance of learning any of it, and the one reason why I am going back home instead of going with you. I have just brains enough to realize that neither I nor any other man of my race should have it. By the time we grow up to it naturally we shall be able to handle it, but not until then."

The two brain brothers grasped hands strongly, and Dunark continued in a lighter vein: "It takes all kinds of people to make a world, you know--and all kinds of races, except the Fenachrone, to make a Universe. With Mardonale gone, the evolution of Osnome shall progress rapidly, and while we may not reach the Ultimate Goal, I have learned enough from you already to speed up our progress considerably."

"Well, that's that. Had to get it off my chest, although I knew you'd get the idea all right. Here are the girls--Sitar too. We'll show 'em around."

* * * * *

Seaton's first thought was for the very brain of the ship--the precious lens of neutronium in its thin envelope of the eternal jewel--without which the beam of fifth-order rays could not be directed. He found it a quarter of a mile back from the needle-sharp prow, exactly in the longitudinal axis of the hull, protected from any possible damage by bulkhead after massive bulkhead of impregnable inoson. Satisfied upon that point, he went in search of the others, who were exploring their vast new space-ship.

Huge as she was, there was no waste space--her design was as compact as that of a fine radio set. The living quarters were grouped closely about the central compartment, which housed the power plants, the many ray generators and projectors, and the myriads of controls of the marvelous mechanism for the projection and direction of fifth-order rays. Several large compartments were devoted to the machinery which automatically serviced the vessel--refrigerators, heaters, generators and purifiers for water and air, and the numberless other mechanisms which would make the cruiser a comfortable and secure home, as well as an invincible battleship, in the heatless, lightless, airless, matterless waste of illimitable, inter-galactic space. Many compartments were for the storage of food-supplies, and these were even then being filled by forces under the able direction of the first of Chemistry.

"All the comforts of home, even to the labels," Seaton grinned, as he read "Dole No. 1" upon cans of pineapple which had never been within thousands of light-years of the Hawaiian Islands, and saw quarter after quarter of fresh meat going into the freezer room from a planet upon which no animal other than man had existed for many thousands of years. Nearly all of the remaining millions of cubic feet of space were for the storage of uranium for power, a few rooms already having been filled with ingot inoson for repairs. Between the many bulkheads that divided the ship into numberless airtight sections, and between the many concentric skins of purple metal that rendered the vessel space-worthy and sound, even though slabs many feet thick were to be shown off in any direction--in every nook and cranny could be stored the metal to keep those voracious generators full-fed, no matter how long or how severe the demand for power. Every room was connected through a series of tubular tunnels, along which force-propelled cars or elevators slid smoothly--tubes whose walls fell together into air-tight seals at any point, in case of a rupture.

As they made their way back to the great control-room room of the vessel, they saw something that because of its small size and clear transparency they had not previously seen. Below that room, not too near the outer skin, in a specially-built spherical launching space, there was _Skylark Two_, completely equipped and ready for an interstellar journey on her own account!

"Why, hello, little stranger!" Margaret called. "Rovol, that was a kind thought on your part. Home wouldn't quite be home without our old _Skylark_, would it, Martin?"

"A practical thought, as well as a kind one," Crane responded. "We undoubtedly will have occasion to visit places altogether too small for the really enormous bulk of this vessel."

"Yes, and whoever heard of a sea-going ship without a small boat?" put in irrepressible Dorothy. "She's just too perfectly kippy for words, sitting up there, isn't she?"

CHAPTER XV

The Extra-Galactic Duel

Loaded until her outer skin almost bulged with tightly packed bars of uranium and equipped to meet any emergency of which the combined efforts of the mightiest intellects of Norlamin could foresee even the slightest possibility, _Skylark Three_ lay quiescent. Quiescent, but surcharged with power, she seemed to Seaton's tense mind to share his own eagerness to be off; seemed to be motionlessly straining at her neutral controls in a futile endeavor to leave that unnatural and unpleasant environment of atmosphere and of material substance, to soar outward into absolute zero of temperature and pressure, into the pure and undefiled ether which was her natural and familiar medium.

The five human beings were grouped near an open door of their cruiser; before them were the ancient scientists, who for so many days had been laboring with them in their attempt to crush the monstrous race which was threatening the Universe. With the elders were the Terrestrials' many friends from the Country of Youth, and surrounding the immense vessel in a throng covering an area to be measured only in square miles were massed myriads of Norlaminians. From their tasks everywhere had come the mental laborers; the Country of Youth had been left depopulated; even those who, their lifework done, had betaken themselves to the placid Nirvana of the Country of Age, returned briefly to the Country of Study to speed upon its way that stupendous Ship of Peace.

The majestic Fodan, Chief of the Five, was concluding his address:

"And may the Unknowable Force direct your minor forces to a successful conclusion of your task. If, upon the other hand, it should by some unforeseen chance be graven upon the Sphere that you are to pass in this supreme venture, you may pass in all tranquillity, for the massed intellect of our entire race is here supporting me in my solemn affirmation that the Fenachrone shall not be allowed to prevail. In the name of all Norlamin, I bid you farewell."

Crane spoke briefly in reply and the little group of Earthly wanderers stepped into the elevator. As they sped upward toward the control room, door after door shot into place behind them, establishing a manifold seal. Seaton's hand played over the controls and the great cruiser of the void tilted slowly upward until its narrow prow pointed almost directly into the zenith. Then, very slowly at first, the unimaginable mass of the vessel floated lightly upward, with a slowly increasing velocity. Faster and faster she flew--out beyond measurable atmosphere, out beyond the outermost limits of the green system. Finally, in interstellar space, Seaton threw out super-powered detector and repelling screens, anchored himself at the driving console with a force, set the power control at "molecular" so that the propulsive force affected alike every molecule of the vessel and its contents, and, all sense of weight and acceleration lost, he threw in the plunger switch which released every iota of the theoretically possible power of the driving mass of uranium.

Staring intently into the visiplate, he corrected their course from time to time by minute fractions of a second of arc; then, satisfied at last, he set the automatic forces which would guide them, temporarily out of their course, around any obstacles, such as the uncounted thousands of solar systems lying in or near their path. He then removed the restraining forces from his body and legs, and with a small pencil of force wafted himself over to Crane and the two women.

"Well, bunch," he stated, matter-of-fact, "we're on our way. We'll be this way for some time, so we might as well get used to it. Any little thing you want to talk over?"

"How long will it take us to catch 'em?" asked Dorothy "Traveling this way isn't half as much fun as it is when you let us have some weight to hold us down."

"Hard to tell exactly, Dottie. If we had precisely four times their acceleration and had started from the same place, we would of course overtake them in just the number of days they had the start of us, since the distance covered at any constant positive acceleration is proportional to the square of the time elapsed. However, there are several complicating factors in the actual situation. We started out not only twenty-nine days behind them, but also a matter of five hundred thousand light-years of distance. It will take us quite a while to get to their starting-point. I can't tell even that very close, as we will probably have to reduce this acceleration before we get out of the Galaxy, in order to give detectors and repellers time to act on stars and other loose impediments. Powerful as those screens are and fast as they work, there is a limit to the velocity we can use here in this crowded Galaxy. Outside it, in free space, of course we can open her up again. Then, too, our acceleration is not exactly four times theirs, only three point nine one eight six. On the other hand, we don't have to catch them to go to work on them. We can operate very nicely at five thousand light-centuries. So there you are--it'll probably be somewhere between thirty-nine and forty-one days, but it may be a day or so more or less."

"How do you know they are using copper?" asked Margaret. "Maybe their scientists stored up some uranium and know how to use it."

"Nope, that's out like a light. First, Mart and I saw only copper bars in their ship. Second, copper is the most efficient metal found in quantity upon their planet. Third, even if they had uranium or any metal of its class, they couldn't use it without a complete knowledge of, and ability to handle, the fourth and fifth orders of rays."

"It is your opinion, then, that destroying this last Fenachrone vessel is to prove as simple a matter as did the destruction of the others?" Crane queried, pointedly.

"Hm-m-m. Never thought about it from that angle at all, Mart.... You're still the ground-and-lofty thinker of the outfit, ain't you? Now that you mention it, though, we may find that the Last of the Mohicans ain't entirely toothless, at that. But say, Mart, how come I'm as wild and cock-eyed as I ever was? Rovol's a slow and thoughtful old codger, and with his accumulation of knowledge it looks like I'd be the same way."

"Far from it," Crane replied. "Your nature and mine remain unchanged. Temperament is a basic trait of heredity, and is neither affected nor acquired by increase of knowledge. You acquired knowledge from Rovol, Drasnik, and others, as did I--but you are still the flashing genius and I am still your balance wheel. As for Fenachrone toothlessness: now that you have considered it, what is your opinion?"

"Hard to say. They didn't know how to control the fifth order rays, or they wouldn't have run. They've got real brains, though, and they'll have something like seventy days to work on the problem. While it doesn't stand to reason that they could find out much in seventy days, still they may have had a set-up of instruments on their detectors that would have enabled them to analyze our fields and thus compute the structure of the secondary projector we used there. If so, it wouldn't take them long to find out enough to give us plenty of grief--but I don't really believe that they knew enough. I don't quite know what to think. They may be easy and they may not; but, easy or hard to get, we're loaded for bear and I'm plenty sure that we'll pull their corks."

"So am I, really, but we must consider every contingency. We know that they had at least a detector of fifth-order rays...."

"And if they did have an analytical detector," Seaton interrupted, "they'll probably slap a ray on us as soon as we stick our nose out of the Galaxy!"

"They may--and even though I do not believe that there is any probability of them actually doing it, it will be well to be armed against the possibility."

"Right, old top--we'll do that little thing!"

* * * * *

Uneventful days passed, and true to Seaton's calculations, the awful acceleration with which they had started out could not be maintained. A few days before the edge of the Galaxy was reached, it became necessary to cut off the molecular drive, and to proceed with an acceleration equal only to that of gravitation at the surface of the Earth. Tired of weightlessness and its attendant discomforts to everyday life, the travelers enjoyed the interlude immensely, but it was all too short--too soon the stars thinned out ahead of "_Three's_" needle prow. As soon as the way ahead of them was clear, Seaton again put on the maximum power of his terrific bars and, held securely at the console, set up a long and involved integral. Ready to transfer the blended and assembled forces to a plunger, he stayed his hand, thought a moment, and turned to Crane.

"Want some advice, Mart. I'd thought of setting up three or four courses of five-ply screen on the board--a detector screen on the outside of each course, next to it a repeller, then a full-coverage ether-ray screen, then a zone of force, and a full-coverage fifth-order ray-screen as a liner. Then, with them all set up on the board, but not out, throw out a wide detector. That detector would react upon the board at impact with anything hostile, and automatically throw out the courses it found necessary."

"That sounds like ample protection, but I am not enough of a ray-specialist to pass an opinion. Upon what point are you doubtful?"

"About leaving them on the board. The only trouble is that the reaction isn't absolutely instantaneous. Even fifth-order rays would require a millionth of a second or so to set the courses. Now if they were using ether waves, that would be lots of time to block them, but if they _should_ happen to have fifth-order stuff it'd get here the same time our own detector-impulse would, and it's just barely conceivable that they might give us a nasty jolt before the defenses went out. Nope, I'm developing a cautious streak myself now, when I take time to do it. We've got lots of uranium, and I'm going to put one course out."

"You cannot put everything out, can you?"

"Not quite, but pretty nearly, I'll leave a hole in the ether screen to pass visible light--no, I won't either. You folks can see just as well, even on the direct-vision wall plates, with light heterodyned on the fifth, so we'll close all ether bands, absolutely. All we'll have to leave open will be the one extremely narrow band upon which our projector is operating, and I'll protect that with a detector screen. Also, I'm going to send out all four courses, instead of only one--then I'll _know_ we're all right."

"Suppose they find our one band, narrow as it is? Of course, if that were shut off automatically by the detector, we'd be safe; but would we not be out of control?"

"Not necessarily--I see you didn't get quite all this stuff over the educator. The other projector worked that way, on one fixed band out of the nine thousand odd possible. But this one is an ultra-projector, an improvement invented at the last minute. Its carrier wave can be shifted at will from one band of the fifth order to any other one; and I'll bet a hat that's _one_ thing the Fenachrone haven't got! Any other suggestions?... all right, let's get busy!"

A single light, quick-acting detector was sent out ahead of four courses of five-ply screen, then Seaton's fingers again played over the keys, fabricating a detector screen so tenuous that it would react to nothing weaker than a copper power bar in full operation and with so nearly absolute zero resistance that it could be driven at the full velocity of his ultra-projector. Then, while Crane watched the instruments closely and while Dorothy and Margaret watched the faces of their husbands with only mild interest, Seaton drove home the plunger that sent that prodigious and ever-widening fan ahead of them with a velocity unthinkable millions of times that of light. For five minutes, until that far-flung screen had gone as far as it could be thrown by the utmost power of the uranium bar, the two men stared at the unresponsive instruments, then Seaton shrugged his shoulders.

"I had a hunch," he remarked with a grin. "They didn't wait for us a second. 'I don't care for some,' says they, 'I've already had any.' They're running in a straight line, with full power on, and don't intend to stop or slow down."

"How do you know?" asked Dorothy. "By the distance? How far away are they?"

"I know, Red-Top, by what I didn't find out with that screen I just put out. It didn't reach them, and it went so far that the distance is absolutely meaningless, even expressed in parsecs. Well, a stern chase is proverbially a long chase, and I guess this one isn't going to be any exception."

* * * * *

Every eight hours Seaton launched his all-embracing ultra-detector, but day after day passed and the instruments remained motionless after each cast of that gigantic net. For several days the Galaxy behind them had been dwindling from a mass of stars down to a huge bright lens; down to a small, faint lens; down to a faintly luminous patch. At the previous cast of the detector it had still been visible as a barely-perceptible point of light in the highest telescopic power of the visiplate. Now, as Dorothy and Seaton, alone in the control room, stared into that visiplate, everything was blank and black; sheer, indescribable blackness; the utter and absolute absence of everything visible or tangible.

"This is awful, Dick.... It's just too darn horrible. It simply scares me pea-green!" she shuddered as she drew herself to him, and he swept both his mighty arms around her in a soul-satisfying embrace.

"'Sall right, darling. That stuff out there'd scare anybody--I'm scared purple myself. It isn't in any finite mind to understand anything infinite or absolute. There's one redeeming feature, though, cuddle-pup--we're together."

"You chirped it, lover!" Dorothy returned his caresses with all her old-time fervor and enthusiasm. "I feel lots better now. If it gets to you that way, too, I know it's perfectly normal--I was beginning to think maybe I was yellow or something ... but maybe you're kidding me?" she held him off at arm's length, looking deep into his eyes: then, reassured, went back-into his arms. "Nope, you feel it, too," and her glorious auburn head found its natural resting-place in the curve of his mighty shoulder.

"Yellow!... You?" Seaton pressed his wife closer still! and laughed aloud. "Maybe--but so is picric acid; so is nitroglycerin; and so is pure gold."

"Flatterer!" Her low, entrancing chuckle bubbled over. "But you know I just revel in it. I'll kiss you for that!"

"It _is_ awfully lonesome out here, without even a star to look at," she went on, after a time, then laughed again. "If the Cranes and Shiro weren't along, we'd be really 'alone at last,' wouldn't we?"

"I'll say we would! But that reminds me of something. According to my figures, we might have been able to detect the Fenachrone on the last test, but we didn't. Think I'll try 'em again before we turn in."

Once more he flung out that tenuous net of force, and as it reached the extreme limit of its travel, the needle of the micro-ammeter flickered slightly, barely moving off its zero mark.

"Whee! Whoopee!" he yelled. "Mart, we're on 'em!"

"Close?" demanded Crane, hurrying into the control room upon his beam.

"Anything but. Barely touched 'em--current something less than a thousandth of a micro-ampere on a million to one step-up. However, it proves our ideas are O. K."

The next day--_Skylark III_ was running on Eastern Standard Time, of the Terrestrial United States of America--the two mathematicians covered sheet after sheet of paper with computations and curves. After checking and rechecking the figures, Seaton shut off the power, released the molecular drive, and applied acceleration of twenty-nine point six oh two feet per second; and five human beings breathed as one a profound sigh of relief as an almost-normal force of gravitation was restored to them.

"Why the let-up?" asked Dorothy. "They're an awful long ways off yet, aren't they? Why not hurry up and catch them?"

"Because we're going infinitely faster than they are now. If we kept up full acceleration, we'd pass them so fast that we couldn't fight them at all. This way, we'll still be going a lot faster than they are when we get close to them, but not enough faster to keep us from maneuvering relatively to their vessel, if things should go that far. Guess I'll take another reading on 'em."

"I do not believe that I should," Crane suggested, thoughtfully. "After all, they may have perfected their instruments, and yet may not have detected that extremely light touch of our ray last night. If so, why put them on guard?"

"They're probably on guard, all right, without having to be put there--but it's a sound idea, anyway. Along the same line I'll release the fifth-order screens, with the fastest possible detector on guard. We're just about within reach of a light copper-driven ray right now, but it's a cinch they can't send anything heavy this far, and if they think we're overconfident, so much the better."

"There," he continued, after a few minutes at the keyboard. "All set. If they put a detector on us, I've got a force set to make a noise like a New York City fire siren. If pressed, I'd reluctantly admit that in my opinion we're carrying caution to a point ten thousand degrees below the absolute zero of sanity. I'll bet my shirt that we don't hear a yip out of them before we touch 'em off. Furthermore...."

* * * * *

The rest of his sentence was lost in a crescendo bellow of sound. Seaton, still at the controls, shut off the noise, studied his meters carefully, and turned around to Crane with a grin.

"You win the shirt, Mart. I'll give it to you next Wednesday, when my other one comes back from the laundry. It's a fifth-order detector ray, coming in beautifully on band forty-seven fifty, right in the middle of the order."

"Aren't you going to put a ray on 'em?" asked Dorothy in surprise.

"Nope--what's the use? I can read theirs as well as I could one of my own. Maybe they know that too--if they don't we'll let 'em think we're coming along, as innocent as Mary's little lamb, so I'll let their ray stay on us. It's too thin to carry anything, and if they thicken it up much I've got an axe set to chop it off." Seaton whistled a merry lilting refrain as his fingers played over the stops and keys.

"Why, Dick, you seem actually pleased about it." Margaret was plainly ill at ease.

"Sure am. I never did like to drown baby kittens, and it kinda goes against the grain to stab a guy in the back, when he ain't even looking, even if he is a Fenachrone. If they can fight back some I'll get mad enough to blow 'em up happy."

"But suppose they fight back too hard?"

"They can't--the worst that can possibly happen is that we can't lick them. They certainly can't lick us, because we can outrun 'em. If we can't get 'em alone, we'll beat it back to Norlamin and bring up re-enforcements."

"I am not so sure," Crane spoke slowly. "There is, I believe, a theoretical possibility that sixth-order rays exist. Would an extension of the methods of detection of fifth-order rays reveal them?"

"_Sixth_? Sweet spirits of niter! Nobody knows anything about them. However, I've had one surprise already, so maybe your suggestion isn't as crazy as it sounds. We've got three or four days yet before either side can send anything except on the sixth, so I'll find out what I can do."

He flew at the task, and for the next three days could hardly be torn from it for rest; but

"O. K., Mart," he finally announced. "They exist, all right, and I can detect 'em. Look here," and he pointed to a tiny receiver, upon which a small lamp flared in brilliant scarlet light.

"Are they sending them?"

"No, fortunately. They're coming from our bar. See, it shines blue when I put a grounded shield between it and the bar, and stays blue when I attach it to their detector ray."

"Can you direct them?"

"Not a chance in the world. That means a lifetime, probably many lifetimes, of research, unless somebody uses a fairly complete pattern of them close enough to this detector so that I can analyze it. 'Sa good deal like calculus in that respect. It took thousands of years to get it in the first place, but it's easy when somebody that already knows it shows you how it goes."

"The Fenachrone learned to direct fifth-order rays so quickly, then, by an analysis of our fifth-order projector there?"

"Our secondary projector, yes. They must have had some neutronium in stock, too--but it would have been funny if they hadn't, at that--they've had intra-atomic power for ages."

Silent and grim, he seated himself at the console, and for an hour he wove an intricate pattern of forces upon the inexhaustible supply of keys afforded by the ultra-projector before he once touched a plunger.

"What are you doing? I followed you for a few hundred steps, but could go no farther."

"Merely a little safety-first stuff. In case they should send any real pattern of sixth-order rays this set-up will analyze it, record the complete analysis, throw out a screen against every frequency of the pattern, throw on the molecular drive, and pull us back toward the galaxy at full acceleration, while switching the frequency of our carrier wave a thousand times a second, to keep them from shooting a hot one through our open band. It'll do it all in about a millionth of a second, too--I want to get us all back alive if possible! Hm--m. They've shut off their ray--they know we've tapped onto it. Well, war's declared now--we'll see what we can see."

Transferring the assembled beam to a plunger, he sent out a secondary projector toward the Fenachrone vessel, as fast as it could be driven, close behind a widespread detector net. He soon found the enemy cruiser, but so immense was the distance that it was impossible to hold the projection anywhere in its neighborhood. They flashed beyond it and through it and upon all sides of it, but the utmost delicacy of the controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship, they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle station at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen closed behind them--the Earth-men felt an instant of unreasoning terror as it seemed that one-half of their peculiar dual personalities vanished utterly. Seaton laughed.

"That was a funny sensation, wasn't it? It just means that they've climbed a tree and pulled the tree up after them."

"I do not like the odds, Dick," Crane's face was grave. "They have many hundreds of men, all trained; and we are only two. Yes, only one, for I count for nothing at those controls."

"All the better, Mart. This board more than makes up the difference. They've got a lot of stuff, of course, but they haven't got anything like this control system. Their captain's got to issue orders, whereas I've got everything right under my hands. Not so uneven as they think!"

* * * * *

Within battle range at last, Seaton hurled his utmost concentration of direct forces, under the impact of which three courses of Fenachrone defensive screen flared through the ultra-violet and went black. There the massed direct attack was stopped--at what cost the enemy alone knew--and the Fenachrone countered instantly and in a manner totally unexpected. Through the narrow slit in the fifth-order screen through which Seaton was operating, in the bare one-thousandth of a second that it was open, so exactly synchronized and timed that the screens did not even glow as it went through the narrow opening, a gigantic beam of heterodyned force struck full upon the bow of the _Skylark_, near the sharply-pointed prow, and the stubborn metal instantly flared blinding white and exploded outward in puffs of incandescent gas under the awful power of that Titanic thrust. Through four successive skins of inoson, the theoretical ultimate of possible strength, toughness, and resistance, that frightful beam drove before the automatically-reacting detector closed the slit and the impregnable defensive screens, driven by their mighty uranium bars, flared into incandescent defense. Driven as they were, they held, and the Fenachrone, finding that particular attack useless, shut off their power.

"Wow! They sure have got something!" Seaton exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. "They sure gave us a solid kick that time! We will now take time out for repairs. Also, I'm going to cut our slit down to a width of one kilocycle, if I can possibly figure out a way of working on that narrow a band, and I'm going to step up our shifting speed to a hundred thousand. It's a good thing they built this ship of ours in a lot of layers--if that'd go through the interior we would have been punctured for fair. You might weld up those holes, Mart, while I see what I can do here."

Then Seaton noticed the women, white and trembling, upon a seat.

"'Smatter? Cheer up, kids, you ain't seen nothing yet. That was just a couple of little preliminary love-taps, like two boxers kinda feeling each other out in the first ten seconds of the first round."

"Preliminary love-taps!" repeated Dorothy, looking into Seaton's eyes and being reassured by the serene confidence she read there. "But they hit us, and hurt us badly--why, there's a hole in our _Skylark_ as big as a house, and it goes through four or five layers!"

"Yes, but we're not hurt a bit. They're easily fixed, and we've lost nothing but a few tons of inoson and uranium. We've got lots of spare metal. I don't know what I did to him, any more than he knows what he did to us, but I'll bet my other shirt that he knows he's been nudged!"

Repairs completed and the changes made in the method of projection, Seaton actuated the rapidly-shifting slit and peered through it at the enemy vessel. Finding their screens still up, he directed a complete-coverage attack upon them with four bars, while with the entire massed power of the remaining generators concentrated into one frequency, he shifted that frequency up and down the spectrum, probing, probing, ever probing with that gigantic beam of intolerable energy--feeling for some crack, however slight, into which he could insert that searing sheet of concentrated destruction. Although much of the available power of the Fenachrone was perforce devoted to repelling the continuous attack of the Terrestrials, they maintained an equally continuous attack offensive, and in spite of the narrowness of the open slit and the rapidity with which that slit was changing from frequency to frequency, enough of the frightful forces came through to keep the ultra-powered defensive screens radiating far into the violet--and, the utmost power of the refrigerating system proving absolutely useless against the concentrated beams being employed, mass after mass of inoson was literally blown from the outer and secondary skins of the _Skylark_ by the comparatively tiny jets of force that leaked through the momentarily open slit from time to time, as exact synchronization was accidentally obtained.

Seaton, grimly watching his instruments, glanced at Crane, who, calm but watchful at his console, was repairing the damage as fast as it was done.

"They're sending more stuff, Mart, and it's getting hotter to handle. That means they're building more projectors. We can play that game, too. They're using up their fuel reserves fast; but we're bigger than they are, carry more metal, and it's more efficient metal, too. Only one way out of it, I guess--what say we put in enough generators to smother them down by brute force, no matter how much power it takes?"

"Why don't you use some of those awful copper shells? Or aren't we close enough yet?" Dorothy's low voice came clearly, so utterly silent was that frightful combat.

"Close! We're still better than two hundred thousand light-years apart! There may have been longer-range battles than this somewhere in the Universe, but I doubt it. And as for copper, even if we could get it to them, it'd be just like so many candy kisses compared to the stuff we're both using. Dear girl, there are fields of force extending for thousands of miles from each of these vessels beside which the exact center of the biggest lightning flash you ever saw would be a dead area!"

He set up a series of integrals and, machine after machine, in a space left vacant by the rapidly-vanishing store of uranium, there appeared inside the fourth skin of the _Skylark_ a row of gigantic generators, each one adding its hellish output to the already inconceivable stream of energy being directed at the foe. As that frightful flow increased by leaps and bounds, the intensity of the Fenachrone attack diminished, and finally it ceased altogether as every iota of the enemy's power became necessary for the maintenance of the defenses. Still greater grew the stream of force from the _Skylark_, and, now that the attack had ceased, Seaton opened the slit wider and stopped its shifting, in order still further to increase the efficiency of his terrible weapon. Face set in a fighting mask and eyes hard as gray iron, deeper and deeper he drove his now irresistible forces. His flying fingers were upon the keys of his console; his keen and merciless eyes were in a secondary projector near the now doomed ship of the Fenachrone, directing masterfully his terrible attack. As the output of his generators still increased, Seaton began to compress a searing hollow sphere of seething energy upon the furiously-straining defensive screens of the Fenachrone. Course after course of the heaviest possible screen was sent out, driven by massed batteries of copper now disintegrating at the rate of tons in every second, only to flare through the ultra-violet and to go down before that dreadful, that irresistible onslaught. Finally, as the inexorable sphere still contracted, the utmost efforts of the defenders could not keep their screens away from their own vessel, and simultaneously the prow and the stern of the Fenachrone cruiser was bared to that awful field of force, in which no possible substance could endure for even the most infinitesimal instant of time.

There was a sudden cessation of all resistance, and those Titanic forces, all directed inward, converged upon a point with a power behind which there was the inconceivable energy of four hundred thousand tons of uranium, being disintegrated at the highest possible rate, short of instant disruption. In that same instant of collapse, the enormous mass of power-copper in the Fenachrone cruiser and the vessel's every atom, alike of structure and contents, also exploded into pure energy at the touch of that unimaginable field of force.

In that awful moment before Seaton could shut off his power it seemed to him that space itself must be obliterated by the very concentration of the unknowable and incalculable forces there unleashed--must be swallowed up and lost in the utterly indescribable brilliance of the field of radiance driven to a distance of millions upon incandescent millions of miles from the place where the last representatives of the monstrous civilization of the Fenachrone had made their last stand against the forces of Universal Peace.

Epilogue

The three-dimensional, moving, talking, almost living picture, being shown simultaneously in all the viewing areas throughout the innumerable planets of the Galaxy, faded out and the image of an aged, white-bearded Norlaminian appeared and spoke in the Galactic language.

"As is customary, the showing of this picture has opened the celebration of our great Galactic holiday, Civilization Day. As you all know, it portrays the events leading up to and making possible the formation of the League of Civilization by a mere handful of planets. The League now embraces all of this, the First Galaxy, and is spreading rapidly throughout the Universe. Varied are the physical forms and varied are the mentalities of our almost innumerable races of beings, but in Civilization we are becoming one, since those backward people who will not co-operate with us are rendered impotent to impede our progress among the more enlightened.

"It is peculiarly fitting that the one who has just been chosen to head the Galactic Council--the first person of a race other than one of those of the Central System to prove himself able to wield justly the vast powers of that office--should be a direct descendant of two of the revered persons whose deeds of olden times we have just witnessed.

"I present to you my successor as Chief of the Galactic Council, Richard Ballinger Seaton, the fourteen hundred sixty-ninth, of Earth."

THE END

       Spacehounds of IPC

_A good many of us, who are now certain beyond a doubt that space travel will forever remain in the realm of the impossible, probably would, if a rocket that were shot to the moon, for instance, did arrive, and perhaps return to give proof of its safe arrival on our satellite, accept the phenomenon in a perfectly blas, twentieth century manner. Dr. Smith, that phenomenal writer of classic scientific fiction, seems to have become so thoroughly convinced of the advent of interplanetary travel that it is difficult for the reader to feel, after finishing "Spacehounds of IPC," that travel in the great spaces is not already an established fact. Dr. Smith, as a professional chemist, is kept fairly busy. As a writer, he is satisfied with nothing less than perfection. For that reason, a masterpiece from his pen has become almost an annual event. We know you will like "Spacehounds" even better than the "Skylark" series._

CHAPTER I

The IPV _Arcturus_ Sets Out for Mars

A narrow football of steel, the Interplanetary Vessel _Arcturus_ stood upright in her berth in the dock like an egg in its cup. A hundred feet across and a hundred and seventy feet deep was that gigantic bowl, its walls supported by the structural steel and concrete of the dock and lined with hard-packed bumper-layers of hemp and fibre. High into the air extended the upper half of the ship of space--a sullen gray expanse of fifty-inch hardened steel armor, curving smoothly upward to a needle prow. Countless hundred of fine vertical scratches marred every inch of her surface, and here and there the stubborn metal was grooved and scored to a depth of inches--each scratch and score the record of an attempt of some wandering cosmic body to argue the right-of-way with the stupendous mass of that man-made cruiser of the void.

A burly young man made his way through the throng about the entrance, nodded unconcernedly to the gatekeeper, and joined the stream of passengers flowing through the triple doors of the double air-lock and down a corridor to the center of the vessel. However, instead of entering one of the elevators which were whisking the passengers up to their staterooms in the upper half of the enormous football, he in some way caused an opening to appear in an apparently blank steel wall and stepped through it into the control room.

"Hi, Breck!" the burly one called, as he strode up to the instrument-desk of the chief pilot and tossed his bag carelessly into a corner. "Behold your computer in the flesh! What's all this howl and fuss about poor computation?"

"Hello, Steve!" The chief pilot smiled as he shook hands cordially. "Glad to see you again--but don't try to kid the old man. I'm simple enough to believe almost anything, but some things just aren't being done. We have been yelling, and yelling hard, for trained computers ever since they started riding us about every one centimeter change in acceleration, but I know that you're no more an I-P computer than I am a Digger Indian. They don't shoot sparrows with coast-defense guns!"

"Thanks for the compliment, Breck, but I'm your computer for this trip, anyway. Newton, the good old egg, knows what you fellows are up against and is going to do something about it, if he has to lick all the rest of the directors to do it. He knew that I was loose for a couple of weeks and asked me to come along this trip to see what I could see. I'm to check the observatory data--they don't know I'm aboard--take the peaks and valleys off your acceleration curve, if possible, and report to Newton just what I find out and what I think should be done about it. How early am I?" While the newcomer was talking, he had stripped the covers from a precise scale model of the solar system and from a large and complicated calculating machine and had set to work without a wasted motion or instant--scaling off upon the model the positions of the various check-stations and setting up long and involved integrals and equations upon the calculator.

The older man studied the broad back of the younger, bent over his computations, and a tender, almost fatherly smile came over his careworn face as he replied:

"Early? You? Just like you always were--plus fifteen seconds on the deadline. The final dope is due right now." He plugged the automatic recorder and speaker into a circuit marked "Observatory," waited until a tiny light above the plug flashed green, and spoke.

"IPV _Arcturus_; Breckenridge, Chief Pilot; trip number forty-three twenty-nine. Ready for final supplementary route and flight data, Tellus to Mars."

"Meteoric swarms still too numerous for safe travel along the scheduled route," came promptly from the speaker. "You must stay further away from the plane of the ecliptic. The ether will be clear for you along route E2-P6-W41-K3-R19-S7-M14. You will hold a constant acceleration of 981.27 centimeters between initial and final check stations. Your take-off will be practically unobstructed, but you will have to use the utmost caution in landing upon Mars, because in order to avoid a weightless detour and a loss of thirty-one minutes, you must pass very close to both the Martian satellites. To do so safely you must pass the last meteorological station, M14, on schedule time plus or minus five seconds, at scheduled velocity plus or minus ten meters, with exactly the given negative acceleration of 981.27 centimeters, and exactly upon the pilot ray M14 will have set for you."

"All x." Breckenridge studied his triplex chronometer intently, then unplugged and glanced around the control room, in various parts of which half a dozen assistants were loafing at their stations.

"Control and power check-out--Hipe!" he barked. "Driving converters and projectors!"

The first assistant scanned his meters narrowly as he swung a multi-point switch in a flashing arc. "Converter efficiency 100, projector reactivity 100; on each of numbers one to forty-five inclusive. All x."

"Dirigible projectors!"

* * * * *

Two more gleaming switches leaped from point to point. "Converter efficiency 100, projector reactivity 100, dirigibility 100, on each of numbers one to thirty-two, inclusive, of upper band; and numbers one to thirty-two, inclusive, of lower band. All x."

"Gyroscopes!"

"35,000. Drivers in equilibrium at ten degrees plus. All x."

"Upper lights and lookout plates!"

The second assistant was galvanized into activity, and upon a screen before him there appeared a view as though he were looking directly upward from the prow of the great vessel. The air above them was full of aircraft of all shapes and sizes, and occasionally the image of one of that flying horde flared into violet splendor upon the screen as it was caught in the mighty, roving beam of one of the twelve ultra-light projectors under test.

"Upper lights and lookout plates--all x," the second assistant reported, and other assistants came to attention as the check-out went on.

"Lower lights and lookout plates!"

"All x," was the report, after each of the twelve ultra-lights of the stern had swung around in its supporting brackets, illuminating every recess of the dark depths of the bottom well of the berth and throwing the picture upon another screen in lurid violet relief.

"Lateral and vertical detectors!"

"Laterals XP2710--all x. Verticals AJ4290--all x."

"Receptors!"

"15,270 kilofranks--all x."

"Accumulators!"

"700,000 kilofrank-hours--all x."

Having thus checked and tested every function of his department, Breckenridge plugged into "Captain," and when the green light went on:

"Chief pilot check-out--all x," he reported briefly.

"All x," acknowledged the speaker, and the chief pilot unplugged. Fifteen minutes remained, during which time one department head after another would report to the captain of the liner that everything in his charge was ready for the stupendous flight.

"All x, Steve?" Breckenridge turned to the computer. "How do you check acceleration and power with the observatory?"

"Not so good, old bean," the younger man frowned in thought. "They figure like astronomers, not navigators. They've made no allowances for anything, not even the reversal--and I figure four thousands for that and for minor detours. Then there's check station errors...."

"Check-station errors! Why, they're always right--that's what they're for!"

"Don't fool yourself--they've got troubles of their own, the same as anybody else. In fact, from a study of the charts of the last few weeks, I'm pretty sure that E2 is at least four thousand kilometers this side of where he thinks he is, that W41 is ten or twelve thousand beyond his station, and that they've both got a lateral displacement that's simply fierce. I'm going to check up, and argue with them about it as we pass. Then there's another thing--they figure to only two places, and we've got to have the third place almost solid if we expect to get a smooth curve. A hundredth of a centimeter of acceleration means a lot on a long trip when they're holding us as close as they are doing now. We'll ride this trip on 981.286 centimeters--with our scheduled mass, that means thirty six points of four seven kilofranks _plus_ equilibrium power. All set to go," the computer stated, as he changed, by fractions of arc, the course-plotters of the automatic integrating goniometer.

"You're the doctor--but I'm glad it's you that'll have to explain to the observatory," and Breckenridge set his exceedingly delicate excess power potentiometer exactly upon the indicated figure. "Well, we've got a few minutes left for a chin-chin before we lift her off."

"What's all this commotion about? Dish out the low-down."

"Well, it's like this, Steve. We pilots are having one sweet time--we're being growled at on every trip. The management squawks if we're thirty seconds plus or minus at the terminals, and the passenger department squalls if we change acceleration five centimeters total en route--claims it upsets the dainty customers and loses business for the road. They're tightening up on us all the time. A couple of years ago, you remember, it didn't make any difference what we did with the acceleration as long as we checked in somewhere near zero time--we used to spin 'em dizzy when we reversed at the half-way station--but that kind of stuff doesn't go any more. We've got to hold the acceleration constant and close to normal, got to hold our schedule on zero, _plus_ or _minus_ ten seconds, and yet we've got to make any detours they tell us to, such as this seven-million kilometer thing they handed us just now. To make things worse, we've got to take orders at every check-station, and yet _we_ get the blame for everything that happens as a consequence of obeying those orders! Of course, I know as well as you do that it's rotten technique to change acceleration at every check-station; but we've told 'em over and over that we can't do any better until they put a real computer on every ship and tell the check-stations to report meteorites and other obstructions to us and then to let us alone. So you'd better recommend us some computers!"

"You're getting rotten computation, that's a sure thing, and I don't blame you pilots for yelling, but I don't believe that you've got the right answer. I can't help but think that the astronomers are lying down on the job. They are so sure that you pilots are to blame that it hasn't occurred to them to check up on themselves very carefully. However, we'll know pretty quick, and then we'll take steps."

"I hope so--but say, Steve, I'm worried about using that much plus equilibrium power. Remember, we've got to hit M14 in absolutely good shape, or plenty heads will drop."

"I'll say they will. I know just how the passengers will howl if we hold them weightless for half an hour, waiting for those two moons to get out of the way, and I know just what the manager will do if we check in minus thirty-one minutes. Wow! He'll swell up and bust, sure. But don't worry, Breck--if we don't check in all right, anybody can have my head that wants it, and I'm taking full responsibility, you know."

"You're welcome to it." Breckenridge shrugged and turned the conversation into a lighter vein. "Speaking of weightlessness, it's funny how many weight-fiends there are in the world, isn't it? You'd think the passengers would enjoy a little weightlessness occasionally--especially the fat ones--but they don't. But say, while I think of it, how come you were here and loose to make this check-up? I thought you were out with the other two of the Big Three, solving all the mysteries of the Universe?"

"Had to stay in this last trip--been doing some work on the ether, force-field theory, and other advanced stuff that I had to go to Mars and Venus to get. Just got back last week. As for solving mysteries, laugh while you can, old hyena. You and a lot of other dim bulbs think that Roeser's Rays are the last word--that there's nothing left to discover--are going to get jarred loose from your hinges one of these days. When I came in nine months ago they were hot on the trail of something big, and I'll bet they bring it in...."

Out upon the dock an insistent siren blared a crescendo and diminuendo blast of sound, and two minutes remained. In every stateroom and in every lounge and saloon speakers sounded a warning:

"For a short time, while we are pulling clear of the gravitational field of the Earth, walking will be somewhat difficult, as everything on board will apparently increase in weight by about one-fifth of its present amount. Please remain seated, or move about with caution. In about an hour weight will gradually return to normal. We start in one minute."

"Hipe!" barked the chief pilot as a flaring purple light sprang into being upon his board, and the assistants came to attention at their stations. "Seconds! Four! Three! Two! One! LIFT!" He touched a button and a set of plunger switches drove home, releasing into the forty-five enormous driving projectors the equilibrium power--the fifteen-thousand-and-odd kilofranks of energy that exactly counterbalanced the pull of gravity upon the mass of the cruiser. Simultaneously there was added from the potentiometer, already set to the exact figure given by the computer, the _plus_-equilibrium power--which would not be changed throughout the journey if the ideal acceleration curve were to be registered upon the recorders--and the immense mass of the cruiser of the void wafted vertically upward at a low and constant velocity. The bellowing, shrieking siren had cleared the air magically of the swarm of aircraft in her path, and quietly, calmly, majestically, the _Arcturus_ floated upward.

* * * * *

Breckenridge, sixty seconds after the initial lift, actuated the system of magnetic relays which would gradually cut in the precisely measured "starting power," which it would be necessary to employ for sixty-nine minutes--for, without the acceleration given by this additional power, they would lose many precious hours of time in covering merely the few thousands of miles during which Earth's attraction would operate powerfully against their progress.

Faster and faster the great cruiser shot upward as more and more of the starting power was released, and heavier and heavier the passengers felt themselves become. Soon the full calculated power was on and the acceleration became constant. Weight no longer increased, but remained constant at a value of plus twenty three and six-tenths percent. For a few moments there had been uneasy stomachs among the passengers--perhaps a few of the first-trippers had been made ill--but it was not much worse than riding in a high-speed elevator, particularly since there was no change from positive to negative acceleration such as is experienced in express elevators.

The computer, his calculations complete, watched the pilot with interest, for, accustomed as he was to traversing the depths of space, there was a never-failing thrill to his scientific mind in the delicacy and precision of the work which Breckenridge was doing--work which could be done only by a man who had had long training in the profession and who was possessed of instantaneous nervous reaction and of the highest degree of manual dexterity and control. Under his right and left hands were the double-series potentiometers actuating the variable-speed drives of the flight-angle directors in the hour and declination ranges; before his eyes was the finely marked micrometer screen upon which the guiding goniometer threw its needle-point of light; powerful optical systems of prisms and lenses revealed to his sight the director-angles, down to fractional seconds of arc. It was the task of the chief pilot to hold the screened image of the cross-hairs of the two directors in such position relative to the ever-moving point of light as to hold the mighty vessel precisely upon its course, in spite of the complex system of forces acting upon it.

For almost an hour Breckenridge sat motionless, his eyes flashing from micrometer screen to signal panel, his sensitive fingers moving the potentiometers through minute arcs because of what he saw upon the screen and in instantaneous response to the flashing, multi-colored lights and tinkling signals of his board. Finally, far from earth, the moon's attraction and other perturbing forces comparatively slight, the signals no longer sounded and the point of light ceased its irregular motion, becoming almost stationary. The chief pilot brought both cross-hairs directly upon the brilliant point, which for some time they had been approaching more and more nearly, adjusted the photo-cells and amplifiers which would hold them immovably upon it, and at the calculated second of time, cut out the starting power by means of another set of automatically timed relays. When only the regular driving power was left, and the acceleration had been checked and found to be exactly the designated value of 981.286 centimeters, he stood up and heaved a profound sigh of relief.

"Well, Steve, that's over with--we're on our way. I'm always glad when this part of it is done."

"It's a ticklish job, no fooling--even for an expert," the mathematician agreed. "No wonder the astronomers think you birds are the ones who are gumming up their dope. Well, it's about time to plug in on E2. Here's where the fireworks start!" He closed the connections which transferred the central portion of the upper lookout screen to a small micrometer screen at Breckenridge's desk and plugged it into the first check-station. Instantly a point of red light, surrounded by a vivid orange circle, appeared upon the screen, low down and to the left of center, and the timing galvanometer showed a wide positive deflection.

"Hashed again!" growled Breckenridge. "I must be losing my grip, I guess. I put everything I had on that sight, and missed it ten divisions. I think I'll turn in my badge--I've cocked our perfect curve already, before we got to the first check-station!" His hands moved toward the controls, to correct their course and acceleration.

"As you were--hold everything! Lay off those controls!" snapped the computer. "There's something screwy, just as I thought--and it isn't you, either. I'm no pilot, of course, but I do know good compensation when I see it, and if you weren't compensating that point I never saw it done. Besides, with your skill and my figures I know darn well that we aren't off more than a tenth of one division. He's cuckoo! Don't call him--let him start it, and refer him to me."

"All x--I'll be only too glad to pass the buck. But I still think, Steve, that you're playing with dynamite. Who ever heard of an astronomer being wrong?"

"You'd be surprised," grinned the physicist, "Since this fuss has just started, nobody has tried to find out whether they were wrong or not...."

"IPV _Arcturus_, attention!" came from the speaker curtly.

"IPV _Arcturus_, Breckenridge," from the chief pilot.

"You have been on my ray almost a minute. Why are you not correcting course and acceleration?"

"Doctor Stevens is computing us and has full control of course and acceleration," replied Breckenridge. "He will answer you."

"I am changing neither course nor acceleration because you are not in position," declared Stevens, crisply, "Please give me your present supposed location, and your latest precision goniometer bearings on the sun, the moon, Mars, Venus, and your Tellurian reference limb, with exact time of observations, gyroscope zero-planes, and goniometer factors!"

"Correct at once or I shall report you to the Observatory," E2 answered loftily, paying no attention to the demand for proof of position.

"Be sure you do that, guy--and while you're at it report that your station hasn't taken a precision bearing in a month. Report that you've been muddling along on radio loop bearings, and that you don't know where you are, within seven thousand kilometers. And speaking of reporting--I know already that a lot of you astronomical guessers have only the faintest possible idea of where you really are, _plus_, _minus_, or lateral; and if you don't get yourselves straightened out before we get to W41, I'm going to make a report on my own account that will jar some of you birds loose from your upper teeth!" He unplugged with a vicious jerk, and turned to the pilot with a grin.

"Guess that'll hold him for a while, won't it?"

"He'll report us, sure," remonstrated Breckenridge. The older man was plainly ill at ease at this open defiance of the supposedly infallible check-stations.

"Not that baby," returned the computer confidently. "I'll bet you a small farm against a plugged nickel that right now he's working his goniometer so hard that it's pivots are getting hot. He'll sneak back into position as soon as he can calculate his results, and pretend he's always been there."

"The others will be all right, then, probably, by the time we get to them?"

"Gosh, no--you're unusually dumb today, Breck. He won't tell anybody anything--he doesn't want to be the only goat, does he?"

"Oh, I see. How could you dope this out, with only the recorder charts?"

"Because I know the kind of stuff you pilots are--and those humps are altogether too big to be accounted for by anything I know about you. Another thing--the next station, P6, I think is keeping himself all x. If so, when you corrected for E2, which was wrong, it'd throw you all off on P6, which was right, and so on--a bad hump at almost every check-station. See?"

* * * * *

True to prediction, the pilot ray of P6 came in almost upon the exact center of the micrometer screen, and Breckenridge smiled in relief as he began really to enjoy the trip.

"How do we check on chronometers?" asked P6 when Stevens had been introduced. "By my time you seem to be about two and a half seconds _plus_?"

"All x--two points four seconds plus--we're riding on 981.286 centimeters, to allow for the reversal and for minor detours. Bye."

"All this may have been coincidence, Breck, but we'll find out pretty quick now," the computer remarked when the flying vessel was nearing the third check-station. "Unless I'm all out of control we'll check in almost fourteen seconds minus on W41, and we may not even find him on the center block of the screen."

When he plugged in W41 was on the block, but was in the extreme upper right corner. They checked in thirteen and eight-tenths seconds minus on the station, and a fiery dialogue ensued when the computer questioned the accuracy of the location of the station and refused point-blank to correct his course.

"Well, Breck, old onion, that tears it," Stevens declared as he unplugged. "No use going any further on these bum reference points. I'm going to report to Newton--he'll rock the Observatory on its foundations!" He plugged into the telegraph room. "Have you got a free high-power wave?... Please put me on Newton, in the main office."

Moving lights flashed and flickered for an instant upon the communicator screen, settling down into a white glow which soon resolved itself into the likeness of a keen-eyed, gray-haired man, seated at his desk in the remote office of the Interplanetary Corporation. Newton smiled as he recognized the likeness of Stevens upon his own screen, and greeted him cordially.

"Have you started your investigation, Doctor Stevens?"

"Started it? I've finished it!" and Stevens tersely reported what he had learned, concluding: "So you see, you don't need special computers on these ships any more than a hen needs teeth. You've got all the computers you need, in the observatories--all you've got to do is make them work at their trade."

"The piloting was all x, then?"

"Absolutely--our curve so far is exactly flat ever since we cut off the starting power. Of course, all the pilots can't be as good as Breckenridge, but give them good computation and good check points and you shouldn't get any humps higher than about half a centimeter."

"They'll get both, from now on," the director assured him. "Thanks. If your work for the trip is done, you might show my little girl, Nadia, around the _Arcturus_. She's never been out before, and will be interested. Would you mind?"

"Glad to, Mr. Newton--I'll be a regular uncle to her."

"Thanks again, Operator, I'll speak to Captain King, please."

"Pipe down that guff, you unlicked cub, or I'll crown you with a proof-bar!" the chief pilot growled, as soon as Stevens had unplugged.

"You and who else?" retorted the computer, cheerfully. "Pipe down yourself, guy--if you weren't so darn dumb and didn't have such a complex, you'd know that you're the crack pilot of the outfit and wouldn't care who else knew it." Stevens carefully covered and put away the calculating machine and other apparatus he had been using and turned again to the pilot.

"I didn't know Newton had any kids, especially little ones, or I'd have got acquainted with them long ago. Of course I don't know him very well, since I never was around the office much, but the old tiger goes over big with me."

"Hm--m. Think you'll enjoy playing nursemaid all the rest of the trip?" Breckenridge asked caustically, but with an enigmatic smile.

"Think so? I _know_ so!" replied Stevens, positively. "I always did like kids, and they always did like me--we fall for each other like ten thousand bricks falling down a well. Why, a kid--_any_ kid--and I team up just like grace and poise.... What's gnawing on you anyway, to make you turn Cheshire cat all of a sudden? By the looks of that grin I'd say you had swallowed a canary of mine some way or other; but darned if I know that I've lost any," and he stared at his friend suspiciously.

"To borrow your own phrase, Steve, 'You'd be surprised,'" and Breckenridge, though making no effort to conceal his amusement, would say no more.

In a few minutes the door opened, and through it there stepped a grizzled four-striper. Almost hidden behind his massive form there was a girl, who ran up to Breckenridge and seized both his hands, her eyes sparkling.

"Hi, Breckie, you old darling! I knew that if we both kept after him long enough Dad would let me ride with you sometime. Isn't this _gorgeous_?"

Stevens was glad indeed that the girl's enthusiastic greeting of the pilot was giving him time to recover from his shock, for Director Newton's "little girl, Nadia" was not precisely what he had led himself to expect. Little she might be, particularly when compared with the giant frame of Captain King, or with Steve's own five-feet-eleven of stature and the hundred and ninety pounds of rawhide and whalebone that was his body, but child she certainly was not. Her thick, fair hair, cut in the square bob that was the mode of the moment, indicated that Nature had intended her to be a creamy blonde, but as she turned to be introduced to him, Stevens received another surprise--for she was one of those rare, but exceedingly attractive beings, a natural blonde with brown eyes and black eyebrows. Sun and wind had tanned her satin skin to a smooth and even shade of brown, and every movement of her lithe and supple body bespoke to the discerning mind a rigidly-trained physique.

"Doctor Stevens, you haven't met Miss Newton, I hear," the captain introduced them informally. "All the officers who are not actually tied down at their posts are anxious to do the honors of the vessel, but as I have received direct orders from the owners, I am turning her over to you--you are to show her around."

"Thanks, Captain, I won't mutiny a bit against such an order. I'm mighty glad to know you, Miss Newton."

"I've heard a lot about you, Doctor. Dad and Breckie here are always talking about the Big Three--what you have done and what you are going to do. I want to meet Doctor Brandon and Doctor Westfall, too," and her hand met his in a firm and friendly clasp. She turned to the captain, and Stevens, noticing that the pilot, with a quizzical expression, was about to say something, silenced him with a fierce aside.

"Clam it, ape, or I'll climb up you like a squirrel!" he hissed, and the grinning Breckenridge nodded assent to this demand for silence concerning children and nursemaids.

"Since you've never been out, Miss Newton, you'll want to see the whole works," Stevens addressed the girl. "Where do you want to begin? Shall we start at the top and work down?"

"All right with me," she agreed, and fell into step beside him. She was dressed in dove-gray from head to foot--toque, blouse, breeches, heavy stockings, and shoes were of the one shade of smooth, lustrous silk; and as they strolled together down the passage-way, the effortless ease and perfect poise of her carriage called aloud to every hard-schooled fibre of his own highly-trained being.

"We're a lot alike you and I--do you know it?" he asked, abruptly and unconventionally.

"Yes, I've felt it, too," she replied frankly, and studied him without affectation. "It has just come to me what it is. We're both in fine condition and in hard training. You're an athlete of some kind, and I'm sure you're a star--I ought to recognize you, but I'm ashamed to say I don't. What do you do?"

"Swim."

"Oh, of course--Stevens, the great Olympic high and fancy diver! I would _never_ have connected our own Doctor Stevens, the eminent mathematical physicist, with the King of the Springboard. Say, ever since I quit being afraid of the water I've had a yen to do that two-and-a-half twist of yours, but I never met anybody who knew it well enough to teach it to me, and I've almost broken my back forty times trying to learn it alone!"

"I've got you, now, too--American and British Womens' golf champion. Shake!" and the two shook hands vigorously, in mutual congratulation. "Tell you what--I'll give you some pointers on diving, and you can show me how to make a golf ball behave. Next to Norman Brandon, I've got the most vicious hook in captivity--and Norm can't help himself. He's left-handed, you know, and, being a southpaw, he's naturally wild. He slices all his woods and hooks all his irons. I'm consistent, anyway--I hook everything, even my putts."

"It's a bargain! What do you shoot?"

"Pretty dubby. Usually in the middle eighties--none of us play much, being out in space most of the time, you know--sometimes, when my hook is going particularly well, I go up into the nineties."

"We'll lick that hook," she promised, as they entered an elevator and were borne upward, toward the prow of the great interplanetary cruiser.

CHAPTER II

----But Does Not Arrive

"All out--we climb the rest of the way on foot," Stevens told his companion, as the elevator stopped at the uppermost passenger floor. They walked across the small circular hall and the guard on duty came to attention and saluted as they approached him.

"I have orders to pass you and Miss Newton, sir. Do you know all the combinations?"

"I know this good old tub better than the men that built her--I helped calculate her," Stevens replied, as he stepped up to an apparently blank wall of steel and deftly manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush with its surface. "This is to keep the passengers where they belong," he explained, as a section of the wall swung backward in a short arc and slid smoothly aside. "We will now proceed to see what makes it tick."

Ladder after ladder of steel they climbed, and bulkhead after bulkhead opened at Stevens's knowing touch. At each floor the mathematician explained to the girl the operation of the machinery there automatically at work--devices for heating and cooling, devices for circulating, maintaining, and purifying the air and the water--in short, all the complex mechanism necessary for the comfort and convenience of the human cargo of the liner.

Soon they entered the conical top compartment, a room scarcely fifteen feet in diameter, tapering sharply upward to a hollow point some twenty feet above them. The true shape of the room, however, was not immediately apparent, because of the enormous latticed beams and girders which braced the walls in every direction. The air glowed with the violet light of the twelve great ultra-light projectors, like searchlights with three-foot lenses, which lined the wall. The floor beneath their feet was not a level steel platform, but seemed to be composed of many lenticular sections of dull blue alloy.

"We are standing upon the upper lookout lenses, aren't we?" asked the girl. "Is that perfectly all right?"

"Sure. They're so hard that nothing can scratch them, and of course Roeser's Rays go right through our bodies, or any ordinary substance, like a bullet through a hole in a Swiss cheese. Even those lenses wouldn't deflect them if they weren't solid fields of force."

As he spoke, one of the ultra-lights flashed around in a short, quick arc, and the girl saw that instead of the fierce glare she had expected, it emitted only a soft violet light. Nevertheless she dodged involuntarily and Stevens touched her arm reassuringly.

"All x, Miss Newton--they're as harmless as mice. They hardly ever have to swing past the vertical, and even if one shines right through you you can look it right in the eye as long as you want to--it can't hurt you a bit."

"No ultra-violet at all?"

"None whatever. Just a color--one of the many remaining crudities of our ultra-light vision. A lot of good men are studying this thing of direct vision, though, and it won't be long before we have a system that will really work."

"I think it's all perfectly wonderful!" she breathed. "Just think of traveling in comfort through empty space, and of actually seeing through seamless steel walls, without even a sign of a window! How can such things be possible?"

"I'll have to go pretty well back," he warned, "and any adequate explanation is bound to be fairly deep wading in spots. How technical can you stand it?"

"I can go down with you middling deep--I took a lot of general science, and physics through advanced mechanics. Of course, I didn't get into any such highly specialized stuff as sub-electronics or Roeser's Rays, but if you start drowning me, I'll yell."

"That's fine--you can get the idea all x, with that to go on. Let's sit down here on this girder. Roeser didn't do it all, by any means, even though he got credit for it--he merely helped the Martians do it. The whole thing started, of course, when Goddard shot his first rocket to the moon, and was intensified when Roeser so perfected his short waves that signals were exchanged with Mars--signals that neither side could make any sense out of. Goddard's pupils and followers made bigger and better rockets, and finally got one that could land safely upon Mars. Roeser, who was a mighty keen bird, was one of the first voyagers, and he didn't come back--he stayed there, living in a space-suit for three or four years, and got a brand-new education. Martian science always was hot, you know, but they were impractical. They were desperately hard up for water and air, and while they had a lot of wonderful ideas and theories, they couldn't overcome the practical technical difficulties in the way of making their ideas work. Now putting other peoples' ideas to work was Roeser's long suit--don't think that I'm belittling Roeser at all, either, for he was a brave and far-sighted man, was no mean scientist, and was certainly one of the best organizers and synchronizers the world has ever known--and since Martian and Tellurian science complemented each other, so that one filled in the gaps of the other, it wasn't long until fleets of space-freighters were bringing in air and water from Venus, which had more of both than she needed or wanted.

"Having done all he could for the Martians and having learned most of the stuff he wanted to know, Roeser came back to Tellus and organized Interplanetary, with scientists and engineers on all three planets, and set to work to improve the whole system, for the vessels they used then were dangerous--regular mankillers, in fact. At about this same time Roeser and the Interplanetary Corporation had a big part in the unification of the world into one nation, so that wars could no longer interfere with progress."

* * * * *

"With this introduction I can get down to fundamentals. Molecules are particles of the first order, and vibrations of the first order include sound, light, heat, electricity, radio, and so on. Second order, atoms--extremely short vibrations, such as hard X-rays. Third order, electrons and protons, with their accompanying Millikan, or cosmic, rays. Fourth order, sub-electrons and sub-protons. These, in the material aspect, are supposed to be the particles of the fourth order, and in the energy aspect they are known as Roeser's Rays. That is, these fourth-order rays and particles seem to partake of the nature of both energy and matter. Following me?"

"Right behind you," she assured him. She had been listening intently, her wide-spaced brown eyes fastened upon his face.

"Since these Roeser's Rays, or particles or rays of the fourth order, seem to be both matter and energy, and since the rays can be converted into what is supposed to be the particles, they have been thought to be the things from which both electrons and protons were built. Therefore, everybody except Norman Brandon has supposed them the ultimate units of creation, so that it would be useless to try to go any further...."

"Why, we were taught that they _are_ the ultimate units!" she protested.

"I know you were--but we really don't know anything, except what we have learned empirically, even about our driving forces. What is called the fourth-order particle is absolutely unknown, since nobody has been able to detect it, to say nothing of determining its velocity or other properties. It has been assumed to have the velocity of light only because that hypothesis does not conflict with observational data. I'm going to give you the generally accepted idea, since we have nothing definite to offer in its place, but I warn you that that idea is very probably wrong. There's a lot of deep stuff down there hasn't been dug up yet. In fact, Brandon thinks that the product of conversion isn't what we think it is, at all--that the actual fundamental unit and the primary mechanism of the transformation lie somewhere below the fourth order, and possibly even below the level of the ether--but we haven't been able to find a point of attack yet that will let us get in anywhere. However, I'm getting 'way ahead of our subject. To get back to it, energy can be converted into something that acts like matter through Roeser's Rays, and that is the empirical fact underlying the drive of our space-ships, as well as that of almost all other vehicles on all three planets. Power is generated by the great waterfalls of Tellus and Venus--water's mighty scarce on Mars, of course, so most of our plants there use fuel--and is transmitted on light beams, by means of powerful fields of force to the receptors, wherever they may be. The individual transmitting fields and receptors are really simply matched-frequency units, each matching the electrical characteristics of some particular and unique beam of force. This beam is composed of Roeser's Rays, in their energy aspect. It took a long time to work out this tight-beam transmission of power, but it was fairly simple after they got it."

He took out a voluminous notebook, at the sight of which Nadia smiled.

"A computer might forget to dress, but you'd never catch one without a full magazine pencil and a lot of blank paper," he grinned in reply and went on, writing as he talked.

"For any given frequency, _f_, and phase angle, _theta_, you integrate, between limits zero and _pi_ divided by two, sine theta d...."

"Hold it--I'm sinking!" Nadia exclaimed. "I don't integrate at all unless it is absolutely necessary. As long as you stick to general science, I'm right on your heels, but please lay off of integrations and all that--most especially stay away from those terrible electrical integrations. I always did think that they were the most poisonous kind known. I want only a general idea--that's all that I can understand, anyway."

"Sure, I forgot--guess I was getting in deeper than is necessary, especially since this whole thing of beam transmission is pretty crude yet and is bound to change a lot before long. There is so much loss that when we get more than a few hundred million kilometers away from a power-plant we lose reception entirely. But to get going again, the receptors receive the beam and from them the power is sent to the accumulators, where it is stored. These accumulators are an outgrowth of the storage battery. The theory of the accumulator is...."

"Lay off the theory, please!" the listener interrupted. "I understand perfectly without it. Energy is stored in the accumulators--you put it in and take it out. That's all that is necessary."

* * * * *

"I'd like to give you some of the theory--but, after all, it wouldn't add much to your understanding of the working of things, and it might mix you up, as some of it is pretty deep stuff. Then, too, it would take a lot of time, and the rest of your friends would squawk if I kept you here indefinitely. From the accumulators, then, the power is fed to the converters, each of which is backed by a projector. The converters simply change the aspect of the rays, from the energy aspect to the material aspect. As soon as this is done, the highly-charged particles--or whatever they are--thus formed are repelled by the terrific stationary force maintained in the projector backing the converter. Each particle departs with a velocity supposed to be that of light, and the recoil upon the projector drives the vessel, or car, or whatever it is attached to. Still with me?"

"Struggling a little, but my nose is still above the surface. These particles, being so infinitesimally small that they cannot even be detected, go right through any substance without any effect--they are not even harmful."

"Exactly. Now we are in position to go ahead with the lights, detectors, and so on. The energy aspect of the rays you can best understand as simply a vibration in the ether--an extremely high frequency one. While not rigidly scientific, that is close enough for you and me. Nobody knows what the stuff really is, and it cannot be explained or demonstrated by any model or concept in three-dimensional space. Its physical-mathematical interpretation, the only way in which it can be grasped at all, requires sixteen coordinates in four dimensions, and I don't suppose you'd care to go into that."

"I'll say I wouldn't!" she exclaimed, feelingly.

"Well, anyway, by the use of suitable fields of force it can be used as a carrier wave. Most of this stuff of the fields of force--how to carry the modulation up and down through all the frequency changes necessary--was figured out by the Martians ages ago. Used as a pure carrier wave, with a sender and a receiver at each end, it isn't so bad--that's why our communicator and radio systems work as well as they do. They are pretty good, really, but the ultra-light vision system is something else again. Sending the heterodyned wave through steel is easy, but breaking it up, so as to view an object and return the impulses, was an awful job and one that isn't half done yet. We see things, after a fashion and at a distance of a few kilometers, by sending an almost parallel wave from a twin-projector to disintegrate and double back the viewing wave. That's the way the lookout plates and lenses work, all over the ship--from the master-screens in the control room to the plates of the staterooms and lifeboats and the viewing-areas of the promenades. But the whole system is a rotten makeshift, and...."

"Just a minute!" exclaimed the girl. "I and everybody else have been thinking that everything is absolutely perfect; and yet every single thing you have talked about, you have ended up by describing as 'unknown,' 'rudimentary,' 'temporary,' or a 'makeshift.' You speak as though the entire system were a poor thing that will have to do until something better has been found, and that nobody knows anything about anything! How do you get that way?"

"By working with Brandon and Westfall. Those birds have got real brains and they're on the track of something that will, in all probability, be as far ahead of Roeser's Rays as our present system is ahead of the science of the seventeenth century."

"Really?" she looked at him in astonishment. "Tell me about it."

"Can't be done," he refused. "I don't know much about it--even they didn't know any too much about some of it when I had to come in. And what little I do know I can't tell, because it isn't mine."

"But you're working with them, aren't you?"

"Yes, in the sense that a small boy helps his father build a house. They're the brains--I simply do some figuring that they don't want to waste time doing."

Nadia, having no belief whatever in his modest disclaimer, but in secret greatly pleased by his attitude, replied:

"Of course you couldn't say anything about an unfinished project--I shouldn't have asked. Where do we go from here?"

"Down the lining of the hull, outside the passengers' quarters to the upper dirigible projectors," and he led the way down a series of steep steel stairways, through bulkheads and partitions of steel. "One thing I forgot to tell you about--the detectors. They're worked on the same principle as the lights, and are just about as efficient. Instead, of light, though, they send out cones of electro-magnetic waves, which set up induced currents in any conductor encountered beyond our own shell. Since all dangerous meteorites have been shown to contain conducting material, that is enough to locate them, for radio finders automatically determine the direction, distance, and magnitude of the disturbance, and swing a light on it. That was what happened when that light swung toward us, back there in the prow."

"Are there any of those life-boats, that I've heard discussed so much lately, near here?" asked the girl.

"Lots of 'em--here's one right here," and at the next landing he opened a vacuum-insulated steel door, snapped on a light, and waved his hand. "You can't see much of it from here, but it's a complete space-ship in itself, capable of maintaining a dozen or fifteen persons during a two-weeks' cruise in space."

"Why isn't it a good idea to retain them? Accidents are still possible, are they not?"

"Of course, and there is no question of doing away with them entirely. Modern ships, however, have only enough of them to take care of the largest number of persons ever to be carried by the vessel."

"Has the _Arcturus_ more than she needs?"

"I'll say she has, and more of everything else, except room for pay-load."

"I've heard them talking about junking her. I think it's a shame."

"So do I, in a way--you see, I helped design her and her sister-ship, the _Sirius_, which Brandon and Westfall are using as a floating laboratory. But times change, and the inefficient must go. She's a good old tub, but she was built when everybody was afraid of space, and we had to put every safety factor into her that we could think of. As a result, she is four times as heavy as she should be, and that takes a lot of extra power. Her skin is too thick. She has too many batteries of accumulators, too many life-boats, too many bulkheads and air-breaks, too many and too much of everything. She is so built that if she should break up out in space, nobody would die if they lived through the shock--there are so many bulkheads, air-breaks, and life-boats that no matter how many pieces she broke up into, the survivors would find themselves in something able to navigate. That excessive construction is no longer necessary. Modern ships carry ten times the pay-load on one-quarter of the power that this old battle-wagon uses. Even though she's only four years old, she's a relic of the days when we used to slam through on the ecliptic route, right through all the meteoric stuff that is always there--trusting to heavy armor to ward off anything too small for the observers and detectors to locate. Now, with the observatories and check-stations out in space, fairly light armor is sufficient, as we route ourselves well away from the ecliptic and so miss all the heavy stuff. So, badly as I hate to see her go there, the old tub is bound for the junk-yard."

* * * * *

A few more flights of stairs brought them to the upper band of dirigible projectors, which encircled the hull outside the passengers' quarters, some sixty feet below the prow. They were heavy, search-light-like affairs mounted upon massive universal bearings, free to turn in any direction, and each having its converter nestling inside its prodigious field of force. Stevens explained that these projectors were used in turning the vessel and in dodging meteorites when necessary, and they went on through another almost invisible door into a hall and took an elevator down to the main corridor.

"Well, you've seen it, Miss Newton," Stevens said regretfully, as he led her toward the captain's office. "The lower half is full of heavy stuff--accumulators, machinery, driving projectors, and such junk, so that the center of gravity is below the center of action of the driving projectors. That makes stable flight possible. It's all more or less like what we've just seen, and I don't suppose you want to miss the dance--anyway, a lot of people want to dance with you."

"Wouldn't you just as soon show me through the lower half as dance?"

"Rather, lots!"

"So would I. I can dance any time, and I want to see everything. Let's go!"

Down they went, past battery after battery of accumulators; climbing over and around the ever-increasing number of huge steel girders and bracers; through mazes of heavily insulated wiring and conduits; past mass after mass of automatic machinery which Stevens explained to his eager listener. They inspected one of the great driving projectors, which, built rigidly parallel to the axis of the ship and held immovably in place by enormous trusses of steel, revealed neither to the eye nor to the ear any sign of the terrific force it was exerting. Still lower they went, until the girl had been shown everything, even down to the bottom ultra-lights and stern braces.

"Tired?" Stevens asked, as the inspection was completed.

"Not very. It's been quite a climb, but I've had a wonderful time."

"So have I," he declared, positively. "I know what--we'll crawl up into one of these stern lifeboats and make us a cup of coffee before we climb back. With me?"

"'Way ahead of you!" Nadia accepted the invitation enthusiastically, and they made their way to the nearest of the miniature space-cruisers. Here, although no emergency had been encountered in all the four years of the vessel's life, they found everything in readiness, and the two soon had prepared and eaten a hearty luncheon.

"Well, I can't think of any more excuses for monopolizing you, Miss Newton, so I suppose I'll have to take you back. Believe me, I've enjoyed this more than you can realize--I've...."

He broke off and listened, every nerve taut. "What was that?" he exclaimed.

"What was what? I didn't hear anything?"

"Something screwy somewhere! I felt a vibration, and anything that'd make this mountain of steel even quiver must have given us one gosh-awful nudge. There's another!"

The girl, painfully tense, felt only a barely perceptible tremor, but the computer, knowing far better than she the inconceivable strength and mass of that enormous structure of solidly braced hardened steel, sprang into action. Leaping to the small dirigible look-out plate, he turned on the power and swung it upward.

* * * * *

"Great suffering snakes!" he ejaculated, then stood mute, for the plate revealed a terrible sight. The entire nose of the gigantic craft had been sheared off in two immense slices as though clipped off by a gigantic sword, and even as they stared, fascinated, at the sight, the severed slices were drifting slowly away. Swinging the view along the plane of cleavage, Stevens made out a relatively tiny ball of metal, only fifty feet or so in diameter, at a distance of perhaps a mile. From this ball there shot a blinding plane of light, and the _Arcturus_ fell apart at the midsection, the lower half separating clean from the upper portion, which held the passengers. Leaving the upper half intact, the attacker began slicing the lower, driving half into thin, disk-shaped sections. As that incandescent plane of destruction made its first flashing cut through the body of the _Arcturus_, accompanied by an additional pyrotechnic display of severed and short-circuited high-tension leads, Stevens and Nadia suddenly found themselves floating weightless in the air of the room. Still gripping the controls of the look-out plate, Stevens caught the white-faced girl with one hand, drew her down beside him, and held her motionless while his keen mind flashed over all the possibilities of the situation and planned his course of action.

"They're apparently slicing us pretty evenly, and by the looks of things, one cut is coming right about here," he explained rapidly, as he found a flashlight and drew his companion through the door and along a narrow passage. Soon he opened another door and led her into a tiny compartment so low that they could not stand upright--a mere cubicle of steel. Carefully closing the door, he fingered dials upon each of the walls of the cell, then folded himself up into a comfortable position, instructed Nadia to do the same, and snapped off the light.

"Please leave it on," the shaken girl asked. "It's so ghastly!"

"We'd better save it, Nadia," he advised, pressing her arm reassuringly, "it's the only light we've got, and we may need it worse later on--its life is limited, you know."

"Later on? Do you think we'll need anything--later on?"

"Sure! Of course they may get us, Nadia, but this little tertiary air-break is a mighty small target for them to hit. And if they miss us, as I think they will, there's a larger room opening off each wall of this one--at least one of which will certainly be left intact. From any one of those rooms we can reach a life-boat. Of course, it's a little too much to expect that any one of the life-boats will be left whole, but they're bulkheaded, too, you know, so that we can be sure of finding something able to navigate--providing we can make our get-away. Believe me, ace, I'm sure glad we're aboard the old _Arcturus_ right now, with all her safety-devices, instead of on one of the modern liners. We'd be sunk right."

"I felt sunk enough for a minute--I'm feeling better now, though, since you are taking it so calmly."

"Sure--why not? A man's not dead until his heart stops beating, you know--our turn'll come next, when they let up a little."

"But suppose they change the width of their slices, and hit this cubby, small as it is?"

"It'd be just too bad," he shrugged. "In that case, we'd never know what hit us, so it's no good worrying about it. But say, we might do something at that, if they didn't hit us square. I can move fairly fast, and might be able to get a door open before the loss of pressure seals it. We'll light the flash ... here, you hold it, so that I can have both hands free. Put both arms around me, just under the arms, and stick to me like a porous plaster, because if I have to move at all, I'll have to jump like chain lightning. Shine the beam right over there, so it'll reflect and light up all the dials at once. There ... hold on tight! Here they come!"

As he spoke, a jarring shudder shook one side of their hiding-place, then, a moment later, the phenomenon was repeated, but with much less force, upon the other side. Stevens sighed with relief, took the light, and extinguished it.

"Missed us clean!" he exulted. "Now, if they don't find us, we're all set."

"How can they possibly find us? I seem to be always worried about the wrong things, but I should think that their finding us would be the least of our troubles."

"Don't judge their vision system by ours--they've got everything, apparently. However, their apparatus may not be delicate enough to spot us in a space this small when their projectors flash through it, as they probably will. Then, too, there's a couple of other big items in our favor--nobody else is in the entire lower half, since all this machinery down here is either automatic or else controlled from up above, so they won't be expecting to see anybody when they get down this far; and we aren't at all conspicuous. We're both dressed in gray--your clothes in particular are almost exactly the color of this armor-plate--so altogether we stand a good chance of being missed."

"What shall we do now?"

"Nothing whatever--wish we could sleep for a couple of hours, but of course there's no hope of that. Stretch out here, like that--you can't rest folded up like an accordion--and I'll lie down diagonally across the room. There's just room for me that way. That's one advantage of weightlessness--you can lie down standing on your head, and go to sleep and like it. But I forgot--you've never been weightless before, have you? Does it make you sick?"

"Not so much, now, except that I feel awfully weird inside. I was horribly dizzy and nauseated at first, but it's going away."

* * * * *

"That's good--it makes lots of people pretty sick. In fact, some folks get awfully sick and can't seem to get used to it at all. It's the canals in the inner ear that do most of it, you know. However, if you're as well as that already, you'll be a regular spacehound in half an hour. I've been weightless for weeks at a stretch, out in the _Sirius_, and now I've got so I really like it. Here, we'd better keep in touch." He found her hand and tucked it under his arm. "Stabilize our positions more, besides keeping us from getting too lonesome, here in the dark," he concluded, in a matter-of-fact voice.

"Thanks for saying 'us'--but you would, wouldn't you?" and a wave of admiration went through her for the real and chivalrous manhood of the man with whom she had been forced by circumstances to cast her lot. "How long must we stay here?"

"As long as the air lasts, and I'd like to stay here longer than that. We don't want to move around any more than we absolutely have to until their rays are off of us, and we have no way of knowing how long that will be. Also, we'd better keep still. I don't know what kind of an audio system they've got, but there's no use taking unnecessary chances."

"All x--I'm an oyster's little sister," and for many minutes the two remained motionless and silent. Now and then Nadia twitched and started at some vague real or imaginary sound--now and then her fingers tightened upon his biceps--and he pressed her hand with his great arm in reassurance and understanding. Once a wall of their cell resounded under the impact of a fierce blow and Stevens instantly threw his arm around the girl, twisting himself between her and the threatened wall, ready for any emergency. But nothing more happened; the door remained closed, the cell stayed bottle-tight, and time wore slowly on. All too soon the unmistakable symptoms of breathing an unfit atmosphere made themselves apparent and Stevens, after testing each of the doors, drew the girl into a larger room, where they breathed deeply of the fresh, cool air.

"How did you know that this room was whole?" asked Nadia. "We might have stepped out into space, mightn't we?"

"No; if this room had lost its tightness, the door wouldn't have opened. They won't open if there's a difference of one kilogram pressure on the two sides. That's how I knew that the room we were in at first was cut in two--the door into that air-break wouldn't move."

"What comes next?"

"I don't know exactly what to do--we'd better hold a little council of war. They may have gone..." Stevens broke off as the structure began to move, and they settled down upon what had been one of the side-walls. Greater and greater became the acceleration, until their apparent weight was almost as much as it would have been upon the Earth, at which point it became constant. "... but they haven't," he continued the interrupted sentence. "This seems to be a capture and seizure, as well as an attack, so we'll have to take the risk of looking at them. Besides, it's getting cold in here. One or two of the adjoining cells have apparently been ruptured and we're radiating our heat out into space, so we'll have to get into a life-boat or freeze. I'll go pick out the best one. Wonder if I'd better take you with me, or hide you and come back after you?"

"Don't worry about that--I'm coming with you," Nadia declared, positively.

"Just as well, probably," he assented, and they set out. A thorough exploration of all the tight connecting cells revealed that not a lifeboat within their reach remained intact, but that habitable and navigable portions of three such craft were available. Selecting the most completely equipped of these, they took up their residence therein by entering it and closing the massive insulating door. Stevens disconnected all the lights save one, and so shielded that one before turning it on that it merely lightened the utter darkness into a semi-permeable gloom. He then stepped up to the lookout plate, and with his hand upon the control, pondered long the possible consequences of what he wished to do.

"What harm would it do to take just a little peek?"

"I don't know--that's the dickens of it. Maybe none, and then again, maybe a lot. You see, we don't know who or what we are up against. The only thing we know is that they've got us beat a hundred ways, and we've got to act accordingly. We've got to chance it sometime, though, if we can ever get away, so we might as well do it now. I'll put it on very short range first, and see what we can see. By the small number of cells we've got here I'm afraid they've split us up lengthwise, too--so that instead of having a whole slice of the old watermelon to live in, we've got only about a sixth of one--shaped about like a piece of restaurant pie. One thing I can do, though. I'll turn on the communicator receiver and put it on full coverage--maybe we can hear something useful."

Putting a little power upon the visiray plate, he moved the point of projection a short distance from their hiding-place, so that the plate showed a view of the wreckage. The upper half of the vessel was still intact, the lower half a jumble of sharply-cut fragments. From each of the larger pieces a brilliant ray of tangible force stretched outward. Suddenly their receiver sounded behind them, as the high-powered transmitter in the telegraph room tried to notify headquarters of their plight.

"_Arcturus_ attacked and cut up being taken tow...."

Rapidly as the message was uttered the transmitter died with a rattle in the middle of a word, and Nadia looked at Stevens with foreboding in her eyes.

"They've got something, that's one thing sure, to be able to neutralize our communicator beams that way," he admitted. "Not so good--we'll have to play this close to our vests, girl!"

"Are you just trying to cheer me up, or do you really think we have a chance?" she demanded. "I want to know just where we stand."

"I'm coming clean with you, no kidding. If we can get away, we'll be all x, because I'll bet a farm that by this time Brandon's got everything those birds have, and maybe more. They beat us to it, that's all. I'm kind of afraid, though, that getting away isn't going to be quite as simple as shooting fish down a well."

* * * * *

Far ahead of them a port opened, a lifeboat shot out at its full power, and again their receiver tried to burst into sound, but it was a vain attempt. The sound died before one complete word could be uttered, and the lifeboat, its power completely neutralized by the rays of the tiny craft of the enemy, floated gently back toward the mass of its parent and accompanied it in its headlong flight. Several more lifeboats made the attempt, as the courageous officers of the _Arcturus_, some of whom had apparently succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the captors, launched the little shells from various ports; but as each boat issued, its power was neutralized and it found itself dragged helplessly along in the grip of one of those mysterious, brilliant rays of force. At least one hidden officer must have been watching the fruitless efforts, for the next lifeboat to issue made no attempt, either to talk or to flee, but from it there flamed out into space a concentrated beam of destruction--the terrible ray of annihilation, against which no known substance could endure for a moment; the ray which had definitely outlawed war. But even that frightful weapon was useless--it spent its force harmlessly upon an impalpable, invisible barrier, a hundred yards from its source, and the bold lifeboat disappeared in one blinding explosion of incandescence as the captor showed its real power in retaliation. Stevens, jaw hard-set, leaped from the screen, then brought himself up so quickly that he skated across the smooth steel floor. Shutting off the lookout plate, he led the half-fainting girl across the room to a comfortable seat and sat down beside her--raging, but thoughtful. Nadia soon recovered.

"Why are you acting so contrary to your nature--is it because of _me_?" she demanded. "A dozen times I've seen you start to do something and then change your mind. I _will not_ be a load on you nor hinder you in anything you want to do."

"I told your father I'd look after you, and I'm going to do it," he replied, indirectly. "I would do it anyway, of course--even if you are ten or twelve years older than I thought you were."

"Yes, Dad never has realized that I'm more than eight years old. I see--you were going out there and be slaughtered?" He flushed, but made no reply. "In that case I'm glad I'm here--that would have been silly. I think we'd better hold that council of war you mentioned a while ago, don't you?"

"I need a smoke--do you indulge?"

"No thanks. I tried it a few times at school, but never liked it."

He searched his pockets, bringing to light an unopened package and a tattered remnant which proved to contain one dilapidated cigarette. He studied it thoughtfully. "I'll smoke this wreck," he decided, "while it's still smokable. We'll save the rest of them--I'm afraid it'll be a long time between smokes. Well, let's confer!"

"This will have to be a one-sided conference. I don't imagine that any of my ideas will prove particularly helpful. You talk and I'll listen.

"You can't tell what ideas may be useful--chip in any time you feel the urge. Here's the dope, as I see it. They're highly intelligent creatures and are in all probability neither Martians nor Venerians. If any of them had any such stuff as that, some of us would have known about it and, besides, I don't believe they would have used it in just that way. Mercury is not habitable, at least for organic beings; and we have never seen any sign of any other kind of inhabitants who could work with metals and rays. They're probably from Jupiter, although possibly from further away. I say Jupiter, because I would think, judging from the small size of the ship, that it may still be in the experimental stage, so that they probably didn't come from any further away than Jupiter. Then, too, if they were very numerous, somebody would have sighted one before. I'd give my left leg and four fingers for one good look at the inside of that ship."

"Why didn't you take it, then? You never even looked toward it, after that one first glimpse."

"I'll say I didn't--the reason being that they may have automatic detectors, and as I have suggested before, our system of vision is so crude that its use could be detected with a clothesline or a basket full of scrap iron. But to resume: Their aim is to capture, not destroy, since they haven't killed anybody except the one crew that attacked them. Apparently they want to study us or something. However, they don't intend that any of us shall get away, nor even send out a word of what has happened to us. Therefore it looks as though our best bet is to hide now, and try to sneak away on them after a while--direct methods won't work. Right?"

"You sound lucid. Is there any possibility of getting back, though, if we got anywhere near Jupiter? It's so far away!"

"It's a long stretch from Jupiter to any of the planets where we have power-plants, all right--particularly now, when Mars and Tellus are subtending an angle of something more than ninety degrees at the sun, and Venus is between the two, while Jupiter is clear across the sun from all three of them. Even when Jupiter is in mean opposition to Mars, it is still some five hundred and fifty million kilometers away, so you can form some idea as to how far it is from our nearest planet now. No, if we expect to get back under our own power, we've got to break away pretty quick--these lifeboats have very little accumulator capacity, and the receptors are useless above about three hundred million kilometers...."

"But it'll take us a long time to go that far, won't it?"

"Not very. Our own ships, using only the acceleration of gravity, and both plus and minus at that, make the better than four hundred million kilometers of the long route to Mars in five days. These birds are using almost that much acceleration, and I don't see how they do it. They must have a tractor ray. Brandon claimed that such a thing was theoretically possible, but Westfall and I couldn't see it. We ragged him about it a lot--and he was right. I thought, of course, they'd drift with us, but they are using power steadily. They've got _some_ system!"

"Suppose they could be using intra-atomic energy? We were taught that it was impossible, but you've shattered a lot of my knowledge today."

"I wouldn't want to say definitely that it is absolutely impossible, but the deeper we go into that line, the more unlikely intra-atomic energy power-plants become. No, they've got a real power-transmission system--one that can hold a tight beam together a lot farther than anything we have been able to develop, that's all. Well, we've given them quite a lot of time to get over any suspicion of us, let's see if we can sneak away from them."

* * * * *

By short and infrequent applications of power to the dirigible projectors of the life-boat, Stevens slowly shifted the position of the fragment which bore their craft until it was well clear of the other components of the mass of wreckage. He then exerted a very small retarding force, so that their bit would lag behind the procession, as though it had accidently been separated. But the crew of the captor was alert, and no sooner did a clear space show itself between them and the mass than a ray picked them up and herded them back into place. Stevens then nudged other pieces so that they fell out, only to see them also rounded up. Hour after hour he kept trying--doing nothing sufficiently energetic to create any suspicion, but attempting everything he could think of that offered any chance of escape from the clutches of their captors. Immovable at the plate, his hands upon the controls, he performed every insidious maneuver his agile brain could devise, but he could not succeed in separating their vehicle from its fellows. Finally, after a last attempt, which was foiled as easily as were its predecessors, he shut off his controls and turned to his companion with a grin.

"I didn't think I could get away with it--they're keen, that gang--but I had to keep at it as long as it would have done us any good."

"Wouldn't it do us any good now?"

"Not a bit--we're going so fast that we couldn't stop--we're out of even radio range of our closest power-plant. We'll have to put off any more attempts until they slow us down. They're fairly close to at least one of the moons of Jupiter, we'll have our best chance--so good, in fact, that I really think we can make it."

"But what good would that do us, if we couldn't get back?" Dire foreboding showed in her glorious eyes.

"Lots of things not tried yet, girl, and we'll try them all. First, we get away. Second, we try to get in touch with Norman Brandon...."

"How? No known radio will carry half that far."

"No, but I think that a radio as yet unknown may be able to--and there is a bare possibility that I'll be able to communicate."

"Oh wonderful--that lifts a frightful load off my mind," she breathed.

"But just a minute--I said I'd come clean with you, and I will. The odds are all against us, no matter what we do. If that unknown radio won't work--and it probably won't--there are several other things we can try, but they're all pretty slim chances. Even if we get away, it'll probably be about the same thing as though you were to be marooned on a desert island without any tools, and with your rescue depending upon your ability to build a high-powered radio station with which to call to a mainland for help. However, if we don't try to get away, our only alternative is letting them know we're here, and joining our friends in captivity."

"And then what?"

"You know as much as I do. Imprisonment and restraint, certain; death, possible; return to Earth, almost certainly impossible--life as guests, highly improbable."

"I'm with you, Steve, all the way."

"Well, it's time to spring off--we've both been awake better than fifty hours. Personally, I'm all in, and you're so near dead that you're a physical wreck. We'll get us a bite of supper and turn in."

An appetizing supper was prepared from the abundant stores and each ate a heartier meal than either would have believed possible. Stevens considered his unopened package of cigarettes, then regretfully put it back into his pocket still unopened and turned to Nadia.

"Well, little fellow, it's time to shove off, and then some. You might as well sleep here, and I'll go in there. If anything scares you, yell. Good-night, old trapper!"

"Wait a minute, Steve." Nadia flushed, and her brown eyes and black eyebrows, in comparison with her golden-blond hair, lent her face a quizzical, elfin expression that far belied her feelings as she stared straight into his eyes. "I've never even been away from the Earth before, and with all this happening I'm simply scared to death. I've been trying to hide it, but I couldn't stand it alone, and we're going to be together too long and too close for senseless conventions to affect us. There's two bunks over there--why don't you sleep in one of them?"

He returned her steadfast gaze for a moment in silence.

"All x with me, Nadia," he answered, keeping out of his voice all signs of the tenderness he felt for her, and of his very real admiration for her straightforward conduct in a terrifying situation. "You trust me, then?"

"_Trust_ you! Don't be silly--I know you! I know you, and I know Brandon and Westfall--I know what you've done, and exactly the kind of men you are. _Trust_ you!"

"Thanks, old golf-shootist," and promises were made and received in a clasp from which Nadia's right hand, strong as it was, emerged slightly damaged.

"By the way, what is your first name, fellow-traveller?" she asked in lighter vein. "Nobody, not even Dad or Breckie, ever seems to call you anything but 'Steve' when they talk about you." She was amazed at the effect of her innocent question, for Stevens flushed to his hair and spluttered.

"It's _Percy_!" He finally, snorted. "Percival Van Schravendyck Stevens. Wouldn't that tear it?"

"Why, I think Percival's a real nice name!"

"Silence!" he hissed in burlesque style. "Young woman, I have revealed to you a secret known to but few living creatures. On your life, keep it inviolate!"

"Oh, very well, if you insist. Good-night--Steve!" and she gave him a radiant and honest smile: the first smile he had seen since the moment of the attack.

CHAPTER III

Castaways Upon Ganymede

Upon awakening, the man's first care was to instruct the girl in the operation of the projectors, so that she could keep the heavily-armored edge of their small section, which she had promptly christened "The Forlorn Hope," between them and the grinding, clashing mass of wreckage, and thus, if it should become necessary, protect the relatively frail inner portions of their craft from damage.

"Keep an eye on things for a while, Nadia," he instructed, as soon as she could handle the controls, "and don't use any more power than is absolutely necessary. We'll need it all, and besides, they can probably detect anything we can use. There's probably enough leakage from the ruptured accumulator cells to mask quite a little emission, but don't use much. I'm going to see what I can do about making this whole wedge navigable."

"Why not just launch what's left of this lifeboat? It's space-worthy, isn't it?"

"Yes, but it's too small. Two or three of the big dirigible projectors of the lower band are on the rim of this piece-of-pie-shaped section we're riding, I think. If so, and if enough batteries of accumulators are left intact to give them anywhere nearly full power, we can get an acceleration that will make a lifeboat look sick. Those main dirigibles, you know, are able to swing the whole mass of the _Arcturus_, and what they'll do to this one chunk of it--we've got only a few thousand tons of mass in this piece--will be something pretty. Also, having the metal may save us months of time in mining it."

He found the projectors, repaired or cut out the damaged accumulator cells, and reconnected them through the controls of the lifeboat. He moved into the "engine-room" the airtanks, stores, and equipment from all the other fragments which, by means of a space-suit, he could reach without too much difficulty. From the battery rooms of those fragments--open shelves, after being sliced open by the shearing ray--he helped himself to banks of accumulator cells from the enormous driving batteries of the ill-fated _Arcturus_, bolting them down and connecting them solidly until almost every compartment of their craft was one mass of stored-up energy.

Days fled like hours, so furiously busy were they in preparing their peculiar vessel for a cruise of indefinite duration. Stevens cut himself short on sleep and snatched his meals in passing; and Nadia, when not busy at her own tasks of observing, housekeeping, and doing what little piloting was required, was rapidly learning to wield most effectively the spanner and pliers of the mechanic and electrician.

"I'm afraid our time is getting short, Steve," she announced, after making an observation. "It looks as though we're getting wherever it is we're going."

"Well, I've got only two more jobs to do, but they're the hardest of the lot. It is Jupiter, or can you tell yet?"

"Jupiter or one of its satellites, I think, from the point where they reversed their power. Here's the observation you told me to take."

"Looks like Jupiter," he agreed, after he had rapidly checked her figures. "We'll pass very close to one of those two satellites--probably Ganymede--which is fine for our scheme. All four of the major satellites have water and atmosphere, but Ganymede, being largest, is best for our purposes. We've got a couple of days yet--just about time to finish up. Let's get going--you know what to do."

"Steve, I'm afraid of it. It's too dangerous--isn't there some other way?"

"None that I can see. The close watch they're keeping on every bit of this junk makes it our only chance for a get-away. I'm pretty sure I can do it--but if I should happen to get nipped, just use enough power to let them know you're here, and you won't be any worse off than if I hadn't tried to pull off this stunt."

He donned a space-suit, filled a looped belt with tools, picked up a portable power-drill, and stepped into the tiny air-lock. Nadia deftly guided their segment against one of the larger fragments and held it there with a gentle, steady pressure, while Stevens, a light cable paying out behind him, clambered carefully over the wreckage, brought his drill into play, and disappeared inside the huge wedge. In less than an hour he returned without mishap and reported to the glowing girl.

"Just like shooting fish down a well! Most of the accumulator cells were tight, and installing the relays wasn't a bad job at all. Believe me, girl, there'll be junk filling all the space between here and Saturn when we touch them off!"

"Wonderful, Steve!" Nadia exclaimed. "It won't be so bad seeing you go into the others, now that you have this one all rigged up."

* * * * *

Around and around the mass of wreckage they crept, and in each of the larger sections Stevens connected up the enormous fixed or dirigible projectors to whatever accumulator cells were available through sensitive relays, all of which he could close by means of one radio impulse. The long and dangerous task done, he stood at the lookout plate, studying the huge disk which had been the upper portion of the lower half of the _Arcturus_ and frowning in thought. Nadia reached over his shoulder and switched off the plate.

"Nix on that second job, big fellow!" she declared. "They aren't really necessary, and you're altogether too apt to be killed trying to get them. It's too ghastly--I won't stand for your trying it, so that ends it."

"We ought to have them, really," he protested. "With those special tools, cutting torches, and all the stuff, we'd be sitting pretty. We'll lose weeks of time by not having them."

"We'll just have to lose it, then. You can't get 'em, any more than a baby can get the moon, so stop crying about it," she went over the familiar argument for the twentieth time. "That stuff up there is all grinding together like cakes of ice in a floe; the particular section you want is in plain sight of whoever is on watch; and those tools and things are altogether too heavy to handle. You're a husky brute, I know, but even you couldn't begin to handle them, even if you had good going. I couldn't help you very much, even if you'd let me try; and the fact that you so positively refuse to let me come along shows how dangerous you know the attempt is bound to be. You'd probably never even get up there alive, to say nothing of getting back here. No, Steve, that's out like a light."

"I sure wish they'd left us weightless for a while, sometime, if only for an hour or two," he mourned.

"But they didn't!" she retorted, practically. "So we're just out of luck to that extent. Our time is about up, too. It's time you worked us back to the tail end of this procession--or rather, the head end, since we're traveling 'down' now."

Stevens took the controls and slowly worked along the outer edge of the mass, down toward its extremity. Nadia put one hand upon his shoulder and he glanced around.

"Thanks, Steve. We have a perfectly wonderful chance as it is, and we've gone so far with our scheme together that it would be a crying shame not to be able to go through with it. I'd hate like sin to have to surrender to them now, and that's all I could do if anything should become of you. Besides..." her voice died away into silence.

"Sure, you're right," he hastily replied, dodging the implication of that unfinished sentence. "I couldn't figure out anything that looked particularly feasible anyway--that's why I didn't try it. We'll pass it up."

Soon they arrived at their objective and maintained a position well in the van, but not sufficiently far ahead of the rest to call forth a restraining ray from their captors. Already strongly affected by the gravitational pull of the mass of the satellite, many of the smaller portions of the wreck, not directly held by the tractors, began to separate from the main mass. As each bit left its place another beam leaped out, until it became apparent that no more were available, and Stevens strapped the girl and himself down before two lookout plates.

"Now for it, Nadia!" he exclaimed, and simultaneously threw on the power of his own projectors and sent out the radio impulse which closed the relays he had so carefully set. They were thrown against the restraining straps savagely and held there by an enormous weight as the gigantic dirigible projectors shot their fragment of the wreck away from the comparatively slight force which had been acting upon it, but they braced themselves and strained their muscles in order to watch what was happening. As the relays in the various fragments closed, the massed power of the accumulators was shorted dead across the converters and projectors instead of being fed into them gradually through the controls of the pilot, with a result comparable to that of the explosion of an ammunition dump. Most of the masses, whose projectors were fed by comparatively few accumulator cells, darted away entirely with a stupendous acceleration. A few of them, however, received the unimpeded flow of complete batteries. Those projectors tore loose from even their massive supports and crashed through anything opposing them like a huge, armor-piercing projectile. It was a spectacle to stagger the imagination, and Stevens grinned as he turned to the girl, who was staring in wide-eyed amazement.

"Well, ace, I think they're busy enough now so that it'll be safe to take that long-wanted look at their controls," and he flashed the twin beams of his lookout light out beyond the upper half of the _Arcturus_--only to see them stop abruptly in mid-space. Even the extremely short carrier-wave of Roeser's Rays could not go through the invisible barrier thrown out by the tiny, but powerful globe of space.

"No penetration?" Nadia asked.

"Flattened them out cold. 'However,' as the fox once remarked about the grapes, 'I'll bet they're sour, anyway.' We'll have some stuff of our own, one of these days. I sure hope the fireworks we started back there keep those birds amused until we get out of sight, because if I use much more power on these projectors we may not have juice enough left to stop with."

"You're using enough now to suit me--I'm so heavy I can hardly lift a finger!"

"You'd better lift 'em! You must watch what's going on back there while I navigate around this moon."

"All x, chief.... They've got their hands full, apparently. Those rays are shooting around all over the sky. It looks as though they were trying to capture four or five things at once with each one."

"Good! Tell me when the moon cuts them off."

* * * * *

At the awful acceleration they were using, which constantly increased the terrific velocity with which they had been traveling when they made good their escape, it was not long until they had placed the satellite between them and the enemy; then Stevens cut down and reversed his power. Such was their speed, however, that a long detour was necessary in order to reduce it to a safe landing rate. As soon as this could be done, Stevens headed for the morning zone and dropped the "Hope" rapidly toward the surface of that new, strange world. Details could not be distinguished at first because of an all-enshrouding layer of cloud, but the rising sun dispelled the mist, and when they had descended to within a few thousand feet of the surface, their vision was unobstructed. Immediately below them the terrain was mountainous and heavily wooded; while far to the east the rays of a small, pale sun glinted upon a vast body of water. No signs of habitation were visible as far as the eye could reach.

"Now to pick out a location for our power-plant. We must have a waterfall for power, a good place to hide our ship from observation, and I'd like to have a little seam of coal. We can use wood if we have to, but I think we can find some coal. This is all sedimentary rock--it looks a lot like the country along the North Fork of the Flathead, in Montana. There are a lot of coal outcrops, usually, in such topography as this is."

"We want to hide in a hurry, though, don't we?"

"Not particularly, I think. If they had missed us at all, they would have had us long ago, and with all the damage we did with those projectors they won't be surprised at one piece being missing--I imagine they lost a good many."

"But they'll know that somebody caused all that disturbance. Won't they hunt for us?"

"Maybe, and maybe not--no telling what they'll do. However, by the time they can land and get checked up and ready to hunt for us, we'll be a mighty small needle, well hidden in a good big haystack."

For several hours they roamed over the mountainous region at high velocity, seeking the best possible location, and finally they found one that was almost ideal--a narrow canyon overhung with heavy trees, opening into a wide, deep gorge upon a level with its floor. A mighty waterfall cascaded into the gorge just above the canyon, and here and there could be seen black outcrops which Stevens, after a close scrutiny, declared to be coal. He deftly guided their cumbersome wedge of steel into the retreat, allowed it to settle gently to the ground, and shut off the power.

"Well, little fellow-conspirator against the peace and dignity of the Jovians, I don't know just where we are, but wherever it is, we're here. We got away clean, and as long as we don't use any high-tension stuff or anything else that they can trace, I think we're as safe as money in a bank."

"I suppose that I ought to be scared to death, Steve, but I'm not--I'm just too thrilled for words," Nadia answered, and the eager sparkle in her eyes bore out her words. "Can we go out now? How about air? Shall we wear suits or go out as we are? Have you got a weapon of any kind? Hurry up--let's do something!"

"Pipe down, ace! Remember that we don't know any more about anything around here than a pig does about Sunday, and conduct yourself accordingly. Take it easy. I'm surprised at the gravity here. This is certainly Ganymede, and it has a diameter of only about fifty seven hundred kilometers. If I remember correctly, Damoiseau estimated its mass at about three one-hundredths that of the Earth, which would make its surface gravity about one-sixth. However, it is actually almost a half, as you see by this spring-balance here. Therefore it is quite a little more massive than has been...."

"What of it? Let's go places and do things!"

"Calm yourself, Ginger, you've got lots of time--we'll be here for quite a while, I'm afraid. We can't go out until we analyze the air--we're sure lucky there's as much as there is. I'm not exactly the world's foremost chemist, but fortunately an air-analysis isn't much of a job with the apparatus we carry."

While Nadia controlled her impatience as best she could, Stevens manipulated the bulbs and pipettes of the gas apparatus.

"Pressure, fifty-two centimeters--more than I dared hope for--and analysis all x, I believe. Oxygen concentration a little high, but not much."

"We won't have to wear the space-suits, then?"

"Not unless I missed something in the analysis. The pressure corresponds to our own at a height of about three thousand meters, which we can get used to without too much trouble. Good thing, too. I brought along all the air I could get hold of, but as I told you back there, if we had to depend on it altogether, we might be out of luck. I'm going to pump some of our air back into a cylinder to equalize our pressure--don't want to waste any of it until we're sure the outside air suits us without treatment."

* * * * *

When the pressure inside had been gradually reduced to that outside and they had become accustomed to breathing the rarefied medium, Stevens opened the airlock and the outside doors, and for some time cautiously sniffed the atmosphere of the satellite. He could detect nothing harmful or unusual in it--it was apparently the same as earthly air--and he became jubilant.

"All x, Nadia--luck is perched right on our banner. Freedom, air, water, power, and coal! Now as you suggested, we'll go places and do things!"

"Suppose it's safe?" Her first eagerness to explore their surroundings had abated noticeably. "You aren't armed, are you?"

"No, and I don't believe that there was a gun of any kind aboard the _Arcturus_. That kind of thing went out quite a while ago, you know. We'll take a look, anyway--we've got to find out about that coal before we decide to settle down here. Remember this half-gravity stuff, and control your leg-muscles accordingly."

Leaping lightly to the ground, they saw that the severed section of fifty-inch armor, which was the rim of their conveyance, almost blocked the entrance to the narrow canyon which they had selected for their retreat. Upon one side that wall of steel actually touched the almost perpendicular wall or rock; upon the other side there was left only a narrow passage. They stepped through it, so that they could see the waterfall and the gorge, and stopped silent. The sun, now fairly high, was in no sense the familiar orb of day, but was a pale, insipid thing, only one-fifth the diameter of the sun to which they were accustomed, and which could almost be studied with the unshielded eye. From their feet a grassy meadow a few hundred feet wide sloped gently down to the river, from whose farther bank a precipice sprang upward for perhaps a thousand feet--merging into towering hills whose rugged grandeur was reminiscent of the topography of the moon. At their backs the wall of the gorge was steep, but not precipitous, and was covered with shrubs and trees--some of which leaned out over the little canyon, completely screening it, and among whose branches birds could now and then be seen flitting about. In that direction no mountains were visible, indicating that upon their side of the river there was an upland plateau or bench. To their right the river, the gorge, and the strip of meadow extended for a mile or more, then curved away and were lost to sight. To their left, almost too close for comfort, was the stupendous cataract, towering above them to a terror-inspiring height. Nadia studied it with awe, which changed to puzzled wonder.

"What's the matter with it, Steve? It looks like a picture in slow motion, like the kind they take of your dives--or am I seeing things?"

"No, it's really slow, compared to what we're used to. Remember that one-half gravity stuff!"

"Oh, that's right, but it certainly does look funny. It gives me the creeps."

"You'll get used to it pretty quick--just as you'll get used to all the rest of the things having only half their earthly weight and falling only half as fast as they ought to when you drop them. Well, I don't see anything that looks dangerous yet--let's go up toward the falls a few meters and prospect that outcrop."

With a few brisk strokes of an improvised shovel he cleared the outcrop of detritus and broke off several samples of the black substance, with which they went back to the "Forlorn Hope."

"It's real coal," Stevens announced after a series of tests. "I've seen better, but on the other hand, there's lots worse. It'll make good gas, and a kind of a coke. Not so hot, but it'll do. Now we'd better get organized old partner, for a long campaign."

"Go ahead and organize--I'm only the cheap help in this enterprise."

"Cheap help! You're apt to be the life of the party. Can you make and shoot a bow and arrow?"

"I'll say I can--I've belonged to an archery club for five years."

"What did I tell you? You're a life saver! Here's the dope--we've got to save our own supplies as much as possible until we know exactly what we're up against, and to do that, we've got to live off the country. I'll fake up something to knock over some of those birds and small game, then we can make real bow-strings and feathered arrows and I'll forge some steel arrow-heads while you're making yourself a real bow. We'd better make me about a hundred-pound war bow, too...."

"A _hundred_!" interrupted Nadia. "That's a lot of bow, big boy--think you can bend it?"

"You'd be surprised," he grinned. "I'm not quite like Robin Hood--I've been known to miss a finger-thick wand at a hundred paces--but I'm not exactly a beginner."

"Oh, of course--I should have known by your language that you're an archer, otherwise you'd never have used such an old-fashioned word as 'pounds.' I shoot a thirty-five-pound bow ordinarily, but for game I should have the heaviest one I can hold accurately--about a forty-five, probably."

"All x. And as soon as I can I'll make us a couple of suits of fairly heavy steel armor, so that we'll have real protection if we should need it. You see, we don't know what we are apt to run up against out here. Then, with that much done, it'll be up to you to provide, since I'll have to work tooth and nail at the forges. You'll have to bring home the bacon, do the cooking and so on, and see what you can find along the line of edible roots, grains, fruits, and what-not. Sort of reverse the Indian idea--you be the hunter and I'll keep the home fires burning. Can do?"

"What it takes to do that, I've got," Nadia assured him, her eyes sparkling. "Have you your job planned out as well and as fittingly as you have mine?"

"And then some. We've got just two methods of getting away from here--one is to get in touch with Brandon, so that he'll come after us; the other is to recharge our accumulators and try to make it under our own power. Either course will need power and lots of it...."

"I never thought of going back in the 'Hope.' Suppose we could?"

"About as doubtful as the radio--I think that I could build a pair of matched-frequency auto-dirigible transmitter and receptor units, such as are necessary for space-ships fed by stationary power-plants, but after I got them built, they'd take us less than half way there. Then we'd have only what power we can carry, and I hate even to think of what probably would happen to us. We'd certainly have to drift for months before we could get close enough to any of our plants to radio for help, and we'd be taking awful chances. You see, we'd have to take a very peculiar orbit, and if we should miss connections passing the inner planets, what the sun would do to us at the closest point and where what's left of us would go on the back-swing, would be just too bad! Besides, if we can get hold of the _Sirius_, they'll come loaded for bear, and we may be able to do something about the rest of the folks out here."

* * * * *

"Oh!" breathed the girl. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could! I thought, of course, they'd all be...." her voice died away.

"Not necessarily--there's always a chance. That's why I'm trying the ultra-radio first. However, either course will take lots of power, so the first thing I've got to do is to build a power plant. I'm going to run a penstock up those falls, and put in a turbine, driving a high-tension alternator. Then, while I'm trying to build the ultra-radio, I'll be charging our accumulators, so that no time will be lost in case the radio fails. If it does fail--and remember I'm not counting on its working--of course I'll tackle the transmission and receptor units before we start out to drift it."

"You say it easy, Steve, but how can you build all those things, with nothing to work with?"

"It's going to be a real job--I'm not try to kid you into thinking it'll be either easy or quick. Here's the way everything will go. Before I can even lay the first length of the penstock, I've got to have the pipe--to make which I've got to have flat steel--to get which I'll have to cut some of the partitions out of this ship of ours--to do which I'll have to have a cutting torch--to make which I'll have to forge nozzles out of block metal and to run which I'll have to have gas--to get which I'll have to mine coal and build a gas-plant--to do which...."

"Good heavens, Steve, are you going back to the Stone Age? I never thought of half those things. Why, it's impossible!"

"Not quite, guy. Things could be a lot worse--that's why I brought along the whole 'Forlorn Hope,' instead of just the lifeboat. As it is, we've got several thousand tons of spare steel and lots of copper. We've got ordinary tools and a few light motors, blowers, and such stuff. That gives me a great big start--I won't have to mine the ores and smelt the metals, as would have been necessary otherwise. However, it'll be plenty bad. I'll have to start out in a pretty crude fashion, and for some of the stuff I'll need I'll have to make, not only the machine that makes the part I want, but also the machine that makes the machine that makes the machine that makes it--and so on, just how far down the line, I haven't dared to think."

"You must be a regular jack-of-all-trades, to think you can get away with such a program as that?"

"I am--nothing else but. You see, while most of my school training was in advanced physics and mathematics, I worked my way through by computing and designing, and I've done a lot of truck-horse labor of various kinds besides. I can calculate and design almost anything, and I can make a pretty good stab at translating a design into fabricated material. I wouldn't wonder if Brandon's ultra-radio would stop me, since nobody had even started to build one when I saw him last--but I helped compute it, know the forces involved as well as he did at that time, and it so happens that I know more about the design of coils and fields of force than I do about anything else. So I may be able to work it out eventually. It isn't going to be not knowing how that will hold me up--it'll be the lack of something that I can't build."

"And that's where you will go back and back and back, as you said about building the penstock?"

"Back and back is right, if I can find all the necessary raw materials--that's what's probably going to put a lot of monkey-wrenches into the machinery." And Stevens went to work upon a weapon of offense, fashioning a crude, but powerful bow from a strip of spring steel strung with heavy wire.

"How about arrows? Shall I go see if I can hit a bird with a rock, for feathers, and see if I can find something to make arrows out of?"

"Not yet--anyway, I'd bet on the birds! I'm going to use pieces of this light brace-rod off the accumulator cells for arrows. They won't fly true, of course, but with their mass I can give them enough projectile force to kill any small animal they hit, no matter how they hit it."

After many misses, he finally bagged a small animal, something like a rabbit and something like a kangaroo, and a couple of round-bodied, plump birds, almost as large as domestic hens. These they dressed, with considerable distaste and a noticeable lack of skill.

"We'll get used to it pretty quick, Diana--also more expert," he said when the task was done. "We now have raw material for bow-strings and clothes, as well as food."

"The word 'raw' being heavily accented," Nadia declared, with a grimace. "But how do we know that they're good to eat?"

"We'll have to eat 'em and see," he grinned. "I don't imagine that any flesh is really poisonous, and we'll have to arrive at the ones we like best by a process of trial and error. Well, here's your job--I'll get busy on mine. Don't go more than a few hundred meters away and yell if you get into a jam."

"There's a couple of questions I want to ask you. What makes it so warm here, when the sun's so far away and Jupiter isn't supposed to be radiating any heat? And how about time? It's twelve hours by my watch since sunrise this morning, and it's still shining."

"As for heat, I've been wondering about that. It must be due to internal heat, because even though Jupiter may be warm, or even hot, it certainly isn't radiating much, since it has a temperature of minus two hundred at the visible surface, which, of course, is the top of the atmosphere. Our heat here is probably caused by radioactivity--that's the most modern dope, I believe. As for time, it looks as though our days were something better than thirty hours long, instead of twenty-four. Of course I'll keep the chronometer going on I-P time, since we'll probably need it in working out observations; but we might as well let our watches run down and work, eat, and sleep by the sun--not much sense in trying to keep Tellurian time here, as I see it. Check?"

"All x. I'll have supper ready for you at sunset. 'Bye!"

A few evenings later, when Stevens came in after his long day's work, he was surprised to see Nadia dressed in a suit of brown coveralls and high-laced moccasins.

"How do I look?" she asked, pirouetting gayly.

"Neat, but not gaudy," he approved. "That's good mole-skin--smooth, soft, and tough. Where'd you make the raise? I didn't know we had anything like that on board. What did you do for thread? You look like a million dollars--you sure did a good job of fitting."

"I had to have something--what with all the thorns and brush, there was almost more of me exposed than covered, and I was getting scratched up something fierce. So I ripped up one of the space-suits, and found out that there's enough cloth, fur, and leather in one of them to make six ordinary suits, and thread by the kilometer. I was awfully glad to see all that thread--I had an idea that I'd have to unravel my stockings or something, but I didn't. Your clothes are getting pretty tacky, too, and you're getting all burned with those hot coals and things. I'm going to build you a suit out of leather for your blacksmithing activities."

"Fine business, ace! Then we can save what's left of our civilized clothes for the return trip. What do we eat?"

"The eternal question of the hungry laboring man! I've got a roasted bongo, a fried filamaloo bird, and a boiled warple for the meat dishes. For vegetables, mashed hikoderms and pimola greens. Neocorn bread."

"Translate that, please, into terms of food."

"Translate it yourself, after you eat it. I changed the system on you today. I've named all the things, so it'll be easier to keep track of those we like and the ones we don't."

With appetites sharp-set by long hours of hard labor they ate heartily; then, in the deepening twilight, they sat and talked in comradely fashion while Stevens smoked one precious cigarette.

* * * * *

It was not long until Nadia had her work well in hand. Game was plentiful, and the fertile valley and the neighboring upland yielded peculiar, but savory vegetable foods in variety and abundance; so that soon she was able to spend some time with Stevens, helping him as much as she could. Thus she came to realize the true magnitude of the task he faced and the real seriousness of their position.

As Stevens had admitted before the work was started, he had known that he had set himself a gigantic task, but he had not permitted himself to follow, step by step, the difficulties that he knew awaited him. Now, as the days stretched into weeks and on into months, he was forced to take every laborious step, and it was borne in upon him just how nearly impossible that Herculean labor was to prove--just how dependent any given earthly activity is upon a vast number of others. Here he was alone--everything he needed must be manufactured by his own hands, from its original sources. He had known that progress would be slow and he had been prepared for that; but he had not pictured, even to himself, half of the maddening setbacks which occurred time after time because of the crudity of the tools and equipment he was forced to use. All too often a machine or part, the product of many hours of grueling labor, would fail because of the lack of some insignificant thing--some item so common as to be taken for granted in all terrestrial shops, but impossible of fabrication with the means at his disposal. At such times he would set his grim jaw a trifle harder, go back one step farther toward the Stone Age, and begin all over again--to find the necessary raw material or a possible substitute, and then to build the apparatus and machinery necessary to produce the part he required. Thus the heart-breaking task progressed, and Nadia watched her co-laborer become leaner and harder and more desperate day by day, unable in any way to lighten his fearful load.

In the brief period of rest following a noonday meal, Stevens lay prone upon the warm, fragrant grass beside the "Forlorn Hope," but it was evident to Nadia that he was not resting. His burned and blistered hands were locked savagely behind his head, his eyes were closed too tightly, and every tense line of his body was eloquent of a strain even more mental than physical. She studied him for minutes, her fine eyes clouded, then sat down beside him and put her hand upon his shoulder.

"I want to talk to you a minute, Steve," she said gently.

"All x, little fellow--but it might be just as well if you didn't touch me. You see, I'm getting so rabid that I can't trust myself."

"That's exactly what I want to talk to you about." A fiery blush burned through her deep tan, but her low, clear voice did not falter and her eyes held his unflinchingly. "I know you better than you know yourself, as I've said before. You are killing yourself, but it isn't the work, frightfully hard and disheartening as it is, that is doing it--it's your anxiety for me and the uncertainty of everything. You haven't been able to rest because you have been raging and fuming so at unavoidable conditions--you have been fighting _facts_. And it's all _so_ useless, Steve, between you and me--everything would check out on zero if we'd just come out into the open."

The man's gaunt frame seemed to stiffen even more rigidly.

"You've said altogether too much or else only half enough, Nadia. You know, of course, that I've loved you ever since I got really to know you--and that didn't take long. You know that I love you and you know how I love you--with the real love that a man can feel for only one woman and only once in his life; and you know exactly what we're up against. Now that _does_ tear it--wide open!" he finished bitterly.

"No, it doesn't, at all," she replied, steadily. "Of course I know that you love me, and I glory in it; and since you don't seem to realize that I love you in exactly the same way, I'll tell you so. Love you! Good heavens, Steve, I never dreamed that such a man as you are really existed! But you're fighting too many things at once, and they're killing you. And they're mostly imaginary, at that. Can't you see that there's no need of uncertainty between you and me? That there is no need of you driving yourself to desperation on my account? Whatever must be is all x with me, Steve. If you can build everything you need, all well and good. We'll be engaged until then, and our love will be open and sweet. If worst comes to worst, so that we can neither communicate with Brandon and Westfall nor leave here under our own power--even that is nothing to kill ourselves about. And yes, I do know exactly what we are facing. I have been prepared for it ever since I first saw what a perfectly impossible thing you are attempting. You are trying to go from almost the Age of Bronze clear up to year-after-next in a month or two. Not one man in a million could have done as much in his lifetime as you have done in the last few weeks, and I do not see how even you, with what little you have to work with, can possibly build such things as power-plants, transmitters, and ultra-radio stations. But what of it? For the day that it becomes clear that we are to remain here indefinitely; that day we will marry each other here, before God. Look around at this beautiful country. Could there be a finer world upon which to found a new race? When we decided to cut loose from the _Arcturus_ I told you that I was with you all the way, and now I'll repeat it, with a lot more meaning. No matter what it's like, Steve, no matter where it leads to, I'm with you--_to--the--end--of--the--road_. Here or upon Earth or anywhere in the Universe. I am yours for life and for eternity."

* * * * *

While she was speaking, the grim, strained lines upon Stevens' face had disappeared, and as she fell silent he straightened up and gently, tenderly, reverently he took her lithe body into his arms.

"You're right, sweetheart--everything _will_ check out on zero, to nineteen decimals." He was a man transfigured. "I've been fighting windmills and I've been scared sick--but how was I to think that a wonder-girl like you could ever love a mutt like me? You certainly are the gamest little partner a man ever had You're the world's straightest shooter, ace--you're a square brick if there ever was one. Your sheer nerve in being willing to go the whole route makes me love you more than ever, if such a thing can be possible, and it certainly puts a new face on the whole cock-eyed Universe for me. However, I don't believe it will come to that. After what you've just said, I sure will lick that job, regardless of how many different factories it takes to make one armature--I'll show that mess of scrap-iron what kind of trees make shingles!"

The girl still in his arms, he rose to his feet and released her slowly, reluctantly, unwilling ever to let her go. Then he shook himself, as though an overwhelming burden had been lifted from his shoulders, and laughed happily.

"See this cigarette?" he went on lightly. "The Last of the Mohicans. I'm going to smoke it in honor of our engagement." He drew the fragrant smoke deep into his lungs and frowned at her in mock seriousness.

"This would be a nice world to live on, of course, but the jobs here are too darn steady. It also seems to be somewhat lacking in modern conveniences, such as steel-mills and machine tools. Then, too, it is just a trifle too far from the Royal and Ancient for you really to enjoy living here permanently, and besides, I can't get my favorite brand of cigarettes around here. Therefore, after due deliberation, I don't believe we'll take the place--we'll go back to Tellus. Kiss me just once more ace, and I'll make that job think a cyclone has struck it right on the center of impact. Like Samuel Weller, or whoever it was, I'm clear full of 'wigor, wim, and witality'!"

The specified kiss and several others duly delivered he strode blithely away, and the little canyon resounded with the blows of his heavy sledge as he attacked with renewed spirit the great forging, white-hot from his soak-pit, which was to become the shaft of his turbo-alternator. Nadia watched him for a moment, her very heart in her eyes, then picked up her spanner and went after more steel, breathing a long and tremulous, but supremely happy sigh.

CHAPTER IV

Ganymedean Life

Slow, hard, and disheartening as the work had been at first, Stevens had never slackened his pace, and after a time, as his facilities increased, the exasperating setbacks decreased in number and severity and his progress became faster and faster. Large as the "Forlorn Hope" was, space was soon at a premium, for their peculiarly-shaped craft became a veritable factory, housing a variety of machinery and equipment unknown in any single earthly industrial plant. Nothing was ornamental--everything was stripped to its barest fundamental necessities--but every working part functioned with a smooth precision to delight the senses of any good mechanic.

In a cavern under the falls was the great turbine, to be full-fed by the crude but tight penstock which clung to the wall of the gorge, angling up to the brink of that stupendous cataract. Bedded down upon solid rock there was a high-tension alternator capable of absorbing the entire output of the mighty turbine. This turbo-alternator was connected to a set of converters from which the energy would flow along three great copper cables--the receptors of the lifeboats being altogether too small to carry the load--to the now completely exhausted accumulators of the "Forlorn Hope." All high-tension apparatus was shielded and grounded, so that no stray impulses could reveal to the possible detectors of the Jovians the presence of this foreign power plant. Housings, frames, spiders, all stationary parts were rough, crude and massive; but bearings, shafts, armatures, all moving parts, were of a polished and finished accuracy and balance that promised months and years of trouble-free operation. Everything ready for the test, Stevens took off his frayed and torn leather coveralls and moccasins and climbed nimbly up the penstock. He never walked down. Opening the head-gate, he poised sharply upon its extremity and took off in a perfect swan-dive; floating unconcernedly down toward that boiling maelstrom two hundred feel below. He struck the water with a sharp, smooth "slup!" and raced ashore, seizing his suit as he ran toward the turbo-alternator. It was running smoothly, and, knowing that everything was tight at the receiving end, he lingered about the power plant until he was assured that nothing would go wrong and that his home manufactured lubricating oil and grease would keep those massive bearings cool.

Hunger assailed him, and glancing at the sun, he noted that it was well past dinner-time.

"Wow!" he exclaimed aloud. "The boss just loves to wait meals--she'll burn me up for this!"

He ran lightly toward "home," eager to tell his sweetheart that the long awaited moment had arrived--that power was now flowing into their accumulators.

"Hi, Diana of the silver bow!" he called. "How come you no blow the dinner bell? Power's on--come give it a look!"

There was no answer to his hail, and Stevens paused in shocked amazement. He knew that never of her own volition would she be out so late--Nadia was gone! A rapid tour of inspection quickly confirmed that which he already knew only too well. Forgotten was his hunger, forgotten the power plant, forgotten everything except the fact that his Nadia, the buoyant spirit in whom centered his Universe, was lost or ... he could not complete the thought, even to himself.

Swiftly he came to a decision and threw off his suit, revealing the body of a Hercules--a body ready for any demand he could put upon it. Always in hard training, months of grinding physical labor and of heavy eating had built him up to a point at which he would scarcely have recognized himself, could he have glanced into a mirror. Mighty but pliable muscles writhed and swelled under his clear skin as he darted here and there, selecting equipment for what lay ahead of him. He donned the heavily armored space-suit which they had prepared months before, while they were still suspicious of possible attack. It was covered with heavy steel at every point, and the lenses of the helmet, already of unbreakable glass, had been re-enforced with thick steel bars. Tank and valves supplied air at normal pressure, so that his powerful body could function at full efficiency, not handicapped by the lighter atmosphere of Ganymede. The sleeves terminated in steel-protected rubber wristlets which left his hands free, yet sheltered from attack--wristlets tight enough to maintain the difference in pressure, yet not tight enough to cut off the circulation. He took up his mighty war-bow and the full quiver of heavy arrows--full-feathered and pointed with savagely barbed, tearing heads of forged steel--and slipped into their sheaths the long and heavy razor-sharp sword and the double-edged dirk, which he had made and ground long since for he knew not what emergency, and whose bell-shaped hilts of steel further protected his hands and wrists. Thus equipped, he had approximately his normal earthly weight; a fact which would operate to his advantage, rather than otherwise, in case of possible combat. With one last look around the "Forlorn Hope," whose every fitting spoke to him of the beloved mistress who was gone, he filled a container with water and cooked food and opened the door.

* * * * *

"It won't be long now; now it won't be long." Nadia caroled happily, buckling on her pack straps and taking up bow and arrows for her daily hunt. "I never thought that he could do it, but what it takes to do things, he's got lots of," she continued to improvise the song as she left the "Hope" with its multitudinous devices whose very variety was a never-failing delight to her; showing as it did the sheer ability of the man, whose brain and hands had almost finished a next-to-impossible task.

Through the canyon and up a well-worn trail she climbed, and soon came out upon the sparsely timbered bench that was her hunting grounds. Upon this day, however, she was full of happy anticipation and her mind was everywhere except upon her work. She was thinking of Stevens, of their love, of the power which he might turn on that very day, and of the possible rescue for which she had hitherto scarcely dared to hope. Thus it was that she walked miles beyond her usual limits without having loosed an arrow, and she was surprised when she glanced up at the sun to see that half the morning was gone and that she was almost to the foothills, beyond which rose a towering range of mountains.

"Snap out of it, girl!" she reprimanded herself. "Go on wool-gathering like this and your man will go hungry--and he'll break you right off at the ankles!" She became again the huntress, and soon saw an animal browsing steadily along the base of a hill. It was a six-legged, deer-like creature, much larger than anything she had as yet seen. But it was meat and her time was short, therefore she crept within range and loosed an arrow with the full power of her hunting bow. Unfamiliar as she was with the anatomy of the peculiar creature, the arrow did not kill. The "hexaped," as she instantly named it, sped away and she leaped after it. She, like her companion, had developed amazingly in musculature, and few indeed were the denizens of Ganymede, who could equal her speed upon that small globe, with its feeble gravitational force.

Up the foothills it darted. Beyond the hills and deep into a valley between two towering peaks the chase continued before Nadia's third arrow brought the animal down. Bending over the game, she became conscious of a strange but wonderful sweet perfume and glanced up, to see something which she certainly had not noticed when the hexaped had fallen. It was an enormous flower, at least a foot in diameter and indescribably beautiful in its crimson and golden splendor. Almost level with her head the gorgeous blossom waved upon its heavy stem; based by a massive cluster of enormous, smooth, dark green leaves. Entranced by this unexpected and marvelous floral display, Nadia breathed deeply of the inviting fragrance--and collapsed senseless upon the ground. Thereupon the weird plant moved over toward her, and the thick leaves began to enfold her knees. This carnivorous thing, however, did not like the heavy cloth of her suit and turned to the hexaped. It thrust several of its leaves into the wounds upon the carcass and fed, while two other leaves rasped together, sending out a piercing call.

In answer to the sound the underbrush crackled, and through it and upon the scene there crashed a vegetable-animal nightmare--the parent of the relatively tiny thing whose perfume had disabled the girl.

Its huge and gorgeous blossom was supported by a long, flexible, writhing stem, and its base was composed of many and highly specialized leaves. There were saws and spears and mighty, but sinuous tendrils; there were slender shoots which seemed to possess some sense of perception; there was the massive tractor base composed of extensible leaves which by their contraction and expansion propelled the mass along the ground. Parent and child fell upon the hexaped and soon bones and hair were all that remained The slender shoots then wandered about the unconscious girl in her strange covering, and as a couple of powerful tendrils coiled about her and raised her into the air over the monstrous base of the thing, its rudimentary brain could almost be perceived working as it sluggishly realized that, now full fed, it should carry this other victim along, to feed its other offspring when they should return to its side.

* * * * *

Barely outside the door of the "Forlorn Hope" Stevens whirled about with a bitter imprecation. He had already lost time needlessly--with a lookout plate he could cover more ground in ten minutes than he could cover afoot in a week. He flipped on the power and shot the violet beam out over the plateau to the district where he knew Nadia was wont to hunt. Not finding her there, he swung the beam in an ever widening circle around that district. Finally he saw a few freshly broken twigs, and scanned the scene with care. He soon found the trail of fresh blood which marked the path of the flight of the hexaped, and with the peculiar maneuverability of the device he was using, it was not long until he was studying the scene where the encounter had taken place. He gasped when he saw the bones and perceived three of Nadia's arrows, but soon saw that the skeleton was not human and was reassured. Casting about in every direction, he found Nadia's bow, and saw a peculiar, freshly trampled path leading from the kill, past the bow, down the valley. He could not understand the spoor, but it was easily followed, and he shot the beam along it at headlong speed until he came up with the monstrous creature that was making it--until he saw what burden that organism was carrying.

He leaped to the controls of the lifeboat, then dropped his hand. While the stream of power now flowing was ample to operate the lookout plates, yet it would be many hours before the accumulator cells would be in condition to drive the craft even that short distance.

"It'll take over an hour to get there--here's hoping I can check in all x," he muttered savagely, as he took careful note of the location and direction of the creature's trail and set off at a fast jog-trot.

The carnivorous flower's first warning that all was not well was received when Stevens' steel-shod feet landed squarely upon its base and one sweeping cut of his sword lopped off the malignant blossom and severed the two tendrils that still held the unconscious Nadia. With a quick heave of his shoulder, he tossed her lightly backward into the smooth-beaten track the creature had made and tried to leap away--but the instant he had consumed in rescuing the girl had been enough for the thing to seize him, and he found himself battling for his very life. No soft-leaved infant this, but a full-grown monster, well equipped with mighty weapons of offense and defense. Well it was for the struggling man that he was encased in armor steel as those saw-edged, hard-spiked leaves drove against him with crushing force; well it was for him that he had his own independent air supply, so that that deadly perfume eddied ineffective about his helmeted head! Hard and fiercely driven as those terrible thorns were, they could do no more than dent his heavy armor. His powerful left arm, driving the double-razor-edged dirk in short, resistless arcs, managed to keep the snaky tendrils from coiling about his right arm, which was wielding the heavy, trenchant sword. Every time that mighty blade descended it cleaved its length through snapping spikes and impotently grinding leaves; but more than once a flailing tendril coiled about his neck armor and held his helmet immovable as though in a vise, while those frightful, grinding saws sought to rip their way through the glass to the living creature inside the peculiar metal housing. Dirk and saber and magnificent physique finally triumphed, but it was not until each leaf was literally severed from every other leaf that the outlandish organism gave up the ghost.

* * * * *

Nadia had been tossed out into pure air, beyond the zone of the stupefying perfume, and she recovered her senses in time to see the finish of the battle. Stevens, assured that his foe was _hors du combat_, turned toward the spot where he had thrown Nadia's body. He saw that she was unharmed, and sprang toward her in relief. He was surprised beyond measure, however, to see her run away at a pace he could not hope to equal, encumbered as he was; motioning frantically at him the while to keep away from her. He stopped, astounded, and started to unscrew his helmet, whereupon she dashed back toward him, signaling him emphatically to leave his armor exactly as it was. He stood still and stared at her, an exasperated question large upon his face, until she made clear to him that he was to follow her at a safe distance, then she set off at a rapid walk. She led him back to where the hexaped had fallen, where she retrieved her bow and arrows; then, keeping a sharp lookout upon all sides, she went on to a small stream of water. She made the dumbfounded man go out into the middle of the creek and lie down and roll over in the water, approaching him sniffing cautiously between immersions. She made him continue the bathing until she could detect not even the slightest trace of the sweet, but noxious fragrance of that peculiarly terrible form of Ganymedean life. Only then did she allow him to remove his helmet, so that she could give him the greeting for which they both had longed and tell him what it was all about.

"So that's it, ace!" he exclaimed, still holding her tightly in his iron embrace. "Great balls of fire! I thought maybe you were still a little cuckoo. Anaesthetic perfume, huh? Hot stuff, I'd say--no wonder you bit--I would, too. It's lucky for us I was air-tight--we'd both be fee...."

"Stop it!" she interrupted him sharply, "Forget it--don't ever even think of it!"

"All x, ace. It's out like the well known light. What to do? It's getting darker than a hat, and we're a long way from home. Don't know whether I could find my way back in the dark or not; and just between you and me, I'm not particularly keen on night travel in these parts after what's just happened. Are you?"

"Anything else but," she assured him, fervently. "I'd lots rather stay hungry until tomorrow."

"No need of that--I've brought along enough supper for both of us. I'm hungry as a wolf, too, now that I have time to think of it. We'll eat and den up somewhere--or climb a tree. Those wampuses probably can't climb trees!"

"There's a nice little cave back there about a hundred meters. We'll pretend it's the Ritz," and they soon had a merry fire blazing in front of the retreat. There they ate of the provisions Stevens had brought. Then, while the man rolled up boulders before the narrow entrance of the cave, Nadia gathered leaves and made a soft bed upon its warm, dry floor.

"Good night, lover," and the girl, untroubled and secure now that Stevens was at her side, was almost instantly asleep; but the man was not sleepy. He thought of the power plant, even now sending its terrific stream of energy into his accumulators. He thought of the ultra radio--where could he get all the materials needed? He thought of his friends, wondering whether or not they would receive his message. He thought of Breckenridge and the other human beings who had been aboard the _Arcturus_, wondering poignantly as to their fate. He thought of Newton and of his own people, who had certainly given them up for dead long since.

But above all he thought of the beautiful, steel-true companion lying there asleep at his mailed feet, and he gazed down at her, his heart in his eyes. The firelight shone through the chinks between the boulders, casting a flickering ruddy light throughout the little cavern. Nadia lay there her head pillowed upon one strong, brown little hand. Her lips were red and sweetly curved, her cheek was smooth and firm as so much brown velvet. She was literally aglow with sheer beauty and with perfect health; and the man reflected, as he studied her hungrily, that this wild life certainly had agreed with her--she was becoming more surpassingly beautiful with every passing day.

"You little trump--you wonderful, lovely, square little brick!" he breathed silently, and bent over to touch her cheek lightly with his lips. Slight as the caress was, it disturbed her, and even in her sleep her subconscious mind sent out an exploring hand, to touch her Steve and thus be reassured. He pressed her hand and she settled back comfortably, with a long, deep breath; and he stretched his iron-clad length beside her and closed his eyes, firmly resolved not to waste a minute of this wonderful night in sleep.

When he opened them an instant later, it was broad daylight, the boulders had been rolled away, the fragrance of roasting meat permeated the atmosphere, and Nadia was making a deafening clamor, beating his steel breastplate lustily with the flat of his huge saber.

"Daylight in the swamp, you sleeper!" she exclaimed. "Roll out or roll up! Come and get it, before I throw it away!"

"I must have been kind of tired," he said sheepishly, when he saw that she had shot a bird and had cooked breakfast for them both while he had been buried in oblivion.

"Peculiar, too, isn't it?" Nadia asked, pointedly. "You only did about ten days' work yesterday in ten minutes, swinging this frightful snickersnee of yours. Why, you played with it as though it were a knitting-needle, and when I wanted to wake you up with it, I could hardly lift it."

"Thought you didn't want that subject even mentioned?" he tried to steer the talk away from his prowess with the broadsword.

"That was yesterday," airily. "Besides, I don't mind talking about you--it's thinking about us being ... you know ... that I can't stand."

"All x, ace. I get you right. Let's eat."

* * * * *

Breakfast over, they started down the valley, Stevens carrying his helmet under his arm. Hardly had they started however, than Nadia's keen eyes saw a movement through the trees, and, she stopped and pointed. Stevens looked once, then hand in hand they dashed back to their cave.

"We'll pile up some of the boulders and you lie low," he instructed her as he screwed on his helmet. She snapped open his face-plate.

"But what about you? Aren't you coming in, too?" she demanded.

"Can't--they'd surround us and starve us out. I'm safe in this armor--thank Heaven we made it as solid as we did--and I'll fight 'em in the open. I'll show 'em what the bear did to the buckwheat!"

"All right, I guess, but I wish I had my armor, too," she mourned as he snapped shut his plate and walled her into the cave with the same great rocks he had used the night before. Then, Nadia safe from attack, he drew his quiver of war-arrows into position over his shoulder, placed one at the ready on his bow-string and turned to face the horde of things rushing up the valley toward him. Wild animals he had supposed them, but as he stood firm and raised his weapon shrill whistles sounded in the throng, and he gasped as he realized that those frightful creatures must be intelligent beings, for not only did they signal to each other, but he saw that they were armed with bows and arrows, spears, and slings!

Six-limbed creatures they were, of a purplish-red color, with huge, tricornigerous heads and with staring, green, phosphorescent eyes. Two of the six limbs were always legs, two always arms; the intermediate two, due to a mid-section jointing of the six-foot-long, almost cylindrical body, could be used at will as either legs or arms. Now, out of range, as they supposed, they halted and gathered about one who was apparently their leader; some standing erect and waving four hands while shaking their horns savagely in Stevens' direction, others trotting around on four legs, busily gathering stones of suitable size for their vicious slings.

Too far away to use their own weapons and facing only one small four-limbed creature, they considered their game already in the bag, but they had no comprehension of earthly muscles, nor any understanding of the power and range of a hundred-pound bow driving a steel-headed war arrow. Thus, while they were arguing, Stevens took the offensive, and a cruelly barbed steel war-head tore completely through the body of their leader and mortally wounded the creature next beyond him. Though surprised, they were not to be frightened off, but with wild, shrill screams rushed to the attack. Stevens had no ammunition to waste, and every time that mighty bow twanged a yard-long arrow transfixed at least one of the red horde--and a body through which had torn one of those ghastly, hand-forged arrow-heads was of very little use thereafter. Accurately-sped arrows splintered harmlessly against the re-enforced windows of his helmet and against the steel guards protecting his hands. He was almost deafened by the din as the stone missiles of the slingers rebounded from his reverberating shell of steel, but he fired carefully, steadily, and powerfully until his last arrow had been loosed. Then, the wicked dirk in his left hand and the long and heavy saber weaving a circular path of brilliance in the sun, he stepped forward a couple of paces to meet the attackers. For a few moments nothing could stand before that fiercely driven blade--severed heads, limbs, and fragments of torsos literally filled the air, but sheer weight of numbers bore him down. As he fell, he saw the white shaft of one of Nadia's hunting-arrows flash past his helmet and bury itself to the flock in the body of one of the horde above him. Nadia knew that her arrows could not harm her lover, and through a chink between two boulders she was shooting into the thickest of the mob speeding her light arrows with the full power of her bow.

Though down, the savages soon discovered that Stevens was not out. In such close quarters he could not use his sword, but the fourteen-inch blade of the dirk, needle-pointed as it was and with two razor-sharp, serrated cutting edges, was itself no mean weapon, and time after time he drove it deep, taking life at every thrust. Four more red monsters threw themselves upon the prostrate man, but not sufficiently versed in armor to seek out its joints, their fierce short spear thrusts did no damage. Presently four more corpses lay still and Stevens, with his, to them incredible, earthly strength, was once more upon his feet in spite of their utmost efforts to pinion his mighty limbs, and was again swinging his devastating weapon. Half their force lying upon the field, wiped out by a small, but invincible and apparently invulnerable being, the remainder broke and ran, pursued by Stevens to the point where the red monsters had first halted. He recovered his arrows and returned to the cave, opening his face-plate as he came.

"All x, sweetheart?" he asked, rolling away the boulders. "Didn't get anything through to you, did they?"

"No, they didn't even realize that I was taking part in the battle, I guess. Did they hurt you while they had you down? I was scared to death for a minute."

"No, the old armor held. One of them must have gnawed on my ankle some, between the greave and the heel-plate, but he couldn't quite get through. 'Sa darn small opening there, too--must have bent my foot 'way around to get in at all. Have to tighten that joint up a little, I guess. I'll bet I've got a black spot and blue spot there the size of my hand--maybe it's only the size of yours, though."

"You won't die of that, probably. Heavens, Steve, that cleaver of yours is a frightful thing in action! Suppose it's safe for us to go home?"

"Absolutely--right now is the best chance we'll ever have, and something tells me that we'd better make it snappy. They'll be back, and next time they won't be so easy to take."

"All x, then--hold me, Steve, I can't stand the sight of that---let alone wade through it. I'm going to faint or something, sure."

"As you were!" he snapped. "You aren't going to pass out now that it's all over! It's a pretty ghastly mess, I know, but shut your eyes and I'll carry you out of sight."

"Aren't we out of sight of that place yet?" she demanded after a time.

"I have been for quite a while," he confessed, "but you're sitting pretty, aren't you? And you aren't very heavy--not here on Ganymede, anyway!"

* * * * *

"Put me down!" she commanded. "After that crack I won't play with you any more at all--I'll pick up my marbles and go home!"

He released her and they hurried hack toward their waterfall, keeping wary eyes sharp-set for danger in any form, animal or vegetable. On the way back across the foothills Stevens shot another hexaped, and upon the plateau above the river Nadia bagged several birds and small animals, but it was not until they were actually in their own little canyon that their rapid pace slackened and their vigilance relaxed.

"After this, ace, we hunt together and we go back to wearing armor while we're hunting. It scared me out of a year's growth when you checked up missing."

"We sure do, Steve," she concurred emphatically. "I'm not going to get more than a meter away from you from now on. What do you suppose those horrible things are?"

"Which?"

"Both."

"Those flowers aren't like anything Tellus ever saw, so we have no basis of comparison. They may be a development of a flycatching plant, or they may be a link between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. However, we don't intend to study 'em, so let's forget 'em. Those animals were undoubtedly intelligent beings; they probably are a race of savages of this satellite."

"Then the really civilized races are probably...."

"Not necessarily--there may well be different types, each struggling toward civilization. They certainly are on Venus, and they once were on Mars."

"Why haven't we seen anything like that before, in all these months? Things have been so calm and peaceful that we thought we had the whole world to ourselves, as far as danger or men were concerned."

"We never saw them before because we never went where they lived--you were a long ways from your usual stamping-grounds, you know. That animal-vegetable flower is probably a high-altitude organism, living in the mountains and never coming as low as we are down here. As for the savages--whatever they are--they probably never come within five kilometers of the falls. Many primitive peoples think that waterfalls are inhabited by demons, and maybe these folks are afflicted the same way."

"We don't know much about our new world yet, do we?"

"We sure don't--and I'm not particularly keen on finding out much more about it until we get organized for trouble, either. Well, here we are--just like getting back home to see the 'Hope,' isn't it?"

"It _is_ home, and will be until we get one of our own on earth," and after Stevens had read his meters, learning with satisfaction that the full current was still flowing into the accumulators, he began to cut up the meat.

"Now that you've got the power-plant running at last, what next?" asked Nadia, piling the cuts in the freezer.

"Brandon's ultra-radio comes next, but it's got more angles to it than a cubist's picture of a set of prisms; so many that I don't know where to begin. There, that job's done--let's sit down and I'll talk at you awhile. Maybe between us we can figure out where to start. I've got everything to build it lined up except for the tube, but that's got me stopped cold. You see, fields of force are all right in most places, but I've got to have one tube, and it's got to have the hardest possible vacuum. That means a mercury-vapor super pump. Mercury is absolutely the only thing that will do the trick and the mercury is one thing that is conspicuous by it's absence in these parts. So are tungsten for filaments, tantalum for plates, and platinum for leads; and I haven't found anything that I can use as a getter, either--a metal, you know, to flash inside the tube to clean up the last traces of atmosphere in it."

"I didn't suppose that such a simple thing as a radio tube could hold you up, after the perfectly unbelievable things that you have done already--but I see now how it could. Of course, the tubes in our receiver over there are too small?"

"Yes, they are only receiver and communicator tubes, and I need a high-power transmitting tube--a fifty-kilowatter, at least. I'd give my left leg to the knee joint for one of those big water-cooled, sixty-kilowatt ten-nineteens right now--it would save us a lot of grief."

"Maybe you could break up those tubes and use the plates and so on?"

"I thought of that, but it won't work--there isn't half enough metal in the lot, and the filaments in particular are so tiny that I couldn't possibly work them over into a big one. Then, too, we haven't got many spare tubes, and if I smash the ones we're using, I put our communicators out of business for good, so that we can't yell for help if we have to drift home--and I still don't get any mercury."

"Do you mean to tell me there's no mercury on this whole planet?"

"Not exactly; but I do mean that I haven't been able to find any, and that it's probably darned scarce. And since all the other metals I want worst are also very dense and of high atomic weight, they're probably mighty scarce here, too. Why? Because we're on a satellite, and no matter what hypothesis you accept for the origin of satellites, you come to the same conclusion--that heavy metals are either absent or most awfully scarce and buried deep down toward the center. There are lots of heavy metals in Jupiter somewhere, but we probably couldn't find them. Jupiter's atmosphere is one mass of fog, and we couldn't see, since we haven't got an infra-red transformer. I could build one, in time, but it would take quite a while--and we couldn't work on Jupiter, anyway, because of its gravity and probably because of its atmosphere. And even if we could work there, we don't want to spend the rest of our lives prospecting for mercury." Stevens fell silent, brow wrinkled in thought.

"You mean, dear, that we're..." Nadia broke off, the sentence unfinished.

"Gosh, no! There's lots of things not tried yet, and we can always set out to drift it. I was thinking only of building the tube. And I'm trying to think ... say, Nadia, what do you know about Cantrell's Comet?"

"Not a thing, except that I remember reading in the newspapers that it was peculiar for something or other. But what has Cantrell's Comet got to do with the high cost of living--or with radio tubes? Have you gone cuckoo all of a sudden?"

"You'll be surprised!" Stevens grinned at her puzzled expression. "Cantrell's Comet is one of Jupiter's comet family and is peculiar in being the most massive one known to science. It was hardly known until after they built those thousand-foot reflectors on the Moon, where the seeing is always perfect, but it has been studied a lot since then. Its nucleus is small, but extremely heavy--it seems to have an average density of somewhere around sixteen. There's platinum and everything else that's heavy there, girl! They ought to be there in such quantity that even such a volunteer chemist as I am could find them!"

* * * * *

"Heavens, Steve!" A look of alarm flashed over Nadia's face, then disappeared as rapidly as it had come into being. "But of course, comets aren't really dangerous."

"Sure not. A comet's tail, which so many people are afraid of as being poison gas, is almost a perfect vacuum, even at its thickest, and we'd have to wear space-suits anyway. And speaking of vacuum ... whoopee! We don't need mercury any more than a goldfish needs a gas-mask. When we get Mr. Tube done, we'll take him out into space, leaving his mouth open, and very shortly he'll be as empty as a flapper's skull. Then we'll seal him up, flash him out, come back here, and start spilling our troubles into Brandon's shell-like ear!"

"Wonderful, Steve! You do get an idea occasionally, don't you? But how do we get out there? Where is this Cantrell's Comet?"

"I don't know, exactly--there's one rub. Another is that I haven't even started the transmitter and receptor units. But we've got some field-generators here on board that I can use, so it won't be so bad. And our comet is in this part of the solar system somewhere fairly close. Wish we had an Ephemeris, a couple of I-P solar charts, and a real telescope."

"You can't do much without an Ephemeris, I should think. It's a good thing you kept the chronometers going. You know the I-P time, day, and dates, anyway."

"I'll have to do without some things, that's all," and the man stared absently at the steel wall. "I remember something about its orbit, since it is one thing that all I-P vessels have to steer clear of. Think I can figure it close enough so that we'll be able to find it in our little telescope, or even on our plate, since we'll be out of this atmosphere. And it might not be a bad idea for us to get away, anyway. I'm afraid of those folks on that space-ship, whoever they were, and they must live around here somewhere. Cantrell's Comet swings about fifty million kilometers outside Jupiter's orbit at aphelion--close enough for us to reach, and yet probably too far for them to find us easily. By the time we get back here, they probably will have quit looking for us, if they look at all. Then too, I expect these savages to follow us up. What say, little ace--do we try it or do we stay here?"

"You know best, Steve. As I said before, I'm with you from now on, in whatever you think best to do. I know that you think it best to go out there. Therefore, so do I."

"Well," he said, finally, "I'd better get busy, then--there's a lot to do before we can start. The radio doesn't come next, after all--the transmitter and receptor units come ahead of it. They won't mean wasted labor, in any event, since we'll have to have them in case the radio fails. You'd better lay in a lot of supplies while I'm working on that stuff, but don't go out of sight, and yell like fury if you see anything. We'd both better wear full armor every time we go out-of-doors--unless I'm all out of control we aren't done with those savages yet. Even though they may be afraid of the demons of the falls, I think they'll have at least one more try at us."

While Nadia brought in meat and vegetables and stored them away, Stevens attacked the problem of constructing the pair of tight-beam, auto-dirigible transmitter and receptor units which would connect his great turbo-alternator to the accumulators of their craft, wherever it might be in space. From the force-field generators of the "Forlorn Hope" he selected the two most suitable for his purpose, tuned them to the exact frequency he required, and around them built a complex system of condensers and coils.

Day after day passed. Their larder was full, the receptor was finished, and the beam transmitter was almost ready to attach to the turbo-alternator before the calm was broken.

"Steve!" Nadia shrieked. Glancing idly into the communicator plate, she had been perfunctorily surveying the surrounding territory. "They're coming! Thousands of them! They're all over the bench up there, and just simply pouring down the hills and up the valley!"

"Wish they'd waited a few hours longer--we'd have been gone. However, we're just about ready for them," he commented grimly, as he stared over her shoulder into the communicator plate. "We'll make a lot of those Indians wish that they had stayed at home with their papooses."

"Have you got all those rays and things fixed up?"

"Not as many as I'd like to have. You see, I don't know the composition of the I-P ray, since it is outlawed to everybody except the police. Of course I could have found out from Brandon, but never paid any attention to it. I've got some nice ultra-violet, though, and a short-wave oscillatory that'll cook an elephant to a cinder in about eight seconds. We'll keep them amused, no fooling! Glad we had time to cover our open sides, and it looks as though that meteorite armor we put over the projectors may be mighty useful, too."

On and on the savages came, massed in formations showing some signs of rude discipline. This time there was neither shrieking nor yelling; the weird creatures advanced silently and methodically. Here and there were massed groups of hundreds, dragging behind them engines which Stevens studied with interest.

"Hm ... m ... m. Catapults," he mused. "You were right, girl of my dreams--armor and bows and arrows wouldn't help us much right now. They're going to throw rocks at us that'll have both mass and momentum. With those things they can cave in our side-armor, and might even dent our roof. When one of those projectiles hits, we want to know where it ain't, that's all."

Stevens cast off the heavily-insulated plug connecting the power plant leads to his now almost fully charged accumulators, strapped himself and Nadia into place at the controls, and waited, staring into the plate. Catapult after catapult was dragged to the lip of the little canyon, until six of them bore upon the target. The huge stranded springs of hair, fiber, and sinew were wound up to the limit, and enormous masses of rock were toilsomely rolled upon the platforms. Each "gunner" seized his trip, and as the leader shrieked his signal the six ponderous masses of metalliferous rock heaved into the air as one. But they did not strike their objective, for as the signal was given, Stevens shot power into his projectors. The "Forlorn Hope" leaped out of the canyon and high into the air over the open meadow, just as the six great projectiles crashed into the ground upon the spot which, an instant before, she had occupied.

* * * * *

Rudimentary discipline forgotten, the horde rushed down into the canyon and the valley, in full clamor of their barbaric urgings. Horns and arms tossed fiercely, savage noises rent the air, and arrows splintered harmlessly upon steel plate an the mystified and maddened warriors upon the plain below gave vent to their outraged feelings.

"Look, Nadia! A whole gang of them are smelling around that power plug. Pretty soon somebody's going to touch a hot spot, and when he does, we'll cut loose on the rest of them."

The huge insulating plug, housing the ends of the three great cables leading to the converters of the turbo-alternator, lay innocently upon the ground, its three yawning holes invitingly open to savage arms. The chief, who had been inspecting the power-plant, walked along the triplex lead and joined his followers at its terminus. Pointing with his horns, he jabbered orders and three red monsters, one at each cable, bent to lift the plug, while the leader himself thrust an arm into each of the three contact holes. There was a flash of searing flame and the reeking smoke of burning flesh--those three arms had taken the terrific no-load voltage of the three-phase converter system, and the full power of the alternator had been shorted directly to ground through the comparatively small resistance of his body.

Stevens had poised the "Forlorn Hope" edgewise in mid-air, so that the gleaming, heavily armored parabolic reflectors of his projectors, mounted upon the leading edge of the fortress, covered the scene below. As the charred corpse of the savage chieftain dropped to the ground, it seemed to the six-limbed creatures that the demons of the falls had indeed been annoyed beyond endurance by their intrusion; for, as if in response to the flash of fire from the power plug, that structure so peculiarly and so stolidly hanging in the air came plunging down toward them. From it there reached down twin fans of death and destruction: one flaming and almost invisibly incandescent violet which tore at the eyes and excruciatingly disintegrated brain and nervous tissues; the other dully glowing an equally invisible red, at the touch of which body temperature soared to lethal heights and foliage burst cracklingly into spontaneous flame.

In their massed hundreds, the savages dropped where they stood, life rived away by the torturing ultra-violet, burned away by the blast of pure heat, or consumed by the conflagrations that raged instantly wherever that wide-sweeping fan encountered combustible material. In the face of power supernatural they lost all thought of attack or of conquest, and sought only and madly to escape. Weapons were thrown away, the catapults were abandoned, and, every man for himself, the mob fled in wildest disorder, each striving to put as much distance as possible between himself and that place of dread mystery, the waterfall.

"Well, I guess that'll hold 'em for a while," Stevens dropped their craft back into its original quarters in the canyon. "Whether they ever believed before that this falls was inhabited by devils or not, they think so now. I'll bet that it will be six hundred Jovian years before any of them ever come within a hundred kilometers of it again. I'm glad of it, too, because they'll let our power plant alone now. Well, let's get going--we've got to make things hum for a while!"

"Why all the rush? You just said that we have scared them away for good."

"The savages, yes, but not those others. We've just turned loose enough radiation to affect detectors all over the system, and it's up to us to get this beam projector set up, get away from here, and get our power shut off before they can trace us. Snap it up, ace!"

The transmitter unit was installed at the converters, the cable was torn out, and, having broken the last material link between it and Ganymede, Stevens hurled the "Forlorn Hope" out into space, using the highest acceleration Nadia could endure. Hour after hour the massive wedge of steel bored outward, away from Jupiter; hour after hour Stevens' anxious eyes scanned his instruments; hour after hour hope mounted and relief took the place of anxiety as the screens remained blank throughout every inquiring thrust into the empty ether. But they knew they would have to keep sharp vigilance.

* * * * *

_Continuing a Thrilling New Serial of Interplanetary Life and Travel by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D._

_Author of "Skylark of Space," and "Skylark Three"_

PART II

Spacehounds of IPC

_One of the most fascinating mysteries of the heavens is the comet. It goes through space, gets near enough to the earth to be seen, and then goes off and disappears in celestial distance. Often it has a hyperbolic orbit, which would make it impossible to come back. Yet it may return--apparently contradicting the geometry of conic sections. This only goes to prove once more that it is risky to say anything is impossible--even that our hero of this story manages beautifully, with the aid of Cantrell's Comet, to avoid complete annihilation while stranded in interstellar space._

_Read "what went before" and then continue the second instalment._

What Went Before:

The Interplanetary Vessel Arcturus sets out for Mars, with Breckenridge as chief pilot, carrying on board, besides its regular crew and some passengers, the famous Dr. Stevens, designer of space ships and computer. He checks computations made by astronomers stationed in floating observatories, and after he has located any trouble and suggests a plan for minimizing the hazards of the trip from the earth to Mars, he reports his findings and suggestions to Mr. Newton, chief of the Interplanetary Corporation.

Stevens then takes Nadia, Mr. Newton's beautiful young daughter, on a specially conducted sight-seeing tour of the Arcturus and thoroughly explains to her all of the works of the vessel. Nadia has herself had a good science education. While they are down at the bottom of the ship--nearing the end of their tour--Stevens feels a barely perceptible movement of the vessel from its course. When he turns on the visiplate, he is horrified to find that a mysterious ray of unparalleled power has neatly sliced the Arcturus in several places.

Nadia and Stevens are completely separated from the rest of the crew and passengers of the ship, so they get into a lifeboat, which is equipped for a limited amount of space travel. Despite the strict and apparently effective vigilance of the enemy destroyer, Stevens and Nadia make their getaway in the lifeboat, which they aptly call "Forlorn Hope," and finally make a safe landing on Ganymede, where Stevens plans to build a power-plant and a radio transmitter, to enable him to communicate with the earth or with the IPV Sirius, which is used by Westfall and Brandon (two of the world's best scientists) as a floating laboratory.

With the very scant apparatus and material available, Stevens sets to work on his power plant. Just as they have it completed and ready to start for Cantrell's Comet, where Stevens believes he can obtain the necessary metal for his giant transmitting tube, they experience a close call with carnivorous plants on the satellite and later with savage inhabitants, which precipitates their trip to the comet.

CHAPTER V

Cantrell's Comet

Far out in space, Jupiter, a tiny moon and its satellites mere pin-points of light, Stevens turned to his companion with a grin.

"Well, Nadia, old golf-shootist, here's where we turn spacehounds again. Hope you like it better this time, because I'm afraid that we'll have to stay weightless for quite a while." He slowly throttled down the mighty flow of power, and watched the conflicting emotions play over Nadia's face in her purely personal battle against the sickening sensations caused by the decrease in their acceleration.

"I'm sorry as the dickens, sweetheart," he went on, tenderly, and the grin disappeared. "Wish I could take it for you, but...."

"But there are times when we've got to fight our own battles and bury our own dead," she interrupted, gamely. "Cut off the rest of that power! I'm _not_ going to be sick--I _won't_ be a--what do you spacehounds call us poor earth-bound dubs who can't stand weightlessness--weight-fiends, isn't it?"

"Yes; but you aren't...."

"I know I'm not, and I'm not going to be one, either! I'm all x, Steve--it's not so bad now, really. I held myself together that time, anyway, and I feel lots better now. Have you found Cantrell's Comet yet? And why so sure all of a sudden that they can't find us? That power beam still connects us to Ganymede, doesn't it? Maybe they can trace it."

"At-a-girl, ace!" he cheered. "I'll tell the world you're no weight-fiend--you're a spacehound right. Most first-trippers, at this stage of the game, wouldn't be caring a whoop whether school kept or not, and here you're taking an interest in all kinds of things already. You'll do, girl of my heart--no fooling!"

"Maybe, and maybe you're trying to kid somebody," she returned, eyeing him intently. "Or maybe you just don't want to answer those questions I asked you a minute ago."

"No, that's straight data, right on zero across the panel," he assured her. "And as for your questions, they're easy. No, I haven't looked for the comet yet, because we'll have to drift for a couple of days before we'll be anywhere near where I think it is. No, they can't trace us, because there is now nothing to trace, unless they can detect the slight power we are using in our lights and so on--which possibility is vanishingly small. Potentially, our beam still exists, but since we are drawing no power, it has no actual present existence. See?"

"Uh-uh," she dissented. "I can't say that I can quite understand how a beam can exist potentially and yet not be there actually enough to trace. Why, a thing has to be actual or not exist at all--you can't possibly have something that is nothing. It doesn't make sense. But lay off those integrations of yours, please," as now armed with a slate-pencil, Stevens began to draw a diagram upon a four-foot sheet of smooth slate. "You know that your brand of math is over my head like a circus tent, so we'll let it lie. I'll take your word for it. Steve--if you're satisfied, it's all x with me."

"I think I can straighten you out a little, by analogy. Here's a rough sketch of a cylinder, with shade and shadow. You've had descriptive geometry, of course, and so know that a shadow, being simply a projection of a material object upon a plane, is a two-dimensional thing--or rather, a two-dimensional concept. Now take the shade, which is, of course, this entire figure here, between the cylinder casting the shadow and the plane of projection. You simply imagine that there is a point source of light at your point of projection: it isn't really there. The shade, then, of which I am drawing a picture, has only a potential existence. You know exactly where it is, you can draw it, you can define it, compute it, and work with it--but still it doesn't exist; there is absolutely nothing to differentiate it from any other volume of air, and it cannot be detected by any physical or mechanical means. If, however, you place a light at the point of projection, the shade becomes actual and can be detected optically. By a sufficient stretch of the imagination, you might compare our beam to that shade. When we turn our power on, the beam is actual; it is a stream of tangible force, and as such can be detected electrically. When our switches here are open, however, it exists only potentially. There is no motion in the ether, nothing whatever to indicate that a beam had ever actually existed there. With me?"

"Floundering pretty badly, but I see it after a fashion. You physicists are peculiar freaks--where we ordinary mortals see actual, solid, heavy objects, you see only empty space with a few electrons and things floating around in it; and yet where we see only empty space, you can see things 'potentially' that may never exist at all. You'll be the death of me yet, Steve! But I'm wasting a lot of time. What do we do now?"

"We get busy on the big tube. You might warm up the annealing oven and melt me that pot of glass, while I get busy on the filament supports, plate brackets, and so on." Both fell to work with a will, and hours passed rapidly and almost silently, so intent was each upon his own tasks.

"All x, Steve." Nadia broke the long silence. "The pyrometer's on the red, and the oven's hot," and the man left his bench. Taking up a long paddle and an even longer blowpipe, he skimmed the melt to a dazzlingly bright surface and deftly formed a bubble.

"I just love to talk at you when you've got your mouth full of a blowpipe." Nadia eyed him impishly and tucked her feet beneath her, poised weightless as she was. "I've got you foul now--I can say anything I want to, and you can't talk back, because your bubble will lose its shape if you do. Oh, isn't that a beauty! I never saw you blow anything that big before," and she fell silent, watching intently.

Slowly there was being drawn from the pot a huge, tapering bulb of hot, glistening glass, its cross-section at the molten surface varying as Stevens changed the rate of draw or the volume of air blown through the pipe. Soon that section narrowed sharply. The glass-blower waved his hand and Nadia severed the form neatly with a glowing wire, just above the fluid surface of the glass remaining in the pot. Pendant from the blowpipe, the bulb was placed over the hot-bench, where Stevens, now begoggled, begloved, and armed with a welding torch, proceeded to fuse into the still, almost plastic, glass sundry necks, side-tubes, supports and other attachments of peculiar pattern. Finally the partially assembled tube was placed in the annealing oven, where it would remain at a high and constant temperature until its filaments, grids, and plates had been installed. Eventually, in that same oven, it would be allowed to cool slowly and uniformly over a period of days.

* * * * *

Thus were performed many other tasks which are ordinarily done either by automatic machinery or by highly skilled specialists in labor--for these two, thrown upon their own resources, had long since learned how much specialization may be represented by the most commonplace article. Whenever they needed a thing they did not have--which happened every day--they had either to make it or else, failing in that, to go back and build something that would enable them to manufacture the required item. Such setbacks had become so numerous as to be expected as part of the day's work; they no longer caused exasperation or annoyance. For two days the two jacks-of-all-trades worked at many lines and with many materials before Stevens called a halt.

"All x, Nadia. It's time for us to stop tinkering and turn into astronomers. We've been out for fifty I-P hours, and we'd better begin looking around for our heap of scrap metal," and, the girl at the communicator plate and Stevens at their one small telescope, they began to search the black, star-jeweled heavens for Cantrell's Comet.

"According to my figures, it ought to be about four hours right ascension, and something like plus twenty degrees declination. My figures aren't accurate, though, since I'm working purely from memory, so we'd better cover everything from Aldebaran to the Pleiades."

"But the directions will change as we go along, won't they?"

"Not unless we pass it, because we're heading pretty nearly straight at it, I think."

"I don't see anything interesting thereabouts except stars. Will it have much tail?"

"Very little--it's close to aphelion, you know, and a comet doesn't have much of a tail so far away from the sun. Hope it's got some of its tail left, though, or we may miss it entirely."

Hours passed, during which the two observers peered intently into their instruments, then Stevens left the telescope and went over to his slate.

"Looks bad, ace--we should have spotted it before this. Time to eat, too. You'd better...."

"Oh, look here, quick!" Nadia interrupted. "Here's something! Yes, it _is_ a comet, and quite close--it's got a little bit of a dim tail."

Stevens leaped to the communicator plate, and, blond head pressed close to brown, the two wayfarers studied the faint image of the wanderer of the void.

"That's it, I just _know_ it is!" Nadia declared. "Steve, as a computer, you're a blinding flash and a deafening report!"

"Yeah--missed it only about half a million kilometers or so," he replied, grinning, "and I'd fire a whole flock of I-P check stations for being four thousand off. However, I could have done worse--I could easily have forgotten all the data on it, instead of only half of it." He applied a normal negative acceleration, and Nadia heaved a profound sigh of relief as her weight returned to her and her body again became manageable by the ordinary automatic and involuntary muscles.

"Guess I am a kind of a weight-fiend at that, Steve--this is much better!" she exclaimed.

"Nobody denies that weight is more convenient at times; but you're a spacehound just the same--you'll like it after a while," he prophesied.

Stevens took careful observations upon the celestial body, altered his course sharply, then, after a measured time interval, again made careful readings.

"That's it, all x," he announced, after completing his calculations, and he reduced their negative acceleration by a third. "There--we'll be just about traveling with it when we get there," he said. "Now, little K. P. of my bosom, our supper's been on minus time for hours. What say we shake it up?"

"I check you to nineteen decimals," and the two were soon attacking the savory Ganymedean goulash which Nadia had put in the cooker many hours before.

"Should we both go to sleep, Steve, or should one of us watch it?"

"Sleep, by all means. There's no meteoric stuff out here, and we won't arrive before ten o'clock tomorrow, I-P time," and, tired out by the events of the long day, man and maid sought their beds and plunged into dreamless slumber.

While they slept, the "Forlorn Hope" drove on through the void at a terrific but constantly decreasing velocity; and far off to one side, plunging along a line making a sharp angle with their own course, there loomed larger and larger the masses which made up the nucleus of Cantrell's Comet.

Upon awakening, Stevens' first thought was for the comet, and he observed it carefully before he aroused Nadia, who hurried into the control room. Looming large in the shortened range of the plate, their objective hurtled onward in its eternal course, its enormous velocity betrayed only by the rapidity with which it sped past the incredibly brilliant background of infinitely distant stars. Apparently it was a wild jumble of separate fragments; a conglomerate, heterogeneous aggregation of rough and jagged masses varying in size from grains of sand up to enormous chunks, which upon Earth would have weighed millions of tons. Pervading the whole nucleus, a slow, indefinite movement was perceptible--a vague writhing and creeping of individual components working and slipping past and around each other as they all rushed forward in obedience to the immutable cosmic law of gravitation.

"Oh, isn't that wonderful!" Nadia breathed. "Think of actually going to visit a comet! It sort of scares me, Steve--it's so creepy and crawly looking. We're awfully close, aren't we?"

"Not so very. We'd probably have lots of time to eat breakfast. But just to be on the safe side, maybe I'd better camp here at the board, and you bring me over something to eat."

"All x, Chief!" and Stevens ate, one eye upon the screen, watching closely the ever-increasing bulk of the comet.

* * * * *

For many minutes he swung the _Forlorn Hope_ in a wide curve approaching the mountain of metal ever and ever more nearly, then turned to the girl.

"Hold everything, Nadia--power's going off in a minute!" He shut off the beam; then, noting that they were traveling a trifle faster than the comet, he applied a small voltage to one dirigible projector. Darting the beam here and there, he so corrected their flight that they were precisely stationary in relation to the comet. He then opened his switches, and the _Forlorn Hope_ hurtled on. Apparently motionless, it was now a part of Cantrell's Comet, traveling in a stupendous, elongated ellipse about the Master of our Solar System, the Sun.

"There, ace, who said anything about weight-fiends? I was watching you, and you never turned a hair that time."

"Why, that's right--I never even thought about it--I was so busy studying that thing out there! I suppose I've got used to it already?"

"Sure--you're one of us now. I knew you would be. Well, let's go places and do things! You'd better put on a suit, too, so you can stand in the air-lock and handle the line."

They donned the heavily insulated, heated suits, and Stevens snapped the locking plugs of the drag line into their sockets upon the helmets.

"Hear me?" he asked. "Sound-disks all x?"

"All x."

"On the radio--all x?"

"All x."

"I tested your tanks and heaters--they're all x. But you'll have to test...."

"I know the ritual by heart, Steve. It's been in every show in the country for the last year, but I didn't know you had to go through it every time you went out-of-doors! Halves, number one all x, two all x, three all x...."

"Quit it!" he snapped. "You aren't testing those valves! That check-up is no joke, guy. These suits are complicated affairs, and some parts are apt to get out of order. You see, a thing to give you fresh air at normal pressure and to keep you warm in absolute space can't be either simple or fool-proof. They've worked on them for years, but they're pretty crude yet. They're tricky, and if one goes sour on you, out in space, it's just too bad--you're lucky to get back alive. A lot of men are still out there somewhere because of the sloppy check-ups."

"'Scuse it, please--I'll be good," and the careful checking and testing of every vital part of the space-suits went on.

Satisfied at last that the armor was spaceworthy, Stevens picked up the coils of drag-line, built of a non-metallic fiber which could retain its flexibility and strength in the bitter cold of outer space, and led the girl into the air-lock.

"Heavens, Steve! It's perfectly stupendous, and grinding around worse than the wreckage of the _Arcturus_ was when I wouldn't let you climb up it--why, I thought comets were _little_, and hardly massive at all!" exclaimed the girl.

"This is little, compared to any regular planet or satellite or even to the asteroids. There's only a few cubic kilometers of matter there, and, as I said before, it's a decidedly unusual comet. You know the game?"

"I've got it--and believe me, I'll yank you back here a lot faster than you can jump over there if any one of those lumps starts to fall on you! Is this drag line long enough?"

"Yes, I've got a hundred meters here, and it's only fifty meters over there to where I'm going. So long," and with a light thrust of his feet, he dove head foremost across the intervening space, a heavy pike held out ahead of him. Straight as a bullet he floated toward his objective, a jagged chunk many yards in diameter, taking the shock of his landing by sliding along the pike-handle as its head struck the mass.

Then, bracing his feet against one lump, he pushed against its neighbor, and under that steady pressure the enormous masses moved apart and kept on moving, grinding among their fellows. Over and around them Stevens sprang, always watching his line of retreat as well as that of his advance, until his exploring pike struck a lump of apparently solid metal. Hooking the fragment toward him, he thrust savagely with his weapon and was reassured--that object was not only metal, but it was metal so hard that his pike-head of space-tempered alloy steel did not make an impression upon its surface. Turning on his helmet light he swung his heavy hammer repeatedly but could not break off even a small fragment.

"Found something, Steve?" Nadia's voice came clearly in his ears.

"I'll say I have! A hunk of solid, non-magnetic metal about the size of an office desk. I can't break off any of it, so I guess we'll have to grab the whole chunk."

He hitched the end of his cable around the nugget, made sure that the loops would not slip, and then, as Nadia tightened the line, he shoved mightily.

"All x, Nadia, she's coming! Pull in my drag line as I said over there, and I'll help you land her."

Inside the _Forlorn Hope_ the mass of metal was urged into the shop, where Stevens clamped it immovably to the steel floor, before he took off his space-suit.

"Why, it's getting covered with snow, and the whole room is getting positively _cold_!" Nadia exclaimed.

"Sure. Anything that comes in from space is cold, even if it's been out only a few minutes, and that hunk of stuff has been out for nobody knows how many million years. It didn't get much heat from the sun except at perihelion, you know, so it's probably somewhere around minus two hundred and sixty degrees now. I'll have to throw a heater on it for half an hour before we can touch it. And since this is more or less new stuff to you, I'll caution you--don't try to touch anything that has just come in. That hammer or pike would freeze your hand instantly, even though they've been out only a little while. Before you touch anything, blow on it, like this, see? If your breath freezes solid on it, like that, don't touch it--it's cold."

* * * * *

Under the infra-beams of the heater, the mass of the metal was brought to room temperature and Stevens attacked it with his machine tools. Bit by bit the stubborn material was torn from the lump. Through heavy goggles he watched the incandescent mass in a refractory crucible, in the heart of the induction furnace.

"What do you think you've got--what you want?"

"I don't know. It wasn't iron--it wouldn't hold a magnet. It's royal metal of some kind, I think. Base metals mostly melt at around fifteen hundred, and that crucible is still dry as a bone at better than seventeen."

"How are you going to separate out the tantalum and the others you want from the ones that you don't want?"

"I'm afraid that I'm not going to, very well," replied Stevens, with a wry grimace. "What I don't know about metallurgy would fill a library, and I'm probably the world's worst chemist. However, by a series of successive liquations, I hope to separate out fractions that I can use. Platinum melts somewhere around seventeen-fifty, tantalum about twenty-nine hundred, and tungsten not until 'way up around thirty-three, or four hundred--and that, by the way, means lots of grief. Of course, each fraction will probably be an alloy of one kind or another, but I think maybe I'll be able to make them do."

"But mayn't that whole chunk be a pure metal?"

"It's conceivable, but not probable. There, she's beginning to separate at just below eighteen hundred! Platinum group coming out now, I think--platinum, rhodium, iridium, and that gang, you know. While I'm doing this, you might be getting those five coils into exact resonance, if you want to."

"Sure I want to," and Nadia made her way across to the short-wave oscillator and set to work.

After an hour or so, bent over her delicate task, she began to twitch uneasily, then shrugged her shoulders impatiently.

"What's the idea of staring at me so?" she broke out suddenly. "How do you expect me to tune these things up if you...." She stopped abruptly, mouth open in amazement, as she turned toward Stevens. He had not been looking at her, but he turned a surprised face from his own task at the sound of her voice. "Excuse me, please, Steve. I don't know what's the matter with me--must be getting jumpy, I guess."

"I wish that was all, but it isn't!" Face suddenly grim and hard, Stevens leaped to the communicator plate and shot the beam out into space. "There's an answer, but that isn't it. You're a fine-tuned instrument yourself, ace, and you've detected something.... I thought so! There's the answer--the guy that was looking at you!"

Plainly there was revealed upon the plate a small, spherical space-ship, very like the one that had attacked and destroyed the _Arcturus_. After Nadia had taken one glance at it, Stevens shut off the power and leaped out into the shop. He closed all the bulkhead doors and air-break openings, then closed and secured the massive insulating door of the lifeboat in which they had made their headquarters. Then, after they had again put on the space-suits they had taken off such a short time before, he extinguished all the lights and hooded the communicator screen before he ventured again to glance out into the void.

"If I had a brain in my head, instead of the pint of bean soup I've got up there, we'd have worn these when they cut up the _Arcturus_, and saved us a lot of mental wear and tear," he remarked. "They were right there in the lockers all the time, and I knew it!"

"Well, we got away, anyway. You couldn't be expected to think of everything at once. We didn't have much time, you know."

"No, but I should have thought of anything as obvious as that, anyway. Wonder how they found us? Did they detect us, or did they come out to this comet after metal, same as we did, and find us accidentally? However, it all works out the same--they're apparently out to get us. I'm afraid this is going to be a whole lot like a rabbit fighting back at a man with a gun; but we'll sure try to nibble us off a lunch while they're getting a square meal ... here they come!"

The enemy sphere launched its flaming plane of force, and the _Forlorn Hope_ shuddered in every plate and member as its apex was severed cleanly under the impact. Instantly Stevens hurled his only weapons. Flaming ultra-violet and dully glowing infra-red, the twin beams lashed out; but their utmost force was of slight moment to the enormous power driving the enemy screens. Two circular spots of cherry red in space were the only results of Stevens' attack, and the next fierce cut sheared away the two projectors and, incidentally, a full half of the fifty-inch armor of the leading edge.

"Then we're checking out now?" Nadia asked quietly, as the man's hands dropped from his useless controls. "I'm sorrier than I can say, lover. But at least, I'm glad that I can go out with you," and her glorious eyes were shining with unshed tears.

"Maybe, but snap out of it, girl--our hearts are still beating! We're not dead yet, and maybe we won't be. Perhaps they want to capture us alive, as they did before; if so, we may be able to hide out on them somewhere and pull off another escape. Things don't look very bright, I know, but we're not checking out until our numbers are actually run up!"

He hooked a hand under her belt as the shocks came closer, and stood tense and ready. The lancing plane cut through one end of their control room, and Stevens leaped with his companion toward the new-made opening; while the air shrieked outward into space and their suits bulged suddenly with the abrupt increase in pressure differential. While they were in midflight, the frightful blade of destruction cleaved its way through the control board and through the spot upon which they had been standing a moment before. As they passed the severed edge, en route into open spare, Stevens seized a metal brace and clung there, every nerve taut.

"Something funny here, Nadia," he said after a little, in a low tone. "They should have made one more cut, to make us absolutely blind and helpless. As it is, they've clipped off all our projectors, so we can't move, but I think we've got the whole control compartment of number two lifeboat untouched. If so, we can look around, anyway. Let's go!"

Floating without effort from fragment to fragment, they made their way toward the section of their cruiser as yet undamaged. They found an airlock in working order, and were soon in the second lifeboat, where Stevens hastily turned on a communicator and peered out into space.

"There they are! There's another stranger out there, too. They're fighting with her, now--that's probably why they didn't polish us off." Steel-braced, clumsy helmets touching, the two Terrestrials stared spell-bound into the plate; watching while the insensately vicious intelligences within the sphere brought its every force to bear upon another and larger sphere which was now so close as to be plainly visible. Like a gigantic drop of quicksilver this second globe appeared--its smooth and highly-polished surface one enormous, perfect, spherical mirror. Watching tensely, they saw flash out that frightful plane of seething energy, with the effects of which they were all too familiar, and saw it strike full upon the dazzling ball.

"This is awful, ace!" Stevens groaned. "They haven't got ray-screens, either, and without them they don't stand a chance. No possible substance can stand up under that beam. When they get done and turn back to us, we'll have to dive back to where we were."

* * * * *

But that brilliant mirror was not as vulnerable as Stevens had supposed. The plane of force struck and clung, but could not penetrate it. Broken up into myriads of scintillating crystals of light, intersecting, multi-colored rays, and cascading flares of sparkling energy, the beam was reflected, thrown back, hurled away on all sides into space in coruscating, blinding torrents. And neither was the monster globe inoffensive. The straining watchers saw a port open suddenly, emit a flame-erupting something, and close as rapidly as it had opened. That something was a projectile, its propelling rockets fiercely aflame; as smoothly brilliant as its mother-ship and seemingly as impervious to the lethal beams of the common foe. Detected almost instantly as it was, it received the full power of the savage attack. The hitherto irresistible plane of force beat upon it; ultra-violet, infra-red, and heat rays enveloped it; there were hurled against it all the forces known to the scientific minds within that fiendishly destructive sphere.

Finally, only a scant few hundreds of yards from its goal, the protective mirror was punctured and the freight of high explosive let go, with a silent, but nevertheless terrific, detonation. But now another torpedo was on its way, and another, and another; boring on ruthlessly toward the smaller sphere. Fighting simultaneously three torpedos and the giant globe, the enemy began dodging, darting hither and thither with a stupendous acceleration; but the tiny pursuers could not be shaken off. At every dodge and turn, steering rockets burst into furious activity and the projectiles rushed ever nearer. Knowing that she had at last encountered a superior force, the sphere turned in mad flight; but, prodigious as was her acceleration, the torpedoes were faster and all three of them struck her at once. There ensued an explosion veritably space-racking in its intensity; a flash of incandescent brilliance that seemed to fill all space, subsiding into a vast volume of tenuous gas which, feebly glowing, flowed about and attached itself to Cantrell's Comet. And in the space where had been the enemy sphere, there was nothing.

A slow-creeping pale blue rod of tangible force reached out from the great sphere, touched the wreckage of the _Forlorn Hope_, and pulled; gently, but with enormous power.

"Tractor beams again!" exclaimed Stevens, still at the plate. "Everybody's got 'em but us, it seems."

"And we can't fight a bit any more, can we?"

"Not a chance--bows and arrows wouldn't do us much good. However, we may not need 'em. Since they fought that other crew, and haven't blown us up, they aren't active enemies of ours, and may be friendly. I haven't any idea who or what they are, since even our communicator ray can't get through that mirror, but it looks as though our best bet is to act peaceable and see if we can't talk to them in some way. Right?"

"Right." They stepped out into the airlock, from which they saw that the great sphere had halted only a few yards from them, and that an indistinct figure stood in an open door, waving to them an unmistakable invitation to enter the strange vessel.

"Shall we, Steve?"

"Might as well. They've got us foul, and can take us if they want us. Anyway, we'll need at least a week to fix us up any kind of driving power, so we can't run--and we probably couldn't get away from those folks if we had all our power. They haven't blown us up, and they could have done it easily enough. Besides, they act friendly, so we'd better meet them half way. Dive!"

Floating toward the open doorway, they were met by another rod of force, brought gently into the airlock, and supported upright beside the being who had invited them to visit him. Apparently an empty space-suit stood there; a peculiarly-fitted suit of some partially transparent, flexible, glass-like material; towering fully a foot over the head of the tall Terrestrial. Closer inspection, however, revealed that there was something inside that suit--a shadowy, weirdly-transparent being, staring at them with large, black eyes. The door clanged shut behind them; they heard the faint hiss of inrushing air, and the inner door opened; but their enveloping suits remained stretched almost as tightly as ever. They felt the floor lurch beneath their feet, and a little weight was granted them as the space-ship got under way. Stevens waved his arms vigorously at the stranger, pointing backward toward where he supposed their own craft to be. The latter waved an arm reassuringly, pressed a contact, and a section of the wall suddenly became transparent. Through it Stevens saw with satisfaction that the _Forlorn Hope_ was not being abandoned; in the grip of powerful tractor beams, every fragment of the wreckage was following close behind them in their flight through space.

* * * * *

Stevens and Nadia followed their guide along a corridor, through several doors, and into a large room, which at first glance seemed empty, but in which several of the peculiarly transparent people of the craft were lying about upon cushions. They were undoubtedly human--but what humans! Tall and reedy they were, with enormous barrel chests, topped by heads which, though really large, appeared insignificant because of the prodigious chests and because of the huge, sail-like, flapping ears. Their skins were a strikingly, livid, pale blue, absolutely devoid of hair; and their lidless eyes, without a sign of iris, were chillingly horrible in their stark contrast of enormous, glaring black pupil and ghastly, transparent blue eyeball.

As the two Terrestrials entered the room, the beings struggled to their feet and hurried laboriously away. Soon one of them returned, dressed in an insulating suit, and carrying three sets of head harnesses, connected by multiplex cables to a large box which he placed upon the floor. He handed the headsets to the first officer, who in turn placed two of them at the feet of the Terrestrials, indicating to them that they were to follow his example in placing them upon their heads, outside the helmets. They did so, and even through the almost perfect insulation, and in spite of the powerful heaters of their suits, they felt a touch of frightful cold. The stranger turned a dial, and the two wanderers from Earth were instantly in full mental communication with Barkovis, the commander of a space-ship of Titan, the sixth satellite of Saturn!

"Well, I'll be ... say, what is this, anyway?" Steve exclaimed involuntarily, and Nadia smiled as Barkovis answered with a thought, clearer than any spoken words.

"It is a thought-exchanger. I do not know its fundamental mechanism, since we did not invent it and since I have had little time to study it. The apparatus, practically as you see it here, was discovered but a short time ago, in a small, rocket-propelled space-ship which we found some distance outside of the orbit of Jupiter. Its source of power had been destroyed by the cold of outer space, but re-powering it was, of course, a small matter. The crew of the vessel were all dead. They were, however, of human stock, and of a type adapted for life upon a satellite. I deduce, from your compact structure, your enormous atmospheric pressure, and your, to us, unbelievably high body temperature, that you must be planet-dwellers. I suppose that you are natives of Jupiter?"

"Not quite." Stevens had in a measure recovered from his stunned surprise. "We are from Tellus, the third planet," and he revealed rapidly the events leading up to their present situation, concluding: "The people in the other sphere were, we believe, natives of Jupiter or of one of the satellites. We know nothing of them, since we could not look through their screens. You rescued us from them; do you not know them?"

"No. Our visirays also were stopped by their screens of force--screens entirely foreign to our science. This is the first time that any vessel from our Saturnian system has ever succeeded in reaching the neighborhood of Jupiter. We came in peace, but they attacked us at sight and we were obliged to destroy them. Now we must hurry back to Titan, for two reasons. First, because we are already at the extreme limit of our power range and Jupiter is getting further and further away from Saturn. Second because our mirrors, which we had thought perfect reflectors of all frequencies possible of generation, are not perfect. Enough of those forces came through the mirrors to volatilize half our crew, and in a few minutes more none of us would have been left alive. Why, in some places our very atmosphere became almost hot enough to melt water! If another of those vessels should attack us, in all probability we should all be lost. Therefore we are leaving as rapidly as is possible."

"You are taking the pieces of our ship along--we do not want to encumber you."

"It is no encumbrance, since we have ample supplies of power. In fact, we are now employing the highest acceleration we Titanians can endure for any length of time."

Stevens pondered long, forgetting that his thoughts were plain as print to the Titanian commander. Thank Heaven these strangers had sense enough to be friendly--all intelligent races should be friends, for mutual advancement. But it was a mighty long stretch to Saturn and this acceleration wasn't so much. How long would it take to get there? Could they get back? Wouldn't they save time by casting themselves adrift, making the repairs most urgently needed, and going back to Ganymede under their own power? But would they have enough power left in the wreck to get even that far? And how about the big tube? He was interrupted by an insistent thought from Barkovis.

"You will save time, Stevens, by coming with us to Titan. There we shall aid you in repairing your vessel and in completing your transmitting tube, in which we shall be deeply interested. Our power plants shall supply you with energy for your return journey until you are close enough to Jupiter to recover your own beam. You are tired. I would suggest that you rest--that you sleep long and peacefully."

"You seem to be handling the _Forlorn Hope_ without any trouble--the pieces aren't grinding at all. We'd better live there, hadn't we?"

"Yes that would be best, for all of us. You could not live a minute here without your suits; and, efficiently insulated as those suits are, yet your incandescent body temperature makes our rooms unbearably hot--so hot that any of us must wear a space-suit while in the same room with you, to avoid being burned to death."

"The incandescently hot" Terrestrials were wafted into the open airlock of their lifeboat upon a wand of force, and soon had prepared a long overdue supper, over which Stevens cast his infectious, boyish grin at Nadia.

"Sweetheart, you are undoubtedly a 'warm number,' and you have often remarked that I 'burn you up.' Nevertheless I think that we were both considerably surprised to discover that we are both hot enough actually to consume persons unfortunate enough to be confined in the same room with us!"

"You're funny, Steve--like a crutch," she rebuked him, but smiled back, an elusive dimple playing in one lovely brown cheek. "Looking right through anybody is too ghastly for words, but I think they're perfectly all x, anyway, in spite of their being so hideous and so cold-blooded!"

CHAPTER VI

A Frigid Civilization

"Hi, Percival Van Schravendyck Stevens!" Nadia strode purposely into Stevens' room and seized him by the shoulder. "Are you going to sleep all the way to Saturn? You answered me when I pounded on the partition with a hammer, but I don't believe that you woke up at all. Get up, you--breakfast will be all spoiled directly!"

"Huh?" Stevens opened one sluggish eye; then, as the full force of the insult penetrated his consciousness, he came wide awake. "Lay off those names, ace, or you'll find yourself walking back home!" he threatened.

"All x by me!" she retorted. "I might as well go home if you're going to sleep _all_ the time!" and she widened her expressive eyes at him impishly as she danced blithely back into the control room. As she went out she slammed his door with a resounding clang, and Stevens pried himself out of his bunk one joint at a time, dressed, and made himself presentable.

"Gosh!" he yawned mightily as he joined the girl at breakfast. "I don't know when I've had such a gorgeous sleep. How do you get by on so little?"

"I don't. I sleep a lot, but I do it every night, instead of working for four days and nights on end and then trying to make up all those four nights' sleep at once. I'm going to break you of that, too, Steve, if it's the last thing I ever do."

"There might be certain advantages in it, at that," he conceded, "but sometimes you've got to do work when it's got to be done, instead of just between sleeps. However, I'll try to do better. Certainly it is a wonderful relief to get out of that mess, isn't it?"

"I'll say it is! But I wish that those folks were more like people. They're nice, I think, really, but they're so ... so ... well, so ghastly that it simply gives me the blue shivers just to look at one of them!"

"They're pretty gruesome, no fooling," he agreed, "but you get used to things like that. I just about threw a fit the first time I ever saw a Martian, and the Venerians are even worse in some ways--they're so clammy and dead-looking--but now I've got real friends on both planets. One thing, though, gives me the pip. I read a story a while ago--the latest best-seller thing of Thornton's named 'Interstellar Slush' or some such tr...."

"Cleophora--An Interstellar Romance," she corrected him. "I thought it was wonderful!"

"I didn't. It's fundamentally unsound. Look at our nearest neighbors, who probably came from the same original stock we did. A Tellurian can admire, respect, or like a Venerian, yes. But for _loving_ one of them--wow! Beauty is purely relative, you know. For instance, I think that you are the most perfectly beautiful thing I ever saw; but no Venerian would think so. Far from it. Any Martian that hadn't seen many of us would have to go rest his eyes after taking one good look at you. Considering what love means, it doesn't stand to reason that any Tellurian woman could possibly fall in love with any man not of her own breed. Any writer is wrong who indulges in interplanetary love affairs and mad passions. They simply don't exist. They _can't_ exist--they're against all human instincts."

"Inter-planetary--in this solar system--yes. But the Dacrovos were just like us, only nicer."

"That's what gives me the pip. If our own cousins of the same solar system are so repulsive to us, how would we be affected by entirely alien forms of intelligence?"

"May be you're right, of course--but you may be wrong, too," she insisted. "The Universe is big enough, so that people like the Dacrovos may possibly exist in it somewhere. May be the Big Three will discover a means of interstellar travel--then I'll get to see them myself, perhaps."

"Yes, and _if_ we do, and _if_ you ever see any such people, I'll bet that the sight of them will make your hair curl right up into a ball, too! But about Barkovis--remember how diplomatic the thoughts were that he sent us? He described our structure as being 'compact,' but I got the undertone of his real thoughts, as well. Didn't you?"

"Yes, now that you mention it, I did. He really thought that we were white-hot, under-sized, overpowered, warty, hairy, hideously opaque and generally repulsive little monstrosities--thoroughly unpleasant and distasteful. But he was friendly, just the same. Heavens, Steve! Do you suppose that he read our real thoughts, too?"

"Sure he did; but he is intelligent enough to make allowances, the same as we are doing. He isn't any more insulted than we are. He knows that such feelings are ingrained and cannot be changed."

* * * * *

Breakfast over, they experienced a new sensation. For the first time in months they had nothing to do! Used as they were to being surrounded by pressing tasks, they enjoyed their holiday immensely for a few hours. Sitting idly at the communicator plate, they scanned the sparkling heavens with keen interest. Beneath them Jupiter was a brilliant crescent not far from the sun in appearance, which latter had already grown perceptibly smaller and less bright. Above them, and to their right, Saturn shone refulgently, his spectacular rings plainly visible. All about them were the glories of the firmament, which never fail to awe the most seasoned observer. But idleness soon became irksome to those two active spirits, and Stevens prowled restlessly about their narrow quarters.

"I'm going to go to work before I go dippy," he soon declared. "They've got lots of power, and we can rig up a transmitter unit to send it over here to our receptor. Then I can start welding the old _Hope_ together without waiting until we get to Titan to start it. Think I'll signal Barkovis to come over, and see what he thinks about it."

The Titanian commander approved the idea, and the transmitting field was quickly installed. Nadia insisted that she, too, needed to work, and that she was altogether too good a mechanic to waste; therefore the two again labored mightily together, day after day. But the girl limited rigidly their hours of work to those of the working day; and evening after evening Barkovis visited with them for hours. Dressed in his heavy space-suit and supported by a tractor beam well out of range of what seemed to him terrific heat radiated by the bodies of the Terrestrials, he floated along unconcernedly; while over the multiplex cable of the thought-exchanger he conversed with the man and woman seated just inside the open outer door of their air-lock. The Titanian's appetite for information was insatiable--particularly did he relish everything pertaining to the earth and to the other inner planets, forever barred to him and to his kind. In return Stevens and Nadia came gradually to know the story of the humanity of Titan.

"I am glad beyond measure to have known you," Barkovis mused, one night. "Your existence proves that there is truth in mythology, as some of us have always believed. Your visit to Titan will create a furor in scientific circles, for you are impossibility incarnate--personifications of the preposterous. In you, wildest fancy had become commonplace. According to many of our scientists, it is utterly impossible for you to exist. Yet you say, and it must be, that there are millions upon millions of similar beings. Think of it! Venerians, Tellurians, Martians, the satellite dwellers of the lost space-ship, and us--so similar mentally, yet physically how different!"

"But where does the mythology come in?" thought Nadia.

"We have unthinkably ancient legends which say that once Titan was extremely hot, and that our remote ancestors were beings of fire, in whose veins ran molten water instead of blood. Since our recorded history goes back some tens of thousands of Saturnian years, and since in that long period there has been no measurable change in us, few of us have believed in the legends at all. They have been thought the surviving figments of a barbarous, prehistoric worship of the sun. However, such a condition is not in conflict with the known facts of cosmogony, and since there actually exists such a humanity as yours--a humanity whose bodily tissues actually _are_ composed largely of molten water--those ancient legends must indeed have been based upon truth.

"What an evolution! Century after century of slowly decreasing temperature--one continuous struggle to adapt the physique to a constantly changing environment. First they must have tried to maintain their high temperature by covering and heating their cities.--Then, as vegetation died, they must have bred into their plants the ability to use as sap purely chemical liquids, such as our present natural fluids--which also may have been partly synthetic then--instead of the molten water to which they had been accustomed. They must have modified similarly the outer atmosphere; must have made it more reactive, to compensate for the lowered temperature at which metabolism must take place. As Titan grew colder and colder they probably dug their cities deeper and ever deeper; until humanity came finally to realize that it must itself change completely or perish utterly.

"Then we may picture them as aiding evolution in changing their body chemistry. For thousands, and thousands of years there must have gone on the gradual adaptation of blood stream and tissue to more and more volatile liquids, and to lower and still lower temperatures. This must have continued until Titan arrived at the condition which has now obtained for ages--a condition of thermal equilibrium with space upon one hand and upon the other the sun, which changes appreciably only in millions upon millions of years. In equilibrium at last--with our bodily and atmospheric temperatures finally constant at their present values, which seem as low to you as yours appear high to us. Truly, an evolution astounding to contemplate!"

"But how about power?" asked Stevens. "You seem to have all you want, and yet it doesn't stand to reason that there could be very much generated upon a satellite so old and so cold."

"You are right. For ages there has been but little power produced upon Titan. Many cycles ago, however, our scientists had developed rocket-driven space-ships, with which they explored our neighboring satellites, and even Saturn itself. It is from power plants upon Saturn that we draw energy. Their construction was difficult in the extreme, since the pioneers had to work in braces because of the enormous force of gravity. Then, too, they had to be protected from the overwhelming pressure and poisonous qualities of the air, and insulated from a temperature far above the melting point of water. In such awful heat, of course, our customary building material, water, could not be employed...."

"But all our instruments have indicated that Saturn is _cold_!" Stevens interrupted.

"Its surface temperature, as read from afar, would be low," conceded Barkovis, "but the actual surface of the planet is extremely hot, and is highly volcanic. Practically none of its heat is radiated because of the great density and depth of its atmosphere, which extends for many hundreds of your kilometers. It required many thousands of lives and many years of time to build and install those automatic power plants, but once they were in operation, we were assured of power for many tens of thousands of years to come."

"Our system of power transmission is more or less like yours, but we haven't anything like your range. Suppose you'd be willing to teach me the computation of your fields?"

"Yes, we shall be glad to give you the formulae. Being an older race, it is perhaps natural that we should have developed certain refinements as yet unknown to you. But I am, I perceived, detaining you from your time of rest--goodbye," and Barkovis was wafted back toward his mirrored globe.

"What do you make of this chemical solution blood of theirs, Steve?" asked Nadia, watching the placidly floating form of the Titanian captain.

"Not much. I may have mentioned before that there are one or two, or perhaps even three men who are better chemists than I am. I gathered that it is something like a polyhydric alcohol and something like a substituted hydrocarbon, and yet different from either in that it contains flourin in loose combination. I think it is something that our Tellurian chemists haven't got yet; but they've got so many organic compounds now that they may have synthesized it, at that. You see, Titan's atmosphere isn't nearly as dense as ours, but what there is of it is pure dynamite. Ours is a little oxygen, mixed with a lot of inert ingredients. Theirs is oxygen, heavily laced with flourin. It's _reactive_, no fooling! However, something pretty violent must be necessary to carry on body reactions at such a temperature as theirs."

"Probably; but I know even less about that kind of thing than you do. Funny, isn't it, the way he thinks 'water' when he means ice, and always thinks of our real water as being molten?"

"Reasonable enough when you think about it. Temperature differences are logarithmic, you know, not arithmetic--the effective difference between his body temperature and ours is perhaps even greater than that between ours and that of melted iron. We never think of iron as being a liquid, you know."

"That's right, too. Well, good night, Steve dear."

"'Bye, little queen of space--see you at breakfast," and the _Forlorn Hope_ became dark and silent.

* * * * *

Day after day the brilliant sphere flew toward distant Saturn, with the wreckage of the _Forlorn Hope_ in tow. Piece by piece that wreckage was brought together and held in place by the Titanian tractors; and slowly but steadily, under Stevens' terrific welding projector, the stubborn steel flowed together, once more to become a seamless, spaceworthy structure. And Nadia, the electrician, followed close behind the welder. Wielding torch, pliers and spanner with practised hand, she repaired or cut out of circuit the damaged accumulator cells and reunited the ends of each severed power lead. Understanding Nadia's work thoroughly, the Titanians were not particularly interested in it; but whenever Stevens made his way along an outside seam, he had a large and thrillingly horrified gallery. Everyone who could possibly secure permission to leave the sphere did so, each upon his own pencil of force, and went over to watch the welder. They did not come close to him--to venture within fifty feet of that slow moving spot of scintillating brilliance, even in a space-suit, meant death--but, poised around him in space, they watched with shuddering, incredulous amazement, the monstrous human being in whose veins ran molten water instead of blood; whose body was already so fiercely hot that it could exist unharmed while working practically without protection, upon _liquefied_ metal!

Finally the welding was done. The insulating space was evacuated and held its vacuum--outer and inner shells were bottle-tight. The two mechanics heaved deep sighs of relief as they discarded their cumbersome armor and began to repair what few of their machine tools had been damaged by the slashing plane of force which had so neatly sliced the _Forlorn Hope_ into sections.

"Say, big fellow, you're the guy that slings the ink, ain't you?" Nadia extinguished her torch and swaggered up to Stevens, hands on hips, her walk an exaggerated roll. "Write me out a long walk. This job's all played out, so I think I'll get me a good job on Titan. I said give me my time, you big stiff!"

"You didn't say nothing!" growled Stevens in his deepest bass, playing up to her lead as he always did. "Bounce back, cub, you've struck a rubber fence! You signed on for duration and you'll stick--see?"

Arm in arm they went over to the nearest communicator plate. Flipping the switch, Stevens turned the dial and Titan shone upon the screen; so close, that it no longer resembled a moon, but was a world toward which they were falling with an immense velocity.

"Not close enough to make out much detail yet--let's take another look at Saturn," and Stevens projected the visiray beam out toward the mighty planet. It was now an enormous full moon, almost five degrees in apparent diameter,[1] its visible surface an expanse of what they knew to be billowing cloud, shining brilliantly white in the pale sunlight, broken only by a dark equatorial band.

[Footnote 1: The moon subtends an angle of about one-half of a degree.]

"Those rings were _such_ a gorgeous spectacle a little while ago!" Nadia mourned. "It's a shame that Titan has to be right in their plane, isn't it? Think of living this close to one of the most wonderful sights in the Solar System, and never being able to see it. Think they know what they're missing, Steve?"

"We'll have to ask Barkovis," Stevens replied. He swung the communicator beam back toward Titan, and Nadia shuddered.

"Oh, it's hideous!" she exclaimed. "I thought that it would improve as we got closer, but the plainer we can see it, the worse it gets. Just to think of human beings, even such cold-blooded ones as those over there, living upon such a horrible moon and _liking_ it, gives mi the blue shivers!"

"It's pretty bleak, no fooling," he admitted, and peered through the eyepiece of the visiray telescope, studying minutely the forbidding surface of the satellite they were so rapidly approaching.

Larger and larger it loomed, a cratered, jagged globe of desolation indescribable; of sheer, bitter cold incarnate and palpable; of stark, sharp contrasts. Gigantic craters, in whose yawning depths no spark of warmth had been generated for countless cycles of time, were surrounded by vast plains eroded to the dead level of a windless sea. Every lofty object cast a sharply outlined shade of impenetrable blackness, beside which the weak light of the sun became a dazzling glare. The ground was either a brilliant white or an intense black, unrelieved by half-tones.

"I can't hand it much, either, Nadia, but it's all in the way you've been brought up, you know. This is home to them, and just to look at Tellus would give them the pip. Ha! Here's something you'll like, even if it does look so cold that it makes me feel like hugging a couple of heater coils. It's Barkovis' city the one we're heading for, I think. It's close enough now so that we can get it on the plate," and he set the communicator beam upon the metropolis of Titan.

"Why, I don't see a thing, Steve--where and what is it?" They were dropping vertically downward toward the center of a vast plain of white, featureless and desolate; and Nadia stared in disappointment.

"You'll see directly--it's too good to spoil by telling you what to look for or wh...."

"Oh, there it is!" she cried. "It _is_ beautiful, Steve, but how frightfully, utterly cold!"

* * * * *

A flash of prismatic color had caught the girl's eye, and, one transparent structure thus revealed to her sight, there had burst into view a city of crystal. Low buildings of hexagonal shape, arranged in irregularly variant hexagonal patterns, extended mile upon mile. From the roofs of the structures lacy spires soared heavenward; inter-connected by long, slim cantilever bridges whose prodigious spans seemed out of all proportion to the gossamer delicacy of their construction. Buildings, spires, and bridges formed fantastic geometrical designs, at which Nadia exclaimed in delight.

"I've just thought of what that reminds me of--it's snowflakes!"

"Sure--I knew it was something familiar. Snowflakes--no two are ever exactly alike, and yet every one is symmetrical and hexagonal. We're going to land on the public square--see the crowds? Let's put on our suits and go out."

The _Forlorn Hope_ lay in a hexagonal park, and near it the Titanian globe had also come to rest. All about the little plot towered the glittering buildings of crystal, and in its center played a fountain; a series of clear and sparkling cascades of liquid jewels. Under foot there spread a thick, soft carpet of whitely brilliant vegetation. Throngs of the grotesque citizens of Titania were massed to greet the space-ships; throngs clustering close about the globular vessel, but maintaining a respectful distance from the fiercely radiant Terrestrial wedge. All were shouting greetings and congratulations--shouts which Stevens found as intelligible as his own native tongue.

"Why, I can understand every word they say, Steve!" Nadia exclaimed, in surprise. "How come, do you suppose?"

"I can, too. Don't know--must be from using that thought telephone of theirs so much, I guess. Here comes Barkovis--I'll ask him."

The Titanian commander had been in earnest conversation with a group of fellow-creatures and was now walking toward the Terrestrials, carrying the multiple headsets. Placing them upon the white sward, he backed away, motioning the two visitors to pick them up.

"It may not be necessary, Barkovis," Stevens said, slowly and clearly. "We do not know why, but we can understand what your people are saying, and it may be that you can now understand us."

"Oh, yes, I can understand your English perfectly. A surprising development, but perhaps, after all, one that should have been expected, from the very nature of the device we have been using. I wanted to tell you that I have just received grave news, which makes it impossible for us to help you immediately, as I promised. While we were gone, one of our two power-plants upon Saturn failed. In consequence, Titan's power has been cut to a minimum, since maintaining our beam at that great distance required a large fraction of the output of the other plant. Because of this lack, the Sedlor walls were weakened to such a point that in spite of the Guardian's assurances, I think trouble is inevitable. At all events, it is of the utmost importance that we begin repairing the damaged unit, for that is to be a task indeed."

"Yes, it will take time," agreed Stevens, remembering what the Titanian captain had told him concerning the construction of those plants--generators which had been in continuous and automatic operation for thousands of Saturnian years.

"It will take more than time--it will take lives," replied Barkovis, gravely. "Scores, perhaps hundreds, of us will never again breathe the clear, pure air of Titan. In spite of all precaution and all possible bracing and insulation, man after man after man will be crushed by his own weight, volatilized by the awful heat, poisoned by the foul atmosphere, or will burst into unthinkable flames at the touch of some flying spark from the inconceivably hot metals with which we shall have to work. A horrible fate, but we shall not lack for volunteers."

"Sure not; and of course you yourself would go. And I never thought of the effect a spark would have on you--your tissues would probably be wildly inflammable. But say, I just had a thought. Just how hot is the air at those plants and just what is the actual pressure?"

"According to the records, the temperature is some forty of your centigrade degrees above the melting-point of water, and the pressure is not far short of two of your meters of mercury. I find it almost impossible to think of mercury as a liquid, however."

"You find it impossible, since you use it as a metal, for wires in coils and so on. But plus forty, while pretty warm, isn't impossible, by any means; and we could stand double our air pressure for quite a while. Both my partner and I are pretty fair mechanics and we've got quite a line of machine tools, such as you could not possibly have here. We'll give it a whirl, since we owe you something already. Lead us to it, ace--but wait a minute! We can't see through the fog, so couldn't find the plants, and probably your wiring diagrams would explode if I touched them."

"I never thought of your helping us," mused Barkovis. "The idea of any living being existing in that inferno has always been unthinkable, but the difficulties you mention are slight. We have already built in our vessel communicators similar to yours, and radio sets. With these we can guide you and explain the plants to you as you work, and our tractor beams will be of assistance to you in moving heavy objects, even at such distances from the surface as we Titanians shall have to maintain. If you will set out a flask of your atmosphere, we will analyze it, for the thought has come to me that perhaps, being planet-dwellers yourselves, the air of Saturn might not be as poisonous to you as it is to us."

"That's a thought, too," and, the news broadcast, it was not long until the two ships leaped into the air, to the accompaniment of the cheers and plaudits of a watching multitude.

* * * * *

In a wide curve they sped toward Saturn. Passing so close to the enormous rings that the individual meteoric fragments could almost be seen with the unaided eye, they flashed on and on, slowing down long before they approached the upper surface of the envelope of cloud. The spherical space-ship stopped and Stevens, staring into his useless screen, drove the _Forlorn Hope_ downward mile after mile, solely under Barkovis' direction, changing course and power from time to time as the Titanian's voice came from the speaker at his elbow. Slower and slower became the descent, until finally, almost upon the broad, flat roof of the power-plant, Stevens saw it in his plate. Breathing deeply in relief, he dropped quickly down upon a flat pavement, neutralized his controls, and turned to Nadia.

"Well, old golf-shootist, we're here at last--now we'll go out and see what's gone screwy with the works. Remember that gravity is about double normal here, and conduct yourself accordingly."

"But it's supposed to be only about nine-tenths," she objected.

"That's at the outer surface of the atmosphere," he replied. "And it's _some_ atmosphere--not like the thin layer we've got on Tellus."

They went into the airlock, and Stevens admitted air until their suits began to collapse. Then, face-plate valves cracked, he sniffed cautiously, finally opening his helmet wide. Nadia followed suit and the man laughed as she wrinkled her nose in disgust as two faint, but unmistakable odors smote her olfactory nerves.

"I never cared particularly for hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide, either," he assured her, "but they aren't strong enough to hurt us in the short time we'll be here. Those Titanian chemists know their stuff, though."

He opened the outer valves slowly, then opened the door and they stepped down upon the smooth, solid floor, which Stevens examined carefully.

"I thought so, from his story. Solid platinum! This whole planet is built of platinum, iridium, and noble alloys--the only substances known that will literally last forever. Believe me, ace of my bosom, I don't wonder that it cost them lives to build it--with their conditions, I don't see how they ever got it built at all."

Before them rose an immense, flat-topped cone of metal, upon the top of which was situated the power plant. Twelve massive pillars supported a flat roof, but permitted the air to circulate freely throughout the one great room which housed the machinery. They climbed a flight of stairs, passed between two pillars, and stared about them. There was no noise, no motion--there was nothing that _could_ move. Twelve enormous masses of metallic checkerwork, covered with wide cooling fins, almost filled the vast hall. From the center of each mass great leads extended out into a clear space in the middle of the room, there uniting in mid-air to form one enormous bus-bar. This bar, thicker than a man's body, had originally curved upward to the base of an immense parabolic structure of latticed bars. Now, however, it was broken in midspan and the two ends bent toward the floor. Above their heads, a jagged hole gaped in the heavy metal of the roof, and a similar hole had been torn in the floor. The bar had been broken and these holes had been made by some heavy body, probably a meteorite, falling with terrific velocity.

"This is it, all right," Stevens spoke to distant Barkovis. "Sure there's nothing on this beam? If it should be hot and I should short circuit or bridge it with my body, it would be just too bad."

"We have made sure that nothing is connected to it," the Titanian assured him. "Do you think you can do anything?"

"Absolutely. We've got jacks that'll bend heavier stuff than that, and after we get it straightened the welding will be easy, but I'll have to have some metal. Shall I cut a piece off the pavement outside?"

"That will not be necessary. You will find ample stores of space metal piled at the base of each pillar."

"All x. Now we'll get the jack, Nadia," and they went back to their vessel, finding that upon Saturn, their combined strength was barely sufficient to drag the heavy tool along the floor.

"Stand aside, please. We will place it for you," a calm voice sounded in their ears, and a pale blue tractor beam picked the massive jack lightly from the floor, and as lightly lifted it to its place beneath the broken bus-bar and held it there while Stevens piled blocks and plates of platinum beneath its base.

"Well, here's where I peel down as far as the law allows. This is going to be real work, girl--no fooling. It'd help a lot if this outfit were sending out a few thousand kilo-franks instead of standing idle."

"How would that help?"

"It's a heat-engine, you know--works by absorbing heat. The cold air sinks--I imagine it pretty nearly blows a gale down the side of this cone when it's working--and hot air rushes in to take its place. I could use a little cool breeze right now," and Stevens, stripped to the waist, bent to the lever of the powerful hydraulic jack.

Beads of sweat gathered upon his broad back, uniting to form tiny rivulets, and the girl became highly concerned about him.

"Let me help you, Steve--I'm pretty husky, too, you know."

"Sure you are, ace, but this is a job for a truck-horse, not a tenderly-nurtured maiden of the upper classes. You can help, though, by breaking out that welding outfit and getting it ready while I'm doing this bending to prepare for the welding."

Under the urge of that mighty jack the ends of the broken bus-bar rose into place, while far off in space the Titanians clustered about their visiray screens, watching, in almost unbelieving amazement, the supernatural being who labored in that reeking inferno of heat and poisonous vapor--who labored almost naked and entirely unprotected, refreshing himself from time to time with drafts of molten water!

"All x, Barkovis--that's high, I guess." Stevens flipped perspiration from his hot forehead with a wet finger and straightened his weary back. "Now you can put this jack away where we had it. Then you might trundle me over enough of that spare metal to fill up this hole, and I'll put on my suit and goggles and practice welding on this floor and the roof, to get the feel of the metal before I tackle the bar."

The hole in the floor was filled with scrap and soon sparks were flying wildly as the searing beam of Stevens' welding projector bit viciously into the stubborn alloy of noble metals; fashioning a smooth, solid floor where the yawning aperture had been. Then, lifted with his tools and plates to the roof, the man repaired that hole also.

"Now I know enough about it to do a good job on the bar," he decided, and brick after brick of alloy was fused into the crack, until only a smoothly rounded bulge betrayed that a break had ever existed in that mighty rod of metal.

"Give 'em the signal to draw power, and see if that's all that was the matter," Stevens instructed, as he relaxed in the grateful coolness of their control room. "Whew, that was a warm job, Nadia--and this air of ours does smell good!"

* * * * *

"It was a horrible job, and I'm glad it's done," she declared. "But say, Steve, that thing looks as little like a power-plant as anything I can imagine. How does it work? You said that it worked on heat, but I don't quite see how. But don't draw diagrams and _please_ don't integrate!"

"No ordinary plant such as we use could run for centuries without attention," he replied. "This is a highly advanced heat-engine--something like a thermo-couple, you know. This whole thing is simply the hot end, connected to the cold end on Titan by a beam instead of wires. When it's working, this metal must cool off something fierce. That's what the checkerwork and fins are for--so that it can absorb the maximum amount of heat from the current of hot, moist air I spoke about. It's a sweet system--we'll have to rig up one between Tellus and the moon. Or even between the Equator and the Arctic Circle there'd be enough thermal differential to give us a million kilofranks. We haven't got the all x signal yet, but it's working--look at it sweat as it cools down!"

"I'll say it's sweating--the water is simply streaming off it!" In their plate they saw that moisture was already beginning to condense upon the heat-absorber: moisture running down the fins in streams and creeping over the dull metal floor in sluggish sheets; moisture which, turning into ice in the colder interior of the checkerwork, again became fluid at the inrush of hot, wet Saturnian air.

"There's the signal--all x, Barkovis? By the way it's condensing water, it seems to be functioning again."

"Perfect!" came the Titanian's enthusiastic reply, "You two planet-dwellers have done more in three short hours than the entire force of Titan could have accomplished in months. You have earned, and shall receive, the highest...."

"As you were, ace!" Stevens interrupted, embarrassed. "This job was just like shooting fish down a well, for us. Since you saved our lives, we owe you a lot yet. We're coming out--straight up!"

The _Forlorn Hope_ shot upward, through mile after mile of steaming fog, until at last she broke through into the light, clear outer atmosphere. Stevens located the Titanian space-ship, and the two vessels once more hurtling together through the ether toward Titan, he turned to his companion.

"Take the controls, will you, Nadia? Think I'll finish up the tube. I brought along a piece of platinum from the power plant, and something that I think is tantalum from Barkovis' description of it. With those and the fractions we melted out, I think I can make everything we'll need."

Now that he had comparatively pure metal with which to work, drawing the leads and filaments was relatively a simple task. Working over the hot-bench with torch and welding projector, he made short work of running the leads through the almost plastic glass of the great tube and of sealing them in place. The plates and grids presented more serious problems; but they were solved and, long before Titan was reached, the tube was out in space, supported by a Titanian tractor beam between the two vessels. Stevens came into the shop, holding a modified McLeod gauge which he had just taken from the interior of the tube. When it had come to equilibrium, he read it carefully and yelled.

"Eureka, little fellow! She's down to where I can't read it, even on this big gauge--so hard that it won't need flashing--harder than any vacuum I ever got on Tellus, even with a Rodebush-Michalek super-pump!"

"But how about occluded and absorbed gas in the filaments and so on when they heat up?" demanded Nadia, practically.

"All gone, ace. I out-gassed 'em plenty out there--seven times, almost to fusion. There isn't enough gas left in the whole thing to make a deep breath for a microbe."

He took up his welding projector and a beam carried him back to the tube. There, in the practically absolute vacuum of space, the last openings in the glass were sealed, and man and great transmitting tube were wafted lightly back into the Terrestrial cruiser.

Hour after hour mirrored Titanian sphere and crude-fashioned terrestrial wedge bored serenely on through space, and it was not until Titan loomed large beneath them that the calm was broken by an insistent call from Titan to the sphere.

"Barkodar, attention! Barkodar, attention!" screamed from the speakers, and they heard Barkovis acknowledge the call.

"The Sedlor have broken through and are marching upon Titania. The order has gone out for immediate mobilization of every unit."

"There's that word 'Sedlor' again--what are they, anyway, Steve?" demanded Nadia.

"I don't know. I was going to ask him when he sprung it on us first, but he was pretty busy then and I haven't thought of it since. Something pretty serious, though--they've jumped their acceleration almost to Tellurian gravity, and none of them can live through much of that."

"Tellurians?" came the voice of Barkovis from the speaker. "We have just...."

"All x--we were on your wave and heard it," interrupted Stevens. "We're with you. What are those Sedlor, anyway? Maybe we can help you dope out something."

"Perhaps--but whatever you do, do not use your heat-projector. That would start a conflagration raging over the whole country, and we shall have enough to do without fighting fire. But it may be that you have other weapons, of which we are ignorant, and I can use a little time in explanation before we arrive. The Sedlor are a form of life, something like your..." he paused, searching through his scanty store of Earthly knowledge, then went on, doubtfully, "perhaps some thing like your insects. They developed a sort of intelligence, and because of their fecundity, adapted themselves to their environment as readily as did man; and for ages they threatened man's supremacy upon Titan. They devoured vegetation, crops, animals, and mankind. After a world-wide campaign, however, they were finally exterminated, save in the neighborhood of one great volcanic crater, which they so honeycombed that it is almost impregnable. All around that district we have erected barriers of force, maintained by a corps of men known as 'Guardians of the Sedlor.' These barriers extend so far into the ground and so high into the air that the Sedlor can neither burrow beneath them nor fly over them. They were being advanced as rapidly as possible, and in a few more years the insects would have been destroyed completely--but now they are again at large. They have probably developed an armor or a natural resistance greater than the Guardians thought possible, so that when the walls were weakened, they came through in their millions, underground and undetected. They are now attacking our nearest city--the one you know, and which you have called Titania."

"What do you use--those high-explosive bombs?"

"The bombs were developed principally for use against them, but proved worse than useless, for we found that when a Sedlor was blown to pieces, each piece forthwith developed into a new, complete creature. Our most efficient weapons are our heat rays--not yours remember--and poison gas. I must prepare our arms."

"Would our heat-ray actually set them afire, Steve?" Nadia asked, as the plate went blank.

"I'll say it would. I'll show you what heat means to them--showing you will be plainer than any amount of explanation," and he shot the visiray beam down toward the city of Titania. Into a low-lying building it went, and Nadia saw a Titanian foundry in full operation. Men clad in asbestos armor were charging, tending, and tapping great electric furnaces and crucibles; shrinking back and turning their armored heads away as the hissing, smoking melt crackled into the molds from their long-handled ladles. Nadia studied the foundry for a moment, interested, but unimpressed.

"Of course it's hot there--foundries always _are_ hot," she argued.

"Yes, but you haven't got the idea yet." Stevens turned again to the controls, following the sphere toward what was evidently a line of battle. "That stuff that they are melting and casting and that is so hot, is not metal, but _ice!_ Remember that the vital fluid of all life here, animal and vegetable, corresponding to our water, is probably more inflammable than gasoline. If they can't work on ice-water without wearing suits of five-ply asbestos, what would a real heat-ray do to them? It'd be about like our taking a dive into the sun!"

"_Ice_!" she exclaimed. "Oh of course--but you couldn't really believe a thing like that without seeing it, could you? Oh, Steve--how utterly horrible!"

* * * * *

The "Barkodar" had dropped down into a line of sister ships, and had gone into action in midair against a veritable swarm of foes. Winged centipedes they were--centipedes fully six feet long, hurling themselves along the ground and through the air in furious hordes. From the flying globes emanated pale beams of force, at the touch of which the Sedlor disappeared in puffs of vapor. Upon the ground huge tractors and trucks, manned by masked soldiery, mounted mighty reflectors projecting the same lethal beam. From globes and tanks there sounded a drumming roar and small capsules broke in thousands among the foe; emitting a red cloud of gas in which the centipedes shriveled and died. But for each one that was destroyed two came up from holes in the ground and the battle-line fell back toward Titania, back toward a long line of derrick-like structures which were sinking force-rods into the ground in furious haste.

Stevens flashed on his ultra-violet projector and swung it into the thickest ranks of the enemy. In the beam many of the monsters died, but the Terrestrial ray was impotent compared with the weapons of the Titanians, and Stevens, snapping off the beam with a bitter imprecation, shot the visiray out toward the bare, black cone of the extinct volcano and studied it with care.

"Barkovis, I've got a thought!" he snapped into the microphone. "Their stronghold is in that mountain, and there's millions of them in there yet, coming out along their tunnels. They've got all the vegetation eaten away for miles, so there's nothing much left there to spread a fire if I go to work on that hill, and, I'll probably melt enough water to put out most of the fires I start. Detail me a couple of ships to drop your fire-foam bombs on any little blazes that may spread, and I'll give them so much to worry about at home, that they'll forget all about Titania."

The _Forlorn Hope_ darted toward the crater, followed closely by two of the dazzling globes. They circled the mountain until Stevens found a favorable point of attack--a stupendous vertical cliff of mingled rock and crystal, upon the base of which he trained his terrific infra-red projector.

"I'm going to draw a lot of power," he warned the Titanians then. "I'm giving this gun everything she'll take."

He drove the massive switches in, and as that dull red beam struck the cliff's base there was made evident the awful effect of a concentrated beam of real and pure heat upon such an utterly frigid world. Vast columns of fire roared aloft, helping Stevens, melting and destroying the very ground as the bodies of the Sedlor in that gigantic ant-heap burst into flames. Clouds of superheated steam roared upward, condensing into a hot rain which descended in destructive torrents upon the fastnesses of the centipedes. As the raging beam ate deeper and deeper into the base of the cliff, the mountain itself began to disintegrate; block after gigantic block breaking off and crashing down into the flaming, boiling, seething cauldron which was the apex of that ravening beam.

Hour after hour Stevens drove his intolerable weapon into the great mountain, teeming with Sedlorean life; and hour after hour a group of Titanian spheres stood by, deluging the surrounding plain with a flood of heavy fumes, through which the holocaust could not spread for lack of oxygen. Not until the mountain was gone--not until in its stead there lay a furiously boiling lake, its flaming surface hundreds of feet below the level of the plain--did Stevens open his power circuits and point the deformed prow of the _Forlorn Hope_ toward Titania.

CHAPTER VII

The Return to Ganymede

"Must you you go back to Ganymede?" Barkovis asked, slowly and thoughtfully. He was sitting upon a crystal bench beside the fountain, talking with Stevens, who, dressed in his bulging space-suit, stood near an airlock of the _Forlorn Hope_. "It seems a shame that you should face again those unknown, monstrous creatures who so inexcusably attacked us both without provocation."

"I'm not so keen on it myself, but I can't see any other way out of it," the Terrestrial replied. "We left a lot of our equipment there, you know; and even if I should build duplicates here, it wouldn't do us any good. These ten-nineteens are the most powerful transmitting tubes known when we left Tellus, but even their fields, dense as they are, can't hold an ultra-beam together much farther than about six astronomical units. So you see we can't possibly reach our friends from here with this tube; and your system of beam transmission won't hold anything together even that far, and won't work on any wave shorter than Roeser's Rays. We may run into some more of those little spheres, though, and I don't like the prospect. I wonder if we couldn't plate a layer of that mirror of yours upon the _Hope_ and carry along a few of those bombs? By the way, what is that explosive--or is it something beyond Tellurian chemistry?"

"Its structure should be clear to you, although you probably could not prepare it upon Tellus because of your high temperature. It is nothing but nitrogen--twenty-six atoms of nitrogen combined to form one molecule of what you would call--N-twenty-six?"

"Wow!" Stevens whistled. "Crystalline, pentavalent nitrogen--no wonder it's violent!"

"We could, of course, cover your vessel with the mirror, but I am afraid that it would prove of little value. The plates are so hot that it would soon volatilize."

"Not necessarily," argued Stevens. "We could live in number one life-boat, and shut off the heat everywhere else. The life-boats are insulated from the structure proper, and the inner and outer walls of the structure are insulated from each other. With only the headquarters lifeboat warm, the outer wall could be held pretty close to zero absolute."

"That is true. The bombs, of course, are controlled by radio, and therefore may be attached to the outer wall of your vessel. We shall be glad to do these small things for you."

The heaters of the _Forlorn Hope_ were shut off, and as soon as the outer shell had cooled to Titanian temperature, a corps of mechanics set to work. A machine very like a concrete mixer was rolled up beside the steel vessel, and into its capacious maw were dumped boxes and barrels of dry ingredients and many cans of sparkling liquid. The resultant paste was pumped upon the steel plating in a sluggish, viscid stream, which spread out into a thick and uniform coating beneath the flying rollers of the skilled Titanian workmen. As it hardened, the paste smoothed magically into the perfect mirror which covered the space-vessels of the satellite; and a full dozen of the mirror explosive bombs of this strange people were hung in the racks already provided.

"Once again I must caution you concerning those torpedoes," Barkovis warned Stevens. "If you use them all, very well, but do not try to take even one of them into any region where it is very hot, for it will explode and demolish your vessel. If you do not use them, destroy them before you descend into the hot atmosphere of Ganymede. The mirror will volatilize harmlessly at the temperature of melting mercury, but the torpedoes must be destroyed. Once more, Tellurians, we thank you for what you have done, and wish you well."

"Thanks a lot for _your_ help--we still owe you something," replied Stevens. "If either of your power-plants go sour on you again, or if you need any more built, be sure to let us know--you can come close enough to the inner planets now on your own beam to talk to us on the ultra-communicator. We'll be glad to help you any way we can--and we may call on you for help again. Goodbye, Barkovis--goodbye, all Titania!"

He made his way through the bitterly cold shop into the control-room of their lifeboat, and while he was divesting himself of his heavy suit, Nadia lifted the _Forlorn Hope_ into the blue-green sky of Titan, accompanied by an escort of the mirrored globes. Well clear of the atmosphere of the satellite, the terrestrial cruiser shot forward at normal acceleration, while the Titanian vessels halted and wove a pattern of blue and golden rays in salute to the departing guests.

"Well, Nadia, we're off--on a long trek, too."

"Said Wun Long Hop, the Chinese pee-lo," Nadia agreed. "Sure everything's all x, big boy?"

"To nineteen decimals," he declared. "You couldn't squeeze another frank into our accumulators with a proof-bar, and since they're sending us all the power we want to draw, we won't need to touch our batteries or tap our own beam until we're almost to Jupiter. To cap the climax, what it takes to make big medicine on those spherical friends of ours, we've got. We're not sitting on top of the world, ace--we've perched exactly at the apex of the entire universe!"

"How long is it going to take?"

"Don't know. Haven't figured it yet, but it'll be _beaucoup_ days," and the two wanderers from far-distant Earth settled down to the routine of a long and uneventful journey.

They gave Saturn and his spectacular rings a wide berth and sped on, with ever-increasing velocity. Past the outer satellites, on and on, the good ship _Forlorn Hope_ flew into the black-and-brilliant depths of interplanetary space. Saturn was an ever-diminishing disk beneath them: above them was Jupiter's thin crescent, growing ever larger and more bright, and the Monarch of the Solar System, remaining almost stationary day after day, increasing steadily in apparent diameter and in brilliance.

* * * * *

Although the voyage from Titan to Ganymede was long, it was not monotonous, for there was much work to be done in the designing and fabrication of the various units which were to comprise the ultra-radio transmitting station. In the various compartments of the _Forlorn Hope_ there were sundry small motors, blowers, coils, condensers, force-field generators, and other items which Stevens could use with little or no alteration; but for the most part he had to build everything himself. Thus it was that time passed quickly; so quickly that Jupiter loomed large and the Saturnian beam of power began to attenuate almost before the Terrestrials realized that their journey was drawing to an end.

"Our beam's falling apart fast," Stevens read his meters carefully, then swung his communicator beam toward Jupiter. "We aren't getting quite enough power to hold our acceleration at normal--think I'll cut now, while we're still drawing enough to let the Titanians know we're off their beam. We've got lots of power of our own now; and we're getting pretty close to enemy territory, so they may locate that heavy beam. Have you found Ganymede yet?"

"Yes, it will be on the other side of Jupiter by the time we get there. Shall I detour, or put on a little more negative and wait for it to come around to this side?"

"Better wait, I think. The farther away we stay from Jupiter and the major satellites, the better."

"All x--it's on. Suppose we'd better start standing watches, in case some of them show up?"

"No use," he dissented. "I've been afraid to put out our electro-magnetic detectors, as they could surely trace them in use. Without them, we couldn't spot an enemy ship even if we were looking right at it, except by accident; since they won't be lighted up and it's awfully hard to see anything out here, anyway. We probably won't know they're within a million kilometers until they put a beam on us. Barkovis says that this mirror will reflect any beam they can use, and I've already got a set of photo-cells in circuit to ring an alarm at the first flash off of our mirror plating. I'd like to get in the first licks myself, but I haven't been able to dope out any way of doing it. So you might as well sleep in your own room, as usual, and I'll camp here right under the panel until we get to Ganymede. There's a couple of little things I just thought of, though, that may help some; and I'm going to do 'em right now."

Putting on his space-suit, he picked up a power drill and went out into the bitter cold of the outer structure. There he attacked the inner wall of their vessel, and the carefully established inter-wall vacuum disappeared in a screaming hiss of air as the tempered point bit through plate after plate.

"What's the idea, Steve?" Nadia asked, when he had re-entered the control room. "Now you'll have all that pumping to do over again."

"Protection for the mirrors," he explained. "You see, they aren't perfect reflectors. There's a little absorption, so that some stuff comes through. Not much, of course; but enough to kill some of those Titanians and almost enough to ruin their ship got through in about ten minutes, and only one enemy was dealing it out. We can stand more than they could, of course, but the mirror itself won't stand much more heat than it was absorbing then. But with air in those spaces instead of vacuum, and with the whole mass of the _Hope_, except this one lifeboat, as cold as it is, I figure that there'll be enough conduction and convection through them to keep the outer wall and the mirror cold--cool enough, at least, to hold the mirror on for an hour. If only one ship tackles us, it won't be bad--but I figure that if there's only one, we're lucky."

* * * * *

Stevens' fears were only too well grounded, for during the "evening" of the following day, while he was carefully scanning the heavens for some sign of enemy craft, the alarm bell over his head burst into its brazen clamor. Instantly he shot out the detectors and ultra-lights and saw not one, but six of the deadly globes--almost upon them, at point-blank range! One was already playing a beam of force upon the _Forlorn Hope_, and the other five went into action immediately upon feeling the detector impulses and perceiving that the weapon of their sister ship had encountered an unusual resistance in the material of that peculiarly mirrored wedge. As those terrific forces struck her, the terrestrial cruiser became a vast pyrotechnic set piece, a dazzling fountain of coruscant brilliance: for the mirror held. The enemy beams shot back upon themselves and rebounded in all directions, in the same spectacular exhibition of frenzied incandescence which had marked the resistance of the Titanian sphere to a similar attack.

But Stevens was not idle. In the instant of launching his detectors, as fast as he could work the trips, four of the frightful nitrogen bombs of Titan--all that he could handle at once--shot out into space, their rocket-tubes flaring viciously. The enemy detectors of course located the flying torpedoes immediately, but, contemptuous of material projectiles, the spheres made no attempt to dodge, but merely lashed out upon them with their ravening rays. So close was the range that they had no time to avoid the radio-directed bombs after discovering that their beams were useless against the unknown protective covering of those mirrored shells. There were four practically simultaneous detonations--silent, but terrific explosions as the pent-up internal energy of solid pentavalent nitrogen was instantaneously released--and the four insensately murderous spheres disappeared into jagged fragments of wreckage, flying wildly away from the centers of explosion. One great mass of riven and twisted metal was blown directly upon the fifth globe, and Nadia stared in horrified fascination at the silent crash as the entire side of the ship crumpled inward like a shell of cardboard under the awful impact. That vessel was probably out of action, but Stevens was taking no chances. As soon as he had clamped a pale blue tractor rod upon the sixth and last of the enemy fleet, he drove a torpedo through the gaping wall and into the interior of the helpless war-vessel. There he exploded it, and the awful charge, detonated in that confined space, literally tore the globular space-ship to bits.

"We'll show these jaspers what kind of trees make shingles!" he gritted between clenched teeth; and his eyes, hard now as gray iron, fairly emitted sparks as he launched four torpedoes upon the sole remaining globe of the squadron of the void. "I've had a lot of curiosity to know just what kind of unnatural monstrosities can possibly have such fiendish dispositions as they've got--but beasts, men or devils, they'll find they've grabbed something this time they can't let go of," and fierce blasts of energy ripped from the exhausts as he drove his missiles, at their highest possible acceleration, toward the captive sphere so savagely struggling at the extremity of his tractor beam.

But that one remaining vessel was to prove no such easy victim as had its sister ships. Being six to one, and supposedly invincible, the squadron had been overconfident and had attacked carelessly, with only its crippling slicing beams instead of its more deadly weapons of total destruction; and so fierce and hard had been Stevens' counter-attack that five of its numbers had been destroyed before they realized what powerful armament was mounted by that apparently crude, helpless, and innocuous wedge. The sixth, however, was fully warned, and every resource at the command of its hellish crew was now being directed against the _Forlorn Hope_.

Sheets, cones, and gigantic rods of force flashed and crackled. Space was filled with silent, devastating tongues of flame. The _Forlorn Hope_ was dragged about erratically as the sphere tried to dodge those hurtling torpedoes; tried to break away from the hawser of energy anchoring her so solidly to her opponent. But the linkage held, and closer and closer Stevens drove the fourfold menace of his frightful dirigible bombs. Pressor beams beat upon them in vain. Hard driven as those pushers were, they could find no footing, but were reflected at many angles by that untouchable mirror and their utmost force scarcely impeded the progress of the rocket-propelled missiles. Comparatively small as the projectiles were, however, they soon felt the effects of the prodigious beams of heat enveloping them, and torpedo after torpedo exploded harmlessly in space as their mirrors warmed up and volatilized. But for each bomb that was lost, Stevens launched another, and each one came closer to its objective than had its predecessor.

Made desperate by the failure of his every beam, the enemy commander thought to use material projectiles himself--weapons abandoned long since by his race as antiquated and inefficient, but a few of which were still carried by the older types of vessels. One such shell was found and launched--but in the instant of its launching Stevens' foremost bomb struck its mark and exploded. So close were the other three bombs, that they also let go at the shock; and the warlike sphere, hemmed in by four centers of explosions, flew apart--literally pulverized. Its projectile, so barely discharged, did not explode--it was loaded with material which could be detonated only by the warhead upon impact or by a radio signal. It was, however, deflected markedly from its course by the force of the blast, so that instead of striking the _Forlorn Hope_ in direct central impact, its head merely touched the apex of the mirror-plated wedge. That touch was enough. There was another appalling concussion, another blinding glare, and the entire front quarter of the terrestrial vessel had gone to join the shattered globes.

Between the point of explosion and the lifeboats there had been many channels of insulation, many bulkheads, many air-breaks, and compartment after compartment of accumulator cells. These had borne the brunt of the explosion, so that the control room was unharmed, and Stevens swung his communicator rapidly through the damaged portions of the vessels.

"How badly are we hurt, Steve--can we make it to Ganymede?"

Nadia was quietly staring over his shoulder into the plate, studying with him the pictures of destruction there portrayed as he flashed the projector from compartment to compartment.

"We're hurt--no fooling--but it might have been a lot worse," he replied, as he completed the survey. "We've lost about all of our accumulators, but we can land on our own beam, and landing power is all we want, I think. You see, we're drifting straight for where Ganymede will be, and we'd better cut out every bit of power we're using, even the heaters, until we get there. This lifeboat will hold heat for quite a while, and I'd rather get pretty cold than meet any more of that gang. I figured eight hours just before they met us, and we were just about drifting then. I think it is safe to say seven hours blind."

"But can't they detect us anyway? They may have sent out a call, you know."

"If we aren't using any power for anything, their electr-omagnetics are the only things we'll register on, and they're mighty short-range finders. Even if they should get that close to us, they'll probably think we're meteoric, since we'll be dead to their other instruments. Luckily we've got lots of air, so the chemical purifiers can handle it without power. I'll shut off everything and we'll drift it. Couldn't do much of anything, anyway--even our shop out there won't hold air. But we can have light. We've got acetylene emergency lamps, you know, and we don't need to economize on oxygen."

"Perhaps we'd better run in the dark. Remember what you told me about their possible visirays, and that you've got only two bombs left."

"All x; that would be better. If I forget it, remind me to blow up those before we hit the atmosphere of Ganymede, will you?" He opened all the power switches, and, every source of ethereal vibrations cut off, the _Forlorn Hope_ drifted slowly on, now appearing forlorn indeed.

* * * * *

Seven hours dragged past: seven age-long hours during which the two sat tense, expecting they knew not what, talking only at intervals and in subdued tones. Stevens then snapped on the communicator beam just long enough to take an observation upon Ganymede. Several such brief glimpses were taken; then, after a warning word to his companion, he sent out and exploded the nitrogen bombs. He then threw on the power, and the vessel leaped toward the satellite under full acceleration. Close to the atmosphere it slanted downward in a screaming, fifteen-hundred-mile drive; and soon the mangled wedge dropped down into the little canyon, which for so long had been "home."

"Well, colonel, home again!" Stevens exulted as he neutralized the controls. "There's that falls, our power plant, the catapults, 'n' everything. Now, unless something interrupts us again; we'll run up our radio tower and give Brandon the long yell."

"How much more have you got to do before you can start sending?"

"Not an awful lot. Everything built--all I've got to do is assemble it. I should be able to do it easily in a week. Hope nothing else happens--if I drag you into any more such messes as those we've just been getting out of by the skin of our teeth, I'll begin to wish that we had started out at first to drift it back to Tellus in the _Hope_. Let's see how much time we've got. We should start shooting one day after an eclipse, so that we'll have five days to send. You see, we don't want to point our beam too close to Jupiter or to any of the large satellites, because the enemy might live there and might intercept it. We had an eclipse yesterday--so one week from today, at sunrise, I start shooting."

"But Earth's an evening star now; you can't see it in the morning."

"I'm not going to aim at Tellus. I'm shooting at Brandon, and he's never there for more than a week or two at a stretch. They're prowling around out in space somewhere almost all the time."

"Then how can you possibly hope to hit them?"

"It may be quite a job of hunting, but not as bad as you might think. They probably aren't much, if any, outside the orbit of Mars, and they usually stay within a couple of million kilometers or so of the Ecliptic, so we'll start at the sun and shoot our beam in a spiral to cover that field. We ought to be able to hit them inside of twelve hours, but if we don't, we'll widen our spiral and keep on trying until we do hit them."

"Heavens, Steve! Are you planning on telegraphing steadily for days at a time?"

"Sure, but not by hand, of course--I'll have an automatic sender and automatic pointers."

Stevens had at his command a very complete machine-shop, he had an ample supply of power, and all that remained for him to do was to assemble the parts which he had built during the long journey from Titan to Ganymede. Therefore, at sunrise of the designated day, he was ready, and, with Nadia hanging breathless over his shoulder, he closed the switch, a toothed wheel engaged a delicate interrupter, and a light sounder began its strident chatter.

"Ganymede point oh four seven ganymede point oh four seven ganymede point oh four seven..." endlessly the message was poured out into the ether, carried by a tight beam of ultra-vibrations and driven by forces sufficient to propel it well beyond the opposite limits of the orbit of Mars.

"What does it say? I can't read code."

Stevens translated the brief message, but Nadia remained unimpressed.

"But it doesn't say anything!" she protested. "It isn't addressed to anybody, it isn't signed--it doesn't tell anybody anything about anything."

"It's all there, ace. You see, since the beam is moving sidewise very rapidly at that range and we're shooting at a small target, the message has to be very short or they won't get it all while the beam's on 'em--it isn't as though we were broadcasting. It doesn't need any address, because nobody but the _Sirius_ can receive it--except possibly the Jovians. They'll know who's sending it without any signature. It tells them that Ganymede wants to receive a message on the ultra-band centering on forty-seven thousandths. Isn't that enough?"

"Maybe. But suppose some of them live right here on Ganymede--you'll be shooting right through the ground all night--or suppose that even if they don't live here, that they can find our beam some way? Or suppose that Brandon hasn't got his machine built yet, or suppose that it isn't turned on when our beam passes them, or suppose they're asleep then? A lot of things might happen."

"Not so many, ace--your first objection is the only one that hasn't got more holes in it than a sieve, so I'll take it first. Since our beam is only a meter in diameter here and doesn't spread much in the first few million kilometers, the chance of direct reception by the enemy, even if they do live here on Ganymede, is infinitesimally small. But I don't believe that they live here--at least, they certainly didn't land on this satellite. As you suggest, however, it is conceivable that they may have detector screens delicate enough to locate our beam at a distance; but since in all probability that means a distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers, I think it highly improbable. We've got to take the same risk anyway, no matter what we do, whenever we start to use any kind of driving power, so there's no use worrying about it. As for your last two objections, I know Brandon and I know Westfall. Brandon will have receivers built that will take in any wave possible of propagation, and Westfall, the cautious old egg, will have them running twenty-four hours a day, with automatic recorders, finders, and everything else that Brandon can invent--and believe me, sweetheart, that's a lot of stuff!"

"It's wonderful, the way you three men are," replied Nadia thoughtfully, reading between the lines of Stevens' utterance. "They knew that you were on the _Arcturus_, of course--and they knew that if you were alive you'd manage in some way to get in touch with them. And you, away out here after all this time, are superbly confident that they are expecting a call from you. That, I think, is one of the finest things I ever heard of."

"They're two of the world's best--absolutely." Nadia looked at him, surprised, for he had not seen anything complimentary to himself in her remark. "Wait until you meet them. They're men, Nadia--real men. And speaking of meeting them--please try to keep on loving me after you meet Norm Brandon, will you?"

"Don't be a simp!" her brown eyes met his steadily. "You didn't mean that--you didn't even say it, did you?"

"Back it comes, sweetheart! But knowing myself and knowing those two...."

"Stop it! If Norman Brandon or Quincy Westfall had been here instead of you, or both of them together, we'd have been here from now on--we wouldn't even have gotten away from the Jovians!"

* * * * *

"Now it's your turn to back water, guy!"

"Well, maybe, a little--if both of them were here, they ought to equal you in some things. Brandon says himself that he and Westfall together make one scientist--Dad says he says so."

"You don't want to believe everything you hear. Neither of them will admit that he knows anything or can do anything--that's the way they are."

"Dad has told me a lot about them--how they've always been together ever since their undergraduate days. How they studied together all over the world, even after they'd been given all the degrees loose. How they even went to the other planets to study--to Mars, where they had to live in space-suits all the time, and to Venus, where they had to take ultra-violet treatments every day to keep alive. How they learned everything that everybody else knew and then went out into space to find out things that nobody else ever dreamed of. How you came to join them, and what you three have done since. They're fine, of course--but they aren't _you_," she concluded passionately.

"No, thank Heaven! I know you love me, Nadia, just as I love you--you know I never doubted it. But you'll like them, really. They're a wonderful team. Brandon's a big brute, you know--fully five centimeters taller than I am, and he weighs close to a hundred kilograms--and no lard, either. He's wild, impetuous, always jumping at conclusions and working out theories that seem absolutely ridiculous, but they're usually sound, even though impractical. Westfall's the practical member--he makes Norm pipe down, pins him down to facts, and makes it possible to put his hunches and wild flashes of genius into workable form. Quince is a...."

"Now _you_ pipe down! I've heard you rave _so_ much about those two--I'd lots rather rave about you, and with more reason. I wish that sounder would start sounding."

"Our first message hasn't gone half way yet. It takes about forty minutes for the impulse to get to where I think they are, so that even if they got the first one and answered it instantly, it would be eighty minutes before we'd get it. I sort of expect an answer late tonight, but I won't be disappointed if it takes a week to locate them."

"I will!" declared the girl, and indeed, very little work was done that day by either of the castaways.

Slowly the day wore on, and the receiving sounder remained silent. Supper was eaten as the sun dropped low and disappeared, but they felt no desire to sleep. Instead, they went out in front of the steel wall, where Stevens built a small campfire. Leaning back against the wall of their vessel, they fell into companionable silence, which was suddenly broken by Stevens.

"Nadia, I just had a thought. I'll bet four dollars I've wasted a lot of time. They'll certainly have automatic relays on Tellus, to save me the trouble of hunting for them, but like an idiot I never thought of it until just this minute, in spite of the speech I made you about them. I'm going to change those directors right now."

"That's quite a job, isn't it?"

"No, only a few minutes."

"Do it in the morning; you've done enough for one day--maybe you've hit them already, any way."

They again became silent, watching Jupiter, an enormous moon some seven degrees in apparent diameter.

"Steve, I simply can't get used to such a prodigious moon! Look at the stripes, and look at that perfectly incredible...."

A gong sounded and they both jumped to their feet and raced madly into the _Hope_. The ultra-receiver had come to life and the sounder was chattering insanely--someone was sending with terrific speed, but with perfect definition and spacing.

"That's Brandon's fist--I'd know his style anywhere," Stevens shouted, as he seized notebook and pencil.

"Tell me what it says, quick, Steve!" Nadia implored.

"Can't talk--read it!" Stevens snapped. His hand was flying over the paper, racing to keep up with the screaming sounder.

"...ymede all x stevens ganymede all x stevens ganymede all x placing and will keep sirius on plane between you and tellus circle fifteen forty north going tellus first send full data spreading beam to cover circle fifteen forty quince suggests possibility this message intercepted and translated personally I think such translation impossible and that he is wilder than a hawk but just in case they should be supernaturally intelligent...."

Stevens stopped abruptly and stared at the vociferous sounder.

"Don't stop to listen--keep on writing!" commanded Nadia.

"Can't," replied the puzzled mathematician. "It doesn't make sense. It sounds intelligent--it's made up of real symbols of some kind or other, but they don't mean a thing to me."

"Oh, I see--he's sending mush on purpose. Read the last phrase!"

"Oh, sure--'mush' is right," and with no perceptible break the signals again became intelligible.

"... if they can translate that they are better scholars than we are signing off until hear from you brandon."

* * * * *

The sounder died abruptly into silence and Nadia sobbed convulsively as she threw herself into Stevens' arms. The long strain over, the terrible uncertainty at last dispelled, they were both incoherent for a minute--Nadia glorifying the exploits of her lover, Stevens crediting the girl herself and his two fellow-scientists with whatever success had been achieved. A measure of self-control regained, Stevens cut off his automatic sender, changed the adjustments of his directors and cut in his manually operated sending key.

"What waves are you using, anyway?" asked Nadia, curiously. "They must be even more penetrating than Roeser's Rays, to have such a range, and Roeser's Rays go right through a planet without even slowing up."

"They're of the same order as Roeser's--that is, they're sub-electronic waves of the fourth order--but they're very much shorter, and hence more penetrating. In fact, they're the shortest waves yet known, so short that Roeser never even suspected their existence."

"Suppose there's a Jovian space-ship out there somewhere that intercepts our beams. Couldn't they locate us from it?"

"Maybe, and maybe not--we'll just have to take a chance on that. That goes right back to what we were talking about this morning. They might be anywhere, so the chance of hitting one is very small. It isn't like hitting the _Sirius_, because we knew within pretty narrow limits where to look for her, and even at that we had to hunt for her for half a day before we hit her. We're probably safe, but even if they should have located us, we'll probably be able to hide somewhere until the _Sirius_ gets here. Well, the quicker I get busy sending the dope, the sooner they can get started."

"Tell them to be sure and bring me all my clothes they can find, a gallon of perfume, a barrel of powder, and a carload of Delray's Fantasie chocolates--I've been a savage so long that I want to wallow in luxury for a while."

"I'll do that--and I want some real cigarettes!"

Stevens first sent a terse, but complete account of everything that had happened to the _Arcturus_, and a brief summary of what he and Nadia had done since the cutting up of the IPV. The narrative finished, he launched into a prolonged and detailed scientific discussion of the enemy and their offensive and defensive weapons. He dwelt precisely and at length upon the functioning of everything he had seen. Though during the long months of their isolation he had been too busy to do any actual work upon the weapons of the supposed Jovians, yet his keen mind had evolved many mathematical and physical deductions, hypotheses, and theories, and these he sent out to the _Sirius_, concluding:

"There's all the dope I can give you. Figure it out, and don't come at all until you can come loaded for bear; they're bad medicine. Call us occasionally, to keep us informed as to when to expect you, but don't call too often. We don't want them locating you, and if they should locate us through your ray or ours, it would be just too bad. So-long. Stevens and Newton."

Nadia had insisted upon staying up and had been brewing pot after pot of her substitutes for coffee while he sat at the key; and it was almost daylight when he finally shut off the power and arose, his right arm practically paralyzed from the unaccustomed strain of hours of telegraphing.

"Well, sweetheart, that's that!" he exclaimed in relief. "Brandon and Westfall are on the job. Nothing to do now but wait, and study up on our own account on those Jovians' rays. This has been one long day for us, though, little ace, and I suggest that we sleep for about a week!"

CHAPTER VIII

Callisto to the Rescue

All humanity of Callisto, the fourth major satellite of Jupiter, had for many years been waging a desperate and apparently hopeless defense against invading hordes of six-limbed beings. Every city and town had long since been reduced to level fields of lava by the rays of the invaders. Every building and every trace of human civilization had long since disappeared from the surface of the satellite. Far below the surface lay the city of Zbardk, the largest of the few remaining strongholds of the human race. At one portal of the city a torpedo-shaped, stubby-winged rocket plane rested in the carriage of a catapult. Near it the captain addressed briefly the six men normally composing his crew.

"Men, you already know that our cruise today is not an ordinary patrol. We are to go to One, there to destroy a base of the hexans. We have perhaps one chance in ten thousand of returning. Therefore I am taking only one man--barely enough to operate the plane. Volunteers step one pace forward."

The six stepped forward as one man, and a smile came over the worn face of their leader as he watched them draw lots for the privilege of accompanying him to probable death. The two men entered the body of the torpedo, sealed the openings and waited.

"Free exits?" snapped the Captain of the Portal, and twelve keen-eyed observers studied minutely screens and instrument panels connected to the powerful automatic lookout stations beneath the rims of the widely separated volcanic craters from which their craft could issue into Callisto's somber night.

"No hexan radiation can be detected from Exit Eight," came the report. The Captain of the Portal raised an arm in warning, threw in the guides, and the two passengers were hurled violently backward, deep into their cushioned seats, as the catapult shot their plane down the runway. As the catapult's force was spent automatic trips upon the undercarriage actuated the propelling rockets and mile after mile, with rapidly mounting velocity, the plane sped through the tube. As the exit was approached, the tunnel described a long vertical curve, so that when the opening into the shaft of the crater was reached and the undercarriage was automatically detached, the vessel was projected almost vertically upward. Such was its velocity and so powerful was the liquid propellant of its rocket motors, that the eye could not follow the flight of the warship as it tore through the thin layer of the atmosphere and hurled itself out into the depths of space.

"Did we get away?" asked the captain, hands upon his controls and eyes upon his moving chart of space.

"I believe so, sir," answered the other officer, at the screens of the six periscopic devices which covered the full sphere of vision. "No reports from the rim, and all screens blank." Once more a vessel had issued from the jealously secret city of Zbardk without betraying its existence to the hated and feared hexans.

For a time the terrific rocket motors continued the deafening roar of their continuous explosions, then, the desired velocity having been attained, they were cut out and for hours the good ship "Bzark" hurtled on through the void at an enormous but constant speed toward the distant world of One, which it was destined never to reach.

"Captain Czuv! Hexan radiation, coordinates twenty two, fourteen, area six!" cried the observer, and the commander swung his own telescopic finder into the indicated region. His hands played over course and distance plotters for a brief minute, and he stared at his results in astonishment.

"I never heard of a hexan traveling that way before," he frowned. "Constant negative acceleration and in a straight line. He must think that we have been cleared out of the ether. Almost parallel to us and not much faster--even at this long range, it is an easy kill unless he starts dodging, as usual."

As he spoke, he snapped a switch and from a port under the starboard wing there shot out into space a small package of concentrated destruction--a rocket-propelled, radio-controlled torpedo. The rockets of the tiny missile were flaming, but that flame was visible only from the rear and no radio beam was upon it. Czuv had given it precisely the direction and acceleration necessary to make it meet the hexan sphere in central impact, provided that sphere maintained its course and acceleration unchanged.

"Shall I direct the torpedo in the case the hexan shifts?" asked the officer.

"I think not. They can, of course, detect any wave at almost any distance, and at the first sign of radioactivity they would locate and destroy the bomb. They also, in all probability, would destroy us. I would not hesitate to attack them on that account alone, but we must remember that we are upon a more important mission than attacking one hexan ship. We are far out of range of their electro-magnetic detectors, and our torpedo will have such a velocity that they will have no time to protect themselves against it after detection. Unless they shift in the next few seconds, they are lost. This is the most perfect shot I ever had at one of them, but one shot is all I dare risk--we must not betray ourselves."

* * * * *

Course, lookout, and rank forgotten, the little crew of two stared into the narrow field of vision, set at its maximum magnification. The instruments showed that the enemy vessel was staying upon its original course. Very soon the torpedo came within range of the detectors of the hexans. But as Captain Czuv had foretold, the detection was a fraction of a second too late, rapidly as their screens responded, and the two men of Zbardk uttered together a short, fierce cry of joy as a brilliant flash of light announced the annihilation of the hexan vessel.

"But hold!" The observer stared into his screen. "Upon that same line, but now at constant velocity, there is still a very faint radiation, of a pattern I have never seen before."

"I think ... I believe ..." the captain was studying the pattern, puzzled. "It must be low frequency, low-tension electricity, which is never used, so far as I know. It may be some new engine of destruction, which the hexan was towing at such a distance that the explosion of our torpedo did not destroy it. Since there are no signs of hexan activity and since it will not take much fuel, we shall investigate that radiation."

Tail and port-side rockets burst into roaring activity and soon the plane was cautiously approaching the mass of wreckage, which had been the IPV _Arcturus_.

"Human beings, although of some foreign species!" exclaimed the captain, as his vision-ray swept through the undamaged upper portion of the great liner and came to rest upon Captain King at his desk.

Although the upper ultra-lights of the Terrestrial vessel had been cut away by the hexan plane of force, jury lights had been rigged, and the two commanders were soon trying to communicate with each other. Intelligible conversation was, of course, impossible, but King soon realized that the visitors were not enemies. At their pantomimed suggestion he put on a space-suit and wafted himself over to the airlock of the Callistonian warplane. Inside the central compartment, the strangers placed over his helmet a heavily wired harness, and he found himself instantly in full mental communication with the Callistonian commander. For several minutes they stood silent, exchanging thoughts with a rapidity impossible in any language; then, dressed in space-suits, both leaped lightly across the narrow gap into the still open outer lock of the terrestrial liner. King watched Czuv narrowly after the pressure began to collapse his suit, but the stranger made no sign of distress. He had been right in his assurance that the extra pressure would scarcely inconvenience him. King tore off his helmet, issued a brief order, and soon every speaker in the _Arcturus_ announced:

"All passengers and all members of the crew except lookouts on duty will assemble immediately in Saloon Three to discuss a possible immediate rescue."

The subject being one of paramount interest, it was a matter of minutes until the full complement of two hundred men and women were in the main saloon, clinging to hastily rigged hand lines, closely packed before the raised platform upon which were King and Czuv, wired together with the peculiar Callistonian harness. To most of the passengers, familiar with the humanity of three planets, the appearance of the stranger brought no surprise; but many of them stared in undisguised amazement at his childish body, his pale, almost colorless skin, his small, weak legs and arms, and his massive head.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" Captain King opened the meeting. "I introduce to you Captain Czuv, of the scout cruiser _Bzarvk_, of the only human race now living upon the fourth large satellite of Jupiter, which satellite we know as Callisto. I am avoiding their own names as much as possible, because they are almost unpronounceable in English or Interplanetarian. This device that you see connecting us is a Callistonian thought transformer, by means of which any two intelligent beings can converse without language. Our situation is peculiar, and in order that you may understand fully what lies ahead of us, the captain will now speak to you, through me--that is, what follows will be spoken by Captain Czuv, of the _Bzarvk_, but he will be using my vocal organs."

"Friends from distant Tellus," King's voice went on, almost without a break, "I greet you. I am glad, for your sake as well as our own, that your vessel was able to destroy the hexan ship holding you captive, and whose crew would have killed you all as soon as they had landed your vessel and had read your minds. I regret bitterly that we can do so little for you, for only the representatives of a human civilization being exterminated by a race of highly intelligent monsters can fully realize how desirable it is for all the various races of humanity to assist and support each other. In order that you may understand the situation, it is necessary that I delve at some length into ancient history, but we have ample time. In about ..." he broke off, realizing that the two races had no thought in common in the measure of time.

"One-half time of rotation of Great Planet upon axis?" flashed from Czuv's brain, and "About five hours," King's mind flashed back.

"It will be about five hours before any steps can be taken, so that I feel justified in using a brief period for explanation. In the evolution of the various forms of life upon Callisto, two genera developed intelligence far ahead of all others. One genus was the human, as you and I; the other the hexan. This creature, happily unknown to you of the planets nearer our common sun, is the product of an entirely different evolution. It is a six-limbed animal, with a brain equal to our own--one perhaps in some ways superior to our own. They have nothing in common with humanity, however; they have few of our traits and fewer of our mental processes. Even we who have fought them so long can scarcely comprehend the chambers of horror that are their minds. Even were I able to paint a sufficiently vivid picture with words, you of Earth could not begin to understand their utter ruthlessness and inhumanity, even among themselves. You would believe that I was lying, or that my viewpoint was warped. I can say only that I hope most sincerely that none of you will ever get better acquainted with them."

* * * * *

"Ages ago, then, the human and the hexan developed upon all four of the major satellites of the Great Planet, which you know as Jupiter, and upon the north polar region of Jupiter itself. By what means the two races came into being upon worlds so widely separated in space we know not--we only know it to be the fact. Human life, however, could not long endure upon Jupiter. The various human races, after many attempts to meet conditions of life there by variations in type fell before the hexans; who, although very small in size upon the planet, thrived there amazingly. Upon the three outer satellites humanity triumphed, and many hundreds of cycles ago the hexans of those satellites were wiped out, save for an occasional tribe of savages of low intelligence who lived in various undesirable portions of the three worlds. For ages then there was peace upon Callisto. Here is the picture at that time--upon Jupiter the hexans; upon Io hexans and humans, waging a ceaseless and relentless war of mutual extermination; upon the three outer satellites humanity in undisturbed and unthreatened peace. Five worlds, each ignorant of life upon any other.

"As I have said, the hexans of Jupiter were, and are, diabolically intelligent. Driven probably by their desire to see what lay beyond their atmosphere of eternal cloud, to the penetration of which their eyesight was attuned, they developed the space-ship; and effected a safe landing, first upon the barren, airless moonlet nearest them, and then upon fruitful Io. There they made common cause with the hexans against the humans, and in space of time Ionian humanity ceased to exist. Much traffic and interbreeding followed between the hexans of Jupiter and those of Io, resulting in time in a race intermediate in size between the parent stocks and equally at home in the widely variant air pressures and gravities of planet and satellite. Soon their astronomical instruments revealed the cities of Europa to their gaze, and as soon as they discovered that the civilization of Europa was human, they destroyed it utterly, with the insatiable blood lust that is their heritage.

"In the meantime the human civilizations of Ganymede and Callisto had also developed instruments of power. Observing the cities upon the other satellites, many scientists studied intensively the problem of space navigation, and finally there was some commerce between the two outer satellites at favorable times. Finally, vessels were also sent to Io and to Europa, but none of them returned. Knowing then what to expect, Ganymede and Callisto joined forces and prepared for war. But our science, so long attuned to the arts of peace, had fallen behind lamentably in the devising of more and ever more deadly instruments of destruction. Ganymede fell, and in her fall we read our own doom. Abandoning our cities, we built anew underground. Profiting from lessons learned full bloodily upon Ganymede, we resolved to prolong the existence of the human race as long as possible.

"The hexans were, and are masters of the physical science. They command the spectrum in a way undreamed of. Their detectors reveal etheric disturbances at unbelievable distances, and they have at their beck and call forces of staggering magnitude. Therefore in our cities is no electricity save that which is wired, shielded, and grounded; no broadcast radio; no source whatever of etheric disturbances save light--and our walls are fields of force which we believe to be impenetrable to any searching frequency capable of being generated. Now I am able to picture to you the present.

"We are the last representatives of the human race in the Jovian planetary system. Our every trace upon the surface has been obliterated. We are hiding in our holes in the ground, coming out at night by stealth so that our burrows shall not be revealed to the hexans. We are fighting for time in which our scientists may learn the secrets of power--and fearing, each new day, that the enemy may have so perfected their systems of rays that they will be able to detect us and destroy us, even in our underground and heavily shielded retreats, by means of forces even more incomprehensible than those they are now employing.

"Therefore, friends, you see how little we are able to do for you, we a race fighting for our very existence and doomed to extinction save for a miracle. We cannot take you to Callisto, for it is besieged by the hexans and the driving forces of your lifeboats, practically broadcast as they are, would be detected and we should all be destroyed long before we could reach safety. Captain King and I have pondered long and have been able to see only one course of action. We are drifting at constant velocity, using no power, and with all save the most vitally necessary machinery at rest. Thus only may we hope to avoid detection during the next two hours.

"Our present course will take us very close to Europa, which the hexans believe to be like Ganymede, entirely devoid of civilized life. Its original humanity was totally destroyed, and all its civilized hexans are finding shelter from our torpedoes upon Jupiter until we of Callisto shall likewise have been annihilated. The temperature of Europa will suit you. Its atmosphere, while less dense than that to which you are accustomed, will adequately support your life. If we are not detected in the course of the next few hours we can probably land upon Europa in safety, since its neighborhood is guarded but loosely. In fact, we have a city there, as yet unsuspected by the hexans, in which our scientists will continue to labor after Callisto's civilization shall have disappeared. We think that it will be safe to use your power for the short time necessary to effect a landing. We shall land in a cavern, in a crater already in communication with our city. In that cavern, instructed and aided by some of us, you will build a rocket vessel--no rays can be used because of the hexans--in which you will be able to travel to a region close enough to your earth so that you can call for help. You will not be able to carry enough fuel to land there--in fact, nearly all the journey will have to be made without power, traveling freely in a highly elongated orbit around the sun--but if you escape the hexans, you should be able to reach home safely, in time. It is for the consideration of this plan that this meeting has been called."

* * * * *

"Just one question," Breckenridge spoke. "The hexans are intelligent. Why are they leaving Europa and Ganymede so unguarded that human beings can move back there and that we can land there, all undetected?"

"I will answer that question myself," replied King. "Captain Czuv did not quite do justice to his own people. It is true that they are being conquered, but for every human life that is taken, a thousand hexans die, and for every human ship that is lost, twenty hexan vessels are annihilated in return. While the hexans are masters of rays, the humans are equally masters of explosives and of mechanisms. They can hit a perfect score upon any target in free space whose course and acceleration can be determined, at any range up to five thousand kilometers, and they have explosives thousands of times as powerful as any known to us. Ray screens are effective only against rays, and the hexans cannot destroy anything they cannot see before it strikes them. So it is that all the hexan vessels except those necessary to protect their own strongholds, are being concentrated against Callisto. They cannot spare vessels to guard uselessly the abandoned satellites. Because of the enormously high gravity of Jupiter the hexans there are safe from human attack save for ineffectual long-range bombardment, but Io is being attacked constantly and it is probable that in a few more years Io also will be an abandoned world. Some of you may have received the impressions that the hexans are to triumph immediately, but such an idea is wrong. The humans can, and will, hold out for a hundred years or more unless the enemy perfects a destructive ray of the type referred to. Even then, I think that our human cousins will hold out a long time. They are able men, fighters all, and their underground cities are beautifully protected."

There was little argument. Most of the auditors could understand that the suggested course was the best one possible. The remainder were so stunned by the unbelievable events of the attack that they had no initiative, but were willing to follow wherever the more valiant spirits led. It was decided that no attempt should be made to salvage any portion of the _Arcturus_, since any such attempt would be fraught with danger and since the wreckage would be of little value. The new vessel was to be rocket driven and was to be built of Callistonian alloys. Personal belongings were moved into lifeboats, doors were closed, and there ensued a painful period of waiting and suspense.

The stated hour was reached without event--no hexan scout had come close enough to them to detect the low-tension radiation of the vital machinery of the _Arcturus_, cut as it was to the irreducible minimum and quite effectively grounded as it was by the enormous mass of her shielding armor. At a signal from Captain Czuv the pilot of each lifeboat shot his tiny craft out into space and took his allotted place in the formation following closely behind the _Bzarvk_, flying toward Europa, now so large in the field of vision that she resembled more a world than a moon. Captain King, in the Callistonian vessel, transmitted to Breckenridge the route and flight data given him by the navigator of the winged craft. The chief pilot, flying "point," in turn relayed more detailed instructions to the less experienced pilots of the other lifeboats.

Soon the surface of Europa lay beneath them; a rugged, cratered, and torn topography of mighty ranges of volcanic mountains. Most of the craters were cold and lifeless; but here and there a plume of smoke and steam betrayed the presence of vast, quiescent forces. Straight down one of those gigantic lifeless shafts the fleet of space craft dropped--straight down a full two miles before the landing signal was given. At the bottom of the shaft a section of the rocky wall swung aside, revealing the yawning black mouth of a horizontal tunnel. At intervals upon its roof there winked into being almost invisible points of light. Along that line of lights the lifeboats felt their way, coming finally into a huge cavern, against one sheer metal wall of which they parked in an orderly row. Roll was called, and the terrestrials walked, as well as they could in the feeble gravity of the satellite, across the vast chamber and into a conveyance somewhat resembling a railway coach, which darted away as soon as the doors were shut. For hundreds of miles that strange tunnel extended, and as the car shot along door after door of natural rock opened before it, and closed as soon as it had sped through. In spite of the high velocity of the vehicle, it required almost two hours to complete the journey. Finally, however, it slowed to a halt and the Terrestrial visitors disembarked at a portal of the European city of the Callistonians.

"Attention!" barked Captain King. "The name of this city, as nearly as I can come to it in English, is _WRUZK_. 'Roosk' comes fairly close to it and is easier to pronounce. We must finish our trip in small cars, holding ten persons each. We shall assemble again in the building in which we have been assigned quarters. The driver of each car will lead his passengers to the council room in which we shall meet."

"Oh, what's the use--this is horrible, horrible--we might as well die!" a nervous woman shrieked, and fainted.

"Such a feeling is, perhaps, natural," King went on, after the woman had been revived and quiet had been restored, "but please control it as much as possible. We are alive and well, and will be able to return to Tellus eventually. Please remember that these people are putting themselves to much trouble and inconvenience to help us, desperate as their own situation is, and conduct yourselves accordingly."

The rebuke had its effect, and with no further protest the company boarded the small cars, which shot through an opening in the wall and into a street of that strange subterranean city. Breckenridge, in the last car to leave the portal, studied his surroundings with interest as his conveyance darted through the gateway. More or less a fatalist by nature and an adventurer, of course, since no other type existed among the older spacehounds of the IPC, he was intensely interested in every new phase of their experience, and was no whit dismayed or frightened.

* * * * *

He found himself seated in a narrow canoe of metal, immediately behind the pilot, who sat at a small control panel in the bow. Propelled by electro-magnetic fields above a single rail, upon lightly touching and noiseless wheels, the terrestrial pilot saw with keen appreciation the manner in which switch after switch ahead of them obeyed the impulses sent ahead from the speeding car. The streets were narrow and filled with monorails; pedestrians pursued their courses upon walks attached to the walls of the buildings, far above the level of the streets. The walls were themselves peculiar, rising as they did stark, unbroken, windowless expanses of metal, merging into and supporting a massive roof of the same silvery metal. Walls and roof alike reflected a soft, yet intense, white light. Soon a sliding switch ahead of them shot in and simultaneously an opening appeared in the blank metal wall of a building. Through the opening the street-car flew, and as the pilot slowed the canoe to a halt, the door slid smoothly shut behind them. Parking the car beside a row of its fellows, the Callistonian driver indicated that the Terrestrials were to follow him and led the way into a large hall. There the others from the _Arcturus_ were assembled, facing Captain King, who was standing upon a table.

"Fellow travelers," King addressed them, "our course of action has been decided. There are two hundred three of us. There will be twenty sections of ten persons, each section being in charge of one of the officers of the _Arcturus_. Doctor Penfield, our surgeon, a man whose intelligence, fairness, and integrity are unquestioned, will be in supreme command. His power and authority will be absolute, limited only by the Callistonian Council. He will work in harmony with the engineer, who is to direct the entire project of building the new vessel. Each of you will be expected to do whatever he can--the work you will be asked to do will be well within your powers, and you will each have ample leisure for recreation, study, and amusement, of all of which you will find unsuspected stores in this underground community. You will each be registered and studied by physicians, surgeons, and psychologists; and each of you will have prescribed for him the exact diet that is necessary for his best development. You will find this diet somewhat monotonous, compared to our normal fare of natural products, since it is wholly synthetic; but that is one of the minor drawbacks that must be endured. Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I will not be with you. In some small and partial recompense for what they are doing for us all, he and I are going with Captain Czuv to Callisto, there to see whether or not we can aid them in any way in the fight against the hexans. One last word--Doctor Penfield's rulings will be the products of his own well-ordered mind after consultation and agreement with the Council of this city, and will be for the best good of all. I do not anticipate any refusal to cooperate with him. If, however, such refusal should occur, please remember that he is a despot with absolute power, and that anyone obstructing the program by refusing to follow his suggestions will spend the rest of his time here in confinement and will go back to Tellus in irons, if at all. In case Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I should not see you again, we bid you goodbye and wish you a safe voyage--but we expect to go back with you."

Brief farewells were said and captain and pilot accompanied Czuv to one of the little street-cars. Out of the building it dashed and down the crowded but noiseless thoroughfare to the portal. Signal lights flashed briefly there and they did not stop, but tore on through the portal and the tunnel, with increasing speed.

"Don't have to transfer to a big car, then?" asked Breckenridge.

"No," King made answer. "Small cars can travel these tubes as well as the large ones, and on much less power. In the city the wheels touch the rails lightly, not for support, but to make contacts through which traffic signals are sent and received. In the tunnels the wheels do not touch at all, as signaling is unnecessary--the tunnels being used infrequently and by but one vehicle at a time. No trolleys, tracks, or wires are visible, you notice. Everything is hidden from any possible visiray of the hexans."

"How about their power?"

"I don't understand it very well--hardly at all, in fact."

"It is quite simple." To the surprise of both Terrestrials, Czuv was speaking English, but with a strong and very peculiar accent; slighting all the vowels and accenting heavily the consonant sounds. "The car no longer requires my attention, so I am now free to converse. You are surprised at my knowing your language? You will speak mine after a few more applications of the thought exchanger. I am speaking with a vile accent, of course, but that is merely because my vocal organs are not accustomed to making vowel sounds. Our power is obtained by the combustion of gases in highly efficient turbines. It is transmitted and used as direct current, our generator and motors being so constructed that they can produce no etheric disturbances capable of penetrating the shielding walls of our city. The city was built close to deposits of coal, oil, and gas of sufficient amount to support our life for thousands of years; for from these deposits come power, food, clothing, and all the other necessities and luxuries of our lives. Strong fans draw air from various extinct craters, force it through ventilating ducts into every room and recess of the city, and exhaust it into the shaft of a quiescent volcano, in whose gaseous outflow any trace of our activities is, of course, imperceptible. For obvious reasons no rockets or combustion motors are used in the city proper."

* * * * *

Thus Captain Czuv explained to the Terrestrials his own mode of life, and received from them in turn full information concerning Earthly life, activity, and science. Long they talked, and it was almost time to slow down for the journey's end when the Callistonian brought the conversation back to their immediate concerns.

"My lieutenant and I were upon a mission of some importance, but it is more important to take you to Callisto, for there may be many things in which you can help us. Not in rays--we know all the vibrations you have mentioned and several others. The enemy, however, is supreme in that field, and until our scientists have succeeded in developing ray-screens, such as are used by the hexans, it would be suicidal to use rays at all. Such screens necessitate the projection of pure, yet dirigible, forces--you do not have them upon your planet?"

"No, and so far as I know such screens are also unknown upon Mars and Venus, with whose inhabitants we are friendly."

"The inhabitants of all the planets should be friendly; the solar system should be linked together in intercourse for common advancement. But that is not to be. The hexans will eventually triumph here, and a Jovian system peopled by hexans will have no intercourse with any human civilization save that of internecine war. We, of Callisto, have only one hope--or is it really a hope? In the South Polar country of Jupiter, there dwells a race of beings implacably hostile to the hexans. They seem to invade the country of the hexans frequently, even though they are apparently repulsed each time. Our emissaries to the South Polar country, however, have never returned--those beings, whatever they are, if not actively inimical, certainly are not friendly toward us."

"You know nothing of their nature?"

"Nothing, since our electrical instruments are not sufficiently sensitive to give us more than a general idea of what is transpiring there, and vision is practically useless in that eternal fog. We know, however, that they are far advanced in science, and we are thankful indeed that none of their frightful flying fortresses have been launched against us. They apparently are not interested in the satellites, and it is no doubt due to their unintentional assistance that we have survived as long as we have."

In the cavern at last, the three men boarded the Callistonian space-plane and were shot up the crater's shaft. The voyage to Callisto was uneventful, even uninteresting save at its termination. The _Bzarvk_, coated every inch as it was with a dull, dead black, completely absorptive outer coating, entered the thin layer of Callisto's atmosphere in darkest night, with all rockets dead, with not a light showing, and with no apparatus of any kind functioning. Utterly invisible and undetectable, she dove downward, and not until she was well below the crater's rim did the forward rockets burst into furious life. Then the Terrestrials understood another reason for the immense depth of those shafts other than that of protection from the detectors of the enemy--all that distance was necessary to overcome the velocity of their free fall without employing a negative acceleration greater than the frail Callistonian bodies could endure. From the cavern at the foot of the shaft, a regulation tunnel extended to the Callistonian city of Zbardk. Portal and city were very like Wruszk, upon distant Europa, and soon the terrestrial captain and pilot were in conference with the Council of Callisto.

* * * * *

Months of Earthly time dragged slowly past, months during which King and Breckenridge studied intensively the offensive and defensive systems of Callisto without finding any particular in which they could improve them to any considerable degree. Captain Czuv and his warplane still survived, and it was while the Callistonian commander was visiting his terrestrial guests, that King voiced the discontent that had long affected both men.

"We're both tired of doing nothing, Czuv. We have been of little real benefit, and we have decided that your ideas of us are all wrong. We are convinced that our personal horsepower can be of vastly more use to you than our brain-power, which doesn't amount to much. Your whole present policy is one of hiding and sniping. I think that I know why, but I want to be sure. Your vessels carry lots of fuel--why can the hexans outrun you?" Thus did King put his problem.

"They can stand enormously higher accelerations than we can. The very strongest of us loses consciousness at an acceleration of twenty-five meters per second per second, no matter how he is braced, and that is only a little greater than the normal gravity of our enemies upon Jupiter. Their vessels at highest power develop an acceleration of thirty-five meters, and the hexans themselves can stand much more than even that high figure," replied Czuv.

"I thought so. Assume that you traveled at forty-five. Would it disable you permanently, or would you recover as soon as it was lowered?"

"We would recover promptly, unless the exposure had been unduly prolonged. Why?"

"Because," said King, "I can stand an acceleration of fifty-four meters for two hours, and Breckenridge here tests fifty two meters. I can navigate anything, and Breckenridge can observe as well as any of your own men. Build a plane to accelerate at forty-five meters and we will blow those hexans out of the ether. You will have to revive and do the shooting, however--your gunnery is entirely beyond us."

"That is an idea of promise, and one that had not occurred to any of us," Czuv replied and work was begun at once upon the new flyer.

When the super-plane was ready for its maiden voyage, its crew of three studied it as it lay in the catapult at the portal. Dead black as were all the warplanes, its body was twice as large as that of the ordinary vessel, its wings were even more stubby, and its accommodations had been cut to a minimum to make room for the enormous stores of fuel necessary to drive the greatly increased battery of rocket motors and for the extra supply of torpedoes carried. Waving to the group of soldiers and citizens gathered to witness the take-off of the new dreadnought of space, the three men entered the cramped operating compartment, strapped themselves into their seats, and were shot away. As usual the driving rockets were cut off well below the rim of the shaft, and the vessel rose in a long and graceful curve, invisible in the night. Such was its initial velocity and so slight was the force of gravity of the satellite that they were many hundreds of miles from the exit before they began to descend, and Breckenridge studied his screens narrowly for signs of hexan activity.

"Do you want to try one of your long-range shots when we find one of them?" the pilot asked Czuv.

"No, it would be useless. Between deflection by air-currents and the dodging of the enemy vessels, our effective range is shortened to a few kilometers, and their beams are deadly at that distance. No, our best course is to follow the original plan--to lure them out into space at uniform acceleration, where we can destroy them easily."

"Right," and Breckenridge turned to King, who was frowning at his controls. "How does she work on a dead stick, Chief?"

"Maneuverability about minus ten at this speed and in this air. She'd have to have at least fifteen hundred kilometers an hour to be responsive out here. See anything yet?"

"Not yet ... wait a minute! Yes, there's one now--P-12 on area five. Give us all the X10 and W27 you can, without using power--we want to edge over close enough so that she can't help but see us when we start the rockets."

"Be sure and stay well out of range. I'm giving her all she'll take, but she won't take much. With these wings she has the gliding angle of a kitchen sink."

"All x--I'm watching the range, close. Wish we had instruments like these on the IPV's. We'll have to install some when we get back. All x! Give her the gun--level and dead ahead!"

Half the battery of rockets burst into their stuttering, explosive roar of power and the vessel darted away in headlong flight.

"He sees us and is after us--turn her straight up!"

A searing, coruscating finger of flame leaped toward them, but their calculations had been sound--the hexan was harmless at that extreme range. King, under the pilot's direction, kept the plane at a safe distance from the sphere while the satellite grew smaller and smaller behind them and Czuv lapsed quietly into unconsciousness.

"He's been out for quite a while. Far enough?" asked King.

"All x now, I guess--don't believe they can see the flash from here. Cut!"

The rockets died abruptly and a blast from the side ports threw the plane out of the beam--and once out of it, beyond range of the electro-magnetic detectors as they were their coating of absolute black rendered the craft safe from observation. One dirigible rocket remained in action, its exhaust hidden from the enemy by the body of the vessel, and Captain Czuv soon recovered his senses.

"Wonderful, gentlemen!" he exclaimed, as he manipulated the delicate controls of his gunnery panel. "This is the first time in history that a Callistonian vessel has escaped from a hexan by speed alone."

An instantaneously extinguished flare of incandescence marked the passing of the hexan sphere into nothingness, and the cruiser shot back toward Callisto in search of more prey. It was all too plentiful, and twenty times the drama was reenacted before approaching day made it necessary for Czuv to take the controls and dive the vessel into the westermost landing-shaft of Zbardk. A rousing and enthusiastic welcome awaited them, and joy spread rapidly when their success became known.

"Now we know what to do, and we had better do it immediately, before they get our system figured out and increase their own power." King reported to the Council. "You might send a couple of ships to Europa and bring back as many of the Tellurian officers as want to come and can be spared from the work there. They all test above forty-five meters, and they can learn this stuff in short order. While they're coming, your engineers can be building more ships like this one."

The new vessel did not make another voyage until nine sister ships were ready and manned, each with two Terrestrial officers and one Callistonian gunner. All ten took to the ether at once, and the hexan fleet melted away like frost-crystals before a summer sun. A few weeks of carnage and destruction and not a hexan was within range of the detectors of Callisto--they were gone!

"This is the first time in years that Callisto's air has been free of the hexans," Czuv said, thoughtfully. "With your help we have reduced their strength to a fraction of what it was, but they have not given up. They will return, with a higher acceleration than even you Terrestrials, powerful as you are, can stand."

"Certainly they will, but you will be no worse off than you were before--you can return to your own highly effective tactics."

"We are infinitely better off for your help. You have given us a new lease on life...."

He broke off as a flaring light sprang into being upon the portal board and the observer of Exit One made his report--there was a hexan vessel in the air, location 425 over VJ-42.

"There's one left! Let us get him! No, he's ours!" Confused shouts arose from the bull-pen; but the original superplane was at the top of the call-board and accordingly King, Breckenridge, and Czuv embarked upon an expedition more hazardous far than they had supposed--an expedition whose every feature was relayed to those in the portal by the automatic lookouts upon the rims and which was ended before a single supporting Callistonian plane could be launched.

For the enemy vessel was not the last of the low-powered hexan vessels, as everyone had supposed--it was the first of the high-powered craft, arriving long before its appearance was expected. Before its terrific acceleration and savage onslaught, the superplane might as well have been stationary and unarmed. After his long dive downward, King could not even leave the atmosphere--the hexan was upon them within a few seconds, even though the stupendous battery of rockets, full driven, had roared almost instantly into desperate action. Bomb after bomb Breckenridge hurled, with full radio control, fighting with every resource at his command, but in vain. The frightful torpedoes were annihilated in mid-flight; and nose, tail-assembly, and wings were sheared neatly from the warplane by a sizzling plane of force. Side rockets and torpedo tubes were likewise sliced away and the helpless body of the Callistonian cruiser, falling like a plummet, was caught and held by a tractor ray. Captor and captive settled toward the ground.

"This is a signal honor," observed Captain Czuv when he had revived. "It has been many, many cycles since they have taken Callistonians captive. They kill us at every opportunity. Is it your custom to destroy yourselves in a situation such as this?"

"It is not. While we live there is hope."

"Not ours. Unless they have made enormous strides in psychological mechanisms, they cannot tear from our minds any secrets we really wish to keep. That is useless," he went on, as King lifted a hand-weapon. "You will have no opportunity whatever to use it," and he was right.

A searing beam of energy drove them out of the vessel, then electro-magnetic waves burned every metallic object out of their possession. Burning rays herded them into the hexan sphere and into a small room, whose door clanged shut behind them.

"Ah, two are humans of a strange breed!" a snarling voice barked from the wall, in the Callistonian language. "Our deductions were accurate, as usual--it is to the humans of Planet Three, whose bodies are a trifle less puny than those of the humanity of the satellites, that we owe our recent reverses. However, those reverses were merely temporary--humanity, no matter what its breed, shall very shortly disappear from the satellites. Now, you scum of the Solar System, you shall be permitted to witness an entrancing spectacle on the way to our headquarters, where all your knowledge is to be taken from you before you die, lingeringly and horribly. There is a strange space-vessel nearing us probably searching for the one we took and which you dogs of Callisto must have been fortunate enough to take from us before we could study and kill its human cargo. Watch its destruction and cringe--and know, in your suffering, that the more you suffer, the greater shall be our enjoyment."

"I believe that," King acknowledged. As all three prisoners stared at the wall-screen, upon which was pictured a huge football of scarred grey steel, Czuv was amazed to see the faces of Breckenridge and King light up with fierce smiles of pleasure and anticipation.

"You dissemble well," remarked the Callistonian. "That will rob them of much pleasure."

"They'll get robbed of more than that," King returned. "This is too good to keep, and since they cannot understand English, I'll tell you something. I told you about Stevens. He apparently wasn't killed, as we thought. He must have escaped, and there is the result. That ship there is far from innocent--her being so far out of range of any of our power-plants proves that. That vessel is the _Sirius_--the research laboratory of the IPC--the Inter-Planetary Corporation! It carries the greatest scientific minds of three of the inner planets, and it is loaded with pure poison or it wouldn't be here. Oh, you hexans, what you have got coming to you!"

* * * * *

_Concluding a Thrilling New Serial of Interplanetary Life and Travel by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D._

_Author of "Skylark of Space," and "Skylark Three"_

PART III

Spacehounds of IPC

_The question of rays--their expanding power for good and evil--is receiving increasing attention from scientists. The x-ray has been found to be very beneficial, given in certain quantities, but extremely inimical to health, and even fatal, if too much exposure is given. The powers of the cosmic rays have not been fully discovered as yet. And there is no reason to doubt the theory that there may be found still more destructive and powerful rays. Even wars are becoming a more dangerous plaything for nations of our world--to say nothing of other possible enemies from other parts of our universe. Stevens and Nadia Newton meet with thrilling experiences galore in this concluding instalment._

What Went Before:

The Interplanetary Vessel _Arcturus_ sets out for Mars, with Breckenridge as chief pilot, carrying on board, besides its regular crew and some passengers, the famous Dr. Stevens, designer of space ships and computer. He checks computations made by astronomers stationed in floating observatories, and after he has located any trouble and suggests a plan for minimizing the hazards of the trip from the earth to Mars he reports his findings and suggestions to Mr. Newton, chief of the Interplanetary Corporation.

Stevens then takes Nadia, Mr. Newton's beautiful young daughter, on a specially conducted sight-seeing tour of the _Arcturus_ and thoroughly explains to her all of the works of the vessel. Nadia has herself had a good science education. While they are down at the bottom of the ship--nearing the end of their tour--Stevens feels a barely perceptible movement of the vessel from its course. When he turns on the visiplate, he is horrified to find that a mysterious ray of unparalleled power has neatly sliced the _Arcturus_ in several places.

Nadia and Stevens are completely separated from the rest of the crew and passengers of the ship, so they get into a lifeboat, which is equipped for a limited amount of space travel. Despite the strict and apparently effective vigilance of the enemy destroyer, Stevens and Nadia make their getaway in the lifeboat, which they aptly call "Forlorn Hope," and finally make a safe landing on Ganymede, where Stevens almost completes a power-plant and a radio transmitter, to enable him to communicate with the earth or with the IPV _Sirius_, which is used by Westfall and Brandon (two of the world's best scientists) as a floating laboratory.

They start for Cantrell's Comet, where Stevens acquires the necessary material for his giant transmitting tube, heads back to Ganymede, when their ship is cut, top and bottom, by a strong ray-beam. Stevens and Nadia soon find that the other ship is manned by friendly beings from Saturn. Together they plan against their common foes--the Hexans--who are enemies of the universe. After helping the Saturnians to repair their power plant, they start back to Ganymede, aided by their new friends from the frigid civilization. Finally, however, Stevens succeeds in connecting, by radio, with the _Sirius_ and his scientist friends on board it, who rush to the aid of the two castaways. It is while the castaways are captives of the Hexans that help looms near.

CHAPTER IX

The _Sirius_ Takes a Hand

The _Sirius_ loafed along through the ether at normal acceleration just outside the orbit of Mars and a million miles north of the ecliptic plane. In the control room, which had been transformed into a bewilderingly complete laboratory, Norman Brandon strode up and down, waving his arms, his unruly black hair on end, addressing savagely his friend and fellow-scientist, who sat unmoved and at ease.

"For cat's sake, Quince, let's get busy! They're outside somewhere, since the police have scoured every cubic kilometer within range of the power plants without finding a trace of them. We've got the power question licked right now--with these fields we can draw sixty thousand kilofranks from cosmic radiation, which is lots more than we'll ever need. We haven't drawn a frank from a plant in a month, and we've had to cut our field strength down to a whisper to keep from burning out our accumulators. We can hunt as far as Neptune easy--we can go to Alpha Centauri if we want to. This thing of piffling and monkeying around here's pulling my cork, and for the ten thousand four hundred and sixty seventh time I say _let's prowl_ and _prowl now_! In fact, I'm getting so sick of sticking around doing nothing that I'm going out anyway, if I have to go alone in a lifeboat!"

Impetuous and violent as Brandon had always been, never before had he gone to such lengths as to suggest a disruption of the partnership; and Westfall, knowing that Brandon, in his most violent moments, never threatened idly, thought long before he replied.

"You will not go alone, of course. If you insist upon going without further preparation I will go too, no matter how foolish I think such a course to be. We have power, it is true, but in all other respects we are in no condition to meet an opponent having command of such resources as must certainly be possessed by those who attacked the _Arcturus_. Our detectors are inefficient, our system of vision is crude, to say the least, and many other things are still in the experimental stage. We have not the slightest idea whom or what we may encounter. It is all too probable that we would simply be throwing away uselessly the lives of more good men. It is also foolish from a general viewpoint, for as you already know, we and our assistants happen to be in better position to study these things than is any one else at the present time. However, I will compromise with you. We can learn much in a month if you will really try, instead of wasting time in fuming around the ship and indulging in these idiotic tantrums. If you will buckle down and really study the problems confronting us for thirty days, we will set out at the end of that time, ready or not."

"All x. I hate to do it, but we've been together too long to bust it up now," and Brandon turned toward his bench. Scarcely had he reached it when a series of dots and dashes roared from an amplifier. Both men leaped for the receiver which had so unexpectedly burst into sound, reaching it just as it relapsed into silence, and from the tape of the recorder they read the brief message.

"...h four seven ganymede point oh four seve...."

"That's Steve!" yelled Brandon. "Nobody else could build an ultra-sender! Direction?"

"No need of calculating distance or direction. Ganymede is the third major satellite of Jupiter."

"Sure. Of course, Quince--never thought of that. Dope enough--point oh four seven."

As Stevens had told Nadia, the message was completely informing to those for whom it was intended, and soon Brandon's answer was flying toward the distant satellite. He then started to call the officers of the Inter-planetary Corporation, but was restrained by his conservative friend.

"It would be better to wait a while, Norman. In a few hours we will know what to tell them."

At high acceleration the _Sirius_ drove toward the Jupiter-Earth-North plane, and Brandon calculated from his own bearings and from the current issue of the "Ephemeris" the time at which Stevens' reply should be received. Two minutes before that time he was pacing up and down in front of the ultra-receiver, and fifteen seconds after it he snapped:

"Come on, Perce, get busy! Shake a leg!"

"Oh, come, Norman; give him a few minutes' leeway, at least," said Westfall, with amused tolerance. "Even if your calculations are that accurate--which of course they are," he added hastily at a stormy glance from hot black eyes, "since we received that message direct, instead of through one of our relay stations, Stevens probably has been throwing it around for hours or perhaps days, looking for us, and the shock of hearing from us at last might well have put him out of control for a minute or two."

The carrier wave hissed into the receiver, forestalling Brandon's fiery reply, followed closely by the code signals they had been expecting. As soon as the story had been told, and while Brandon was absorbed in the scientific addenda of Stevens, Westfall thoughtfully called up Newton, Nadia's father.

"Nadia is alive, free, safe, well, and happy," he shot out without preliminary or greeting, as soon as the now lined features of the director showed upon the communicator screen, and the careworn countenance smoothed magically into the keen face of the fighting Newton of old, as Westfall recounted rapidly the tale of the castaways.

"They apparently have not suffered in any way," he concluded. "All that Stevens wants is some cigarettes, and your daughter's needs, while somewhat more numerous than his, seem to be only clothes, powder, perfume, and candy. Therefore we need not worry about them. The fate of the others is still unknown, but there seems to be a slight possibility that some of them may yet be rescued. You may release as much or as little of this story as may seem desirable. Stevens is still sending data of a highly technical nature. We shall arrive there at 21:32 next Tuesday."

* * * * *

In due time the message from Ganymede ended and Brandon, with many pages of his notebook crammed with figures and equations, snapped off the power of the receiver and turned to his bench. Gone was the storming, impetuous rebel; his body was ruled solely by the precise and insatiable brain of the research scientist.

"He's great, that kid Perce! When I see him, I'm going to kiss him on both cheeks. He's got enough dope on them to hang them higher than Franklin's kite, and we'll nail those jaspers to the cross or I'm a polyp! He's crazier than a loon in most of his hunches, but he's filled four of our biggest gaps. There is such a thing, as a ray-screen, you kill-joy, and there are also lifting or tractor rays--two things I've been trying to dope out and that you've been giving me the Bronx cheer on. The Titanians have had a tractor ray for ages--he sent me complete dope on it--and the Jovians have got them both. We'll have them in three days, and it ought to be fairly simple to dope out the opposite of a tractor, too--a pusher or presser beam. Say, round up the gang, will you, while I'm licking some of this stuff into shape for you to tear apart? Where are Venus and Mars? Um ... m ... m. Tell Alcantro and Fedanzo to come over here pronto--give 'em a special if necessary. We'll pick up Dol Kenor and Pyraz Amonar on the way--no, get them to Tellus, too. Then we'll get action quicker. Those four are all I want--get anybody else you want to come along."

His hands playing over the keys of an enormous calculating machine, Brandon was instantly immersed in a profound mathematico-physical problem; deaf and blind to everything about him. Westfall, knowing well that far-reaching results would follow Brandon's characteristic attack, sat down at the controls of the communicator. He first called Mars, the home planet of Alcantro and Fedanzo, the foremost force-field experts of three planets; and was assured in no uncertain terms that those rulers of rays were ready and anxious to follow wherever Brandon and Westfall might lead. Thence to Venus, where Dol Kenor, the electrical wizard, and Pyraz Amonar, the master of mechanism, also readily agreed to accompany the expedition. He then called the General-in-Chief of the Interplanetary Police, requesting a detail of two hundred picked men for the hazardous venture. These most important calls out of the way, he was busy for over an hour giving long-distance instructions so that everything would be in readiness for the servicing of the immense space-cruiser the following Tuesday night.

Having guarded against everything his cautious and far-seeing mind could envisage, he went over to Brandon's desk and sat down, smoking contemplatively until the idea had been roughed out in mathematical terms.

"Here's the rough draft of the ray screen, Quince. We generate a blanket frequency, impressed upon the ultra carrier wave. That's old stuff, of course. Here's the novelty, in equation 59. With two fields of force, set up from data 27 to 43, it will be possible actually to project a pure force of such a nature that it will react to de-heterodyne the blanketing frequency at any predetermined distance. That, of course, sets up a barrier against any frequency of the blanketed band. Incidentally, an extension of the same idea will enable us to see anywhere we want to look--calculate a retransmitting field."

"One thing at a time, please. That screen may be possible, but those fields will never generate it. Look at datum 31, in which your assumptions are unsound. In order to make any solution at all possible you have assumed cosine squared theta negligible. Mathematically, it is of course vanishingly small compared to the first power of the cosine, but fields of that type must be _exact_, and your neglect of the square is indefensible. Since you cannot integrate with the squared term in place, your whole solution fails."

"Not necessarily. We'll go back to 29, and put in sine squared theta minus one equal to z sub four. That gives us a coversed sine in 30, and then we integrate...."

Thus the argument raged, and all the assistants whose work was not too pressing gathered around unobtrusively, for it was from just such fierce discussions as this that the ultra-radio and other epoch-making discoveries had come into being. Yard after yard of calculator paper was filled with equations and computations. Weirdly shaped curves were drawn, with arguments at every point--arguments hot and violent from Brandon, from Westfall cold and precise, backed by lightning calculations and with facts and diagrams culled from the many abstruse works of reference, which by this time literally covered the bench and overflowed upon the floor.

It was in this work that the strikingly different temperaments and abilities of the two scientists were revealed. Brandon never stood still, but walked around jerkily, chewing savagely the stem of an ancient and reeking pipe, gesticulating vigorously, the while his keen and agile mind was finding a way over, around, or through the apparently insuperable obstacles which beset their path; by means of mathematical and physical improvisations, which no one not inspired by sheer genius could have evolved. Westfall, seated quietly at the calculator, mercilessly shredded Brandon's theories to ribbons, pointing out their many flaws with his cold, incisive reasoning and with rapid calculations of the many factors involved. Then Brandon would find a remedy for each weakness in turn and, when Westfall could no longer find a single flaw in the structure, they would toss the completed problem upon a table and attack the next one with unabated zeal. Brandon, in his light remark that the two made one real scientist, had far understated the case--those two brains, each so powerful and each so perfectly complementing the other, comprised the master-scientist who was to revolutionize science completely in a few short years.

To such good purpose did they labor that the calculations were practically finished by the time they reached the earth. There the ship was serviced with a celerity that spoke volumes for the importance of her mission--even the _Aldebaran_, the dazzlingly gold-plated queen of the fleet, waited unattended and disregarded on minus time while the entire force of the Interplanetary Corporation concentrated upon the battle-scarred old hulk of the _Sirius_. Brandon was surprised when he saw the two companies of police, but characteristically accepted without question the wisdom of any decision of his friend, and cordially greeted Inspector-General Crowninshield, only a year or so older than himself, but already in charge of a Division.

"Keen-looking bunch, Crown. Lot of different outfits--volunteers for special duty from the whole Tellurian force?"

"Yes. Everybody wanted to go, and there threatened to be trouble over the selection, so we picked the highest ratings from the whole Service. If there ever was such a thing as a picked force, we shall have it with us."

"What d'you mean, 'us'? You aren't going, are you?"

"Try to keep me from it! The names of all five of us I-G's were put in a hat, and I was lucky."

"Well, you may come in handy, at that," Brandon conceded. "And here's the big boss himself. Hi, Chief!"

"Ho, Brandon! Ho, Westfall!" Newton, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the IPC, shook hands with the two scientists. "Your Martians and Venerians are in Lounge Fifteen. I suppose that you have a lot of things to thrash out, so you may as well start now. Everything is being attended to--I'll take charge now."

"You going along, too?" asked Brandon.

"Going along, _too_? I'm _running_ this cruise!" Newton declared. "I may take advice from you on some things and from Crowninshield on others, but I am in charge!"

"All x--it's a relief, at that," and Brandon and Westfall went to join their fellow-scientists in the designated room of the space-cruiser.

* * * * *

What a contrast was there as the representatives of three worlds met! All six men were of the same original stock or of a similar evolution--science has not, even yet, decided the question definitely. Their minds were very much alike, but their respective environments had so variantly developed their bodily structures that to outward seeming they had but little in common.

Through countless thousands of generations the Martians had become acclimated to a planet having little air, less water, and characterized by abrupt transitions from searing heat to bitter cold: from blinding light to almost impenetrable darkness. Eight feet tall and correspondingly massive, they could barely stand against the gravitational force of the Earth, almost three times as great as that of Mars, but the two Martian scientists struggled to their feet as the Terrestrials entered.

"As you were, fellows--lie down again and take it easy." Brandon suggested in the common Interplanetarian tongue. "We'll be away from here very soon, then we can ease off."

"We greet our friends standing as long as we can stand," and, towering a full two feet above Brandon's own six-feet-two, Alcantro and Fedanzo in turn engulfed his comparatively tiny hand in a thick-shelled paw and lifted briefly the inner lids of quadruply-shielded eyes. For the Martian skin is not like ours. It is of incredible thickness; dry, pliable, rubbery, and utterly without sensation: heavily lined with fat and filled throughout its volume with tiny air-cells which make it an almost perfect non-conductor of heat and which prevent absolutely the evaporation of the precious moisture of the body. For the same reasons their huge and cat-like eyes are never exposed, but look through sealed, clear windows of membrane, over which may be drawn at will one or all of four pairs of lids--lids transparent, insensible, non-freezable, air-spaced insulators. Even the air they exhale carries from their bodies a minimum of the all-important heat and moisture, for the passages of their nostrils do not lead directly to the lungs, as do ours. They are merely the intakes for a tortuous system of tubes comprising a veritable heat-exchanger, so that the air finally expelled is in almost perfect equilibrium with the incoming supply in temperature and in moisture content. A grayish tan in color, naked and hairless--though now, out of deference to Terrestrial conventions, wearing light robes of silk--indifferent alike to any extreme of heat or cold, light or darkness: such were the two forbidding beings who arose to greet their Terrestrial friends, then again reclined.

"I suppose that you have been given to drink?" Westfall made sure that they had been tendered the highest hospitality of Mars.

"We have drunk full deeply, thanks; and it was not really necessary, for we drank scarcely three weeks ago."

Brandon and Westfall turned then and greeted the two Venerians, as different from the Martians as they were from the Terrestrials. Of earthly stature, form, and strength, yet each was encased in a space-suit stretched like a drum-head, and would live therein or in the special Venerian rooms of the vessel as long as the journey should endure. For the atmosphere of Venus is more than twice as dense as ours, is practically saturated with water-vapor, carries an extremely high concentration of carbon dioxide, and in their suits and rooms is held at a temperature of one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. The lenses of their helmets were of heavy, yellowish-red composition, protecting their dead-white skins and red eyes from all actinic rays--for the Venerian lives upon the bottom of an everlasting sea of fog and his thin epidermis, utterly without pigmentation, burns and blisters as frightfully at the least exposure to actinic light as does ours at the touch of a red-hot iron.

Out in space at last, cruising idly with the acceleration set at a point bearable for the Martians, Westfall called the meeting to order and outlined the situation facing them. Brandon then handed around folios of papers, upon which the Venerians turned the invisible infra-red beams of the illuminators upon their helmets, thus flooding them with the "light" to which their retinas were most responsive.

"Here's the data," Brandon began. "As you see from Sheet 1, we can already draw any amount of power we shall need from cosmic radiation alone...."

"Perpetual motion--ridiculous!" snapped from the sending disk upon the helmet of the master of mechanism.

"Not at all, Amonar," put in his fellow Venerian, "any more than a turbo-generator at the foot of a waterfall is perpetual motion. Those radiations originate we know not where, probably as a result of intra-atomic reactions. The fields of force of our hosts merely intercept these radiations, as a water-driven turbine intercepts the water. We merely use a portion of their energy before permitting them to go on, to we know not what end. Truly you have made a notable achievement in science, Tellurian friends, and we congratulate you upon its accomplishment. Please proceed."

"Upon the following sheets are described the forces employed by the Jovians, as we shall call them until we find out who or what they really are. We will discuss these forces later. For each force we have already calculated a screen, and we have also calculated various other forces of our own, with which we hope to arm ourselves before we reach Ganymede. The problems facing us are complex, since there are some nine thousand forcebands of the order in which we are working, each differing from all the others as much as torque differs from tension, or as much as red differs from green. Therefore we have appealed to you for help, knowing that we could do but little alone. Alcantro and Fedanzo will supervise the construction of the generators of the various fields from these calculations. Dol Kenor will correlate power and electricity to and with the fields. Westfall and I will help work out the theoretical difficulties as they arise. Pyraz Amonar, who can devise and build a machine to perform any conceivable mechanical task, will help us all in the many mechanical difficulties we shall certainly encounter. Discussion of any point is now in order."

* * * * *

Step by step and equation after equation the calculations and plans were gone over, until every detail was clear in each mind. Then the men bent to their tasks; behind them not only the extraordinarily complete facilities of that gigantic workshop which was the _Sirius_; but also the full power of the detachment of police--the very cream of the young manhood of the planet. Week after toilsome week the unremitting labor went on, and little by little the massive cruiser of the void became endowed with an offensive and defensive armament incredible. An armament conceived in the fertile and daring brain of a sheer genius, guided only by the knowledge that such things were already in existence somewhere; reduced to working theory by a precise, mathematical logician; translated into fields of force by the greatest known experts; powered by the indefatigable efforts of an electrical wizard; made possible by the artful mechanical devices of the greatest inventor that three worlds had ever known! Thus it was that they approached Ganymede, ready, with blanketing screens full out, save for one narrow working band, and with a keen-eyed observer at every plate. When even the hyper-critical Westfall was convinced that their preparations were as complete as they could be made with the limited information at hand, Brandon directed a beam upon the satellite and tapped off a brief message:

"stevens ganymede will arrive in about ten hours direct carrier beam toward sun we can detect it and will follow it to wherever you are sirius."

"ipv sirius," came the reply, "everything here, all x glad to see you thanks newton and stevens."

Brandon, at the controls, scanning his screens narrowly, dropped the vessel down to within a mile or two of the point of origin of Stevens' carrier beam without incident; then spoke to Westfall, at his side, with a grin.

"Nice layout the kid's got down there, Quince. It's too bad--don't look like we're going to get any action for our money a-tall. 'Sa shame, too--what's the use of wasting it, now that we've got it all made?"

"We are not done yet," cautioned Westfall, and even as he spoke an alarm bell burst into strident clamor--one of their far-flung detector screens was telling the world that it had encountered a dangerous frequency. The new ultra-lights flared instantly along the line automatically laid down by the detector, and upon the closely ruled micrometer screen of Brandon's desk there glowed in natural color the image of a globular space-ship, approaching them with terrific speed.

"Men all stationed, of course, Crown?"

"Stationed and ready." Crowninshield, phones at his ears and microphone at his lips, was staring intently into his own plate.

"Kinda think I'll do most of it from here, but you can't always tell. If they get inside my guard you all know what to do."

"All x."

Expecting another such hollow victory as the other Hexan vessel had won over the defenseless _Arcturus_, the small stranger flashed nearer and nearer that huge and featureless football of armor steel. Within range, she launched her flaming plane of energy, but this time that Jovian sheet of force did not encounter unprotected and non-resisting steel. Upon the outer ray-screen, flaming white into incandescent defense, the furious bolt spent itself, and in the instant of the launching of the searing blade of flame, Brandon had gone into action. Switch after switch drove home, and one after another those frightful fields of force, those products of the mightiest minds of three planets, were hurled out against the tiny Jovian sphere. Driven as they were by the millions upon millions of horsepower stored in the accumulators of the _Sirius_ they formed a coruscating spherical shell of intolerable energy all around the enemy vessel, but even their prodigious force was held at bay by the powerful defensive screens of the smaller space-ship. But attack the Jovian could not, every resource at her command being necessary to fend off the terrific counter-attack of her intended prey, and she turned in flight. Small and agile as she was, the enormous mass of the _Sirius_ precluded any possibility of maneuvering with the Jovian, but Brandon had no intention of maneuvering. Rapid as the motions of the stranger were and frantic as was her dodging, the terrific forces of the tractor beams of the Interplanetary Vessel held her in an unbreakable grip, and although she dragged the massive _Sirius_ hither and thither, she could not escape.

"Hm ... m ... m," mused Brandon. "We seem to be getting nowhere fast. How much power we using, Mac, and how much have we got coming in?"

"Output eighty-five thousand kilofranks," replied MacDonald, the first assistant. "Intake forty-nine thousand."

"Not so good--can't hold out forever at that rate. Shove out the receptor screens to the limit and drive 'em. They figure a top of sixty thousand, but we ought to pick up a little extra from that blaze out there. Drive 'em full out or up to sixty-five, whichever comes first. Can't seem to crush his screens, so I guess we'll have to try something else," and a thoughtful expression came over his face as he slowly extended his hand toward another switch, with a questioning glance at Westfall.

"Better not do that yet, Norman. Use that only as a last resort, after everything else has failed."

"Yeah--I'm scared to death of trying it, and it isn't necessary yet. He must have an open slit somewhere to work through, just as we have. I'll feel around for it a while."

"Is there any way of hetrodyning the new visiray upon the exploring frequency?"

"Hm ... m.... Never thought of that--it would be nice, too.... I think we can do it, too. Watch 'em, Quince, and holler if they start anything."

He abandoned his desk and established the necessary connections between the visiray apparatus and the controls of his board. There was a fierce violet-white glare from the plate as he closed the switch, and he leaped back with his hands over his eyes, temporarily blinded.

"Wow, that's hot stuff!" he exclaimed. "It works, all x, to the queen's taste," as he donned his heavy ray-goggles and resumed his place.

After making certain that the visiray was precisely synchronized and phased with the searching frequency, he built up the power of that beam until it was using twenty thousand kilofranks. Then, by delicately manipulating the variable condensers and inductances of his sensitive shunting relay circuits, he slowly shifted that frightful rod of energy from frequency to frequency, staring into the brilliant blankness of his micrometer screen as he did so. After a few minutes of search the screen darkened somewhat, revealing the image of the Jovian globe. Brandon instantly shifted into that one channel the entire power of his attack; steadying the controls to bring the sphere of the Jovians into the sharpest possible focus, knowing that he had found the open slit and that through it there was pouring upon the enemy the full power of his terrible weapon.

In the fraction of a second before the Jovians could detect the attack and close the slit, he saw a portion of the wall of their vessel flare into white heat and literally explode outward in puffs and gouts of flaming, molten metal and of incandescent gases. But the thrust, savage as it was, had not been fatal and the enemy countered instantly. Now that the crushing force of the full-coverage attack was lessened for a moment, through another slit there poured a beam of energy equal to the Terrestrials' own--a beam of such intense power that the outer screen of the _Sirius_ flared from red through the spectrum, to and beyond the violet, and went black in less than a second, and the inner screen had almost gone down before Brandon's lightning hands could restore the complete coverage that so effectively blanketed the forces of the enemy.

"Well, we're back to the _status quo_," announced Brandon, calmly. "It's a good gag they didn't have time to locate our working slit--if they had pushed that stuff through our open channel, we'd have gotten frizzled up some around the edges. As it was, we got the edge on that exchange--take it from your Uncle Dudley, Quince, that bird knows that he's been nudged!"

* * * * *

Again he searched the entire band for an opening, but could find none. The enemy had apparently retired into a tightly closed shell of energy. The small vessel no longer struggled, nor even moved, but was merely resisting passively.

"Not an open channel, not even one for him to work through--he can't wiggle. Well, that won't get him anything. We're so much bigger than he is, that we can outlast him and will get him some time, since he's bound to run out of power before we do. I don't believe he can receive anything, sealed up as he is, and he can't have accumulators enough more efficient than ours to make up the difference, can he, Quince?"

"It is quite possible. For instance, although we have never heard of any progress being made along such lines, it has been pointed out repeatedly that synthesis of a radio-active element of very high atomic weight would theoretically yield an almost perfect accumulator--one many thousands of times as efficient as ours in mass-to-energy ratio. Then, too, you realize, of course, that there is a bare possibility that intra-atomic energy may not be absolutely impossible."

"Nix on that, Quince. I'll stand for a lot, but not for that last idea! It's hard to say that anything's impossible, of course, except things made so by definition or by being contrary to observational facts, but the best work shows that intra-atomic energy is just about as impossible as anything can well be. It has been shown pretty conclusively that all ordinary matter is already in its most stable state, so that work must be done upon any ordinary atom to decompose it. Besides, if he had either radioactive accumulators or intra-atomic energy, he would have cut us up long ago. Nope, the answer is that he's probably yelled for help and is trying to hold out until it gets here," was Brandon's rejoinder.

"What can we do about it?" asked Quince.

"Don't know yet. I do know, though, that we aren't half as ready for trouble as I thought we were. There's a dozen things I want to do that I can't because we haven't got the stuff. Don't say 'I told you so,' either--I know you did! You're the champion ground-and-lofty thinker of the century. Alcantro!

"Here!"

"Round up the gang, will you, and figure me out a screen and a set of meters that will indicate an open band? We lose too much time feeling around anyhow, and we're too apt to take one on the chin while we're doing it. Also, you ought to make it so it'll shoot a jolt into the opening, while you're at it," said Brandon.

"We shall begin at once," and the massive Martian as he replied, stepped over to the calculating machine.

"Well, Quince, we can't do much to him this way--he's crawled into a hole and pulled the hole in after him. Gosh, I wish we had more stuff!"

"After all, we have everything whose necessity and practicability could have been foreseen in the light of our information. We can, of course, go further."

"You chirped it! But we can't let things ride this way or we'll get our hair singed. We'll have to decorate him with the grand slam, I guess."

"Yes, it seems as though the time for emergency measures has arrived."

"Put everything on the center of the band?"

"That is probably the best frequency to use in a case of this kind."

"He can't control, so we'll push him down close to the ground before we go to work on him--so we don't have so far to fall if anything goes screwy with the works. Here's hoping nothing gives away!"

The _Sirius_, almost against the flaming screens of the Jovian, and both vessels very close to the surface of the satellite, Brandon tested the power leads briefly, adjusted dials and coils, then touched the button which actuated the relays--relays which in turn drove home the gigantic switches that launched a fearsome and as yet untried weapon. Instantly released, the full seven hundred thousand kilofranks of their stupendous batteries of accumulators drove into the middle frequency of the attacking band, and Brandon's heart was in his mouth as he stared into the plate to see what would happen. He saw! Everything in the _Sirius_ held fast, and under the impact of the inconceivable plane of force, the screens of the enemy vessel flared instantly into an even more intense incandescence and in that same fleeting instant went down, and all defenses vanished as the metal sphere fell apart into two halves, as would an apple under the full blow of a broad-axe.

Brandon quickly shut off his power and stared in relief into the central compartment of the globular ship of space, now laid open, and saw there figures, one or two of which were moving weakly. As he looked, one of these feebly attempted to raise a peculiar, tubular something toward a helplessly fettered body. Even as Brandon snatched away the threatening weapon with a beam of force, he recognized the captive.

"Great Cat, there's Breckenridge!" he gasped, and directed a lifting beam upon the bound and unconscious prisoner. Rapidly, but carefully, he was brought through the double airlock and into the control room, where his shackles were cut away and where he soon revived under vigorous and skilful treatment.

"Any more of you in there? Did I hit any of you with that beam?" demanded Brandon, intensely, as soon as Breckenridge showed signs of understanding.

"King's in there somewhere, and there's a Callistonian human being that you mustn't kill," the chief pilot replied, weakly and with great effort in every word. "Don't believe that you hit anybody direct, but the shock was pretty bad." Having delivered his message, he lay back, exhausted.

"All x. Crown, give me a squad...."

"Not on your life!" barked the general. "This is my job and I'll do it myself. Your job is fighting the _Sirius_--stay with it!"

"Not in seven thousand years--I'm in on this, too," Brandon protested, but was decisively overruled by Newton.

"You belong right here at this board, since no one else can handle it the way you can. Stay here!" he commanded.

"All right," grudgingly assented the physicist, and held the _Sirius_ upright, with her needle-sharp stern buried a few feet deep in the ground.

He watched the wreckage jealously while Crowninshield and forty helmeted men issued from the service door in the lower ultra-light compartment and advanced upon the two halves of the enemy vessel. As no hostile demonstrations ensued, scaling ladders were quickly placed and with weapons at the alert the police boarded the hemispheres, manacled the still helpless beings visible, and, after laying down a fog of stupefying gas, vanished into compartments beyond the metal partitions. After a short time they reappeared and climbed down the scaling ladders, carrying several inert forms, and Brandon spoke into his transmitter.

"King all x, Crowninshield?"

"I think so. Not being in the control room he was not as badly shocked by the passage of the beam as were Breckenridge and those you saw. The things in the other rooms were about ready to fight, so we gave them a little whiff of tritylamin, but Captain King will be as good as ever in a few minutes."

"Fine business!" The police entered the _Sirius_, the service doors clanged shut, and Brandon turned to Westfall.

"While they're coming up, I guess I'll pick up Perce and Miss Newton. We'd better get them aboard and beat it, while we're all in one piece!"

But even before he could send out the exploring beam of his communicator, the voice of Stevens came from the receiver.

"Hi, Brandon and Westfall! We've watched the whole show. Congratulations, fellows! Welcome to Ganymede! You are in our valley--we're upstream from you about three hundred meters; just below the falls, on the meadow side."

"All x," Brandon acknowledged. "We saw you. Come on out where we can pick you up. We've got to get away from here, and get away fast!"

"We'll carry off the pieces of that ship, too, Quince--we may be able to get a lot of pointers from it," and Brandon swung mighty tractor beams upon the severed halves of the Jovian vessel, then extended a couple of smaller rays to meet the two little figures racing across the smooth green meadow toward the _Sirius_.

CHAPTER X

Among Friends at Last

The time for the landing of the _Sirius_ was drawing near, and the castaways upon Ganymede had donned their only suits of earthly clothing, instead of the makeshifts of mole-skin, canvas, and leather they had been wearing so long. Thorns and underbrush had pierced and torn their once natty outing costumes, and sparks and flying drops of molten metal from Stevens' first crude forges had burned in them many gaping holes.

"I did the best I could with them, Steve, but they look pretty crumby," Nadia wrinkled her nose as she studied the anything but invisible seams, darns, and staring patches everywhere so evident, both in her own apparel of gray silk and in the heavy whipcord clothing of her companion.

"You did a great job, considering what you had to work with," he reassured her. "Besides, who cares about a few patches? I feel a lot more civilized in my own clothes, don't you?"

"Well ... yes," she admitted. "They're silk, anyway, even if they don't look like much, and I'm just reveling in the feel of them next to me after the horrible, rough, scratchy things I've been wearing. See anything yet?"

"Not yet." Stevens had been scanning the heavens with a pair of binoculars. "That doesn't mean much, though, as they'll be just about in the sun and they'll be coming like a scared dog. Might as well put away these glasses--we probably won't be able to see them until they're right on top of us."

"What shall we take with us?"

"Don't know--nothing, probably, since they must have a campaign already mapped out. I'd like to salvage a lot of this junk, but I'm afraid we won't be able to. I'm going to take my bow and arrows, though, aren't you?"

"Absolutely! That's one thing that's better than anything I ever had on Earth. This bow of mine is perfect."

"There they are! Three rousing cheers! Say, but that old hulk looks good to me!"

"Doesn't she, though!" cried Nadia, vibrant with excitement. "You know, Steve. I've hardly dared really to believe it until this very minute. Oh look! What's that?"

The _Sirius_ had stopped in midair and they could see, far in the distance, the tiny sphere of the Jovians, rushing to the attack.

"Oh, how horrible!" cried the girl, her voice breaking. "I'm afraid, Steve...."

"You needn't be, ace. I've told you they won't go off half-cocked as long as Westfall is on the job. They're ready for anything, or they wouldn't be here--but just the same I wish that they had that Titanian mirror and a couple of those bombs!"

In a moment more the Jovian plane of force was launched, the powerful ray-screens flared into white-hot, sparkling defense, and the battle was on. Held spell-bound as the castaways were by that spectacular duel, yet Stevens' trained mind warned him of the perils of their position.

"Grab your bow and we'll beat it!" and he rapidly led her away from the steel structures to an open hillside, well away from any projection, tree, or sharp point of rock. "If that keeps up very long, we're going to see some real fireworks, and I don't know whether there will be enough left of our plant here to salvage or not. Everything is grounded, of course, but I don't believe that ordinary grounds will amount to much against what's coming."

"What _are_ you talking about?" demanded Nadia.

"Look!" he replied, pointing, and as he spoke, a terrific bolt of lightning launched itself from the incandescent screen of the Jovian vessel upon their slender ultra-radio tower, which subsided instantly into a confused mass of molten and twisted metal.

* * * * *

As the power of the beams was increased and as the combatants drew nearer and nearer the ground, the lightning display grew ever more violent. Well below the canyon as the warring vessels were, the power-plant and penstock did not suffer at all and only a few discharges struck the _Forlorn Hope_--discharges which were carried easily to ground by the enormous thickness of her armor--but every prominent object for hundreds of yards below the _Hope_ was literally blasted out of existence. Radio tower, directors and fittings; trees, shrubs, sharp points of rock--all were struck again and again; fused, destroyed, utterly obliterated by the inconceivable energy being dissipated by those impregnable screens of force. Even almost flat upon the ground as the spectators were, each individual hair upon their heads strove fiercely to stand erect, so heavily charged was the very air. Stevens' arm was blue for days, such was Nadia's grip upon it, and she herself could scarcely breathe in that mighty arm's constriction--but each was conscious only of that incredibly violent struggle, of that duel to the death being waged there before their eyes with those frightful weapons, hitherto unknown to man. They saw the _Sirius_ triumphant, and Stevens led the dancing girl back into their dwelling of steel.

"Danger's all over now. Radio's gone, but we should fret a lot about that. It has done its stuff--we can use the communicators. And now, sweetheart, I'm going to kiss you--for the first time in seven lifetimes."

Locked in each other's arms, they watched the scene until Stevens thought it time to send his message. Then, running hand in hand toward the huge space-cruiser, they were snatched apart and drawn up toward the double airlocks of the main entrance. Pressure gradually brought up to normal, they were ushered into the control room, where Nadia glanced around quickly and almost took her father off his feet by her tempestuous rush into his arms.

"Oh, Daddy darling. I just knew you'd come along! I haven't seen you for a million years!" she exclaimed, rapturously. "And Bill, too--wonderful!" as she fervently embraced a young man wearing the uniform of a lieutenant of Interplanetary Police. "Ouch, Bill--you're breaking all my ribs!"

"Well, you cracked three of mine. Maybe you don't know how husky you are, but you've got a squeeze like a full grown boa constrictor!" He held her off at arms' length and studied her with admiration. "Gee, it's fine to see you again, Sis. You're looking great, too--I think I'll bring my girl out here to live. You always were a knockout, but now you're the loveliest thing I ever saw!"

He made his way through the group surrounding Stevens, while Nadia and her father talked earnestly.

"I'm Bill Newton. Thanks," he said, simply, holding out his hand, which was taken in a bone-crushing grip.

"Bring him over here, Bill!" Nadia called before Stevens could find a reply.

"I don't know how to say anything, Stevens," the officer continued, in embarrassment, as the two men turned to obey the summons. "She's a good kid, and we think a lot of her. We'd about given her up. We.... She.... Oh, rats, what's the use? You know what I mean. You're there, Stevens, like a...."

"Clam it, ace!" Stevens interrupted. "I get you, to nineteen decimals. And you don't half know just what a good kid she really is. She's the reason we're here--we were down pretty close to bed-rock for a while, she stood up when I wilted. She's got everything. She...."

"Clam it yourself, Steve! Don't believe a word of it, Dad and Bill. _Wilt_!" Nadia's voice dripped scorn. "Why, he di...."

"Please!" Newton's voice was somewhat husky as he silenced the clamor of the three young people, all talking at once. "I will not embarrass you further by trying to say something that no words can express. You told me that you would take care of her, and I learn that you have done so."

"I did what I could, but most of the credit belongs to her, no matter what she says," Stevens insisted. "Anyway, sir, here she is; alive, well and ... unharmed," and his eyes bore unflinchingly the piercing gaze of the older man, who was reassured and pleased by what he read therein. "One thing I want to say right now, though, that may make you feel like canceling the welcome. I loved Nadia even before the _Arcturus_ was attacked, and since then, coming to know her as I have, the feeling hasn't lessened any."

"Nadia has already told me all about you two," said her father, "and the welcome stands. If you could take care of her as well as you have done since you left the _Arcturus_, I have no doubt of your ability to take care of her for life. We have been examining the work you have done here, son, and the more I saw of it the more amazed I became that you could have succeeded as you did. We are deeply indebted.... Just a minute! There's my call--I'm wanted in Fifteen. I'll see you again directly."

"Hi, Norm!" Stevens further relieved the surcharged atmosphere. "As soon as you and Quince can leave those controls come over and see us, will you?"

"All x--coming up!" sounded Brandon's deep and pleasant bass, and the two rescuers, who had tactfully avoided the family reunion, came over and greeted the third of their triumvirate.

"Ho, Perce--you look fit." Brandon ran an expert hand over Stevens' arm and shoulder. "Looks as if he might last a round or two, doesn't he, Quince?"

"You are looking fine, Steve. Neither of you appear any the worse for your experiences. So this is Nadia? We have heard of you, Miss Newton."

"I believe that, knowing Dad," she replied. "Thanks, both of you, for digging us out. I've heard about you two, and I'm going to kiss you both."

Westfall, the silent and reserved, was taken aback, but Brandon met her more than half-way.

"All x, Nadia--payment in full received and hereby acknowledged," he laughed, as he allowed her feet to return to the floor. "Even if it was some stout lads from Mars and Venus that did all the work we'll take the reward--especially since Alcantro and Fedanzo couldn't feel even such a high-voltage salute as that one was, and I can't picture you kissing a Venerian even if you could get to him. Whenever you get lost again, be sure to let us know, now that you've got our address. If I know Perce at all, you've heard of us 'til you're sick of it and us--it's a weakness of his--talking too much."

"Why, it's no such th...." began Nadia, but broke off as an aide came up and saluted smartly.

"Pardon me, but General Crowninshield requests that Doctor Brandon, Doctor Westfall, and Doctor Stevens join the council in Lounge Fifteen as soon as convenient." He saluted again and turned away.

"Yes, that's right, folks--we've got to take a lot of steps, fast--see you later," and Brandon, taking each of the other two by an arm, marched them away toward the designated assembly room.

* * * * *

There, already seated at a long table, were Czuv, King, and Breckenridge, all fully recovered, engaged in earnest conversation with Newton and Crowninshield. Alcantro and Fedanzo, the Martian scientists, were listening intently, as were the two Venerians Dol Kenor and Pyraz Amonar. The eyes of the three newcomers, however, did not linger upon the group at the table, but were irresistibly drawn to one corner of the room, where six creatures lay in the heaviest manacles afforded by the stores of the Interplanetary Police. Not only were they manacled, but each was facing a ray-projector, held by a soldier whose expression showed plainly that he would rather press the lethal contact than not.

"Oh--those the things we're fighting?" Brandon stopped at the threshold and stared intently at the captive hexans. Goggling green eyes glaring venomously, they were lying quiet, but tense; mighty muscles ready to burst into berserk activity should the attention of a guard waver for a single instant.

But little more than half as large as the savage creatures with whom Stevens had fought in the mountain glade upon Ganymede, the hexans resembled those aborigines only as civilized men might resemble gigantic primordial savages of our own Earth. Brandon's gaze went from short, powerful legs up a round, red body to the enormous, freakish double pair of shoulders, with its peculiar universal jointing. From the double shoulders sprang four limbs, the front pair of which were undoubtedly arms, terminating in large, but fairly normal, hands. The intermediate limbs were longer than the legs and were much more powerful than the arms, and ended in members that were very evidently feet and hands combined. What in a human being would be the back of the hand was the sole of the foot--when walking upon that foot the long and dexterous thumb and fingers were curled up, out of the way and protected from injury, in the palm of the hand. From the monstrous shoulders there rose a rather long and very flexible, yet massive and columnar neck, supporting a head neither human nor bestial--a head utterly unknown to Terrestrial history or experience. The massive cranium bespoke a highly developed and intelligent brain, as did the three large and expressive, peculiar, triangular eyes. The three sensitive ears were very long, erect, and sharply pointed. Each was set immediately above an eye, one upon each side of the head and one in front. Each ear was independently and instantly movable in any direction, to catch the faintest sound. The head, like the body and limbs, was entirely devoid of hair. The horns, so prominent in the savages Stevens had seen, were in this highly intelligent race but vestigial--three small, sharp, black protuberances only an inch in length, one surmounting each ear, outlining the lofty forehead. The nose occupied almost the whole middle of the face and was not really a nose--it developed into a small and active proboscis. The chin was receding almost to the point of disappearance, so that the mouth, with its multiple rows of small, sharp, gleaming-white teeth, was almost hidden under the face instead of being a part of it. Such were the hexans, at whom the Big Three stared in undisguised amazement.

"Attention, please!" Newton called the meeting to order. "We have learned that all the passengers of the _Arcturus_, and all the crew save three, are alive and safe for the time being. Most of them are upon the satellite Europa. However, I understand that we are not yet sufficiently well armed to withstand such an attack in force as will certainly develop when we move to rescue them. This seems to be a war of applied physics--Doctor Brandon, as spokesman for the Scientific forces of the expedition, what are your suggestions?"

"Anticipating an attack in response to signals probably sent out by the enemy," replied Brandon. "I headed directly south immediately. We are now well south the ecliptic, and are traveling at considerably more than full Martian acceleration. Before making any suggestions, I should like to hear from Captain Czuv, who is more familiar than we are with the common enemy. Are they apt to follow us: can they detect us if we should drift at constant velocity; and can we search the brains of the prisoners with his Callistonian thought-exchanger, if he should build one with our help?"

"If they are close enough to us to overtake us without too much lost time, they will certainly attack us," Czuv answered at a nod from Newton. "Ordinarily they would pursue us to the limits of the Solar System if necessary, but since they have suffered reverses of late and cannot spare any vessels, they will probably not pursue us far. Yes, they can detect us, even without the driving rays, since this vessel uses much low-tension, low-frequency electricity in its automatic machinery, lights, and so on. No; our thought-transformer cannot take thoughts by force, and the hexans will exchange no ideas with us. They are implacable and deadly foes of all humanity, irrespective of planet or race. Mercy is to them unknown--they neither give nor take quarter."

"I can bear him out in that," Crowninshield interposed grimly. "The first one to recover snapped our ordinary handcuffs like so much thread and literally tore four men to pieces before the rest of us could ray him. Will you need me longer, Director Newton?"

"I think not. General. Captain Czuv, you have made no headway with them?" asked the Director.

"None whatever, as I foretold. They understand me thoroughly, since two of them speak my own tongue, but nothing that they have said can ever be repeated here. I knew from the first that all such attempts would be fruitless, but I have tried--and failed. I suggest what I suggested at first--put them to death, here and now, as they lie there, for most assuredly they will in some way contrive to take toll of lives of your own humanity if you allow them to live."

"You may be right," said Newton, "but neither the General nor myself can give the order for their death, since Interplanetary law does not countenance such summary action. However, the guards are fully warned of the peril, and will ray every prisoner at the first sign of unruliness. General Crowninshield, you may remove the prisoners and deal with them in accordance with...."

* * * * *

Pandemonium reigned. At Crowninshield's signal for the guards to leave the room with their captives, all six had strained furiously at their bonds and three of them had broken free in a flash, throwing themselves upon the guards with unthinkable ferocity. Stevens, seeing a ray-projector in a hand of one of the prisoners, hurled his heavy chair instantly and with terrific force. The projector flew into the air, shattered and useless, while the hexan was knocked into a corner by the momentum of the massive projectile and lay there, stunned and broken. Brandon, likewise reacting instantaneously, had bent over and seized a leg of the table, bracing his knee against the corner. With a mighty lunge of his powerful body he wrenched out the support and with a continuation of the same motion, he brought the jagged oak head of his terrible club down full upon the crown of the second hexan, who had already torn one guard apart and was leaping toward Czuv, his hereditary foe. In midflight he was dashed to the floor, his head a shapeless, pulpy mass, and Brandon, bludgeon again aloft, strode deeper into the fray. For a brief moment searing lethal beams probed here and there, chains clanked and snapped, once more that ponderous and irresistible oaken mace fell like the hammer of Thor, again spattering brains and blood abroad as it descended--then again came silence. The six erstwhile prisoners lay dead, but they had taken five of the guards with them--literally dismembered, hideously torn limb from limb by the superhuman, incredible physical strength and utter ferocity of the hexans.

By common consent the meeting was adjourned to another room, for the business in hand could not be postponed.

"Captain Czuv was right--we Tellurians could not believe in the existence of such a race without the evidence of our own senses." Newton reopened the meeting. "From this time on we take no prisoners. Doctor Brandon, you may resume."

"The detectors and lookouts will give ample warning of any attack, and Doctor Westfall has suggested that we should have all possible facts at hand before we try to decide upon a course of action. We should like to hear the full reports of Captain King, Captain Czuv, Chief Pilot Breckenridge, and Doctor Stevens."

The four men told their stories tersely and rapidly, while the others listened in deep attention. As the last speaker sat down, Newton again turned to Brandon, who silently jerked his head at Westfall, knowing his own inadequacy in such a situation--realizing that here was needed Westfall's cold and methodical thinking.

"Director Newton and gentlemen," Westfall spoke calmly and precisely. "We have much to do before we can meet the hexans upon equal terms. We have many new fields of force and rays to develop, of whose nature and necessity Doctor Brandon is already aware. Then, too, we must recalculate our visirays so that we can operate at greater range and efficiency. We must also examine the hexan space-ship which is towing, to do which it will be desirable to drift at constant velocity for a time. In it we may find instruments or devices as yet unknown to us. It also occurs to me that since this is an Interplanetary Police problem of the first magnitude, we should at once get in touch with Police Headquarters, so that the Peace Fleet can be armed as we ourselves are, or shall be, armed; for a large and highly efficient fleet will be necessary to do that which must be done. It is, of course, a foregone conclusion that Interplanetary humanity will support the humanity of Callisto against the hexans.

"It is also self-evident that we must stay here and rescue the Tellurians now upon Europa and Callisto, but we are not yet in position to decide just how that rescue is to be accomplished. Four courses are apparently open to us. First, to attempt it as soon as we shall have strengthened our armament as much as is now possible. That would invite a massed attack, and in my opinion would be foolish--probably suicidal. Second, to stand by at a distance until the rocket-ship is launched, then to escort it back to the Earth. Third, to aid the Callistonians as much as possible while awaiting the completion of the rocket-vessel. Fourth, and perhaps the most feasible and quickest, it may be possible for the Callistonian rocket-ships to bring out fellow-Tellurians, a few at a time, to us here out in space, since they are apparently able to come and go at will. However, I would recommend that we make no plans for the rescue as yet--there is little use in attempting to deal with an ever-changing situation until we are ready to act forthwith. I suggest that we strengthen our offensive and defensive armament first, then secure information as to the exact status of affairs, both upon Callisto and upon Europa. Then, ready to act, we will do at once whatever seems called for by the situation then obtaining."

"The program as outlined seems eminently sensible. Are there any comments or suggestions?" None having been offered, Director Newton adjourned the meeting and each man attacked his particular problem.

True to Czuv's prediction the hexans did not deem it worthwhile to pursue the Terrestrial vessel, so obviously and so earnestly fleeing from them, and shortly, the acceleration was cut off, to render possible a thorough study of the two halves of the spherical warship of the enemy. Scientists donned space-suits and studied every feature of the strange vessel, while mechanics dismantled and transferred to the _Sirius_ every device and instrument of interest. One or two novel and useful applications of rays and forces were found, their visirays and communicators in particular being of a high degree of efficiency; but upon the whole the science of the hexans was found to be inferior to that now known to the scientists of Interplanetary's flying laboratory. Brandon studied the hexan power-system most carefully, and, everything in readiness and after a long talk with Westfall, he called a general conference in the control-room.

"Gentlemen, we have done about everything we can do for the time being. By combining the best features of the visirays and communicators of the hexans with our own newly-perfected devices, we now have a really excellent system of communication. Our friends from Mars and Venus have so altered and enlarged our force-controls that our offensive and defensive fields, rays, and screens leave little to be desired. In power we are far ahead of the enemy. They apparently know nothing of the possibilities of cosmic radiation, but depend upon tight-beam transmission from their own power-plants--which transmission they have perfected to a point far beyond anything reached by us of the three planets. They do not use accumulators, and therefore their dissipation is limited to their maximum reception, which is about seventy thousand kilofranks. Since we can dissipate ten times that amount of energy, we could withstand, for a short time, the simultaneous attacks of ten of their vessels. Eleven or more of them, however, would be able to crush our defensive screens--and Captain Czuv has seen as many as a hundred of their space-ships in one formation. Furthermore, since they have several times our maximum acceleration, they could concentrate quickly upon any desired point. We could not escape them by flight if they really set out to overtake us, which they certainly will do if we again venture into their territory. Therefore it is clear that we cannot subject ourselves to any attack in force and it follows that we cannot do much of anything until the police fleet of some five hundred vessels can be re-armed and can join us near Callisto. This will require several months at best. As you already know, it has been decided that we should not return to any of the minor planets, as to do so might invite a hexan attack upon our police fleet which is as yet unprepared. We are now heading for Uranus, in the hope that such a course will distract the attention of the hexans from Tellus, even though they probably already know that we are Tellurians. Our new communicator ray will reach any member of the Jovian system from this point. It has been decided that it is safe to use it, since it employs an almost absolutely tight beam of very small diameter, and since we know that that one hexan vessel, at least, had no apparatus sufficiently sensitive to detect a beam of that nature. We will therefore now get in touch with the Callistonians and with our own people."

* * * * *

Brandon seated himself before the communicator screen, and while the others packed themselves closely around his stool, he snapped on the visiray and turned the dials which directed that invisible, immensely complex beam through space. The screen was apparently in itself a coign of vantage, flying through space with the velocity of light, and the watchers gasped involuntarily and drew themselves together, as with that unthinkable speed they flashed down toward the surface of Callisto. So realistic was the impression that they themselves were hurtling through the void, that they could scarcely reason themselves into believing their positive knowledge that the impending collision was not an actual happening! Reducing the velocity of the projection abruptly as it approached the satellite, Brandon flashed it down into a crater indicated by Czuv, and along a tunnel to the city of Zbardk, where the Callistonian captain held a long conversation with the Council of the nation. Frowning in thought, he turned to Newton and spoke seriously and slowly.

"Immediately after the loss of our super-plane, with the supposed death of King, Breckenridge, and myself, the other Tellurian officers were returned to Europa, since even they could be of no assistance to us Callistonians in our struggle against the new, high-acceleration vessels of the hexans. The present situation is much more serious than I would have believed possible. The last vessel going to visit Wruszk, our city upon Europa, was caught and destroyed by the hexans, and for many weeks no ship or message has come from there to Callisto. In spite of the fact that the hexan fleet is smaller than ever before, they are guarding Europa very closely. It is feared that they may have found and destroyed our city there--an expedition is even now about to set out in a desperate attempt to learn the fate of our fellows."

"Suppose the rays of the lifeboats were detected in landing?" asked Brandon. "That might have given them a clue."

"Possibly; but it is equally possible that our own men became careless in the operation of one of our own vessels. Having been unmolested so long, they might have relaxed their vigilance. We may never know."

"Tell 'em to cancel the expedition--we'll shoot the visiray over there right now and find out all about it. We'll let them know pretty quickly. Also, you might tell them that you've got complete plans and specifications for all the weapons that the hexans have, and a couple besides, and that the quicker they shoot a ship out here after you, the sooner they can get to building some stuff to blow those hexans clear out of space!"

It was the work of only a few moments to drive the visiray projection to Europa, where Czuv, to the great relief of all, found that the hexans had not yet discovered either Wruszk or the Terrestrial workings. All Europan humanity, fully aware of the hexan investment, was exerting every possible precaution against discovery by the enemy. This information was duly flashed to the Council of Callisto, and the projection was then hurled across the intervening reaches of space and into the cavern in which was being built the enormous rocket-ship in which the Terrestrial refugees were to attempt the long voyage back to their own distant planet.

It took some little time to convince Doctor Penfield that there had been projected into the empty air of his little sanctum an absolutely invisible and impalpable structure of pure force capable of receiving and transmitting voice and vision. Once convinced of the reality of the phenomenon, however, the speaker beside Brandon's communicator screen fairly rattled under the fervor of his greeting, so great was his pleasure at the arrival of the expedition of relief and in knowing that King and Breckenridge, whom they had, of course, given up for dead, were aboard the Interplanetary vessel.

Penfield reported that the work upon the great rocket-ship was progressing satisfactorily, although slowly, since it was so much larger than any vessel theretofore constructed by the Callistonians. Newton, in turn, informed the autocrat of the stranded Terrestrials as to the _status quo_ of the rescuing party.

"Of course, because of the hexan blockade, you cannot take us off until they have been wiped out, which will be several months at best," the surgeon said, slowly, and a shadow came over his face as he spoke. "Well, what can't be cured...."

"Trouble with the personnel?" King broke in sharply.

"Personnel, yes; but not trouble in the sense you mean--we have had none of that. It is only that there are four more of us now than there were...."

"Huh? How come?" demanded Brandon, in astonishment.

"Four babies have been born to us here so far, and several more are coming. They are the ones I'm worried about. Most normal adults can stand it here without any serious effects, but this thin atmosphere and weak gravity are certain to result in abnormal development of children. However, there may be another way out of it. Are you using normal acceleration, or have you Martians aboard?"

"Both," replied Brandon. "We are carrying two inhabitants of Mars, but Alcantro and Fedanzo are not ordinary Martians. They have been in constant training ever since we left Tellus, and now they can stand as high an acceleration as a weak Tellurian. We're riding at normal."

"Good! As you already know, there has been no communication of late between here and Callisto. It had already been decided, however, that one more voyage must be risked, in order to bring back material which is most urgently needed. Since the vessel will leave here light and is large enough to carry about thirty passengers on a short trip with some crowding, the Council will probably approve of having it carry some of our passengers out to the _Sirius_--especially now, since a vessel must visit you, anyway, to get Captain Czuv and the specifications of the new armament. All these things can be done with one vessel in one trip."

"That sounds fine!" boomed King. "It will give me a chance to get back there where I belong, too. Whom are you sending out?"

"The seven couples who either have babies already or who will have them in the next few months; and some of our young who aren't standing the gaff any too well. You won't be in the red very deeply on the deal, either--while two or three of the passengers I am sending you will certainly be a nuisance; anybody could use, anywhere, such men as Commander Sanderson and Lieut..."

"Sanderson!" interrupted King. "Why, he wasn't--when did _he_ get married?"

"The day after we arrived here," replied the surgeon. "His fiancee was aboard the _Arcturus_, and when they found out how long we would have to be here, they very sensibly decided not to wait."

"Were there any others?" demanded Nadia, who, standing between Stevens and her father, had been an interested listener.

"Plenty of them! Fourteen of our young women passengers have married here upon Europa. A few married fellow-passengers, but most of them picked out officers of the _Arcturus_. You'll find your staff made up pretty largely of benedicts now, King! We've been here a year, you know, and time will tell! Young Commander Sanderson's a fine baby--he'll be a credit to the IPC some day, if we can get him aboard the _Sirius_, where he can get a good start. We could give our babies normal air pressure here by building special rooms, but we cannot give them the normal acceleration necessary to develop their muscles properly."

"Well, we'd better snap over to Callisto and take this up with the Council," Brandon put in. "I don't imagine that there will be any objections, so you might as well get your ship gassed up and loaded--we'll be back here with the okay in about a minute and a half."

* * * * *

With Brandon at the controls and with Czuv at the communicator plate, the projection flashed toward distant Callisto and the group melted away, each man going about his interrupted task.

"Daddy, take us somewhere--I want to talk to you," Nadia spoke to her father, and the director led her and Stevens to his own room.

"All x, daughter; out with it!" and he bent upon her a quizzical glance, under which a fiery blush burned from her throat to her forehead.

"Dad, I've been thinking a lot since you rescued us, and what we've just heard has given me the nerve to say it. Steve, of course, wouldn't dare suggest such a thing until we're safely back on Earth, so I will." Her deep brown eyes held his steadily. "All those girls got married--why, some of them have babies already--and Steve and I have waited for each other _so_ long, daddy! And _none_ of them love each other the way we do. Do they, Steve?"

"I don't see how they could, sir; and that goes straight across the panel," and he bore unflinchingly the piercing gaze of the older man as his right arm encircled the girl and held her close.

"Well, why not?" A sudden smile transformed Newton's stern visage. "There are three chaplains with the police--a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi. Also, we have on board two full-fledged I-P captains, either of whom is authorized to tie matrimonial knots. The means are not lacking--if you're both sure of yourselves?" and all levity disappeared as he studied the two young faces.

"Yes, you are sure," he continued after a moment "just as her mother and I were--and are. It is too bad that she cannot be here with you, but it may be a long time before we can return to Tellus, and you have indeed waited long.

"Oh thanks, Daddy, you're just a perfectly wonderful old darling!" Nadia exclaimed, as she threw her arms rapturously around his neck. "And this isn't a warship at all--you know perfectly well that it's a research laboratory, and that as soon as the Navy gets here, you won't let it fight a bit more, because such scientists can't be allowed to risk themselves! And also, you're forgetting that whole flock of women and babies that are coming out here just as fast as they can get themselves ready. So get going, daddy old dear, and let's do things! Steve's a Quaker and we're Presbyterians, so none of the chaplains will do at all. Besides, I promised Captain King ages ago that he could marry me, so go get him and we'll do it now. Bill can be my bridesmaid, you'll give me away, and Steve can have the other two of his Big Three for best men. I'm off to hunt up the flimsiest, fussiest white dress I can find in my trunks. Let's go!"

"Mr. Newton." Stevens spoke thoughtfully as Nadia darted away. "You said something about her mother, I didn't want to say anything to raise false hopes while she was here, but I've got an idea. Let's meet in Brandon's room instead of here. We can send code to Tellus easily enough on our ultrawave, and we may be able to fake up something on vision."

A few minutes later the Big Three were in Brandon's private study; staring intently into a screen of ground glass upon which played flickering, flashing lights, while the black-haired physicist manipulated micrometer dials in infinitesimal arcs.

"Once more, Mac," Brandon directed. "Pretty nearly had them that time. We're stretching this projector about six hundred percent, but we've got to make this connection. Can't you give me just a little more voltage on those secondaries?"

"I can _not_!" the voice of the first assistant snapped from the speaker. "I'm overloading now so badly that some of my plates are getting hot--if I hold this voltage much longer, the whole secondary bank of tubes is going out. All x--you're on zero!"

"All x!" Flashing and waning, the lights upon the screen formed fleeting, shifting, nebulous images of a relay station upon distant Earth; but the utmost power of the transmitting fields could neither steady the image nor hold it.

"Back off, Mac," Brandon instructed. "I'm afraid we can't hold 'em direct--no use blowing a bank of tubes. We'll try relaying through Mars--we can hold them there, I think. It will muss up reception some, but it will probably be better than direct, at that. Point oh five three six ... all x--shoot!"

Brandon's relay station upon Mars was finally raised and held, and a corps of keenly interested engineers there made short work of the Earth-Mars linkage. Soon the screen glowed with the picture of the transmitter-room of the Terrestrial station, and while the three men were waiting for Mrs. Newton to be called to her own television set, the door behind them opened. Nadia and her escorts entered the room--but Stevens' eyes saw only the entrancing vision of loveliness that was his bride. Dressed in a clinging white gown of shimmering silk, her hair a golden blond corona, sweetly curved lips slightly parted and wide eyes eloquent, she paused momentarily as Stevens came to his feet and stared at her, his very heart in his eyes.

"You never saw me in a dress before--do you like me, Steve?"

"_Like_ you! You're beautiful!" and gray eyes and brown, deep with wonder and with love, met and held as, unheeding the presence of their friends, they went into each other's arms in a coalescence as inevitable and as final as Fate itself.

"Hi, Nadia old dear!" and "Daughter, from what I can see of my son-in-law, I believe that he may do," came together from the speaker. Nadia tore herself from Stevens' embrace, to see upon the lambent screen the happily smiling faces of her mother and sister.

"Mother! Claire! Oh, you three wonder-workers!" She addressed simultaneously the distant Terrestrials and the scientists at her side, while broken exclamations, punctuated by ominous, crackling snaps, came from the laboring amplifier.

"Sorry to interrupt," MacDonald's voice broke in, "but you'll have to hurry it up. Alcantro and Fedanzo are doing their best, but every plate in my secondary bank's red hot, and you could fry an egg on any one of my transformers. Even my primary tubes are running hot. She won't hold together five minutes longer!"

Captain King opened his book, and in that small steel room, unadorned save for stack upon stack of bookcases, the brief but solemn ceremony joining two young lives was read--its solemnity only intensified by its unique accompaniment. For from Brandon at the primary controls, through the power-room of the _Sirius_ and the relay-station upon Mars, to the immense Interplanetary transmitter upon Earth, the greatest radio and television engineers of two planets were fighting overdriven equipment, trying to hold an almost impossible connection, in order that Nadia Newton's mother and sister might be present at her wedding, hundreds of millions of miles distant in space!

"I pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder." The sacred old ritual ended and Captain King picked up the bride in his great arms as though she were a baby, kissed her vigorously, and set her down in front of the transmitter. In the midst of the joyous confusion that ensued a tearing, rattling crash came from the speaker and the screen went blank.

"There!" lamented MacDonald from the power room. "I knew they'd blow! There goes my whole secondary bank--eight perfectly good ten-nineteens all shot to...."

"That's too bad, but it couldn't be helped; they went for a good cause," interrupted Brandon. "I'll come down and help clean up the mess."

* * * * *

Leaving the bridal party, he made his way rapidly to the power room, where he found MacDonald and the two Martians inspecting the smoking remains of what had been the secondary bank of their powerful ultra-transmitter. Spare parts in abundance were on hand, and it was not long until the damaged section was apparently as good as new.

"Now to try her out," Brandon announced. "We want to give her a good workout, but there's no use trying the I-P stations any more--they're altogether too hard to handle at this range. Czuv said something about an unknown race of monstrosities at the south pole of Jupiter--let's try it on them for a while."

He flung the field of force out into space, as responsive to his will as a well-trained horse, and guided it toward the southern limb of that gigantic world. Down and down the projection plunged, through mile after mile of reeking, steaming fog, impenetrable to earthly eyes. Finally it came to rest upon the surface, hundreds of feet deep in a lush, dank, tropical jungle, and Brandon plugged into the Venerian room.

"Kenor? We've got a lot of use for you, if you can come down here for a while. Thanks a lot." He turned to the Martians. "Luckily, we've got a couple of infra-red transformers aboard, so we won't have to build one. You fellows might break one out and shunt it onto this circuit while Dol Kenor is hunting up something for us to look at.

"Hi, old Infra-Eyes!" he went on, as the Venerian scientist waddled into the room in his bulging space-suit. "We've got something here that's right down your alley. Want to see what you can see?"

"Ah, a beautiful scene!" exclaimed Dol Kenor, after one glance into the plate. "It is indeed a relief, after all this coldness and glare, to see such a soft, warm landscape--even though I have never expected to behold quite such a violent bit of jungle," and under his guidance the projection flashed over hundreds of miles of territory. To the eyes of the Terrestrials the screen revealed only a blank, amorphous grayness, through which at times there shot lines and masses of vague and meaningless form; but the Venerian was very evidently seeing and enjoying many and diverse scenes.

"There, I think, is what you wish to see first," he announced, as he finally steadied the controls, and Brandon cut in upon the shunting screen the infra-red transformer. This device, developed long before to render possible the use of Terrestrial eyes in the opaque atmosphere of Venus, stepped up the fog-piercing long waves into the frequencies of light capable of affecting the earthly retina. Instantly the dull gray blank of the shunting screen became transformed into a clear and colorful picture of the great city of the Jovians of the South.

"Great Cat!" Brandon exclaimed. "Flying fortresses is right! They're in war formation, too, or I'm a polyp! We've got to watch this, Mac, all of it, and watch it close--it's apt to have a big bearing on what we'll have to do, before they get done. Better we rig up another set, and put a relay of observers on this job!"

CHAPTER XI

The Vorkul-Hexan War

Vorkulia, the city of the Vorkuls, was an immense seven-pointed star. At its center, directly upon the south pole of Jupiter, rose a tremendous shaft--its cross-section likewise a tapering seven-pointed star--which housed the directing intelligence of the nation. Radiating from the seven cardinal points of the building were short lanes leading to star-shaped open plots, from which in turn branched out ways to other stellate areas; ways reaching, after many such steps, to the towering inner walls of the metropolis. The outer walls, still loftier and even more massive ramparts of sullen gray-green metal, formed a seamless, jointless barrier against an utterly indescribable foe; a barrier whose outer faces radiated constantly a searing, coruscating green emanation. Metal alone could not long have barred that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back, impotent. Writhing and crawling, loathesomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that radiant wall in vain.

The short, zig-zag lanes, the ways, and the seven-pointed areas were paved with a greenish glass. This pavement was intended solely to prevent vegetable growth and carried no traffic whatever, since few indeed of the Vorkuls have ever been earth-bound and all traffic was in the air. The principal purpose of the openings was to separate, and thus to render accessible by air, the mighty buildings which, level upon level, towered upward, with airships hovering at or anchored to doorways and entrances at every level. Buildings, entrances, everything visible--all replicated, reiterated, repeated infinite variations in the one theme, that of the septenate stelliform.

Color ran riot; masses varied from immense blocks of awe-inspiring grandeur to delicate tracery of sheerest gossamer; lights flamed and flared in wide bands and in narrow, flashing pencils--but in all, through all, over all, and dominating all was the Seven-Pointed Star.

In and almost filling the space, at least a mile in width, between the inner and the outer walls were huge, seven-sided structures--featureless, squat, forbidding heptagons of dull green metal. No thing living was to be seen in that space. Its pavement was of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of the walls, was burned and blackened and seared as though by numberless exposures to intolerable flame. In a lower compartment of one of these enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor, First Projector Officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board. He was at ease--his huge wings folded, his sinuous length coiled comfortably in slack loops about two horizontal bars. But at least one enormous, extensible eye was always pointed toward the board, always was at least one nimble and bat-like ear cocked attentively in the direction of the signal panel.

A whistling, shrieking ululation rent the air and the officer's coils tightened as he reared a few feet of his length upright, shooting out half a dozen tentacular arms to various switches and controls upon his board, while throughout the great heptagon, hundreds of other Vorkuls sprang to attention at their assigned posts of duty. As the howling wail came to a climax in a blast of sound Kromodeor threw over a lever, as did every other projector officer in every other heptagon, and there was made plain to any observer the reason for the burns and scars in the tortured space between the lofty inner and outer walls of Vorkulia. For these heptagons were the monstrous flying fortresses which Czuv had occasionally seen from afar, as they went upon some unusual errand above the Jovian banks of mist, and which Brandon was soon to see in his visiray screen. The seared and disfigured metal of the pavement and walls was made so by the release of the furious blasts of energy necessary to raise those untold thousands of tons of mass against the attraction of Jupiter, more than two and a half times the gravity of our own world! Vast volumes of flaming energy shrieked from the ports. Wave upon wave, flooding the heptagons, it dashed back and forth upon the heavy metal between the walls. As more and more of the inconceivable power of those Titanic generators was unleashed, it boiled forth in a devastating flood which, striking the walls, rebounded and leaped vertically far above even those mighty ramparts. Even the enormous thickness of the highly conducting metal could not absorb all the energy of that intolerable blast, and immediately beneath the ports new seven-pointed areas of disfigurement appeared as those terrific flying fortresses were finally wrenched from the ground and hurled upward.

* * * * *

High in the air, another signal wailed up and down a peculiar scale of sound and the mighty host of vessels formed smoothly into symmetrical groups of seven. Each group then moved with mathematical precision into its allotted position in a complex geometrical formation--a gigantic, seven-ribbed, duplex cone in space. The flagship flew at the apex of this stupendous formation; behind, and protected by, the full power of the other floating citadels of the forty-nine groups of seven. Due north, the amazing armada sped in rigorous alignment, flying along a predetermined meridian--due north!

At the end of his watch Kromodeor relinquished his board to the officer relieving him and shot into the air, propelled by the straightening of the powerful coils of his snake-like body and tail. Wings half spread, lateral and vertical ruddering fins outthrust, he soared across the room toward a low opening. Just before they struck the wall upon either side of the doorway the great wings snapped shut, the fins retracted, and the long and heavy body struck the floor of the passage without a jar. With a wriggling, serpentine motion he sped like a vibrant arrow along the hall and into a wardroom. There, after a brief glance around the room, he coiled up beside a fellow officer who, with one eye, was negligently reading a scroll held in three or four hands; while with another eye, poised upon its slender pedicle, he watched a moving picture upon a television screen.

"Hello, Kromodeor," Wixill, Chief Power Officer[2] greeted the newcomer in the wailing, hissing language of the Vorkuls. He tossed the scroll into the air, where it instantly rolled into a tight cylinder and shot into an opening in the wall of the room. "Glad to see you. Books and shows are all right on practice cruises, but I can't seem to work up much enthusiasm about such things now."

[Footnote 2: In order to avoid all unnecessary strain upon the memory of the reader, all titles, etc., have been given in the closest possible English equivalent, instead of in an attempted transliteration of the foreign word. This particular officer has no counterpart upon Tellurian vessels. He is the second in command of a Vorkulian fortress, his function being to supervise all expenditure of power.--E. E. S.]

Kromodeor elevated an eye and studied the screen, upon which, to the accompaniment of whistling, shrieking sound, whirled and gyrated an interlacing group of serpentine forms.

"A good show, Wixill," the projector officer replied, "but nothing to hold the attention of men engaged in what we are doing. Think of it! After twenty years of preparation--two long lifetimes--and for the first time in our history, we are actually going to war!"

"I have thought of it at length. It is disgusting. Compelled to traffic with an alien form of life! Were it not to end in the extinction of those unspeakable hexans, it would be futile to the point of silliness. I cannot understand them at all. There is ample room upon this planet for all of us. Our races combined are not using one seven-thousandth of its surface. You would think that they would shun all strangers. Yet for ages have they attacked us, refusing to let us alone, until finally they forced us to prepare means for their destruction. They seem as senselessly savage as the jungle growths, and, but for their very evident intelligence, one would class them as such. You would think that, being intelligent and being alien to us, they would not have anything to do with us in any way, peacefully or otherwise. However, their intrusions and depredations are about to end."

"They certainly are. Vorkulia has endured much--too much--but I am glad that our forefathers did not decide to exterminate them sooner. If they had, we could not have been doing this now."

"There speaks the rashness of youth, Kromodeor. It is a violation of all our instincts to have any commerce with outsiders, as you will learn as soon as you see one of them. Then, too, we will lose heavily. Since we have studied their armaments so long, and have subjected every phase of the situation to statistical analysis, it is certain that we are to succeed--but you also know at what cost."

"Two-sevenths of our force, with a probable error of one in seven," replied the younger Vorkul. "And because that figure cannot be improved within the next seven years and because of the exceptional weakness of the hexans due to their unexpectedly great losses upon Callisto, we are attacking at this time. Their spherical vessels are nothing, of course. It is in the reduction of the city that we will lose men and vessels. But at that, each of us has five chances in seven of returning, which is good enough odds--much better than we had in that last expedition into the jungle. But by the Mighty Seven, I shall make myself wrap around one hexan, for my brother's sake," and his coils tightened unconsciously. "Hideous, repulsive monstrosities! Creatures so horrible should not be allowed to live--they should have been tossed over the wall to the jungle ages ago!" Kromodeor curled out an eye as he spoke, and complacently surveyed the writhing cylinder of sinuous, supple power that was his own body.

"Better avoid contact work with them if possible," cautioned Wixill. "You might not be able to unwrap, and to touch one of them is almost unthinkable. Speaking of wrapping, you know that they are putting on the finals of the contact work in the star this evening. Let's watch them."

They slid to the floor and wriggled away in perfect "step"--undulating along in such nice synchronism that their adjacent sides, only a few inches apart, formed two waving rigidly parallel lines. Deep in the lower part of the fortress they entered a large assembly room, provided with a raised platform in the center and having hundreds of short, upright posts in lieu of chairs; most of which were already taken by spectators. The two officers curled their tails comfortably around two of the vacant pillars, elevated their heads to a convenient level of sight and directed each an eye or two upon the stage. This was, of course, heptagonal. Its sides, like those of the mighty flying forts themselves, were not straight, but angled inward sufficiently to make the platform a seven-pointed star. The edge was outlined by a low rail, and bulwark and floor were padded with thick layers of a hard but smooth and yielding fabric.

* * * * *

In this star-shaped ring two young Vorkuls were contending for the championship of the fleet in a contest that seemed to combine most of the features of wrestling, boxing, and bar-room brawling, with no holds barred. Four hands of each of the creatures held heavy leather billies, and could be used only in striking with those weapons, the remaining hands being left free to employ as the owner saw fit. Since the sport was not intended to be lethal, however, the eyes and other highly vulnerable parts were protected by metal masks, and the wing ribs were similarly guarded by leathern shields. The guiding fins, being comparatively small and extremely tough, required no protection.

"We're just in time," Kromodeor whistled. "The main bout is nicely on. See anyone from the flagship? I might stake a couple of korpels that Sintris will paint the symbol upon his wing."

"Most of their men seem to be across the star," Wixill replied, and both beings fell silent, absorbed in the struggle going on in the ring.

It was a contest well worth watching. Wing crashed against mighty wing and the lithe, hard bodies snapped and curled this way and that, almost faster than the eye could follow, in quest of advantageous holds. Above the shrieking wails of the crowd could be heard the smacks and thuds of the eight flying clubs as they struck against the leather shields or against tough and scaly hides. For minutes the conflict raged, with no advantage apparent. Now the fighters were flat upon the floor of the star, now dozens of feet in the air above it, as one or the other sought to gain a height from which to plunge downward upon his opponent; but both stayed upon or over the star--to leave its boundaries was to lose disgracefully.

Then, high in air, the visiting warrior thought that he saw an opening and grappled. Wings crashed in fierce blows, hands gripped and furiously wrenched. Two powerful bodies, tapering smoothly down to equally powerful tails, corkscrewed around each other viciously, winding up into something resembling tightly twisted lamp cord; and the two Vorkuls, each helpless, fell to the mat with a crash. Fast as was Zerexi, the gladiator from the flagship, Sintris was the merest trifle faster. Like the straightening of a twisted spring of tempered steel that long body uncoiled as they struck the floor, and up under those shielding wings--an infinitesimal fraction of a second slow in interposing--that lithe tail sped. Two lightning loops flashed around the neck of the visitor and tightened inexorably. Desperately the victim fought to break that terrible strangle hold, but every maneuver was countered as soon as it was begun. Beating wings, under whose frightful blows the very air quivered, were met and parried by wings equally capable. Hands and clubs were of no avail against that corded cable of sinew, and Sintris, his head retracted between his wings and his own hands reenforcing that impregnable covering over his head and neck, threw all his power into his tail--tightening, with terrific, rippling surges, that already throttling band about the throat of his opponent. Only one result was possible. Soon Zerexi lay quiet, and a violet beam of light flared from a torch at the ringside, bathing both contenders. At the flash the winner disengaged himself from the loser, and stood by until the latter had recovered the use of his paralyzed muscles. The two combatants then touched wing tips in salute and flew away together, over the heads of the crowd; plunging into a doorway and disappearing as the two officers uncoiled from their "seats" and wriggled out into the corridor.

"Fine piece of contact work," said Wixill, thoughtfully. "I'm glad that Sintris won, but I did not expect him to win so easily. Zerexi shouldn't have gone into a knot so early against such a fast man."

"Oh, I don't know," argued Kromodeor. "His big mistake was in that second body check. If he had blocked the sixth arm with his fifth, taken out the fourth and second with his third, and then gone in with...." and so, quite like two early experts after a good boxing match, the friends argued the fine points of the contest long after they had reached their quarters.

Day after day the vast duplex cone of Vorkulian fortresses sped toward the north pole of the great planet, with a high and constant velocity. Day after day the complex geometrical figure in space remained unchanged, no unit deviating measurably from its precise place in the formation. Over rapacious jungles, over geysers spouting hot water, over sullenly steaming rivers and seas, over boiling lakes of mud, and high over gigantic volcanoes, in uninterrupted eruptions of cataclysmic violence, the Vorkulian phalanx flew--straight north. The equatorial regions, considerably hotter than the poles, were traversed with practically no change in scenery--it was a world of steaming fog, of jungle, of hot water, of boiling, spurting mud, and of volcanoes. Not of such mild and sporadic volcanic outbreaks as we of green Terra know, but of gigantic primordial volcanoes, in terrifyingly continuous performances of frightful intensity. Due north the Vorkulian spearhead was hurled, before the rigorous geometrical alignment was altered.

"All captains, attention!" Finally, in a high latitude, the flagship sent out final instructions. "The hexans have detected us and our long range observers report that they are coming to meet us in force. We will now go into the whirl, and proceed with the maneuvers exactly as they have been planned. Whirl!"

At the command, each vessel began to pursue a tortuous spiral path. Each group of seven circled slowly about its own axis, as though each structure were attached rigidly to a radius rod, and at the same time spiraled around the line of advance in such fashion that the whole gigantic cone, wide open maw to the fore, seemed to be boring its way through the air.

"Lucky again!" Kromodeor, in the wardroom, turned to Wixill as the two prepared to take their respective watches. "It looks as though the first action would come while we're on duty. I've got just one favor to ask, if you have to economize on power, let Number One alone, will you?"

"No fear of that," Wixill hissed, with the Vorkulian equivalent of a chuckle. "We have abundance of power for all of your projector officers. But don't waste any of it, or I'll cut you down five ratings!"

"You're welcome. When I shine old Number One on any hexan work, one flash is all we'll take. See you at supper," and, leaving his superior at the door of the power room, Kromodeor wriggled away to his station upon the parallel horizontal bars before his panel.

Making sure that his tail coils were so firmly clamped that no possible lurch or shock could throw him out of position, he set an eye toward each of his sighting screens, even though he knew that it would be long before those comparatively short range instruments would show anything except friendly vessels. Then, ready for any emergency, he scanned his one "live" screen--the one upon which were being flashed the pictures and reports secured by the high-powered instruments of the observers.

* * * * *

With the terrific acceleration employed by the hexan spheres, it was not long until the leading squadron of fighting globes neared the Vorkulian war-cone. This advance guard was composed of the new, high-acceleration vessels. Their crews, with the innate blood-lust and savagery of their breed, had not even entertained the thought of accommodating their swifter pace to that of the main body of the fleet. These vast, slow-moving structures were no more to be feared than those similar ones whose visits they had been repulsing for twenty long Jovian years--by the time the slower spheres could arrive upon the scene there would be nothing left for them to do. Therefore, few in number as were the vessels of the vanguard, they rushed to the attack. In one blinding salvo they launched their supposedly irresistible planes of force--dazzling, scintillating planes under whose fierce power the studying, questing, scouting fortresses previously encountered had fled back southward; cut, beaten, and crippled. These spiraling monsters, however, did not pause or waver in their stolidly ordered motion. As the hexan planes of force flashed out, the dull green metal walls broke into a sparkling green radiance, against which the Titanic bolts spent themselves in vain. Then there leaped out from the weird brilliance of the walls of the fortresses great shafts of pale green luminescence--tractor ray after gigantic tractor ray, which seized upon the hexan spheres and drew them ruthlessly into the yawning open end of that gigantic cone.

Then, in each group of seven, similar great streamers of energy reached out from fortress to fortress, until each group was welded into one mighty unit by twenty-one such bands of force. The unit formed, a ray from each of its seven component structures seized upon a designated sphere, and under the combined power of those seven tractors, the luckless globe was literally snapped into the center of mass of the Vorkulian unit There seven dully gleaming red pressor rays leaped upon it, backed by all the power of seven gigantic fortresses, held rigidly in formation by the unimaginable mass of the structures and by their twenty-one prodigious tractor beams. Under that awful impact, the screens and walls of the hexan spheres were exactly as effective as so many structures of the most tenuous vapor. The red glare of the vortex of those beams was lightened momentarily by a flash of brighter color, and through the foggy atmosphere there may have flamed briefly a drop or two of metal that was only liquefied. The red and green beams snapped out, the peculiar radiance died from the metal walls, and the gigantic duplex cone of the Vorkuls bored serenely northward--as little marked or affected by the episode as is a darting swift who, having snapped up a chance insect in full flight, darts on.

"Great Cat!" Far off in space, Brandon turned from his visiray screen and wiped his brow. "Czuv certainly chirped it, Perce, when he called those things flying fortresses. But who, what, why, and how? We didn't see any apparatus that looked capable of generating or handling those beams--and of course, when they got started, their screens cut us off at the pockets. Wish we could have made some sense out of their language--like to know a few of their ideas--find out whether we can't get on terms with them some way or other. Funny-looking wampuses, but they've got real brains--their think-tanks are very evidently full of bubbles. If they have it in mind to take us on next, old son, it'll be just ... too ... bad!"

"And then some," agreed Stevens. "They've got something--no fooling. It looks like the hexans are going to get theirs, good and plenty, pretty soon--and then what? I'd give my left lung and four front teeth for one long look at their controls in action."

"You and me both--it's funny, the way those green ray-screens stick to the walls, instead of being spherical, as you'd expect ... should think they'd _have_ to radiate from a center, and so be spherical," Brandon cogitated. "However, we've got nothing corkscrewy enough to go through them, so we'll have to stand by. We'll stay inside whenever possible, look on from outside when we must, but all the time picking up whatever information we can. In the meantime, now that we've got our passengers, old Doctor Westfall prescribes something that he says is good for what ails us. Distance--lots of distance, straight out from the sun--and I wouldn't wonder if we'd better take his prescription."

The two Terrestrial observers relapsed into silence, staring into their visiray plates, searching throughout the enormous volume of one of those great fortresses in another attempt to solve the mystery of the generation and propagation of the incredible manifestations of energy which they had just witnessed. Scarcely had the search begun, however, when the visirays were again cut off sharply--the rapidly advancing main fleet of the hexans had arrived and the scintillant Vorkulian screens were again in place.

True to hexan nature, training and tradition, the fleet, hundreds strong, rushed savagely to the attack. Above, below, and around the far-flung cone the furious globes dashed, attacking every Vorkulian craft viciously with every resource at their command; with every weapon known to their diabolically destructive race. Planes of force stabbed and slashed, concentrated beams of annihilation flared fiercely through the reeking atmosphere, gigantic aerial bombs and torpedoes were hurled with full radio control against the unwelcome visitor--with no effect. Bound together in groups of seven by the mighty, pale-green bands of force, the Vorkulian units sailed calmly northward, spiraling along with not the slightest change in formation or velocity. The frightful planes and beams of immeasurable power simply spent themselves harmlessly against those sparklingly radiant green walls--seemingly as absorbent to energy as a sponge is to water, since the eye could not detect any change in the appearance of the screens, under even the fiercest blasts of the hexan projectors. Bombs, torpedoes, and all material projectiles were equally futile--they exploded harmlessly in the air far from their objectives, or disappeared at the touch of one of those dark, dull-red pressor rays. And swiftly, but calmly and methodically as at a Vorkulian practice drill, the heptagons were destroying the hexan fleet. Seven mighty green tractors would lash out, seize an attacking sphere, and snap it into the center of mass of the unit of seven. There would be a brief flash of dull red, a still briefer flare of incandescence, and the impalpable magnets would leap out to seize another of the doomed globes. It was only a matter of moments until not a hexan vessel remained; and the Vorkulian juggernaut spiraled onward, now at full acceleration, toward the hexan stronghold dimly visible far ahead of them--a vast city built around Jupiter's northern pole.

At the controls of his projector, Kromodeor spun a dial with a many-fingered, flexible hand and spoke.

"Wixill, I am being watched again--I can feel very plainly that strange intelligence watching everything I do. Have the tracers located him?"

"No, they haven't been able to synchronize with his wave yet. Either he is using a most minute pencil or, what is more probable, he is on a frequency which we do not ordinarily use. However, I agree with you that it is not a malignant intelligence. All of us have felt it, and none of us senses enmity. Therefore, it is not a hexan--it may be one of those strange creatures of the satellites, who are, of course, perfectly harmless."

"Harmless, but unpleasant," returned Kromodeor. "When we get back I'm going to find his beam myself and send a discharge along it that will end his spying upon me. I do not...."

* * * * *

A wailing signal interrupted the conversation and every Vorkul in the vast fleet coiled even more tightly about his bars, for the real battle was about to begin. The city of the hexans lay before them, all her gigantic forces mustered to repel the first real invasion of her long and warlike history. Mile after mile it extended, an orderly labyrinth of spherical buildings arranged in vast interlocking series of concentric circles--a city of such size that only a small part of it was visible, even to the infra-red vision of the Vorkulians. Apparently the city was unprotected, having not even a wall. Outward from the low, rounded houses of the city's edge there reached a wide and verdant plain, which was separated from the jungle by a narrow moat of shimmering liquid--a liquid of such dire potency that across it, even those frightful growths could neither leap nor creep.

But as the Vorkulian phalanx approached--now shooting forward and upward with maximum acceleration, screaming bolts of energy flaming out for miles behind each heptagon as the full power of its generators was unleashed--it was made clear that the homeland of the hexans was far from unprotected. The verdant plain disappeared in a blast of radiance, revealing a transparent surface, through which could be seen masses of machinery filling level below level, deep into the ground as far as the eye could reach; and from the bright liquid of the girdling moat there shot vertically upward a coruscantly refulgent band of intense yellow luminescence. These were the hexan defences, heretofore invulnerable and invincible. Against them any ordinary warcraft, equipped with ordinary weapons of offense, would have been as pitifully impotent as a naked baby attacking a battleship. But now those defenses were being challenged by no ordinary craft; it had taken the mightiest intellects of Vorkulia two long lifetimes to evolve the awful engine of destruction which was hurling itself forward and upward with an already terrific and constantly increasing speed.

Onward and upward flashed the gigantic duplex cone, its entire whirling mass laced and latticed together--into one mammoth unit by green tractor beams and red pressors. These tension and compression members, of unheard-of power, made of the whole fleet of three hundred forty-three fortresses a single stupendous structure--a structure with all the strength and symmetry of a cantilever truss! Straight through that wall of yellow vibrations the vast truss drove, green walls flaming blue defiance as the absorbers overloaded; its doubly braced tip rearing upward, into and beyond the vertical as it shot through that searing yellow wall. Simultaneously from each heptagon there flamed downward a green shaft of radiance, so that the whole immense circle of the cone's mouth was one solid tractor beam, fastening upon and holding in an unbreakable grip mile upon mile of the hexan earthworks.

Practically irresistible force and supposedly immovable object! Every loose article in every heptagon had long since been stored in its individual shockproof compartment, and now every Vorkul coiled his entire body in fierce clasp about mighty horizontal bars: for the entire kinetic energy of the untold millions of tons of mass comprising the cone, at the terrific measure of its highest possible velocity, was to be hurled upon those unbreakable linkages of force which bound the trussed aggregation of Vorkulian fortresses to the deeply buried intrenchments of the hexans. The gigantic composite tractor beam snapped on and held. Inconceivably powerful as that beam was, it stretched a trifle under the incomprehensible momentum of those prodigious masses of metal, almost halted in their terrific flight. But the war-cone was not quite halted; the calculations of the Vorkulian scientists had been accurate. No possible artificial structure, and but few natural ones--in practice maneuvers entire mountains had been lifted and hurled for miles through the air--could have withstood the incredible violence of that lunging, twisting, upheaving impact. Lifted bodily by that impalpable hawser of force and cruelly wrenched and twisted by its enormous couple of angular momentum, the hexan works came up out of the ground as a waterpipe comes up in the teeth of a power shovel. The ground trembled and rocked and boulders, fragments of concrete masonry, and masses of metal flew in all directions as that city-encircling conduit of diabolical machinery was torn from its bed.

* * * * *

A portion of that conduit fully thirty miles in length was in the air, a twisted, flaming inferno of wrecked generators, exploding ammunition, and broken and short-circuited high-tension leads before the hexans could themselves cut it and thus save the remainder of their fortifications. With resounding crashes, the structure parted at the weakened points, the furious upheaval stopped and, the tractor beams shut off, the shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in clashing, grinding ruin upon the city.

The enormous duplex cone of the Vorkuls did not attempt to repeat the maneuver, but divided into two single cones, one of which darted toward each point of rupture. There, upon the broken and unprotected ends of the hexan cordon, their points of attack lay: theirs the task to eat along that annular fortress, no matter what the opposition might bring to bear--to channel in its place a furrow of devastation until the two cones, their work complete, should meet at the opposite edge of the city. Then what was left of the cones would separate into individual heptagons, which would so systematically blast every hexan thing into nothingness as to make certain that never again would they resume their insensate attacks upon the Vorkuls. Having counted the cost and being grimly ready to pay it, the implacable attackers hurled themselves upon their objectives.

Here were no feeble spheres of space, commanding only the limited energies transmitted to their small receptors through the ether. Instead there were all the offensive and defensive weapons developed by hundreds of generations of warrior-scientists; wielding all the incalculable power capable of being produced by the massed generators of a mighty nation. But for the breach opened in the circle by the irresistible surprise attack, they would have been invulnerable, and, hampered as they were by the defenseless ends of what should have been an endless ring, the hexans took heavy toll.

The heptagons, massive and solidly braced as they were, and anchored by tractor rays as well, shuddered and trembled throughout their mighty frames under the impact of fiercely driven pressor beams. Sullenly radiant green wall-screens flared brighter and brighter as the Vorkulian absorbers and dissipators, mighty as they were, continued more and more to overload; for there were being directed against them beams from the entire remaining circumference of the stronghold. Every deadly frequency and emanation known to the fiendish hexan intellect, backed by the full power of the city, was poured out against the invaders in sizzling shrieking bars, bands, and planes of frenzied incandescence. Nor was vibratory destruction alone. Armor-piercing projectiles of enormous size and weight were hurled--diamond-hard, drill-headed projectiles which clung and bored upon impact. High-explosive shells, canisters of gas, and the frightful aerial bombs and radio-dirigible torpedoes of highly scientific war--all were thrown with lavish hand, as fast as the projectors could be served. But thrust for thrust, ray for ray, projectile for massive projectile, the Brobdingnagian creations of the Vorkuls gave back to the hexans.

The material lining of the ghastly moat was the only substance capable of resisting the action of its contents, and now, that lining destroyed by the uprooting of the fortress, that corrosive, brilliantly mobile liquid cascaded down in to the trough and added its hellish contribution to the furious scene. For whatever that devouring fluid touched flared into yellow flame, gave off clouds of lurid, strangling vapor, and disappeared. But through yellow haze, through blasting frequencies, through clouds of poisonous gas, through rain of metal and through storm of explosive the two cones ground implacably onward, their every offensive weapon centered upon the fast-receding exposed ends of the hexan fortress. Their bombs and torpedoes ripped and tore into the structure beneath the invulnerable shield and exploded, demolishing and hurling aside like straws, the walls, projectors, hexads and vast mountains of earth. Their terrible rays bored in, softening, fusing, volatilizing metal, short-circuiting connections, destroying life far ahead of the point of attack; and, drawn along by the relentlessly creeping composite tractor beam, there progressed around the circumference of the hexan city two veritable Saturnalia of destruction--uninterrupted, cataclysmic detonations of sound and sizzling, shrieking, multi-colored displays of pyrotechnic incandescence combining to form a spectacle of violence incredible.

But the heptagons could not absorb nor radiate indefinitely those torrents of energy, and soon one greenishly incandescent screen went down. Giant shells pierced the green metal walls, giant beams of force fused and consumed them. Faster and faster the huge heptagon became a shapeless, flowing mass, its metal dripping away in flaming gouts of brilliance; then it disappeared utterly in one terrific blast as some probing enemy ray reached a vital part. The cone did not pause nor waver. Many of its component units would go down, but it would go on--and on and on until every hexan trace had disappeared or until the last Vorkulian heptagon had been annihilated.

In one of the lowermost heptagons, one bearing the full brunt of the hexan armament, Kromodeor reared upright as his projector controls went dead beneath his hands. Finding his communicator screens likewise lifeless, he slipped to the floor and wriggled to the room of the Chief Power Officer, where he found Wixill idly fingering his controls.

"Are we out?" asked Kromodeor, tersely.

"All done," the Chief Power Officer calmly replied. "We have power left, but we cannot use it, as they have crushed our screens and are fusing our outer walls. Two out of seven chances, and we drew one of them. We are still working on the infra band, over across on the Second's board, but we won't last long...."

* * * * *

As he spoke, the mighty fabric lurched under them, and only their quick and powerful tails, darting in lightning loops about the bars, saved them from being battered to death against the walls as the heptagon was hurled end over end by a stupendous force. With a splintering crash it came to rest upon the ground.

"I wonder how that happened? They should have rayed us out or exploded us," Kromodeor pondered. The Vorkuls, with their inhumanly powerful, sinuous bodies, were scarcely affected by the shock of that frightful fall.

"They must have had a whole battery of pressors on us when our greens went out--they threw us half-way across the city, almost into the gate we made first," Wixill replied, studying the situation of the vessel in the one small screen still in action. "We aren't hurt very badly--only a few holes that they are starting to weld already. When the absorber and dissipator crews get them cooled down enough so that we can use power again, we'll go back."

But they were not to resume their place in the attack. Through the holes in the still-glowing walls, hexan soldiery were leaping in steady streams, fighting with the utmost savagery of their bloodthirsty natures, urged on by the desperation born of the knowledge of imminent defeat and total destruction. Hand-weapons roared, flashed, and sparkled; heavy bars crashed and thudded against crunching bones; mighty bodies and tails whipped crushingly about six-limbed forms which wrenched and tore with monstrously powerful hands and claws. Fiercely and valiantly the Vorkuls fought, but they were outnumbered by hundreds and only one outcome was possible.

Kromodeor was one of the last to go down. Weapons long since exhausted, he unwrapped his deadly coils from about a dead hexan and darted toward a storeroom, only to be cut off by a horde of enemies. Throwing himself down a vertical shaft, he flew toward a tiny projector-locker, in the lowermost part of one of the great star's points, the hexans in hot pursuit. He wrenched the door open, and even while searing planes of force were riddling his body, he trained the frightful weapon he had sought. He pressed the contact, and bursts of intolerable flame swept the entire passage clear of life. Weakly he struggled to go out into the aisle, but his muscles refused to do the bidding of his will and he lay there, twitching feebly.

In the power room of the heptagon a hexan officer turned fiercely to another, who was offering advice.

"Vorkuls? Bah!" he snarled, viciously. "Our race is finished. Die we must, but we shall take with us the one enemy, who above all others needs destruction!" and he hurled the captured Vorkulian fortress into the air.

As the heptagon lurched upward, the massive door of a lower projector locker clanged shut and Kromodeor collapsed in a corner, his consciousness blotted out.

* * * * *

"Well, that certainly tears it! That's a ... I...." Stevens' ready vocabulary failed him and he turned to Brandon, who was still staring narrow-eyed into the plate, watching the destruction of the hexan city.

"They've got something, all right--you've got to hand it to them," Brandon replied. "And we thought we knew something about forces and physical phenomena in general. Those birds have forgotten more than we ever will know. Just one of those things could take the whole I-P fleet, armed as we are now, any morning before breakfast, just for setting-up exercises. We've got to do something about it--but what?"

"It's okay--whatever you say. There may be an out somewhere, but I don't see it," and Stevens' gloomy tone matched his words.

Highly trained scientists both, they had been watching that which transcended all the science of the inner planets and knew themselves outclassed immeasurably.

"Only one thing to do, as I see it," Brandon cogitated. "That's to keep on going straight out, the way we're headed now. We'd better call a council of war, to dope out a line of action."

CHAPTER XII

The Citadel in Space

For the first time in many days Brandon and Westfall sat at dinner in the main dining room of the _Sirius_. They were enjoying greatly the unaccustomed pleasure of a leisurely, formal meal; but still their talk concerned the projection of pure forces instead of subjects more appropriate to the table; still their eyes paid more attention to diagrams drawn upon scraps of paper than to the diners about them.

"But I tell you, Quince, you're full of little red ants, clear to the neck!" Brandon snorted, as Westfall waved one of his arguments aside. "You must have had help to get that far off--no one man could possibly be as wrong as you are. Why, those fields absolutely will...."

"Hi, Quincy! Hi, Norman!" a merry voice interrupted. "Still fighting as usual, I see! What kind of knights are you, anyway, to rescue us poor damsels in distress, and then never even know that we're alive?" A tall, willowy brunette had seen the two physicists as she entered the saloon, and came over to their table, a hand outstretched to each in cordial greeting.

"Ho, Verna!" both men exclaimed, and came to their feet as they welcomed the smiling, graceful newcomer.

"Sit down here, Verna--we have hardly started," Westfall invited, and Brandon looked at the girl in assumed surprise as she seated herself in the proffered chair.

"Well, Verna, it's like this...." he began.

"That's enough!" she broke in. "That phrase always was your introduction to one of the world's greatest brainstorms. But I know that this is the first time you have had time even to eat like civilized beings, so I'll forgive you this once. Why all the registering of amazement, Norman?"

"I'm astonished that you aren't being monopolized by some husband or other. Surely the officers of the _Arcturus_ weren't so dumb that they'd stand for your still being Verna _Pickering_, were they?"

"Not dumb, Norman, no. Far from it. But I'm still working for my M. R. S. degree, and I haven't succeeded in snaring it yet. You'd be surprised at how cagy those officers got after a few of them had been captured. But they are just like any other hunted game, I suppose--the antelopes that survive get pretty wild, you know," she concluded, plaintively.

"Well, that certainly is one tough break for a poor little girl," Brandon sympathized. "Quince, our little Nell, here, hasn't been done right by. I'm bashful and you're a woman-hater, but between us, some way, we've simply got to take steps."

"You might take longer steps than you think," Verna laughed, her regular, white teeth and vivid coloring emphasized by her olive skin and her startling hair, black as Brandon's own. "Perhaps I would like a scientist better than an I-P officer, anyway. The more I think of it, the surer I am that Nadia Newton had the right idea. I believe that I'll catch me a physicist, too--either of you would do quite nicely, I think," and she studied the two men carefully.

Westfall, the methodical and precise, had never been able to defend himself against Verna Pickering's badinage, but Brandon's ready tongue took up the challenge.

"Verna, if you really decided to get any living man he wouldn't stand a chance in the world," he declared. "If you've already made up your mind that I'm your meat, I'll come down like Davy Crockett's coon. But if either of us will do, that'll give us each a fifty-fifty chance to escape your toils. What say we play a game of freeze-out to decide it?"

"Fine, Norman! When shall we play?"

"Oh, between Wednesday and Thursday, any week you say," and the two fenced on, banteringly but skilfully, with Westfall an appreciative and unembarrassed listener.

Dinner over, Brandon and Westfall went back to the control room, where they found Stevens already seated at one of the master screens.

"All x, Perce?"

"All x. The observers report no registrations during the last two watches," and the three fell into discussion. Long they talked, studying every angle of the situation confronting them; until suddenly a speaker rattled furiously and an enormous, staring eye filled both master plates. Brandon's hand flashed to a switch, but the image disappeared even before he could establish the full-coverage ray screen.

"I'm on the upper band--take the lower!" he snapped, but Stevens' projector was already in action. Trained minds all, they knew that some intelligence had traced them, and all realized that it was of the utmost importance to know what and where that intelligence was. Stevens found the probing frequency in his range and they flashed their own beam along it, encountering finally one of the monstrous Vorkulian fortresses, far from Jupiter and almost directly between them and the planet! Its wall screens were in operation, and no frequency at their command could penetrate that neutralizing blanket of vibrations.

"What kind of an eye was that--ever see anything like it, Perce?" Brandon demanded.

"I don't think so, though of course we got only an awfully short flash of it. It didn't look like the periscopic eyes that those flying snakes had--looked more like a hexan eye, don't you think? Couldn't very well be hexan, though, in that kind of a ship."

"Don't think so, either. Maybe it's a purely mechanical affair that they use for observing. Anyway, old sons, I don't like the looks of things at all. Quince, you're the brains of this outfit--shift the massive old intellect into high and tell us what to do."

Westfall, staring into the eyepiece of the filar micrometer, finished measuring the apparent size of the heptagon before he turned toward Stevens and Brandon.

"It is hard to decide upon a course of action, since anything that we do may prove to be wrong," he said, slowly. "However, I do not see that this latest development can operate to change the plan we have already adopted; that of running away, straight out from the sun. We may have to increase our acceleration to the highest value the women and babies can stand. A series of observations of our pursuer will, of course, be necessary to decide that point. It would be useless to go to Titan, for they would be powerless to help us. We could not hold their mirror upon either the _Sirius_ or their torpedoes against such forces as that fortress has at her command. Then, too, we might well be bringing down upon them an enemy who would destroy much of their world before he could be stopped. Both Uranus and Neptune are approximately upon our present course. Do the Titanians know anything of either of them, Steve?"

"Not a thing," the computer replied. "They can't get nearly as far as Uranus on their power beam--it's all they can do to make Jupiter. They seem to think, though, that one or more of the satellites of Uranus or Neptune may be inhabited by beings similar to themselves, only perhaps even more so. But considering the difference between what we found on the Jovian satellites and on Titan, I'd say that anything might be out there--on Uranus, Neptune, their satellites, or anywhere else."

"Cancel Uranus, and double that for Neptune," Brandon commanded. "Realize how far away they are?"

"That's right, too," agreed Stevens. "Before we got there, with any acceleration we can use now, this whole mess will be cleaned up, one way or the other."

* * * * *

Westfall completed the series of observations and calculated his results. Then, with a grave face, he went to consult the medical officers. The women, children, and the two Martian scientists were sent to the sick-bay and the acceleration was raised slowly to twenty meters per second per second, above which point the physicians declared they should not go unless it became absolutely necessary. Then the scientists met again--met without Alcantro and Fedanzo, who lay helpless upon narrow hospital bunks, unable even to lift their massive arms.

While Westfall made another series of precise measurements of the super-dreadnought of space so earnestly pursuing them, Brandon stumbled heavily about the room, hands jammed deep into pockets, eyes unseeing emitting clouds of smoke from his villainously reeking pipe. The Venetians, lacking Brandon's physical strength and by nature quieter of disposition, sat motionless; keen minds hard at work. Stevens sat at the calculating machine, absently setting up and knocking down weird and meaningless integrals, while he also concentrated upon the problem before them.

"They are still gaining, but comparatively slowly," Westfall finally reported. "They seem to be...."

"In that case we may be all x," Brandon interrupted, brandishing his pipe vigorously. "We know that they're on a beam--apparently we're the only ones hereabouts having cosmic power. If we can keep away from them until their beam attenuates, we can whittle 'em down to our size and then take them, no matter how much accumulator capacity they've got."

"But can we keep away from them that long?" asked Dol Kenor, pointedly; and his fellow Venerian also had a question to propound:

"Would it not be preferable to lead them in a wide circle, back to a rendezvous with the Space Fleet, which will probably be ready by the time of meeting?"

"I am afraid that that would be useless," Westfall frowned in thought. "Given power, that fortress could destroy the entire Fleet almost as easily as she could wipe out the _Sirius_ alone."

"Kenor's right." Stevens spoke up from the calculator. "You're getting too far ahead of the situation. We aren't apt to keep ahead of them long enough to do much leading anywhere. The Titanians can hold a beam together from Saturn to Jupiter--why can't these snake-folks?"

"Several reasons," Brandon argued stubbornly. "First place, look at the mass of that thing, and remember that the heavier the beam the harder it is to hold it together. Second, there's no evidence that they wander around much in space. If their beams are designed principally for travel upon Jupiter, why should they have any extraordinary range? I say they can't hold that beam forever. We've got a good long lead, and in spite of their higher acceleration, I think we'll be able to keep out of range of their heavy stuff. If so, we'll trace a circle--only one a good deal bigger than the one Amonar suggested--and meet the fleet at a point where that enemy ship will be about out of power."

Thus for hours the scientists argued, agreeing upon nothing, while the Vorkulian fortress crept ever closer. At the end of three days of the mad flight, the pursuing space ship was in plain sight, covering hundreds of divisions of the micrometer screens. But now the size of the images was increasing with extreme slowness, and the scientists of the _Sirius_ watched with strained attention the edges of those glowing green pictures. Finally, when the pictured edges were about to cease moving across the finely-ruled lines, Brandon cut down his own acceleration a trifle, and kept on decreasing it at such a rate that the heptagon still crept up, foot by foot.

"Hey what's the big idea?" Stevens demanded.

"Coax 'em along. If we run away from them they'll probably reverse power and go back home, won't they? Their beam is falling apart fast, but they're still getting so much stuff along it that we couldn't do a thing to stop them. If they think that we're losing power even faster than they are, though, they'll keep after us until their beam's so thin that they'll just be able to stop on it. Then they'll reverse or else go onto their accumulators--reverse, probably, since they'll be a long ways from home by that time. We'll reverse, too, and keep just out of range. Then, when we both have stopped and are about to start back, their beam will be at its minimum and we'll go to work on 'em--foot, horse, and marines. Nobody can run us as ragged as they've been doing and get away with it as long as I'm conscious and stand a chance in the world of hanging one onto their chins in retaliation. I've got a hunch. If it works, we can take those birds alone, and take 'em so they'll _stay_ took. We might as well break up--this is going to be an ordinary job of piloting for a few days, I think. I'm going up and work with the Martians on that hunch. You fellows work out any ideas you want to. Watch 'em close, Mac. Keep kidding 'em along, but don't let them get close enough to puncture us."

* * * * *

Everything worked out practically as Brandon had foretold, and a few days later, their acceleration somewhat less than terrestrial gravity, he called another meeting in the control room. He came in grinning from ear to ear, accompanied by the two Martians, and seated himself at his complex power panel.

"Now watch the professor closely, gentlemen," he invited. "He is going to cut that beam."

"But you can't," protested Pyraz Amonar.

"I know you can't, ordinarily, when a beam is tight and solid. But that beam's as loose as ashes right now. I told you I had a hunch, and Alcantro and Fedanzo worked out the right answer for me. If I can cut it, Quince, and if their screens go down for a minute, shoot your visiray into them and see what you can see."

"All x. How much power are you going to draw?"

"Plenty--it figures a little better than four hundred thousand kilofranks. I'll draw it all from the accumulators, so as not to disturb you fellows on the cosmic intake. We don't care if we do run the batteries down some, but I don't want to hold that load on the bus-bars very long. However, if my hunch is right, I won't be on that beam five minutes before it's cut from Jupiter--and I'll bet you four dollars that you won't see the original crew in that fort when you get into it."

He set upper and lower bands of dirigible projectors to apply a powerful sidewise thrust, and the _Sirius_ darted off her course. Flashing a minute pencil behind the huge heptagon, Brandon manipulated his tuning circuits until a brilliant spot in space showed him that he was approaching resonance with the heptagon's power beam. Micrometer dials were then engaged and the delicate tuning continued until the meters gave evidence that the two beams were precisely synchronized and exactly opposite in phase. Four plunger switches closed, that tiny pilot ray became an enormous rod of force, and as those two gigantic beams met in exact opposition and neutralized each other, a solid wall of blinding brilliance appeared in the empty ether behind the Vorkulian fortress. As that dazzling wall sprang into being, the sparkling green protection died from the walls of the heptagon.

"Go to it, Quince!" Brandon yelled, but the suggestion was entirely superfluous. Even before the wall-screen had died, Westfall's beam was trying to get through it, and when the visiray revealed the interior of the heptagon, the quiet and methodical physicist was shaken from his habitual calm.

"Why, they aren't the winged monsters at all--they're _hexans_!" he exclaimed.

"Sure they are." Brandon did not even turn his heavily-goggled eyes from the blazing blankness of his own screen. "That was my hunch. Those snakes went about things in a business-like fashion. They didn't strike me as being folks who would pull off such a wild stunt as trying to chase us clear out of the solar system, but a gang of hexans would do just that. Some of them must have captured that ship and, already having it in their cock-eyed brains that we were back of what happened on Callisto, they decided to bump us off if it was the last thing they ever did. That's what I'd do myself, if I were a hexan. Now I'll tell you what's happening back at the home power plant of that ship and what's going to happen next. I'm kicking up a horrible row out there with my interference, and a lot of instruments at the other end of that beam must be cutting up all kinds of didoes, right now. They'll check up on that ship with the expedition, by radio and what-not, and when they find out that it's clear out here--chop! Didn't get to see much, did you?"

"No, they must have switched over to their accumulators almost instantly."

"Yeah, but if they've got accumulator capacity enough to hold off our entire cosmic intake and get back to Jupiter besides, I'm a polyp! We're going to take that ship, fellows, and learn a lot of stuff we never dreamed of before. Ha! There goes his beam--pay me the four, Quince."

The dazzling wall of incandescence had blinked out without warning, and Brandon's beam bored on through space, unimpeded. He shut it off and turned to his fellows with a grin--a grin which disappeared instantly as a thought struck him and he leaped back to his board.

"Sound the high-acceleration warning quick, Perce!" he snapped, and drove in switch after switch.

"Cosmic intake's gone down to zero!" exclaimed MacDonald, as the _Sirius_ leaped away.

"Had to cut it--they might shoot a jolt through that band. Just thought of something. Maybe unnecessary, but no harm done if ... it's necessary, all x--we're taking a sweet kissing right now. You see, even though we're at pretty long range, they've got some horrible projectors, and they were evidently mad enough to waste some power taking a good, solid flash at us--and if we hadn't been expecting it, that flash would have been a bountiful sufficiency, believe me--Great Cat! Look at that meter--and I've had to throw in number ten shunt! The outer screen is drawing five hundred and forty thousand!"

* * * * *

They stared at the meter in amazement. It was incredible, even after they had seen those heptagons in action, that at such extreme range any offensive beam could be driven with such unthinkable power--power requiring for its neutralization almost the full output of the prodigious batteries of accumulators carried by the _Sirius_! Yet for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that beam drove furiously against their straining screens, and even Brandon's face grew tense and hard as that frightful attack continued. At the end of twenty-two minutes, however, the pointer of the meter snapped back to the pin and every man there breathed an explosive sigh of relief--the almost unbearable bombardment was over; the screen was drawing only its maintenance load.

"Wow!" Brandon shouted. "I thought for a minute they were going to hang to us until we cracked, even if it meant that they'd have to freeze to death out here themselves!"

"It would have meant that, too, don't you think?" asked Stevens.

"I imagine so--don't see how they could possibly have enough power left to get back to Jupiter if they shine that thing on us much longer. Of course, the more power they waste on us, the quicker we can take them; but I don't want much more of that beam, I'll tell the world--I just about had heart failure before they cut off!"

The massive heptagon was now drifting back toward Jupiter at constant velocity. The hexans were apparently hoarding jealously their remaining power, for their wall screens did not flash on at the touch of the visiray. Through unresisting metal the probing Terrestrial beams sped, and the scientists studied minutely every detail of the Vorkulian armament; while the regular observers began to make a detailed photographic survey of every room and compartment of the great fortress. Much of the instrumentation and machinery was familiar, but some of it was so strange that study was useless--days of personal inspection and experiment, perhaps complete dismantling, would be necessary to reveal the secrets hidden within those peculiar mechanisms.

"They're trying to save all the power they can--think I'll make them spend some more," Brandon remarked, and directed against the heptagon a heavy destructive beam. "We don't want them to get back to Jupiter until after we've boarded them and found out everything we want to know. Come here, Quince--what do you make of this?"

Both men stared at the heptagon, frankly puzzled; for the screens of the strange vessel did not radiate, nor did the material of the walls yield under the terrible force of the beam. The destructive ray simply struck that dull green surface and vanished--disappeared without a trace, as a tiny stream of water disappears into a partially-soaked sponge.

"Do you know what you are doing?" asked Westfall, after a few minutes' thought. "I believe that you are charging their accumulators at the rate of," he glanced at a meter, "exactly thirty-one thousand five hundred kilofranks."

"Great Cat!" Brandon's hand flashed to a switch and the beam expired. "But they can't just simply grab it and store it, Quince--it's impossible!"

"The word 'impossible' in that connection, coming from you, has a queer sound," Westfall said pointedly and Brandon actually blushed.

"That's right, too--we have got pretty much the same idea in our cosmic intake fields, but we didn't carry things half as far as they have done. Huh! They're flashing us again ... but those thin little beams don't mean anything. They're just trying to make us feed them some more, I guess. But we've got to hold them back some way--wonder if they can absorb a tractor field?"

The hexans had lashed out a few times with their lighter weapons, but, finding the _Sirius_ unresponsive, had soon shut them off and were stolidly plunging along toward Jupiter. Brandon flung out a tractor rod and threw the mass of his cruiser upon it as it locked into those sullen green walls. But as soon as the enemy felt its drag, their screens flared white, and the massive Terrestrial space-ship quivered in every member as that terrific cable of force was snapped.

"They apparently cannot store up the energy of a tractor," commented Westfall, "but you will observe that they have no difficulty in radiating when they care to."

"Those two ideas didn't pan out so heavy. There's lots of things not tried yet, though. Our next best bet is to get around in front of him and push back. If they wiggle away from more than fifty percent of a pressor, they're really good."

The pilot maneuvered the _Sirius_ into line, directly between Jupiter and the pentagon; and as the driving projectors went into action, Brandon drove a mighty pressor field along their axis, squarely into the center of mass of the Vorkulian fortress. For a moment it held solidly, then, as the screens of the enemy went into action, it rebounded and glanced off in sparkling, cascading torrents. But the hexans, with all their twisting and turning, could not present to that prodigious beam of force any angle sufficiently obtuse to rob it of half its power, and the driving projectors of the pentagon again burst into activity as the backward-pushing mass of the _Sirius_ made itself felt. In a short time, however, the wall-screens were again cut off--apparently more power was required to drive them than they were able to deflect.

Although even the enormous tonnage of the Terrestrial cruiser was insignificant in comparison with the veritable mountain of metal to which she was opposed, so that the fiercest thrust of her driving projectors did not greatly affect the monster's progress; yet Brandon and his cohorts were well content.

"It's a long trip back to where they came from, and since they wanted to drift all the way, I think they'll be out of power before they get there," Brandon summed up the situation. "We aren't losing any power, either, since we are using only a part of our cosmic intake."

In a few hours the struggle had settled down to a routine matter--the _Sirius_ being pushed backward steadily against the full drive of her every projector, contesting stubbornly every mile of space traversed. Assured that the regular pilots and lookouts were fully capable of handling the vessel, the scientists were about to resume their interrupted tasks when one of the photographers called them over to look at something he had discovered in one of the lowermost and smallest compartments of the heptagon. All crowded around the screens, and saw pictured there the winged, snake-like form of one of the original crew of the Vorkulian vessel!

"Dead?" Brandon asked.

"Not yet," replied the photographer. "He is twitching a little once in a while, but you see, he's pretty badly cut up."

"I see he is ... he must have a lot of vitality to have lasted this long--may be he'll live through it yet. Hold him on the plate, and get his exact measurements." He turned to the communicator. "Doctor von Steiffel? Can you come down to the control room a minute? We may want you to operate upon one of these South Jovians after a while."

"_Himmel! Es ... ist ... der...._" The great surgeon, bearded and massive, stared into the plate, and in his surprise started to speak in his native German. He paused, his long, powerful fingers tracing the likeness of the Vorkul upon the plate, then went on: "I would like very much to operate, but, not understanding our intentions, he would, of course, struggle. And when that body struggles--_schrecklichkeit_!" and he waved his arms in a pantomime of wholesale destruction.

"I thought of that--that's why I am talking to you now instead of when we get to him, two or three days from now. We'll give you his exact measurements, and a crew of mechanics will, under your direction, sink holes in the steel floor and install steel bands heavy enough to hold him rigid, from tailfins to wing-tips. We'll hold him there until we can make him understand that we're friends. It is of the utmost importance to save that creature's life if possible; because we do not want one of their fortresses launched against us--and in any event, it will not do us any harm to have a friend in the City of the South."

"Right. I will also have prepared some kind of a space-suit in which he can be brought from his vessel to ours," and the surgeon took the measurements and went to see that the "operating table" and suit were made ready for Kromodeor, the sorely wounded Vorkul.

* * * * *

It was not long until the projectors of the heptagon went out and she lay inert in space, power completely exhausted. Knowing that the screens of the enemy would absorb any ordinary ray, the scientists had calculated the most condensed beam they could possibly project, a beam which, their figures showed, should be able to puncture those screens by sheer mass action--puncture them practically instantaneously, before the absorbers could react. To that end they had arranged their circuits to hurl seven hundred sixty-five thousand kilofranks--the entire power of their massed accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake--in one tiny bar of superlative density, less than one meter in diameter! Everything ready, Brandon shot in prodigious switches that launched that bolt--a bolt so vehement, so inconceivably intense, that it seemed fairly to blast the very ether out of existence as it tore its way along its carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the control panels of the absorber screens; parts so vital that without them the great vessel would be helpless, and yet items which the Terrestrials could reconstruct quite readily from their photographs and drawings.

As that irresistible bolt touched the Vorkulian wall-screen, the spot of contact flared instantaneously through the spectrum and into the black beyond the violet as that screen overloaded locally. Fast as it responded and highly conductive though it was, it could not handle that frightfully concentrated load. In the same fleeting instant of time every molecule of substance in that beam's path flashed into tenuous vapor--no conceivable material could resist or impede that stabbing stiletto of energy--and the main control panel of the Vorkulian wall-screen system vanished. Time after time, as rapidly as he could sight his beam and operate his switches, Brandon drove his needle of annihilation through the fortress, destroying the secondary controls. Then, the walls unresisting, he cut in the vastly larger, but infinitely less powerful, I-P ray, and with it systematically riddled the immense heptagon. Out through the gaping holes in the outer walls rushed the dense atmosphere of Jupiter, and the hexans in their massed hundreds died.

The _Sirius_ was brought up beside the heptagon, so that her main air-lock was against one of the yawning holes in the green metal wall of the enemy. There she was anchored by tractor beams, and the two hundred picked men of the I-P police, in full space equipment, prepared to board the gigantic fortress of the void. Brandon sat tense at his controls, ready to send his beam ahead of the troopers against any hexans that might survive in some as yet unpunctured compartment. General Crowninshield sat beside the physicist at an auxiliary board, phones at ears and four infra-red visiray plates ranged in front of him; ready through light or darkness to direct and oversee the attack, no matter where it might lead or how widely separated the platoons might become before the citadel was taken.

The space-line men--the engineers of weightless combat--led the van, protected by the projectors of their fellows. Theirs the task to set up ways of rope, along which the others could advance. Power drills bit savagely into metal, making holes to receive the expanding eyebolts; grappling hooks seized fast every protuberance and corner; points of little stress were supported by powerful suction cups; and at intervals were strung beam-fed lanterns, illuminating brilliantly the line of march. Through compartments and down corridors they went, bridging the many gaps in the metal through which Brandon's beams had blasted their way; guided by Crowninshield along the shortest feasible path toward the little projector room in which Kromodeor, the wounded Vorkul, lay. There were so many chambers and compartments in the heptagon that it had, of course, been impossible to puncture them all, and in some of the tight rooms were groups of hexans, anxious to do battle. But the general's eye led his men, and if such a room lay before them, Brandon's frightful beam entered it first--and where that beam entered, life departed.

But the hexans were really intelligent, as has been said. They had had time to prepare for what they knew awaited them, and they were rendered utterly desperate by the knowledge that, no matter what might happen, their course was run. Their power was gone, and even if the present enemy should be driven off, they would float idly in space until they died of cold; or, more probably, hurtling toward Jupiter as they were, they would plunge to certain death upon its surface as soon as they came within its powerful gravitational field. Therefore some fifty of the creatures, who had had space experience in their spherical vessels, had spent the preceding days in manufacturing space equipment. Let the weight-fiends plan upon detonating magazines of explosives, upon laying mines calculated to destroy the invaders, even the vessel itself and all within it. Let them plan upon any other such idle schemes, which were certain to be foreseen and guarded against by the space-hardened veterans who undoubtedly moaned that all-powerful and vengeful football of scarred gray metal. Space-fighters were they, and as space-fighters would they die; taking with them to their own inevitable death a full quota of the enemy.

* * * * *

Thus it came about that the head of the column of police had scarcely passed a certain door, when in the room behind it there began to assemble the half-hundred spacehounds of the hexans. When the vanguard had approached that room, Crowninshield had inspected it thoroughly with his infra-red beams. He had found it punctured and airless, devoid of life or of lethal devices, and had passed on. But now the space-suited warriors of the horde, guided in their hiding by their own visirays, were massing there. When the center of the I-P column reached that door, it burst open. There boiled out into the corridor, into the very midst of the police, fifty demoniacal hexans, fighting with Berserk fury, ruled by but one impulse--to kill.

Hand-weapons flashed viciously, tearing at steel armor and at bulging space-suits. Space-hooks bit and tore. Pikes and lances were driven with the full power of brawny arms. Here and there could be seen trooper and hexan, locked together in fierce embrace far from any hand-line--six limbs against four, all ten plied with abandon in mortal, hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot combat.

"Give way!" yelled Crowninshield into the ears of his men. "Epstein, back! LeFevre, advance! Get out of block ten--give us a chance to use a beam!"

As the police fell back out of the designated section of the corridor, Brandon's beam tore through it, filling it from floor to ceiling with a volume of intolerable energy. In that energy walls, doorway, and space-lines, as well as most of the hexans, vanished utterly. But the beam could not be used again. Every surviving enemy had hurled himself frantically into the thickest ranks of the police and the battle raged fiercer than ever. It did not last long. The ends of the column had already closed in. The police filled the corridor and overflowed into the yawning chasm cut by the annihilating ray. Outnumbered, surrounded upon all sides, above, and below by the Terrestrials, the hexans fought with mad desperation to the last man--and to the last man died. And even though in lieu of their own highly efficient space-armor they had fought in weak, crude, and hastily improvised space-suits, which were pitifully inferior to the ray resistant, heavy steel armor of the I-P forces, nevertheless the enormous strength and utter savagery of the hexans had taken toll; and when the advance was resumed, it was with extra lookouts scanning the entire neighborhood of the line of march.

Since the troops had entered the fortress as close to their goal as possible, it was not long until the leading platoon reached the door behind which Kromodeor lay. Tools and cylinders of air were brought up, and the engineers quickly fitted pressure bulkheads across the corridor. There was a screaming hiss from the valves, the atmosphere in that walled-off space became dense, and mechanics attacked with their power drills the door of the projector room. It opened, and four husky orderlies rapidly but gently encased the long body of the Vorkul in the space-suit built especially to receive it. As that monstrous form in its weirdly bulging envelope was guided through the air-locks into the _Sirius_, Crowninshield barked orders into his transmitter and the police reformed. They would now systematically scour the fortress, to wipe out any hexans that might still be in hiding; to discover and destroy any possible traps or infernal machines which the enemy might have planted for their undoing.

Assured that the real danger to the _Sirius_ was over and that his presence was no longer necessary, Brandon turned his controls over to an assistant and went up to the Venerian rooms, where von Steiffel and his staff were to operate upon the Vorkul. There, in the dense, hot air, but little different now from the atmosphere of Jupiter, Kromodeor lay; bolted down to the solid steel of the floor by means of padded steel straps. So heavy were the bands that he could not possibly break even one of them; so closely were they spaced that he could scarcely have moved a muscle had he tried. But he did not try--so near death was he that his mighty muscles did not even quiver at the trenchant bite of the surgeon's tools. Von Steiffel and his aides, meticulously covered with sterile gowns, hoods, and gloves, worked in most rigidly aseptic style; deftly and rapidly closing the ghastly wounds inflicted by the weapons of the hexans.

"Hi, Brandon," the surgeon grunted as he straightened up, the work completed. "I did not use much antiseptic on him. Because of possible differences in blood chemistry and in ignorance of his native bacteria, I depended almost wholly upon asepsis and his natural resistance. It is a good thing that we did not have to use an anaesthetic. He is in bad shape, but if we can feed him successfully, he may pull through."

"Feed him? I never thought of that. What d'you suppose he eats?"

"I have an idea that it is something highly concentrated, from his anatomy. I shall try giving him sugar, milk chocolate, something of the kind. First I shall try maple syrup. Being a liquid, it is easily administered, and its penetrating odor also may be a help."

* * * * *

A can of the liquid was brought in and to the amazement of the Terrestrials, the long, delicate antennae of the Vorkul began to twitch as soon as the can was opened. Motioning hastily for silence, von Steiffel filled a bowl and placed it upon the floor beneath Kromodeor's grotesque nose. The twitching increased, until finally one dull, glazed eye brightened somewhat and curled slowly out upon its slender pedicle, toward the dish. His mouth opened sluggishly and a long, red tongue reached out, but as his perceptions quickened, he became conscious of the strangers near him. The mouth snapped shut, the eye retracted, and heaving, rippling surges traversed that powerful body as he struggled madly against the unbreakable shackles of steel binding him to the floor.

"_Ach, kindlein_!" The surgeon bent anxiously over that grotesque but frightened head; soothing, polysyllabic German crooning from his bearded lips.

"Here, let's try this--I'm good on it," Stevens suggested, bringing up the Callistonian thought exchanger. All three men donned headsets, and sent wave after wave of friendly and soothing thoughts toward that frantic and terrified brain.

"He's got his brain shut up like a clam!" Brandon snorted. "Open up, guy--we aren't going to hurt you! We're the best friends you've got, if you only knew it!"

"Himmel, und he iss himself killing!" moaned von Steiffel.

"One more chance that might work," and Brandon stepped over to the communicator, demanding that Verna Pickering be brought at once. She came in as soon as the air-locks would permit, and the physicist welcomed her eagerly.

"This fellow's fighting so he's tearing himself to pieces. We can't make him receive a thought, and von Steiffel's afraid to use an anaesthetic. Now it's barely possible that he may understand hexan. I thought you wasted time learning any of it, but maybe you didn't--see if you can make him understand that we're friends."

The girl flinched and shrank back involuntarily, but forced herself to approach that awful head. Bending over, she repeated over and over one harsh, barking syllable. The effect of that word was magical. Instantly Kromodeor ceased struggling, an eye curled out, and that long, supple tongue flashed down and into the syrup. Not until the last sticky trace had been licked from the bowl did his attention wander from the food. Then the eye, sparkling brightly now, was raised toward the girl. Simultaneously four other eyes arose, one directed at each of the men and the other surveying his bonds and the room in which he was. Then the Vorkul spoke, but his whistling, hissing manner of speech so garbled the barking sounds of the hexan words he was attempting to utter, that Verna's slight knowledge of the language was of no use. She therefore put on one of the headsets, motioning the men to do the same, and approached Kromodeor with the other, repeating the hexan word of friendly import. This time the Vorkul's brain was not sealed against the visitors and thoughts began to flow.

"You've used those things a lot," Brandon turned to Stevens in a quick aside. "Can you hide your thoughts?"

"Sure--why?"

"All I can think of is that power system of theirs, and he'd know what we were going to do, sure. And I'd better be getting at it anyway. So you can wipe that off your mind with a clear conscience--the rest of us will get everything they've got there. Your job's to get everything you can out of this bird's brain. All x?"

"All x."

"Why, you didn't put yours on!" Verna exclaimed.

"No, I don't think I'll have time. If I get started talking to him now, I'd be here from now on, and I've got a lot of work to do. Steve can talk to him for me--see you later," and Brandon was gone.

He went directly to the Vorkulian fortress, bare now of hexan life and devoid of hexan snares and traps. There he and his fellows labored day after day learning every secret of every item of armament and equipment aboard the heptagon.

"Did you finish up today, Norm?" asked Stevens one evening. "Kromodeor's coming to life fast. He's able to wiggle around a little now, and is insisting that we take off the one chain we keep on him and let him use a plate, to call his people."

"All washed up. Guess I'll go in and talk to him--you all say he's such an egg. With this stuff off my mind I can hide it well enough. By the way, what does he eat?" And the two friends set out for the Venerian rooms.

"Anything that's sweet, apparently, with just enough milk to furnish a little protein. Won't eat meat or vegetables at all--von Steiffel says they haven't got much of a digestive tract, and I know that they haven't got any teeth. He's already eaten most all the syrup we had on board, all of the milk chocolate, and a lot of the sugar. But none of us can get any kind of a raise out of him at all--not even Nadia, when she fed him a whole box of chocolates."

"No, I mean what does he eat when he's home?"

"It seems to be a sort of syrup, made from the juices of jungle plants, which they drag in on automatic conveyors and process on automatic machinery. But he's a funny mutt--hard to get. Some of his thoughts are lucid enough, but others we can't make out at all--they are so foreign to all human nature that they simply do not register as thoughts at all. One funny thing, he isn't the least bit curious about anything. He doesn't want to examine anything, doesn't ask us any questions, and won't tell us anything about anything, so that all we know about him we found out purely by accident. For instance, they like games and sports, and seem to have families. They also have love, liking, and respect for others of their own race--but they seem to have no emotions whatever for outsiders. They're utterly inhuman--I can't describe it--you'll have to get it for yourself."

"Did you find out about the Callistonians who went to see them?"

"Negatively, yes. They never arrived. They probably couldn't see in the fog and must have missed the city. If they tried to land in that jungle, it was just too bad!"

"That would account for everything. So they're strictly neutral, eh? Well, I'll tell him 'hi,' anyway." Now in the sickroom, Brandon picked up the headset and sent out a wave of cheery greeting.

To his amazement, the mind of the Vorkul was utterly unresponsive to his thoughts. Not disdainful, not inimical; not appreciative, nor friendly--simply indifferent to a degree unknown and incomprehensible to any human mind. He sent Brandon only one message, which came clear and coldly emotionless.

"I do not want to talk to you. Tell the hairy doctor that I am now strong enough to be allowed to go to the communicator screen. That is all." The Vorkul's mind again became an oblivious maze of unintelligible thoughts. Not deliberately were Kromodeor's thoughts hidden; he was constitutionally unable to interest himself in the thoughts or things of any alien intelligence.

"Well, that for that." A puzzled, thoughtful look came over Brandon's face as he called von Steiffel. "A queer duck, if there ever was one. However, their ship will never bother us, that's one good thing; and I think we've got about everything of theirs that we want, anyway."

The surgeon, after a careful examination of his patient, unlocked the heavy collar with which he had been restraining the over-anxious Vorkul, and supported him lightly at the communicator panel. As surely as though he had used those controls for years Kromodeor shot the visiray beam out into space. One hand upon each of the several dials and one eye upon each meter, it was a matter only of seconds for him to get in touch with Vorkulia. To the Terrestrials the screen was a gray and foggy blank; but the manifest excitement shrieking and whistling from the speaker in response to Kromodeor's signals made it plain that his message was being received with enthusiasm.

"They are coming," the Vorkul thought, and lay back, exhausted.

"Just as well that they're comin' out here, at that," Brandon commented. "We couldn't begin to handle that structure anywhere near Jupiter--in fact, we wouldn't want to get very close ourselves, with passengers aboard."

Such was the power of the Vorkulian vessels that in less than twenty hours another heptagon slowed to a halt beside the _Sirius_ and two of its crew were wafted aboard.

They were ushered into the Venerian room, where they talked briefly with their wounded fellow before they dressed him in a space-suit, which they filled with air to their own pressure. Then all three were lifted lightly into the air, and without a word or a sign were borne through the air-locks of the vessel, and into an opening in the wall of the rescuing heptagon. A green tractor beam reached out, seizing the derelict, and both structures darted away at such a pace that in a few minutes they had disappeared in the black depths of space.

"Well--that, as I may have remarked before, is indisputably and conclusively that." Brandon broke the surprised, almost stunned, silence that followed the unceremonious departure of the visitors. "I don't know whether to feel relieved at the knowledge that they won't bother us, or whether to get mad because they won't have anything to do with us."

He sent the "All x" signal to the pilot and the _Sirius_, once more at the acceleration of Terrestrial gravity, again bored on through space.

CHAPTER XIII

Spacehounds Triumphant

Now that the hexan threat that had so long oppressed the humanity of the _Sirius_ was lifted, that dull gray football of armor steel was filled with relief and rejoicing as the pilot laid his course for Europa. Lounges and saloons resounded with noise as police, passengers, and such of the crew as were at liberty made merry. The control room, in which were grouped the leaders of the expedition and the scientists, was orderly enough, but a noticeable undertone of gladness had replaced the tense air it had known so long.

"Hi, men!" Nadia Stevens and Verna Pickering, arms around each other's waists, entered the room and saluted the group gaily before they became a part of it.

"'Smatter, girls--tired of dancing already?" asked Brandon.

"Oh, no--we could dance from now on," Verna assured him. "But you see, Nadia hadn't seen that husband of hers for fifteen minutes, and was getting lonesome. Being afraid of all you men, she wanted me to come along for moral support. The real reason I came, though," and she narrowed her expressive eyes and lowered her voice mysteriously, "is that you two physicists are here. I want to study my chosen victims a little longer before I decide over which of you to cast the spell of my fatal charm."

"But you can't do that," he objected, vigorously. "Quince and I are going to settle that ourselves some day--by shooting dice, or maybe each other, or...." he broke off, listening to an animated conversation going on behind them.

"... just simply outrageous!" Nadia was exclaiming. "Here we saved his life, and I fed him a lot of my candy, and we went to all the trouble of bringing their ship back here almost to Jupiter for them, and then they simply dashed off without a word of thanks or anything! And he always acted as though he never wanted to see or hear of any of us again, ever! Why, they don't _think_ straight--as Norman would say it, they're _full_ of little red _ants_! Why, they aren't even _human_!"

"Sure not." Brandon turned to the flushed speaker. "They couldn't be, hardly, with their make-up. But is it absolutely necessary that all intelligent beings should possess such an emotion as gratitude? Such a being without it does seem funny to us, but I can't see that its lack necessarily implies anything particularly important. Keep still a minute," he went on, as Nadia tried to interrupt him, "and listen to some real wisdom. Quince, _you_ tell 'em."

"They are, of course, very highly developed and extremely intelligent; but it should not be surprising that intelligence should manifest itself in ways quite baffling to us human beings, whose minds work so differently. They are, however ... well, peculiar."

"I _won't_ keep still!" Nadia burst out, at the first opportunity. "I don't want to talk about those hideous things any more, anyway. Come on, Steve, let's go up and dance!"

Crowninshield turned to Verna, with the obvious intention of leading her away, but Brandon interposed.

"Sorry, Crown, but this lady is conducting a highly important psychological research, so your purely social claims will have to wait until after the scientific work is done."

"Why narrow the field of investigation?" laughed the girl. "I'd rather widen it, myself--I might prefer a general, even to a physicist!"

They went up to the main saloon and joined the mle there, and after one dance with Verna--all he could claim in that crowd of men--Crowninshield turned to Brandon.

"You two seem to know Miss Pickering extraordinarily well. Would I be stepping on your toes if I give her a play?"

"Clear ether as far as we're concerned." Brandon shrugged his shoulders. "She's been kicking around under foot ever since she was knee high to a duck--we gave her her first lessons on a slide rule."

"Don't be dumb, Norman. That woman's a knock-out--a riot--a regular tri-planet call-out!"

"Oh, she's all x, as far as that goes. She's a good little scout, too--not half as dumb as she acts--and she's one of the squarest little aces that ever waved a plume; but as for _playing_ her--too much like our kid sister."

"Good--me for her!" and they made their way back down to the control room.

Stevens, after his one dance with Nadia, had already returned. Brandon and Crowninshield found him seated at the calculating machine, continuing a problem which already filled several pages of his notebook.

"'Smatter, Steve? So glad to see a calculator and some paper that you can't let them alone?"

"Not exactly--just had a thought a day or so ago. Been computing the orbit of the wreckage of the _Arcturus_ around Jupiter. Think we should salvage it--the upper half, at least. It was left intact, you know."

"H ... m ... m. That would be nice, all right. Dope enough?"

"Got the direction solid, from my own observations; the velocity's a pretty rough approximation though. But after allowing for my probable error, it figures an ellipse of low eccentricity, between the orbits of Io and Europa. Its period is short--about two days."

"Isn't it wonderful to have a brain?" Brandon addressed the room at large. "The kid's clever. Nobody else would have thought of it, except maybe Westfall. Let's see your figures. Um ... m ... m. According to that, we're within an hour of it, right now." He turned to the pilot and sketched rapidly.

"Get on this line here, please, and decelerate, so that the stuff'll catch up with us, and pass the word to the lookouts. Stevens and I will take the bow plates.

"That's a good idea," he went on to Stevens, as they took their places at main and auxiliary ultra-banks. "Lot of plunder in that ship. Instruments, boats, and equipment worth millions, besides most of the junk of the passengers--clothes, trunks, trinkets, and what-not. You're there, bucko!"

"Thanks, Chief," ... and they fell silent, watching the instruments carefully, and from time to time making computations from the readings of the acceleration and flight meters.

"There she is!" An alarm bell had finally sounded, the ultra-lights had flared out into space, and upon both screens there shone out images of the closely clustered wreckage of the _Arcturus_. But both men were more interested just then in the mathematics of the recovery than in the vessel itself.

"Missed it eight minutes of time and eleven divisions on the scale," reported Stevens. "Not so good."

"Not so bad either--I've seen worse computation." Thus lightly was dismissed a mathematical feat which, a few years earlier, before the days of I-P computers, would have been deemed worthy of publication in "The Philosophical Magazine."

* * * * *

Director Newton was called in, and it was decided that the many small fragments of the vessel were not worth saving; that its upper half was all that they should attempt to tow the enormous distance back to Tellus. The pace of the _Sirius_ was adjusted to that of the floating masses, and tractor beams were clamped upon the undamaged portion of the derelict, and upon the two slices from the nose of the craft. A couple of the larger fragments of wreckage were also taken, to furnish metal for the repairs which would be necessary. Acceleration was brought slowly up to normal, and the battle-scarred cruiser of the void, with her heavy burden of inert metal, resumed her interrupted voyage toward Europa; the satellite upon which the passengers and crew of the ill-fated _Arcturus_ had been so long immured. On she bored through the ether, detector screens full out and greenly scintillant Vorkulian wall-screens outlining her football shape in weird and ghastly light; unafraid now of any possible surviving space-craft of the hexans.

But if the hexans detected her, they made no sign. Perhaps their fleet had been destroyed utterly; perhaps it had been impressed upon even their fierce minds that those sparkling green screens were not to be molested with impunity! The satellite was reached without event and down into the crater landing shaft the two enormous masses of metal dropped.

Callisto's foremost citizens were on hand to welcome the Terrestrial rescuers, and revelry reigned supreme in that deeply buried Europan community. All humanity celebrated. The Callistonians rejoiced because they were now freed from the age-old oppression of the hexan hordes; because they could once more extend their civilization over the Jovian satellites and live again their normal lives upon the surface of those small worlds.

The Terrestrials were almost equally enthusiastic in the reunion that marked the end of the long imprisonment of the refugees.

As soon as the hull of the _Arcturus_ had been warmed sufficiently to permit inspection, its original passengers were allowed to visit it briefly, to examine and to reclaim their belongings. Of course, some damage had been done by the cold of interplanetary space, but in general everything was as they had left it. Stevens and Nadia were among the first permitted aboard. They went first to the control room, where Stevens found his bag still lying behind Breckenridge's desk, where he had thrown it when he first boarded the vessel. Then they made their way up to Nadia's stateroom, which they found in meticulous order and spotless in its cleanliness--there is neither dust nor dirt in space. Nadia glanced about the formal little room and laughed up at her husband.

"Funny, isn't it, sweetheart, how little we know what to expect? Just think how surprised I would have been, when I left this room, if I had been told that I would have a husband before I got back to it!"

Breckenridge's first thought was for his precious triplex automatic chronometer, which he found, of course, "way off"--six and three-tenths seconds fast. Having corrected the timepiece from that of the _Sirius_, he immersed himself in the other delicate instruments of his department--and he was easy to find from that time on.

Overcrowded as the _Sirius_ already was, it was decided that the original complement of the _Arcturus_ should occupy their former quarters aboard her during the return trip. To this end, corps of mechanics set to work upon the salvaged hulk. Heavy metal work was no novelty to the Callistonian engineers and mechanics, and the _Sirius_ also was well equipped with metal-working machines and men. Thus the prow was welded; armored, insulating air-breaks were built along the stern, which was the plane of hexan cleavage, electrical connections were restored; and lastly, a set of the great Vorkulian wall-screen generators, absorbers, and dissipators was installed, with sufficient accumulator capacity for their operation. Director Newton studied this installation in silence for some time, then went in search of Brandon.

"I hadn't considered the possibility of being attacked again between here and Tellus, but there's always the chance," he admitted. "If you think that there is any danger, we will crowd them all into the _Sirius_. It will not be at all comfortable, but it will be better than having any more of us killed."

"With that outfit they'll be as safe as we will," the scientist assured him. "They can stand as much grief as we can. We'll do the fighting for the whole outfit from here, and anything we meet will have to take us before they can touch them. So they had better ride it there, where they'll have passengers' accommodations and be comfortable. As to danger, I don't know what to expect. They may all be gone and they may not. We're going to expect trouble every meter of the way in, though, and be ready for it."

Everything ready and thoroughly tested, and stream of power flowing into the _Arcturus_ from the cosmic receptors of her sister ship, the passengers and their new possessions were moved into their former quarters. There was a brief ceremony of farewell, the doors of the airlocks were closed, the careful check-out was gone through, and the driving projectors of the _Sirius_ lifted both great vessels up the shaft, slowly and easily. And after them, as long as they could be seen, stared the thousands of Callistonians who thronged the great shaft's floor. Many of the spectators were not, strictly speaking, Callistonians at all. They were really Europans, born and reared in that hidden city which was to have been the last stronghold of Callisto's civilization. In that throng were hundreds who had never before seen the light of the sun nor any of the glories of the firmament, hundreds to whom that brief glimpse was a foretaste of the free and glorious life which was soon to be theirs.

Up and up mounted that powerful tug-boat of space, with her heavy barge, falling smoothly upward at normal acceleration. Below her first Europa, then mighty Jupiter, became moons growing smaller and smaller. In their stateroom Nadia's supple waist writhed in the curve of Stevens' arm as she turned and looked up at him with sparkling eyes.

"Well, big fellow, how does it feel to be out of a job? Or are you going over there every day on a tractor beam to work, as Norman suggested?"

"Not on your sweet young life!" he exclaimed. "Norm thought he was kidding somebody, but it registered zero. It gives me the pip to loaf around when there's a lot of work to do, but this is entirely different. Nothing's driving us now, and a fellow's entitled to at least one honeymoon during his life. And what a honeymoon this is going to be, little spacehound of my heart! Nothing to do but love you all the way from here to Tellus! Whoopee!"

"Oh, there's a couple of other things to do," she reminded him gaily. "You've got to smoke a lot of good cigarettes, I must eat a lot of Delray's chocolates, and we both really should catch up on eating fancy cooking. Speaking of eating, isn't that the second call for dinner? It _is_!" and they went along the narrow hall toward the elevator. To these two the long journey was to seem all too short.

Long though the voyage was, it was uneventful. The occupants of the two vessels were in constant touch with each other by means of the communicators, and there was also much visiting back and forth in person. Stevens and Nadia came often to the _Sirius_, and were accompanied frequently by Verna Pickering, who claimed anew her ancient right of "kicking around under foot," wherever Brandon and Westfall might chance to be--and at such times General Crowninshield was practically certain to appear. And upon days when the beautiful brunette did not appear, the commandant generally found it necessary to inspect in person something in the _Arcturus_.

Day after day passed, and even the new and ultra-powerful detector screens of the _Sirius_ remained unresponsive and cold. Day after day the plates before the doubled lookouts and observers remained blank. Power flowed smoothly and unfailingly into the cosmic receptors, and the products of conversion were discharged with equal smoothness and regularity from the forty-five gigantic driving projectors. The tractor beam held its heavy burden easily and the generators functioned perfectly. And finally a planet began to loom up in the stern lookout plates.

Verna, the irrepressible, was in the control room of the _Sirius_, quarreling adroitly with Brandon and deftly flirting with Crowninshield. Glancing into the control screen she saw the planet in its end block, then studied the instruments briefly.

"We're heading for _Mars_!" she declared with conviction. "I thought it looked that way yesterday, but supposed it must be only apparent--a trick of piloting or something about the orbit. I thought of course you were taking us back home--but you can't _possibly_ get to Tellus on any such course as this!"

"Sure not," Brandon replied easily. "Certainly it's Mars. Isn't that where the _Arcturus_ started out for? Whoever said we were going to Tellus? Of course, if any of the passengers want to go right back the IPC will undoubtedly furnish transportation _gratis_. But paste this in your hat, Verna, for future reference--when spacehounds start out to go anywhere they _go_ there, even if they have to spend a year or so on minus time to do it!"

Closer and closer they approached the red planet, swinging around in a wide arc in order to make their course coincide exactly with the pilot ray of check station M14, which was now precisely in its scheduled location in space. At the chief pilot's desk in the control room of the _Arcturus_, Breckenridge checked in with the station, then calculated rapidly the instant of their touching the specially-built bumper platforms of spring steel, hemp, and fiber which awaited them upon the Martian dock of the Interplanetary Corporation. Within range of the terminal, he plugged into it, waited until the tiny light flashed its green message of attention, and reported.

"IPV _Arcturus_; Breckenridge, Chief Pilot; trip number forty-three twenty-nine. Checking in--four hundred forty-six days, fifteen hours, eleven minutes, thirty-eight and seven-tenths seconds minus!"

THE END.

       SUBSPACE SURVIVORS

by

EDWARD E. SMITH, Ph. D.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | _There has always been, and will always be, the problem of | | surviving the experience that any trained expert can handle | | ... when there hasn't been any first survivor to be an | | expert! When no one has ever gotten back to explain what | | happened...._ | +--------------------------------------------------------------+

I.

"All passengers, will you[1] pay attention, please?" All the high-fidelity speakers of the starship _Procyon_ spoke as one, in the skillfully-modulated voice of the trained announcer. "This is the fourth and last cautionary announcement. Any who are not seated will seat themselves at once. Prepare for take-off acceleration of one and one-half gravities; that is, everyone will weigh one-half again as much as his normal Earth weight for about fifteen minutes. We lift in twenty seconds; I will count down the final five seconds.... Five ... Four ... Three ... Two ... One ... Lift!"

The immense vessel rose from her berth; slowly at first, but with ever-increasing velocity; and in the main lounge, where many of the passengers had gathered to watch the dwindling Earth, no one moved for the first five minutes. Then a girl stood up.

She was not a startlingly beautiful girl; no more so than can be seen fairly often, of a summer afternoon, on Seaside Beach. Her hair was an artificial yellow. Her eyes were a deep, cool blue. Her skin, what could be seen of it--she was wearing breeches and a long-sleeved shirt--was lightly tanned. She was only about five-feet-three, and her build was not spectacular. However, every ounce of her one hundred fifteen pounds was exactly where it should have been.

First she stood tentatively, flexing her knees and testing her weight. Then, stepping boldly out into a clear space, she began to do a high-kicking acrobatic dance; and went on doing it as effortlessly and as rhythmically as though she were on an Earthly stage.

"You mustn't _do_ that, Miss!" A stewardess came bustling up. Or, rather, not exactly bustling. Very few people, and almost no stewardesses, either actually bustle in or really enjoy one point five gees. "You really _must_ resume your seat, Miss. I must insist.... Oh, you're Miss Warner...."

She paused.

"That's right, Barbara Warner. Cabin two eight one."

"But really, Miss Warner, it's regulations, and if you should fall...."

"Foosh to regulations, and _pfui_ on 'em. I won't fall. I've been wondering, every time out, if I could do a thing, and now I'm going to find out."

Jackknifing double, she put both forearms flat on the carpet and lifted both legs into the vertical. Then, silver slippers pointing motionlessly ceilingward, she got up onto her hands and walked twice around a vacant chair. She then performed a series of flips that would have done credit to a professional acrobat; the finale of which left her sitting calmly in the previously empty seat.

"See?" she informed the flabbergasted stewardess. "I _could_ do it, and I didn't...."

Her voice was drowned out in a yell of approval as everybody who could clap their hands did so with enthusiasm. "More!" "Keep it up, gal!" "Do it again!"

"Oh, I didn't do that to show off!" Barbara Warner flushed hotly as she met the eyes of the nearby spectators. "Honestly I didn't--I just _had_ to know if I could." Then, as the applause did not die down, she fairly scampered out of the room.

* * * * *

For one hour before the _Procyon's_ departure from Earth and for three hours afterward, First Officer Carlyle Deston, Chief Electronicist, sat attentively at his board. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed one hundred sixty-two pounds net. Just a little guy, as spacemen go. Although narrow-waisted and, for his heft, broad-shouldered, he was built for speed and maneuverability, not to haul freight.

Watching a hundred lights and half that many instruments, listening to two phone circuits, one with each ear, and hands moving from switches to rheostats to buttons and levers, he was completely informed as to the instant-by-instant status of everything in his department.

Although attentive, he was not tense, even during the countdown. The only change was that at the word "Two" his right forefinger came to rest upon a red button and his eyes doubled their rate of scan. If anything in his department had gone wrong, the _Procyon_'s departure would have been delayed.

And again, well out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into a socket below the one remaining green light and spoke:

"Procyon One to Control Six. Flight Eight Four Nine. Subspace Radio Test One. How do you read me, Control Six?"

"Control Six to Procyon One. I read you ten and zero. How do you read me, Procyon One?"

"Ten and zero. Out." Deston flipped a toggle and the solitary green light went out.

Perfect signal and zero noise. That was that. From now until Emergence--unless something happened--he might as well be a passenger. Everything was automatic, unless and until some robot or computer yelled for help. Deston leaned back in his bucket seat and lighted a cigarette. He didn't need to scan the board constantly now; any trouble signal would jump right out at him.

Promptly at Dee plus Three Zero Zero--three hours, no minutes, no seconds after departure--his relief appeared.

"All black, Babe?" the newcomer asked.

"As the pit, Eddie. Take over." Eddie did so. "You've picked out your girl friend for the trip, I suppose?"

"Not yet. I got sidetracked watching Bobby Warner. She was doing handstands and handwalks and forward and back flips in the lounge--under one point five gees yet. _Wow!_ And after that all the other women looked like a dime's worth of catmeat. She doesn't stand out too much until she starts to move, but then--Oh, _brother_!" Eddie rolled his eyes, made motions with his hands, and whistled expressively. "Talk about poetry in motion! Just walking across a stage, she'd bring down the house and stop the show cold in its tracks."

"O. K., O. K., don't blow a fuse," Deston said, resignedly. "I know. You'll love her undyingly; all this trip, maybe. So bring her up, next watch, and I'll give her a gold badge. As usual."

"You ... how _dumb_ can you get?" Eddie demanded. "D'you think I'd even _try_ to play footsie with _Barbara Warner_?"

"You'd play footsie with the Archangel Michael's sister if she'd let you; and she probably would. So who's Barbara Warner?"

Eddie Thompson gazed at his superior pityingly. "I know you're ten nines per cent monk, Babe, but I _did_ think you pulled your nose out of the megacycles often enough to learn a _few_ of the facts of life. Did you ever hear of Warner Oil?"

"I think so." Deston thought for a moment. "Found a big new field, didn't they? In South America somewhere?"

"Just the biggest on Earth, is all. And not only on Earth. He operates in all the systems for a hundred parsecs around, and he never sinks a dry hole. Every well he drills is a gusher that blows the rig clear up into the stratosphere. Everybody wonders how he does it. My guess is that his wife's an oil-witch, which is why he lugs his whole family along wherever he goes. Why else would he?"

"Maybe he loves her. It happens, you know."

"Huh?" Eddie snorted. "After twenty years of her? Comet-gas! Anyway, would _you_ have the sublime gall to make passes at Warner Oil's heiress, with more millions in her own sock than you've got dimes?"

"I don't make passes."

"That's right, you don't. Only at books and tapes, even on ground leaves; more fool you. Well, then, would you _marry_ anybody like that?"

"Certainly, if I loved...." Deston paused, thought a moment, then went on: "Maybe I wouldn't, either. She'd make me dress for dinner. She'd probably have a live waiter; maybe even a butler. So I guess I wouldn't, at that."

"You nor me neither, brother. But _what_ a dish! What a lovely, luscious, toothsome _dish_!" Eddie mourned.

"You'll be raving about another one tomorrow," Deston said, unfeelingly, as he turned away.

"I don't know; but even if I do, _she_ won't be anything like _her_," Eddie said, to the closing door.

And Deston, outside the door, grinned sardonically to himself. Before his next watch, Eddie would bring up one of the prettiest girls aboard for a gold badge; the token that would let her--under approved escort, of course--go through the Top.

He himself never went down to the Middle, which was passenger territory. There was nothing there he wanted. He was too busy, had too many worthwhile things to do, to waste time that way ... but the hunch was getting stronger and stronger all the time. For the first time in all his three years of deep-space service he felt an overpowering urge to go down into the very middle of the Middle; to the starship's main lounge.

He knew that his hunches were infallible. At cards, dice, or wheels he had always had hunches and he had always won. That was why he had stopped gambling, years before, before anybody found out. He was that kind of a man.

Apart from the matter of unearned increment, however, he always followed his hunches; but this one he did not like at all. He had been resisting it for hours, because he had never visited the lounge and did not want to visit it now. But _something_ down there was pulling like a tractor, so he went. He didn't go to his cabin; didn't even take off his side-arm. He didn't even think of it; the .41 automatic at his hip was as much a part of his uniform as his pants.

Entering the lounge, he did not have to look around. She was playing bridge, and as eyes met eyes and she rose to her feet a shock-wave swept through him that made him feel as though his every hair was standing straight on end.

"Excuse me, please," she said to the other three at her table. "I must go now." She tossed her cards down onto the table and walked straight toward him; eyes still holding eyes.

He backed hastily out into the corridor, and as the door closed behind her they went naturally and wordlessly into each other's arms. Lips met lips in a kiss that lasted for a long, long time. It was not a passionate embrace--passion would come later--it was as though each of them, after endless years of bootless, fruitless longing, had come finally home.

"Come with me, dear, where we can talk," she said, finally; eying with disfavor the half-dozen highly interested spectators.

And a couple of minutes later, in cabin two hundred eighty-one, Deston said: "So _this_ is why I had to come down into passenger territory. You came aboard at exactly zero seven forty-three."

"Uh-uh." She shook her yellow head. "A few minutes before that. That was when I read your name in the list of officers on the board. First Officer, Carlyle Deston. I got a tingle that went from the tips of my toes up and out through the very ends of my hair. Nothing like when we actually saw each other, of course. We both knew the truth, then. It's wonderful that you're so strongly psychic, too."

"I don't know about that," he said, thoughtfully. "All my training has been based on the axiomatic fact that the map is _not_ the territory. Psionics, as I understand it, holds that the map is--practically--the territory, but can't prove it. So I simply don't know _what_ to believe. On one hand, I have had real hunches all my life. On the other, the signal doesn't carry much information. More like hearing a siren when you're driving along a street. You know you have to pull over and stop, but that's all you know. It could be police, fire ambulance--_anything_. Anybody with any psionic ability at all ought to do a lot better than that, I should think."

"Not necessarily. You've been fighting it. Ninety-nine per cent of your mind doesn't _want_ to believe it; is dead set against it. So it has to force its way through whillions and skillions of ohms of resistance, so only the most powerful stimuli--'maximum signal' in your jargon, perhaps?--can get through to you at all." Suddenly she giggled like a schoolgirl. "You're either psychic or the biggest wolf in the known universe, and I know you aren't a wolf. If you hadn't been as psychic as I am, you'd've jumped clear out into subspace when a perfectly strange girl attacked you."

"How do you know so much about me?"

"I made it a point to. One of the juniors told me you're the only virgin officer in all space."

"That was Eddie Thompson."

"Uh-huh." She nodded brightly.

"Well, is that bad?"

"Anything else but. That is, he thought it was terrible--outrageous--a betrayal of the whole officer caste--but to me it makes everything just absolutely perfect."

"Me, too. How soon can we get married?"

"I'd say right now, except...." She caught her lower lip between her teeth and thought. "No, no 'except'. Right now, or as soon as you can. You can't, without resigning, can you? They'd fire you?"

"Don't worry about that," he grinned. "My record is good enough, I think, to get a good ground job. Even if they fire me for not waiting until we ground, there's lots of jobs. I can support you, sweetheart."

"Oh, I know you can. I wasn't thinking of _that_. You wouldn't _like_ a ground job."

"What difference does that make?" he asked, in honest surprise. "A man grows up. I couldn't have you with me in space, and I'd like that a lot less. No, I'm done with space, as of now. But what was that 'except' business?"

* * * * *

"I thought at first I'd tell my parents first--they're both aboard--but I decided not to. She'd scream bloody murder and he'd roar like a lion and none of it would make me change my mind, so we'll get married first."

He looked at her questioningly; she shrugged and went on: "We aren't what you'd call a happy family. She's been trying to make me marry an old goat of a prince and I finally told her to go roll her hoop--to get a divorce and marry the foul old beast herself. And to consolidate two empires, he's been wanting me to marry a multi-billionaire--who is also a louse and a crumb and a heel. Last week he _insisted_ on it and I blew up like an atomic bomb. I told him if I got married a thousand times I'd pick every one of my husbands myself, without the least bit of help from either him or her. I'd keep on finding oil and stuff for him, I said, but that was all...."

"_Oil_!" Deston exclaimed, involuntarily, as everything fell into place in his mind. The way she walked; poetry in motion ... the oil-witch ... two empires ... more millions than he had dimes.... "Oh, you're Barbara Warner, then."

"Why, of course; but my friends call me 'Bobby'. Didn't you--but of course you didn't--you never read passenger lists. If you did, you'd've got a tingle, too."

"I got plenty of tingle without reading, believe me. However, I never expected to----"

"Don't say it, dear!" She got up and took both his hands in hers. "I know how you feel. I don't like to let you ruin your career, either, but _nothing_ can separate us, now that we've found each other. So I'll tell you this." Her eyes looked steadily into his. "If it bothers you the least bit, later on, I'll give every dollar I own to some foundation or other, I swear it."

He laughed shamefacedly as he took her in his arms. "Since that's the way _you_ look at it, it won't bother me a bit."

"Uh-huh, you _do_ mean it." She snuggled her head down into the curve of his neck. "I can tell."

"I know you can, sweetheart." Then he had another thought, and with strong, deft fingers he explored the muscles of her arms and back. "But those acrobatics in plus gee--and you're trained down as hard and fine as I am, and it's my business to be--how come?"

"I majored in Physical Education and I love it. And I'm a Newmartian, you know, so I teach a few courses----"

"Newmartian? I've heard--but you aren't a colonial; you're as Terran as I am."

"By blood, yes; but I was born on Newmars. Our actual and legal residence has always been there. The tax situation, you know."

"I don't know, no. Taxes don't bother me much. But go ahead. You teach a few courses. In?"

"Oh, bars, trapeze, ground-and-lofty tumbling, acrobatics, aerialistics, high-wire, muscle-control, judo--all that kind of thing."

"Ouch! So if you ever happen to accidentally get mad at me you'll tie me right up into a pretzel?"

"I doubt it; very seriously. I've tossed lots of two-hundred-pounders around, of course, but they were _not_ space officers." She laughed unaffectedly as she tested his musculature much more professionally and much more thoroughly than he had tested hers. "Definitely I couldn't. A good big man can always take a good little one, you know."

"But I'm not big; I'm just a little squirt. You've probably heard what they call me?"

"Yes, and I'm going to call you 'Babe', too, and mean it the same way they do. Besides, who wants a man a foot taller than she is and twice as big? You're just _exactly_ the right size!"

"That's spreading the good old oil, Bobby, but I'll never tangle with you if I can help it. Buzz-saws are small, too, and sticks of dynamite. Shall we go hunt up the parson--or should it be a priest? Or a rabbi?"

"Even _that_ doesn't make a particle of difference to you."

"Of course not. How could it?"

"A parson, please." Then, with a bright, quick grin: "We _have_ got a lot to learn about each other, haven't we?"

"Some details, of course, but nothing of any importance and we'll have plenty of time to learn them."

"And we'll love every second of it. You'll live down here in the Middle with me, won't you, all the time you aren't actually on duty?"

"I can't imagine doing anything else," and the two set out, arms around each other, to find a minister. And as they strolled along:

"Of course you won't actually _need_ a job, ever, or my money, either. You never even thought of dowsing, did you?"

"Dowsing? Oh, that witch stuff. Of course not."

"Listen, darling. All the time I've been touching you I've been learning about you. And you've been learning about me."

"Yes, but----"

"No buts, buster. You have really tremendous powers, and they _aren't_ latent, either. All you have to do is quit fighting them and _use_ them. You're ever so much stronger and fuller than I am. All I can do at dowsing is find water, oil, coal, and gas. I'm no good at all on metals--I couldn't feel gold if I were perched right on the roof of Fort Knox; I couldn't feel radium if it were frying me to a crisp. But I'm _positive_ that you can tune yourself to anything you want to find."

He didn't believe it, and the argument went on until they reached the "Reverend's" quarters. Then, of course, it was dropped automatically; and the next five days were deliciously, deliriously, ecstatically happy days for them both.

II.

At the time of this chronicle the status of interstellar flight was very similar to that of intercontinental jet-plane flight in the nineteen-sixties. Starships were designed by humanity's best brains; carried every safety device those brains could devise. They were maintained and serviced by ultra-skilled, ultra-trained, ultra-able crews; they were operated by the _creme-de-la-creme_ of manhood. Only a man with an extremely capable mind in an extremely capable body could become an officer of a subspacer.

Statistically, starships were the safest means of transportation ever used by man; so safe that Very Important Persons used them regularly, unthinkingly, and as a matter of course. Statistically, the starships' fatality rate per million passenger-light-years was a small fraction of that of the automobiles' per million passenger-miles. Insurance companies offered odds of tens of thousands to one that any given star-traveler would return unharmed from any given star-trip he cared to make.

Nevertheless, accidents happened. A chillingly large number of lives had, as a total, been lost; and no catastrophe had ever been even partially explained. No message of distress or call for help had ever been received. No single survivor had ever been found; nor any piece of wreckage.

And on the Great Wheel of Fate the _Procyon_'s number came up.

In the middle of the night Carlyle Deston came instantaneously awake--feeling with his every muscle and with his every square inch of skin; listening with all the force he could put into his auditory nerves; while deep down in his mind a huge, terribly silent voice continued to yell: "DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!"

In a very small fraction of a second Carlyle Deston moved--and fast. Seizing Barbara by an arm, he leaped out of bed with her.

"We're abandoning ship--get into this suit--quick!"

"But what ... but I've _got_ to dress!"

"No time! Snap it up!" He practically hurled her into her suit; clamped her helmet tight. Then he leaped into his own. "Skipper!" he snapped into the suit's microphone. "Deston. Emergency! Abandon ship!"

The alarm bells clanged once; the big red lights flashed once; the sirens barely started to growl, then quit. The whole vast fabric of the ship trembled and shuddered and shook as though it were being mauled by a thousand impossibly gigantic hammers. Deston did not know and never did find out whether it was his captain or an automatic that touched off the alarm. Whichever it was, the disaster happened so fast that practically no warning at all was given. And out in the corridor:

"Come on, girl--sprint!" He put his arm under hers and urged her along.

She did her best, but in comparison with his trained performance her best wasn't good. "I've never been checked out on sprinting in spacesuits!" she gasped. "Let go of me and go on ahead. I'll follow----"

Everything went out. Lights, gravity, air-circulation--everything.

"You haven't been checked out on free fall, either. Hang onto this tool-hanger here on my belt and we'll travel."

"Where to?" she asked, hurtling through the air much faster than she had ever gone on foot.

"Baby Two--that is, Lifecraft Number Two--my crash assignment. Good thing I was down here in the Middle; I'd never have made it from up Top. Next corridor left, I think." Then, as the light of his headlamp showed numbers on the wall: "Yes. Square left. I'll swing you."

He swung her and they shot to the end of the passage. He kicked a lever and the lifecraft's port swung open--to reveal a blaze of light and a startled, gray-haired man.

"What happened.... What hap ...?" the man began.

"Wrecked. We've had it. We're abandoning ship. Get into that cubby over there, shut the door tight behind you, and _stay there_!"

"But can't I do something to help?"

"Without a suit and not knowing how to use one? You'd get burned to a cinder. Get in there--and _jump_!"

The oldster jumped and Deston turned to his wife. "Stay here at the port, Bobby. Wrap one leg around that lever, to anchor you. What does your telltale read? That gauge there--your radiation meter. It reads twenty, same as mine. Just pink, so we've got a minute or so. I'll roust out some passengers and toss 'em to you--you toss 'em along in there. Can do?"

She was white and trembling; she was very evidently on the verge of being violently sick; but she was far from being out of control. "Can do, sir."

"Good girl, sweetheart. Hang on one minute more and we'll have gravity and you'll be O. K."

The first five doors he tried were locked; and, since they were made of armor plate, there was nothing he could do about them except give each one a resounding kick with a heavy steel boot. The sixth was unlocked, but the passengers--a man and a woman--were very evidently and very gruesomely dead.

So was everyone else he could find until he came to a room in which a man in a spacesuit was floundering helplessly in the air. He glanced at his telltale. Thirty-two. High in the red, almost against the pin.

"Bobby! What do you read?"

"Twenty-six."

"Good. I've found only one, but we're running out of time. I'm coming in."

* * * * *

In the lifecraft he closed the port and slammed on full drive away from the ship. Then, wheeling, he shucked Barbara out of her suit like an ear of corn and shed his own. He picked up a fire-extinguisher-like affair and jerked open the door of a room a little larger than a clothes closet. "Jump in here!" He slammed the door shut. "Now strip, quick!" He picked the canister up and twisted four valves.

Before he could get the gun into working position she was out of her pajamas--the fact that she had been wondering visibly what it was all about had done nothing whatever to cut down her speed. A flood of thick, creamy foam almost hid her from sight and Deston began to talk--quietly.

"Thanks, sweetheart, for not slowing us down by arguing and wanting explanations. This stuff is DEKON--short for Decontaminant, Complete; Compound, Adsorbent, and Chelating, Type DCQ-429.' Used soon enough, it takes care of radiation. Rub it in good, all over you--like this." He set the foam-gun down on the floor and went vigorously to work. "Yes, hair, too. Every square millimeter of skin and mucous membrane. Yes, into your eyes. It stings 'em a little, but that's a lot better than going blind. And your mouth. Swallow six good big mouthfuls--it's tasteless and goes down easy.

"Now the soles of your feet--O. K. The last will hurt plenty, but we've _got_ to get some of it into your lungs and we can't do it the hospital way. So when I slap a gob of it over your mouth and nose inhale hard and deep. Just once is all anybody can do, but that's enough. And don't fight. Any ordinary woman I could handle, but I can't handle you fast enough. So if you don't inhale deep I'll have to knock you cold. Otherwise you die of lung cancer. Will do?"

"Will do, sweetheart. Good and deep. No fight," and she emptied her lungs.

He slapped it on. She inhaled, good and deep; and went into convulsive paroxysms of coughing. He held her in his arms until the worst of it was over; but she was still coughing hard when she pulled herself away from him.

"But ... how ... about ... you?" She could just barely talk; her voice was distorted, almost inaudible. "Let ... me ... help ... you ... quick!"

"No need, darling. Two other men out there. The old man probably won't need it--I think I got him into the safe quick enough--the other guy and I will help each other. So lie down there on the bunk and take it easy until I come back here and help you get the gunkum off. So-long for half an hour, pet."

Forty-five minutes later, while all four were still cleaning up the messes of foam, something began to buzz sharply. Deston stepped over to the board and flipped a switch. The communicator came on. Since everything aboard a starship is designed to fail safe, they were, of course, in normal space. On the visiplates hundreds of stars blazed in vari-colored points of hard, bright light.

"Baby Two acknowledging," Deston said. "First Officer Deston and three passengers. Deconned to zero. Report, please."

"Baby Three. Second Officer Jones and four passengers. Deconned to----"

"Thank God, Herc!" Formality vanished. "With _you_ to astrogate us, we may have a chance. But how'd you make it? I'd've sworn a flying saucer couldn't've got down from the Top in the time we had."

"Same thing right back at you, Babe. I didn't have to come down. We were in Baby Three when it happened." Full vision was on; a big, square-jawed, lean, tanned face looked out at them from the screen.

"Huh? How come? And who's 'we'?"

"My wife and I." Second Officer Theodore "Hercules" Jones was somewhat embarrassed. "I got married, too, day before yesterday. After the way the old man chewed you out, though, I knew he'd slap irons on me without saying a word, so we kept it dark and hid out in Baby Three. These three are all we could find before our meters went high red. I deconned Bun, then----"

"Bun?" Barbara broke in. "Bernice Burns? How _wonderful_!"

"Formerly Bernice Burns." The face of a platinum-blonde beauty appeared on the screen beside Jones'. "And _am_ I glad to see _you_, Barbara, even if I did just meet you yesterday! I didn't know whether I'd ever see another girl's face or not!"

"Let's cut the chat," Deston said then. "Herc, give me course, blast, and time for rendezvous ... hey! My watch stopped!"

"So did mine," Jones said. "So just hold one gravity on eighteen dash forty-seven dash two seventy-one and I'll correct you as necessary."

After setting course, and still thinking of his watch, Deston said; "But it's nonmagnetic. It never stopped before."

The gray-haired man spoke. "It was never in such a field before. You see, those two observations of fact invalidate twenty-four of the thirty-eight best theories of hyper-space. But tell me--am I correct in saying that none of you were in direct contact with the metal of the ship when it happened?"

"We avoid it in case of trouble. You? Name and job?" Deston jerked his head at the younger stranger.

"I know _that_ much. Henry Newman. Crew-chief, normal space jobs, unlimited."

"Your passengers, Herc?"

"Vincent Lopresto, financier, and his two bodyguards. They were sleeping in their suits, on air-mattresses. Grounders. Don't like subspace--or space, either."

"Just so." The gray-haired man nodded, almost happily. "We survivors, then, absorbed the charge gradually----"

"But what the----" Deston began.

"One moment, please, young man. You perhaps saw some of the bodies. What were they like?"

"They looked ... well, not exactly as though they had exploded, but----" he paused.

"Precisely." Gray-Hair beamed. "That eliminates all the others except three--Morton's, Sebring's, and Rothstein's."

"You're a specialist in subspace, then?"

"Oh, no, I'm not a specialist at all. I'm a dabbler, really. A specialist, you know, is one who learns more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing at all. I'm just the opposite. I'm learning less and less about more and more; hoping in time to know nothing at all about everything."

"In other words, a Fellow of the College. I'm glad you're aboard, sir."

"Oh, a Theoretician?" Barbara's face lit up and she held out her hand. "With dozens of doctorates in everything from Astronomy to Zoology? I've never met ... I'm _ever_ so glad to meet you, Doctor----?"

"Adams. Andrew Adams. But I have only eight at the moment. Earned degrees, that is."

"But what were you doing in this lifecraft? No, let me guess. You were X-ray-eying it and fine-toothing it for improvements made since your last trip, and storing the details away in your eidetic memory."

"Not eidetic, by any means. Merely very good."

"And how many metric tons of apparatus have you got in the hold?" Deston asked.

"Less than six. Just what I _must_ have in order to----"

"Babe!" Jones' voice cut in. "Course change. Stay on alpha eighteen. Shift beta to forty-four and gamma to two sixty-five."

* * * * *

Rendezvous was made. Both lifecraft hung motionless relative to the _Procyon_'s hulk. No other lifecraft had escaped. A conference was held.

Weeks of work would be necessary before Deston and Jones could learn even approximately what the damage to the _Procyon_ had been. Decontamination was automatic, of course, but there would be literally hundreds of hot spots, each of which would have to be sought out and neutralized by hand. The passengers' effects would have to be listed and stored in the proper cabins. Each body would have to be given velocity away from the ship. And so on. Every survivor would have to work, and work hard.

The two girls wanted to be together. The two officers almost _had_ to be together, to discuss matters at unhampered length and to make decisions. Each was, of course, almost as well versed in engineering as he was in his own specialty. All ships' officers from First to Fifth had to be. And, as long as they lived or until the _Procyon_ made port, all responsibility rested: First, upon First Officer Deston; and second, upon Second Officer Jones. Therefore Theodore and Bernice Jones came aboard Lifecraft Two, and Deston asked Newman to flit across to Lifecraft Three.

"Not me; I like the scenery here better." Newman's eyes raked Bernice's five-feet-eight of scantily-clad sheer beauty from ankles to coiffure. "If you're too crowded--I know a lifecraft carries only fifty people--go yourself."

"As a crew-chief, you know the law." Deston spoke quietly--too quietly, as the other man should have known. "I am in command."

"You ain't in command of _me_, pretty boy!" Newman sneered. "You can play God when you're on sked, with a ship-full of trained dogs to bite for you, but out here where nobody has ever come back from I make my own law--with _this_!" He patted his side pocket.

"Draw it, then!" Deston's voice now had all the top-deck rasp of his rank. "Or crawl!"

The First Officer had not moved; his right hand still hung quietly at his side. Newman glanced at the girls, both of whom were frozen; at Jones, who smiled at him pityingly; at Adams, who was merely interested. "I ... my ... yours is right where you can get at it," he faltered.

"You should have thought of that sooner. But, this once, I won't move a finger until your hand is in your pocket."

"Just wing him, Babe," Jones said then. "He looks strong enough, except for his head. We can use him to shovel out the gunkum and clean up."

"Uh-uh. I'll have to kill him sometime, and the sooner the better. Square between the eyes. Do you want a hundred limit at ten bucks a millimeter on how far the hole is off dead center?"

The two girls gasped; stared at each other and at the two officers in horror; but Jones said calmly, without losing any part of his smile: "I don't want a dime's worth of that. I've lost too much money that way already." At which outrageous statement both girls knew what was going on and smiled in relief.

And Newman misinterpreted those smiles completely; especially Bernice's. The words came hard, but he managed to say then. "I crawl."

"Crawl, what?"

"I crawl, sir. You'll want my gun----"

"Keep it. There's a lot more difference than _that_ between us. How close can you count seconds?"

"Plus or minus five per cent, sir."

"Close enough. Your first job will be to build some kind of a brute-force, belt-or-gear thing to act as a clock. You will really work. Any more insubordination or any malingering at all and I'll put you into a lifecraft and launch you into space, where you can make your own laws and be monarch of all you survey. Dismissed! Now--flit!"

* * * * *

Newman flitted--fast--and Barbara, turning to her husband, opened her mouth to speak and shut it. No, he would have killed the man; he would have _had_ to. He still might have to. Wherefore she said instead: "Why'd you let him keep his pistol? The ... the _slime_! And after you actually saved his life, too!"

"With some people what's past doesn't count. The other was just a gesture. Psychology. It'll slow him down, I think. Besides, he'd have another one as soon as we get back into the _Procyon_."

"But you can lock up _all_ their guns, can't you?" Bernice asked.

"I'm afraid not. How about the other three, Herc?"

"With thanks to you, Barbara, for the word; slime. If Lopresto is a financier, I'm an angel, with wings and halo complete. Gangsters; hoodlums; racketeers; you'd have to open every can of concentrate aboard to find all their spare artillery."

"Check. The first thing to do is----"

"One word first," Bernice put in. "I want to thank you, First Off--no, not First Officer, but I could hardly----"

"Sure you can. I'm 'Babe' to us all, and you're 'Bun'. As to the other, forget it. You and I, Herc, will go over and----"

"And I," Adams put in, definitely. "I must photograph everything, before it is touched; therefore I must be the first on board. I must do some autopsies and also----"

"Of course. You're right," Deston said. "And if I haven't said it before, I'm tremendously glad to have a Big Brain along ... oh, excuse that crack, please, Dr. Adams. It slipped out on me."

Adams laughed. "In context, I regard that as the highest compliment I have ever received. To you youngsters my advanced age of fifty-two represents senility. Nevertheless, you men need not 'Doctor' me. Either 'Adams' or 'Andy' will do very nicely. As for you two young women----"

"I'm going to call you 'Uncle Andy'," Barbara said, with a grin. "Now, Uncle Andy, you being a Big Brain--the term being used in its most complimentary sense--and the way you talked, one of your eight doctorates is in medicine."

"Of course."

"Are you any good at obstetrics?"

"In the present instance I am perfectly safe in saying----"

"Wait a minute!" Deston snapped. "Bobby, you are _not_----"

"I am too! That is, I don't suppose I _am_ yet, since we were married only last Tuesday, but if he's competent--and I'm _sure_ he is--I'm certainly _going_ to! If we get back to Earth I _want_ to, and if we don't, both Bun and I have _got_ to. Castaways' Code, you know. So how about it, Uncle Andy?"

"I know what you two girls are," Adams said, quietly. "I know what you two men must of necessity be. Therefore I can say without reservation that none of you need feel any apprehension whatever."

Deston was about to say something, but Barbara forestalled him. "Well, we can _think_ about it, anyway, and talk it over. But for right now, I think it's high time we all got some sleep. Don't you?"

* * * * *

It was; and they did; and after they had slept and had eaten "breakfast" the three men wafted themselves across a couple of hundred yards of space to the crippled starship. Powerful floodlights were rigged.

"What ... a ... mess." Deston's voice was low and wondering. "The whole Top looks as though she'd crash-landed and spun out for eight miles. But the Middle and Tail look untouched."

Inside, however, devastation had gone deep into the Middle. Bulkheads, walls, floors, structural members; were torn, sheared, twisted into weirdly-distorted shapes impossible to understand or explain. And, much worse, were the _absences_; for in dozens of volumes, of as many sizes and of shapes incompatible with any three-dimensional geometry, every solid thing had vanished--without leaving any clue whatever as to where or how it had gone.

After three long days of hard work, Adams was satisfied. He had taken pictures as fast as both officers could process the film; he had covered many miles of tape with words only half of which either spaceman could understand. Then, finally, he said:

"Well, that covers the preliminary observations as well as I know how to do it. Thank you, boys, for your forbearance and your help. Now, if you'll help me find my stuff and bring some of it--a computer and so on--up to the lounge?" They did so; the "and so on" proving to be a bewildering miscellany indeed. "Thank you immensely, gentlemen; now I won't bother you any more."

"You've learned a lot, Doc, and we haven't learned much of anything." Deston grinned ruefully. "That makes you the director. You'll have to tell us, in general terms, what to do."

"Oh? I can offer a few suggestions. It is virtually certain: One, that no subspace equipment will function. Two, that all normal-space equipment, except for some items you know about, will function normally. Three, that we can't do anything about subspace without landing on a planet. Four, that such landing will require extreme--I might almost say fantastic--precautions."

Although both officers thought that they understood Item Four, neither of them had any inkling as to what Adams really meant. They did understand thoroughly, however, Items One, Two, and Three.

"Hell's jets!" Deston exclaimed. "Do you mean we'll have to blast _normal_ to a system?"

"It isn't as bad as you think, Babe," Jones said. "Stars are much thicker here--we're in the center somewhere--than around Sol. The probability is point nine plus that any emergence would put us less than point four light-years away from a star. A couple of them show disks. I haven't measured any yet; have you, Doc?"

"Yes. Point two two, approximately, to the closest."

"So what?" Deston demanded. "What's the chance of it having an Earth-type planet?"

"Any solid planet will do," Adams said. "Just so it has plenty of mass."

"That's still quite a trip." Deston was coming around. "Especially since we can't use more than one point----"

"One point _zero_ gravities," Jones put in.

"Over the long pull--and the women--you're right," Deston agreed, and took out his slide rule. "Let's see ... one gravity, plus and minus ... velocity ... time ... it'll take about eleven months?"

"Just about," Jones agreed, and Adams nodded.

"Well, if that's what the cards say, there's no use yowling about it," and all nine survivors went to work.

Deston, besides working, directed the activities of all the others except Adams; who worked harder and longer than did anyone else. He barely took time out to eat and to sleep. Nor did either Deston or Jones ask him what he was doing. Both knew that it would take five years of advanced study before either of them could understand the simplest material on the doctor's tapes.

III.

The tremendous engines of the _Procyon_ were again putting out their wonted torrents of power. The starship, now a mere spaceship, was on course at one gravity. The lifecraft were in their slots, but the five and the four still lived in them rather than in the vast and oppressive emptiness that the ship itself now was. And socially, outside of working hours, the two groups did not mix.

Clean-up was going nicely, at the union rate of six hours on and eighteen hours off. Deston could have set any hours he pleased, but he didn't. There was plenty of time. Eleven months in deep space is a fearfully, a tremendously long time.

"Morning," "afternoon," "evening," and "night" were, of course, purely conventional terms. The twenty-four-hour "day" measured off by the brute-force machine that was their masterclock carried no guarantee, expressed or implied, as to either accuracy or uniformity.

One evening, then, four hard-faced men sat at two small tables in the main room of Lifecraft Three. Two of them, Ferdy Blaine and Moose Mordan, were playing cards for small stakes. Ferdy was of medium size; compact rather than slender; built of rawhide and spring steel. Lithe and poised, he was the epitome of leashed and controlled action. Moose was six-feet-four and weighed a good two-forty--stolid, massive, solid. Ferdy and Moose; a tiger and an elephant; both owned _in fee simple_ by Vincent Lopresto.

The two at the other table had been planning for days. They had had many vitriolic arguments, but neither had made any motion toward his weapon.

"Play it my way and we've got it made, I tell you!" Newman pounded the table with his fist. "Seventy _million_ if it's a cent! Heavier grease than your lousy spig Syndicate ever even _heard_ of! I'm as good an astrogator as Jones is, and a damn sight better engineer. In electronics I maybe ain't got the theory Pretty Boy has, but at building and repairing the stuff I've forgot more than he ever will know. At _practical_ stuff, and that's all we give a whoop about, I lay over both them sissies like a Lunar dome."

"Oh, yeah?" Lopresto sneered. "How come you aren't ticketed for subspace, then?"

"For hell's sake, act your age!" Newman snorted in disgust. Eyes locked and held, but nothing happened. "D'ya think I'm dumb? Or that them subspace Boy Scouts can be fixed? Or I don't know where the heavy grease is at? Or I can't make the approach? Why ain't _you_ in subspace?"

"I see." Lopresto forced his anger down. "But I've got to be _sure_ we can get back without 'em."

"You can be _damn_ sure. I got to get back myself, don't I? But get one thing down solid. _I_ get the big peroxide blonde."

"You can have her. Too big. I like the little yellowhead a lot better."

Newman sneered into the hard-held face so close to his and said: "And don't think for a second _you_ can make me crawl, you small-time, chiseling punk. Rub _me_ out after we kill them off and you get nowhere. You're dead. Chew on that a while, and you'll know who's boss."

After just the right amount of holding back and objecting, Lopresto agreed. "You win, Newman, the way the cards lay. Have you ever planned this kind of an operation or do you want me to?"

"You do it, Vince," Newman said, grandly. He had at least one of the qualities of a leader. "Besides, you already have, ain't you?"

"Of course. Ferdy will take Deston----"

"No he won't! He's _mine_, the louse!"

"If you're _that_ dumb, all bets are off. What are you using for a brain? Can't you see the guy's chain lightning on ball bearings?"

"But we're going to surprise 'em, ain't we?"

"Sure, but even Ferdy would just as soon not give _him_ an even break. _You_ wouldn't stand the chance of a snowflake in hell, and if you've got the brains of a louse you know it."

"O. K., we'll let Ferdy have him. Me and you will match draws to see who----"

"I can draw twice to your once, but I suppose I'll have to prove it to you. I'll take Jones; you will gun the professor; Moose will grab the dames, one under each arm, and keep 'em out of the way until the shooting's over. The only thing is, when? The sooner the better. Tomorrow?"

"Not quite, Vince. Let 'em finish figuring course, time, distance, all that stuff. They can do it a lot faster and some better than I can. I'll tell you when."

"O. K., and I'll give the signal. When I yell 'NOW' we give 'em the business."

Newman went to his cabin and the muscle called Moose spoke thoughtfully. That is, as nearly thoughtfully as his mental equipment would allow.

"I don't like that ape, boss. Before you gun him, let me work him over just a little bit, huh?"

"It'll be quite a while yet, but that's a promise, Moose. As soon as his job's done he'll wish he'd never been born. Until then, we'll let him think he's Top Dog. Let him rave. But Ferdy, any time he's behind me or out of sight, watch him like a hawk. Shoot him through the right elbow if he makes one sour move."

"I get you, boss."

* * * * *

A couple of evenings later, in Lifecraft Two, Barbara said: "You're worried, Babe, and everything's going so smoothly. Why?"

"Too smoothly altogether. That's why. Newman ought to be doing a slow burn and goldbricking all he dares; instead of which he's happy as a clam and working like a nailer ... and I wouldn't trust Vincent Lopresto or Ferdinand Blaine as far as I can throw a brick chimney by its smoke. This whole situation stinks. There's going to be shooting for sure."

"But they couldn't do _anything_ without you two!" Bernice exclaimed. "It'd be suicide ... and with no motive ... _could_ they, Ted, possibly?"

Jones' dark face did not lighten. "They could, and I'm very much afraid they intend to. As a crew-chief, Newman is a jack-leg engineer and a very good practical 'troncist; and if he's what I _think_ he is----" He paused.

"Could be," Deston said, doubtfully. "In with a mob of normal-space pirate-smugglers. I'll buy that, but there wouldn't be enough plunder to----"

"Just a sec. So he's a pretty good rule-of-thumb astrogator, too, and we're computing every element of the flight. As for motive--salvage. With either of us alive, none. With both of us dead, can you guess within ten million bucks of how much they'll collect?"

"_Blockhead_!" Deston slapped himself on the forehead. "I never even _thought_ of that angle. That nails it down solid."

"With the added attraction," Jones went on, coldly and steadily, "of having two extremely desirable female women for eleven months before killing them, too."

Both girls shrank visibly, and Deston said: "Check. I thought that was the main feature, but it didn't add up. This does. Now, how will they figure the battle? Both of us at once, of----"

"Why?" Barbara asked. "I'd think they'd waylay you, one at a time."

"Uh-uh. The survivor would lock the ship in null-G and it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel. Since we're almost never together on duty ... and it won't come until after we've finished the computations ... they'll think up a good reason for _everybody_ to be together, and that itself will be the tip-off. Ferdy will probably draw on me----"

"And he'll kill you," Jones said, flatly. "So I think I'll blow his brains out tomorrow morning on sight."

"And get killed yourself? No ... much better to use their own trap----"

"We _can't_! Fast as you are, you aren't in _his_ class. He's a professional--probably one of the fastest guns in space."

"Yes, but ... I've got a ... I mean I think I can----"

Bernice, grinning openly now, stopped Deston's floundering. "It's high time you fellows told each other the truth. Bobby and I let our back hair down long ago--we were both tremendously surprised to know that both you boys are just as strongly psychic as we are. Perhaps even more so."

"Oh ... so _you_ get hunches, too?" Jones demanded. "So you'll have plenty of warning?"

"All my life. The old alarm clock has never failed me yet. But the girls can't start packing pistols now."

"I wouldn't know how to shoot one if I did," Bernice laughed. "I'll throw things I'm very good at that."

"Huh?" Jones asked. He didn't know his new wife very well, either. "What can _you_ throw straight enough to do any good?"

"Anything I can reach," she replied, confidently. "Baseballs, medicine balls, cannon balls, rocks, bricks, darts, discus, hammer, javelin--what-have-you. In a for-real battle I'd prefer ... chairs, I think. Flying chairs are really hard to cope with. Knives are too ... uh-uh, I'd much rather have you fellows do the actual executing. I'll start wearing a couple of knives in leg-sheaths, but I won't throw 'em or use 'em unless I absolutely have to. So who will I knock out with the first chair?"

"I'll answer that," Barbara said, quietly. "If it's Blaine against Babe, it'll be Lopresto against Herc. So you'll throw your chairs or whatever at that unspeakable oaf Newman."

"I'd rather brain him than anyone else I know, but that would leave that gigantic gorilla to ... why, he'd ... listen, you'll simply _have_ to go armed."

"I always do." Barbara held out her hands. "Since they don't want to shoot us two--yet--these are all the weapons I'll need."

"Against a man-mountain like that? You're _that_ good? Really?"

"Especially against a man-mountain like that. I'm that good. Really," and both Joneses began to realize what Deston already knew--just how deadly those harmless-seeming weapons could be.

Barbara went on: "We should have a signal, in case one of us gets warning first. Something that wouldn't mean anything to them ... musical, say ... Brahms. That's it. The very instant any one of us feels their intent to signal their attack he yells 'BRAHMS!' and we _all_ beat them to the punch. O. K.?"

It was O. K., and the four--Adams was still hard at work in the lounge--went to bed.

* * * * *

And three days later, within an hour after the last flight-datum had been "put in the tank," the four intended victims allowed themselves to be inveigled into the lounge. Everything was peaceful; everyone was full of friendship and brotherly love. But suddenly "BRAHMS!" rang out, with four voices in absolute unison; followed a moment later by Lopresto's stentorian "NOW!"

It was a very good thing that Deston had had ample warning, for he was indeed competing out of his class. As it was, his bullet crashed through Blaine's head, while the gunman's went harmlessly into the carpet. The other pistol duel wasn't even close! Lopresto's hand barely touched his gun.

Bernice, even while shrieking the battle-cry, leaped to her feet, hurled her chair, and reached for another; but one chair was enough. That fiercely but accurately-sped missile knocked the half-drawn pistol from Newman's hand and sent his body crashing to the floor, where Deston's second bullet made it certain that he would not recover consciousness.

Barbara's hand-to-hand engagement took about one second longer. Moose Mordan was big and strong; and, for such a big man, was fairly fast physically. If he had had time to get his muscles ready, he might have had a chance. His thought processes, however, were lamentably slow; and Barbara Warner Deston was almost as fast physically as she was mentally. Thus she reached him before he even began to realize that this pint-sized girl actually intended to hit him; and thus it was that his belly-muscles were still completely relaxed when her small but extremely hard left fist sank half-forearm-deep into his solar plexus.

With an agonized "_WHOOSH_!" he began to double up, but she scarcely allowed him to bend. Her right hand, fingers tightly bunched, was already boring savagely into a selected spot at the base of his neck. Then, left hand at his throat and right hand pulling hard at his belt, she put the totalized and concentrated power of her whole body behind the knee she drove into his groin.

That ended it. The big man could very well have been dying on his feet. To make sure, however--or to keep the girl from knowing that she had killed a man?--Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the rug.

Both girls flung themselves, sobbing, into their husband's arms.

The whole battle had lasted only a few seconds. Adams, although he had seen almost everything, had been concentrating so deeply that it took those few seconds for him actually to realize what was going on. He got up, felt[2] of Newman's head, then looked casually at the three other bodies.

"Oh, I _killed_ him, Carl!" Barbara sobbed, convulsively. "And the worst of it is, I really _meant_ to! I _never_ did anything like that before in my whole life!"

"You didn't kill him, Barbara," Adams said.

"Huh?" She raised her head from Deston's shoulder; the contrast between her streaming eyes and the relief dawning over her whole face was almost funny. "Why, I did the foulest things possible, and as hard as I possibly could. I'm _sure_ I killed him."

"By no means, my dear. Judo techniques, however skillfully and powerfully applied, do not and can not kill instantly. Bullets through the brain do. I will photograph the cadavers, of course, and perform the customary post-mortem examinations for the record; but I know already what the findings will be. These four men died instantly of gunshot wounds."

* * * * *

With the four gangsters gone, life aboardship settled down quickly into a routine. That routine, however, was in no sense dull. The officers had plenty to do; operating the whole ship and rebuilding the mechanisms that were operating on jury rigging or on straight "bread-board" hookups. And in their "spare" time they enjoyed themselves tremendously in becoming better and better acquainted with their wives. For Bernice and Jones, like Barbara and Deston, had for each other an infinite number of endless vistas of personality; the exploration of which was sheerest delight.

The girls--each of whom became joyously pregnant as soon as she could--kept house and helped their husbands whenever need or opportunity arose. Their biggest chore, however, was to see to it that Adams got sleep, food, and exercise. For, if left to his own devices, he would never have exercised at all, would have grabbed a bite now and then, and would have slept only when he could no longer stay awake.

"Uncle Andy, why don't you _use_ that Big Brain of yours?" Barbara snapped at him one day. "For a man that's actually as smart as you are, I swear you've got the least sense of anybody I know!"

"But it's necessary, my dear child," Adams explained, unmoved. "This material is new. There are many extremely difficult problems involved, and I have less than a year to work on them. Less than _one year_; and it is a task for a team of specialists and all the resources of a research center."

To the officers, however, Adams went into more detail. "Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the safety devices employed; it is improbable that we are the first survivors of a subspace catastrophe to set course for a planet."

After some argument, the officers agreed.

"While I cannot as yet detect it, classify it, or evaluate it, we are carrying an extremely heavy charge of an unknown nature; the residuum of a field of force which is possibly more or less analogous to the electromagnetic field. This residuum either is or is not dischargeable to an object of planetary mass; and I'm virtually certain that it is. The discharge may be anything from an imperceptible flow up to one of such violence as to volatilize the craft carrying it. From the facts: One, that in the absence of that field the subspace radio will function normally; and Two, that no subspace-radio messages have ever been received from survivors; the conclusion seems inescapable that the discharge of this unknown field is in fact of extreme violence."

"Good God!" Deston exclaimed. "Oh ... _that_ was what you meant by 'fantastic precautions,' back there?"

"Precisely."

"But what can we _do_ about it?"

"I don't know. I ... simply ... do ... not ... know." Adams lost himself in thought for over a minute. "This is all _so_ new ... I know _so_ little ... and am working with such _pitifully_ inadequate instrumentation--However, we have months of time yet, and if I am unable to arrive at a conclusion before arrival--I don't mean a rigorous analysis, of course, but merely a stop-gap, empirical, pragmatic solution--we will simply remain in orbit around that sun until I do."

IV.

The _Procyon_ bored on through space, at one unchanging gravity of acceleration. It may not seem, at first glance, that one gravity would result in any very high velocity; but when it is maintained steadily for days and weeks and months, it builds up to a very respectable speed. Nor was there any question of power, for the _Procyon_'s atomics did not drive the ship, but merely energized the "Chaytors"--the Chaytor Effect engines that tapped the energy of the expanding universe itself.

Thus, in less than six months, the _Procyon_ had attained a velocity almost half that of light. At the estimated mid-point of the flight the spaceship, still at one gravity of drive, was turned end-for-end; so that for the ensuing five-and-a-fraction months she would be slowing down.

A few weeks after the turnover, Adams seemed to have more time. At least, he devoted more time to the expectant mothers, even to the point of supervising Deston and Jones in the construction of a weirdly-wired device by means of which he studied and photographed the unborn child each woman bore. He said nothing, however, until Barbara made him talk.

"Listen, you egregious clam," she said, firmly, "I know darn well I've been pregnant for at _least_ seven months, and I ought to be twice this big. Our clock isn't _that_ far off; Carl said that by wave lengths or something it's only about three per cent fast. And you've been pussyfooting and hem-hawing around all this time. Now, Uncle Andy, I want the _truth_. _Are_ we in for a lot of trouble?"

"Trouble? Of course not. _Certainly_ not. No trouble at all, my dear. Why, you've seen the pictures--here, look at them again ... see? Absolutely normal fetus--yours, too, Bernice. _Perfect_! No malformations of any kind."

"Yes, but for what _age_?" Bernice asked, pointedly. "Four months, say? I see, I was exposed to a course in embryology myself, once."

"But _that's_ the interesting part of it!" Adams enthused. "Fascinating! And, indubitably, supremely important. In fact, it may point out the key datum underlying the solution of our entire problem. If this zeta field is causing this seemingly peculiar biological effect, that gives us a tremendously powerful new tool, for certain time vectors in the generalized matrix become parameters. Thus, certain determinants, notably the all-important delta-prime-sub-mu, become manipulable by ... but you aren't _listening_!"

"I'm listening, pops, but nothing is coming through. But thanks much, anyway. I feel a lot better, knowing I'm not going to give birth to a monster. Or _are_ you sure, really?"

"Of _course_ I'm sure!" Adams snapped, testily, and Barbara led Deston aside.

"Have you got the _slightest_ idea of what he was talking about?" she asked.

"Just the slightest, if any. Either that time is relative--no, that's so elementary he wouldn't mention it. Maybe he's figured out a _variable_ time of some kind or other. Anyway, you girls' slowness in producing has given the old boy a big lift, and I'm mighty glad of it."

"But aren't you _worried_, sweetheart? Not even the least little bit?"

"Of course not," and Deston very evidently meant just that.

"I am. I can't help but be. Why aren't you?"

"Because Doc isn't, and he knows his stuff, believe me. He can't lie any better than a three-year-old, and he's _sure_ that all four of you are just as safe as though you were in God's lefthand hip pocket."

"Oh--that's right. I never thought of it that way. So I _don't_ have anything to worry about, do I?" She lifted her lips to be kissed; and the kiss was long and sweet.

* * * * *

Time flew past until, one day a couple of weeks short of arrival, Adams rushed up to Deston and Jones. "I have it!" he shouted, and began to spout a torrent of higher--very _much_ higher--mathematics.

"Hold it, Doc!" Deston held up an expostulatory hand. "I read you zero and ten. Can't you delouse your signal? Whittle the stuff down to our size?"

"W-e-l-l-," the scientist looked hurt, but did consent to forego the high math. "The discharge _is_ catastrophic; in energy equivalent something of the order of magnitude of ten thousand discharges of lightning. And, unfortunately, I do _not_ know what it is. It is virtually certain, however, that we will be able to dissipate it in successive decrements by the use of long, thin leads extending downward toward a high point of the planet."

"Wire, you mean? What kind?"

"The material is not important except in that it should have sufficient tensile strength to support as many miles as possible of its own length."

"We've got dozens of coils of hook-up wire," Deston said, "but not too many _miles_ and it's soft stuff."

"_Graham_ wire!" Jones snapped his finger.

"Of course," Deston agreed. "Hundreds of miles of it. Float the senser down on a Hotchkiss----"

"Tear-out." Jones objected.

"Bailey it--spidered out to twenty or so big, flat feet. That'll take metal, but we can cannibal the whole Middle without weakening the structure."

"Sure ... surges--backlash. Remote it."

"Check. Remote everything to Baby Two, and----"

"Would you mind delousing _your_ signal?" Adams asked, caustically.

"'Scuse, please, Doc. A guy does talk better in his own lingo, doesn't he? Well, Graham wire is one-point-three-millimeter-diameter, ultra-high-tensile steel wire. Used for re-wrapping the Grahams, you know."

"No, I don't know. What are Grahams?"

"Why, they're the intermediates between the Chaytors ... O. K., O. K., they're something like bottles, that have to stand terrifically high pressures."

"That's what I want to know. Such wire will do very nicely. Note now that our bodies must be grounded very thoroughly to the metal of the ship."

"You're so right. We'll wrap the girls in silver-mesh underwear up to the eyeballs, and run leads as big as my wrist to the frame."

* * * * *

The approach was made, and the fourth planet out from that strange sun was selected as a ground. That planet was not at all like Earth. It had very little water, very little atmosphere, and very little vegetation. It was twice as massive as Earth; its surface was rugged and jagged; one of its stupendous mountain ranges had sharp peaks more than forty thousand feet high.

"There's one thing more we must do," Adams said. "I have barely begun to study this zeta field, and this one may very well be unique--irreplaceable. We must, therefore, launch all the lifecraft--except Number Two, of course--into separate orbits around this sun, so that a properly-staffed and properly-equipped expedition can study it."

"Your proper expedition might get its pants burned off, too."

"There is always that possibility; but I will insist on being assigned to the project. This information, young man, is _necessary_."

"O. K., Doc," and it was done; and in a few days the _Procyon_ hung motionless, a good five hundred miles high, directly above the highest, sharpest mountain peak they had been able to find.

The Bailey boom, with its spider-web-like network of grounding cables and with a large pulley at its end, extended two hundred feet straight out from the side of the ship. A twenty-five-mile coil of Graham wire was mounted on the remote-controlled Hotchkiss reel. The end of the wire was run out over the pulley; a fifteen-pound weight, to act both as a "senser" and to keep the wire from fouling, was attached; and a few hundred feet of wire were run out.

Then, in Lifecraft Two--as far away from the "business district" as they could get--the human bodies were grounded and Deston started the reel. The wire ran out--and ran--and ran--and ran. The full twenty-five miles were paid out, and still nothing happened. Then, very slowly, Deston let the big ship move straight downward. Until, finally, it happened.

There was a blast beside which the most terrific flash of lightning ever seen on Earth would have seemed like a firecracker. In what was almost a vacuum though she was, the whole immense mass of the _Procyon_ was hurled upward like the cork out of a champagne bottle. And as for what it _felt_ like--since the five who experienced it could never describe it, even to each other, it is obviously indescribable by or to anyone else. As Bernice said long afterward, when she was being pressed by a newsman: "Just tell 'em it was the living end," and that is as good a description as any.

The girls were unwrapped from their silver-mesh cocoons and, after a minute or so of semihysterics, were as good as new. Then Deston stared into the 'scope and gulped. Without saying a word he waved a hand and the others looked. It seemed as though the entire tip of the mountain was gone; had become a seething, flaming volcano on a world that had known no volcanism[3] for hundreds of thousands of years.

"And what," said Deston finally, "do you suppose happened to the other side of the ship?"

The boom, of course, was gone. So were all twenty of the grounding cables which, each the size of a man's arm, had fanned out in all directions to anchorages welded solidly to the vessel's skin and frame. The anchorages, too, were gone; and tons upon tons of high-alloy steel plating and structural members for many feet around where each anchorage had been. Steel had run like water; had been blown away in gusts of vapor.

"Shall I try the radio now, Doc?" Deston asked.

"By no means. This first blast would, of course, be the worst, but there will be several more, of decreasing violence."

* * * * *

There were. The second, while it volatilized the boom and its grounding network, merely fused portions of the anchorages. The third took only the boom itself; the fourth took only the dangling miles of wire. At the sixth trial nothing--apparently--happened; whereupon the wire was drawn in and a two-hundred-pound mass of steel was lowered until it was in firm and quiescent contact with the solid rock of the planet.

"Now you may try your radio," Adams said.

Deston flipped a switch and spoke, quietly but clearly, into a microphone. "_Procyon One_ to Control Six. Flight Eight Four Nine. Subspace Radio Test Ninety-Five--I think. How do you read me, Control Six?"

The reply was highly unorthodox. It was a wild yell, followed by words not directed at Deston at all. "Captain Reamer! Captain French! Captain Holloway! ANYBODY! It's the _Procyon_! The _PROCYON_, that was lost a year ago! Unless some fool is playing a dumb joke."

"It's no joke--I hope." Another voice, crisp and authoritative, came in; growing louder as its source approached the distant pickup. "Or somebody will rot in jail for a hundred years."

"_Procyon One_ to Control Six," Deston said again. His voice was not quite steady this time; both girls were crying openly and joyfully. "How do you read me, Frenchy old horse?"

"It _is Procyon One_--the Runt himself--Hi, Babe!" the new voice roared, then quieted to normal volume. "I read you eight and one. Survivors?"

"Five. Second Officer Jones, our wives, and Dr. Andrew Adams, a Fellow of the College of Advanced Study. He's solely responsible for our being here, so----"

"Skip that for now. In a lifecraft? No, after this long, it must be the ship. Not navigable, of course?"

"Not in subspace, and only so-so in normal. The Chaytors are O. K., but the whole Top is spun out and the rest of her won't hold air--air, hell! She won't hold shipping crates! All the Wesleys are shot, and all the Q-converters. Half the Grahams are leaking like sieves, and----"

"Skip that, too. Just a sec--I'll cut in the downstairs recorder. Now start in at your last check and tell us what's happened since."

"It's a long story."

"Unwind it, Runt, I don't give a damn how long it is. Not a full-detailed report, just hit the high spots--but don't leave out anything really important."

"Wow!" Jones remarked, audibly. "Wottaman Frenchy! Like the ex-urbanite said to the gardener: 'I don't want you to work hard--just take big shovelfulls and lots of 'em per minute'."

"That's enough out of you, Herc my boy. You'll be next. Go ahead, Babe."

Deston went ahead, and spoke almost steadily for thirty minutes. He did not mention the gangsters; nor any personal matters. Otherwise, his report was accurate and complete. He had no idea that everything he said was going out on an Earth-wide hookup; or that many other planets, monitoring constantly all subspace channels, were hooking on. When he was finally released Captain French said, with a chuckle:

"Off the air for a minute. You've no idea what an uproar this has stirred up already. They let them have all your stuff, but we aren't putting out a thing until some Brass gets out there and gets the real story----"

"That _is_ the real story, damn it!"

"Oh, sure, and a very nice job, too, for an extemporaneous effort--if it was. Semantics says, though, that in a couple of spots it smells like slightly rancid cheese, and ... no-no, keep still! Too many planets listening in--_verbum sap_. Anyway, THE PRESS smells something, too, and they're screaming their lungs out, especially the sob-sisters. Now, Herc, on the air, you're orbiting the fourth planet of a sun. What sun? Where?"

"I don't know. Unlisted. We're in completely unexplored territory. Standard reference angles are as follows"--and Jones read off a long list of observations, not only of the brightest stars of the galaxy, but also of the standard reference points, such as S-Doradus, lying outside it. "When you get that stuff all plotted, you'll find a hell of a big confusion; but I _hope_ there aren't enough stars in it but what you can find us sometime."

"Off the air--for good, I hope. Don't make me laugh, Buster, Your probable center will spear it. If there's ever more than one star in any confusion _you_ set up, I'll eat all the extras. But there's a dozen Big Brains here, gnawing their nails off up to the wrist to talk to Adams all the rest of the night, so put him on and let's get back to sleep, huh? They're cutting this mike now."

"Just a minute!" Deston snapped. "What's your time?"

"Three, fourteen, thirty-seven. So go back to bed, you night-prowling owl."

"Of what day, month, and year?" Deston insisted.

"Friday, Sep----" French's voice was replaced by a much older one; very evidently that of a Fellow of the College.

After listening for a moment to the newcomer and Adams, Barbara took Deston by the arm and led him away. "Just a little bit of _that_ gibberish is a bountiful sufficiency, husband mine. So I think we'd better take Captain French's advice, don't you?"

* * * * *

Since there was only one star in Jones' "Confusion" (by the book, "Volume of Uncertainty") finding the _Procyon_ was no problem at all. High Brass came in quantity and the entire story--except for one bit of biology--was told. Two huge subspace-going machine shops also came, and a thousand mechanics, who worked on the crippled liner for almost three weeks.

Then the _Procyon_ started back for Earth under her own subspace drive, under the command of Captain Theodore Jones. His first, last, and only subspace command, of course, since he was now a married man. Deston had wanted to resign while still a First Officer, but his superiors would not accept his resignation until his promotion "for outstanding services" came through. Thus, Ex-Captain Carlyle Deston and his wife were dead-heading, not quite back to Earth, but to the transfer-point for the planet Newmars.

"Theodore Warner Deston is going to be born on Newmars, where he should be," Barbara had said, and Deston had agreed.

"But suppose she's Theodora?" Bernice had twitted her.

"Uh-uh," Barbara had said, calmly. "I just _know_ he's Theodore."

"Uh-huh, I know." Bernice had nodded her spectacular head. "And we wanted a girl, so she is. Barbara Bernice Jones, her name is. A living doll."

Although both pregnancies were well advanced, neither was very near full term. Thus it was clear that both periods of gestation were going to be well over a year in length; but none of the five persons who knew it so much as mentioned the fact. To Adams it was only one tiny datum in an incredibly huge and complex mathematical structure. The parents did not want to be pilloried as crackpots, as publicity-seeking liars, or as being unable to count; and they knew that nobody would believe them if they told the truth; even--or especially?--no medical doctor. The more any doctor knew about gynecology and obstetrics, in fact, the less he would believe any such story as theirs.

Of what use is it to pit such puny and trivial things as _facts_ against rock-ribbed, iron-bound, entrenched AUTHORITY?

The five, however, _knew_; and Deston and Jones had several long and highly unsatisfactory discussions; at first with Adams, and later between themselves. At the end of the last such discussion, a couple of hours out from the transfer point, Jones lit a cigarette savagely and rasped:

"Wherever you start or whatever your angle of approach, he _always_ boils it down to this: 'Subjective time is measured by the number of learning events experienced.' I ask you, Babe, what does that mean? If anything?"

"It sounds like it ought to mean _something_, but I'll be damned if I know what." Deston gazed thoughtfully at the incandescent tip of his friend's cigarette. "However, if it makes the old boy happy and gives the College a toehold on subspace, what do _we_ care?"

       _Triplanetary_

By EDWARD E. SMITH, Ph.D.

We are sure that our readers will be highly pleased to have us give the first installment of a story by Dr. Smith. It will continue for several numbers and is a worthy follower of the "Skylark" stories which were so much appreciated by our readers. We think that they will find this story superior to the earlier ones. Dr. Smith certainly has the narrative power, and that, joined with his scientific position, makes him an ideal author for our columns.

CHAPTER I

Pirates of Space

Apparently motionless to her passengers and crew, the Interplanetary liner _Hyperion_ bored serenely onward through space at normal acceleration. In the railed-off sanctum in one corner of the control room a bell tinkled, a smothered whirr was heard, and Captain Bradley frowned as he studied the brief message upon the tape of the recorder--a message flashed to his desk from the operator's panel. He beckoned, and the second officer, whose watch it now was, read aloud:

"Reports of scout patrols still negative."

"Still negative." The officer scowled in thought. "They've already searched beyond the widest possible location of the wreckage, too. Two unexplained disappearances inside a month--first the _Dione_, then the _Rhea_--and not a plate nor a lifeboat recovered. Looks bad, sir. One might be an accident; two might possibly be a coincidence...." His voice died away. What might that coincidence mean?

"But at three it would get to be a habit," the captain finished the thought. "And whatever happened, happened quick. Neither of them had time to say a word--their location recorders simply went dead. But of course they didn't have our detector screens nor our armament. According to the observatories we're in clear ether, but I wouldn't trust them from Tellus to Luna. You have given the new orders, of course?"

"Yes, sir. Detectors full out, all three courses of defensive screen on the trips, projectors manned, suits on the hooks. Every object detected in the outer space to be investigated immediately--if vessels, they are to be warned to stay beyond extreme range. Anything entering the fourth zone is to be rayed."

"Right--we are going through!"

"But no known type of vessel could have made away with them without detection," the second officer argued. "I wonder if there isn't something in those wild rumors we've been hearing lately?"

"Bah! Of course not!" snorted the captain. "Pirates in ships faster than light--fifth order rays--nullification of gravity--mass without inertia--ridiculous! Proved impossible, over and over again. No, sir, if pirates are operating in space--and it looks very much like it--they won't get far against a good big battery full of kilowatt-hours behind three courses of heavy screen, and a good solid set of multiplex rays. Properly used, they're good enough for anybody. Pirates, Neptunians, angels, or devils--in ships or on sunbeams--if they tackle the _Hyperion_ we'll burn them out of the ether!"

Leaving the captain's desk, the watch officer resumed his tour of duty. The six great lookout plates into which the alert observers peered were blank, their far-flung ultra-sensitive detector screens encountering no obstacle--the ether was empty for thousands upon thousands of kilometers. The signal lamps upon the pilot's panel were dark, its warning bells were silent. A brilliant point of white in the center of the pilot's closely ruled micrometer grating, exactly upon the cross-hairs of his directors, showed that the immense vessel was precisely upon the calculated course, as laid down by the automatic integrating course-plotters. Everything was quiet and in order.

"All's well, sir," he reported briefly to Captain Bradley--but all was not well.

* * * * *

Danger--more serious far in that it was not external--was even then, all unsuspected, gnawing at the great ship's vitals. In a locked and shielded compartment, deep down in the interior of the liner, was the great air purifier. Now a man leaned against the primary duct--the aorta through which flowed the stream of pure air supplying the entire vessel. This man, grotesque in full panoply of space armor, leaned against the duct, and as he leaned a drill bit deeper and deeper into the steel wall of the pipe. Soon it broke through, and the slight rush of air was stopped by the insertion of a tightly fitting rubber tube. The tube terminated in a heavy rubber balloon, which surrounded a frail glass bulb. The man stood tense, one hand holding before his silica-and-steel helmeted head a large pocket chronometer, the other lightly grasping the balloon. A sneering grin was upon his face as he awaited the exact second of action--the carefully pre-determined instant when his right hand, closing, would shatter the fragile flask and force its contents into the primary air stream of the _Hyperion_!

* * * * *

Far above, in the main saloon, the regular evening dance was in full swing. The ship's orchestra crashed into silence, there was a patter of applause and Clio Marsden, radiant belle of the voyage, led her partner out into the promenade and up to one of the observation plates.

"Oh, we can't see the earth any more!" she exclaimed. "Which way do you turn this, Mr. Costigan?"

"Like this," and Conway Costigan, burly young first officer of the liner, turned the dials. "There--this plate is looking back, or down, at Tellus; this other one is looking ahead."

Earth was a brilliantly shining crescent far beneath the flying vessel. Above her, ruddy Mars and silvery Jupiter blazed in splendor ineffable against a background of utterly indescribable blackness--a background thickly besprinkled with dimensionless points of dazzling brilliance which were the stars.

"Oh, isn't it wonderful!" breathed the girl, awed. "Of course, I suppose that it's old stuff to you, but I--a ground-gripper, you know, and I could look at it forever, I think. That's why I want to come out here after every dance. You know, I ..."

Her voice broke off suddenly, with a queer, rasping catch, as she seized his arm in a frantic clutch and as quickly went limp. He stared at her sharply, and understood instantly the message written in her eyes--eyes now enlarged, staring hard, brilliant, and full of soul-searing terror as she slumped down, helpless but for his support. In the act of exhaling as he was, lungs almost entirely empty, yet he held his breath until he had seized the microscope from his belt and had snapped the lever to "emergency."

"Control room!" he gasped then, and every speaker throughout the great cruiser of the void blared out the warning as he forced his already evacuated lungs to absolute emptiness. "Vee-Two Gas! Get tight!"

Writhing and twisting in his fierce struggle to keep his lungs from gulping in a draft of that noxious atmosphere, and with the unconscious form of the girl draped limply over his left arm, Costigan leaped toward the portal of the rearest lifeboat. Orchestra instruments crashed to the floor and dancing couples fell and sprawled inertly while the tortured First Officer swung the door of the lifeboat open and dashed across the tiny room to the air-valves. Throwing them wide open, he put his mouth to the orifice and let his laboring lungs gasp their eager fill of the cold blast roaring from the tanks. Then, air-hunger partially assuaged, he again held his breath, broke open the emergency locker, donned one of the space-suits always kept there, and opened its valves wide in order to flush out of his uniform any lingering trace of the lethal gas.

He then leaped back to his companion. Shutting off the air, he released a stream of pure oxygen, held her face in it, and made shift to force some of it into her lungs by compressing and releasing her chest against his own body. Soon she drew a spasmodic breath, choking and coughing, and he again changed the gaseous stream to one of pure air, speaking urgently as she showed signs of returning consciousness. Now, it was Clio Marsden's life.

"Stand up!" he snapped. "Hang onto this brace and keep your face in this air-stream until I get a suit around you! Got me?"

She nodded weakly, and, assured that she could now hold herself at the valve, it was the work of only a minute to encase her in one of the protective coverings. Then, as she sat upon a bench, recovering her strength, he flipped on the lifeboat's visiphone projector and shot its invisible beam up into the control room, where he saw space-armored figures furiously busy at the panels.

"Dirty work at the cross-roads!" he blazed to his captain, man to man--formality disregarded, as it so often was in the Triplanetary service. "There's skulduggery afoot somewhere in our primary air! Maybe that's the way they got those other two ships--pirates! Might have been a timed bomb--don't see how anybody could have stowed away down there through the inspections, and nobody but Franklin can neutralize the shield of the air-room--but I'm going to look around, anyway. Then I'll join you fellows up there."

"What was it?" the shaken girl asked. "I think that I remember your saying 'Vee-Two gas.' That's forbidden! Anyway, I owe you my life, Conway, and I'll never forget it--never. Thanks--but the others--how about all the rest of us?"

"It was Vee-Two, and it is forbidden," Costigan replied grimly, eyes fast upon the flashing plate, whose point of projection was now deep in the bowels of the vessel. "The penalty for using it or having it is death on sight. Gangsters and pirates use it, since they have nothing to lose, being on the death list already. As for your life, I haven't saved it yet--you may wish I'd let it ride before we get done. The others are too far gone for oxygen--couldn't have brought even you around a few seconds later, quick as I got to you. But there's a sure antidote--we all carry it in a lock-box in our armor--and we all know how to use it, because crooks all use Vee-Two and so we're always expecting it. But since the air will be pure again in half an hour we'll be able to revive the others easily enough if we can get by with whatever is going to happen next. There's the bird that did it, right in the air-room! It's the chief engineer's suit, but that isn't Franklin that's in it. Some passenger--disguised--slugged the chief--took his suit and projectors--hole in duct--p-s-s-t! All washed out! Maybe that's all he was scheduled to do to us in this performance, but he'll do nothing else in this life!"

"Don't go down there!" protested the girl. "His armor is _so_ much better than that emergency suit you are wearing, and he's got Mr. Franklin's Lewiston, besides!"

"Don't be an idiot!" he snapped. "We can't have a live pirate aboard--we're going to be altogether too busy with outsiders directly. Don't worry, I'm not going to give him a break. I'm taking a Standish and I'll rub him out like a blot. Stay right here until I come back after you," he commanded, and the heavy, vacuum insulated door of the lifeboat clanged shut behind him as he leaped out into the promenade.

Straight across the saloon he made his way, paying no attention to the inert forms scattered here and there. Going up to a blank wall, he manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush with its surface, swung a heavy door aside, and lifted out the Standish--a fearsome weapon. Squat, huge, and heavy, it resembled somewhat an overgrown machine rifle, but one possessing a thick, short telescope, with several opaque condensing lenses and parabolic reflectors. Laboring under the weight of the thing, he strode along corridors and clambered heavily down short stairways. Finally he came to the purifier room, and grinned savagely as he saw the greenish haze of light obscuring the door and walls--the shield was still in place; the pirate was still inside, still flooding with the terrible Vee-Two the _Hyperion's_ primary air.

He set his peculiar weapon down, unfolded its three massive legs, crouched down behind it and threw in a switch. Dull red beams of frightful intensity shot from the reflectors and sparks, almost of lightning proportions, leaped from the shielding screen under their impact. Roaring and snapping, the conflict went on for seconds; then, under the superior force of the Standish, the greenish radiance gave way. Behind it the metal of the door ran the gamut of color--red, yellow, blinding whiter--then literally exploded; molten, vaporized, burned away. Through the aperture thus made Costigan could plainly see the pirate in the space-armor of the chief engineer--an armor which was proof against rifle fire and which could reflect and neutralize for some little time even the terrific beam Costigan was employing. Nor was the pirate unarmed--a vicious flare of incandescence leaped from his Lewiston, to spend its force in spitting, crackling pyrotechnics against the ether-wall of the squat and monstrous Standish. But Costigan's infernal machine did not rely only upon vibratory destruction. At almost the first flash of the pirate's weapon the officer touched a trigger; there was a double report, ear-shattering in that narrowly confined space; and the pirate's body literally flew into mist as a half-kilogram shell tore through his armor and exploded. Costigan shut off his beam, and, with not the slightest softening of one hard lineament, stared around the air-room; making sure that no serious damage had been done to the vital machinery of the air-purifier--the very lungs of the great space-ship.

Dismounting the Standish, he lugged it back up to the main saloon, replaced it in its safe and again set the combination lock. Thence to the lifeboat, where Clio cried out in relief as she saw that he was unhurt.

"Oh, Conway, I've been so afraid something would happen to you!" she exclaimed, as he led her rapidly upward toward the control room. "Of course you...." she paused.

"Sure," he replied, laconically. "Nothing to it. How do you feel--about back to normal?"

"All right, I think, except for being scared to death and just about out of control. I don't suppose that I'll be good for anything, but whatever I can do, count me in on."

"Fine--you may be needed, at that. Everybody's out, apparently, except those who, like me, had a warning and could hold their breath until they got to their suits."

"But how did you know what it was? You can't see it, nor smell it, nor anything."

"You inhaled a second before I did, and I saw your eyes. I've been in it before--and when you see a man get a jolt of that stuff just once, you never forget it. The engineers down below got it first, of course--it must have wiped them out. Then we got it in the saloon. Your passing out warned me, and luckily I had enough breath left to give the word. Quite a few of the fellows up above should have had time to get away--we'll see 'em all in the control room."

"I suppose that was why you revived me--in payment for so kindly warning you of the gas attack?" The girl laughed; shaky, but game.

"Something like that, probably," he answered, lightly. "Here we are--now we'll soon find out what's going to happen next."

In the control room they saw at least a dozen armored figures; not now rushing about, but seated at their instruments, tense and ready. Fortunate it was that Costigan--veteran of space as he was, though young in years--had been down in the saloon; fortunate that he had been familiar with that horrible outlawed gas; fortunate that he had had the presence of mind enough and sheer physical stamina enough to send his warning without allowing one paralyzing trace to enter his own lungs. Captain Bradley, the men on watch, and several other officers in their quarters or in the wardrooms--space-hardened veterans all--had obeyed instantly and without question the amplifiers' gasped command to "get tight." Exhaling or inhaling, their air-passages had snapped as that dread "Vee-Two" was heard, and they had literally jumped into their armored suits of space--flushing them out with volume after volume of unquestionable air; holding their breath to the last possible second, until their straining lungs could endure no more.

Costigan waved the girl to a vacant bench, cautiously changed into his own armor from the emergency suit he had been wearing, and approached the captain.

"Anything in sight, sir?" he asked, saluting. "They should have started something before this."

"They've started, but we can't locate them. We tried to send out a general sector alarm, but that had hardly started when they blanketed our wave. Look at that!"

Following the captain's eyes, Costigan stared at the high powered set of the ship's operator. Upon the plate, instead of a moving, living, three-dimensional picture, there was a flashing glare of blinding white light; from the speaker, instead of intelligible speech, was issuing a roaring, crackling stream of noise.

"It's impossible!" Bradley burst out, violently. "There's not a gram of metal inside the fourth zone--within a hundred thousand kilometers--and yet they must be close to send such a wave as that. But the Second thinks not--what do you think, Costigan?" The bluff commander, reactionary and of the old school as was his breed, was furious--baffled, raging inwardly to come to grips with the invisible and undetectable foe. Face to face with the inexplicable, however, he listened to the younger men with unusual tolerance.

"It's not only possible; it's quite evident that they've got something we haven't." Costigan's voice was bitter. "But why shouldn't they have? Service ships never get anything until it's been experimented with for years, but pirates and such always get the new stuff as soon as it's discovered. The only good thing I can see is that we got part of a message away, and the scouts can trace that interference out there. But the pirates know that, too--it won't be long now," he concluded, grimly.

He spoke truly. Before another word was spoken the outer screen flared white under a beam of terrific power, and simultaneously there appeared upon one of the lookout plates a vivid picture of the pirate vessel--a huge, black globe of steel, now emitting flaring offensive beams of force. Her invisibility lost, now that she had gone into action, she lay revealed in the middle of the first zone--at point-blank range.

Instantly the powerful weapons of the _Hyperion_ were brought to bear, and in the blast of full-driven beams the stranger's screens flamed incandescent. Heavy guns, under the recoil of whose fierce salvos, the frame of the giant globe trembled and shuddered, shot out their tons of high-explosive shell. But the pirate commander had known accurately the strength of the liner, and knew that her armament was impotent against the forces at his command. His screens were invulnerable, the giant shells were exploded harmlessly in mid-space, miles from their objective. And suddenly a frightened pencil of flame stabbed brilliantly from the black hulk of the enemy. Through the empty ether it tore, through the mighty defensive screens, through the tough metal of the outer and inner walls. Every ether-defence of the _Hyperion_ vanished, and her acceleration dropped to a quarter of its normal value.

"Right through the battery room!" Bradley groaned. "We're on the emergency drive now. Our rays are done for, and we can't seem to put a shell anywhere near her with our guns!"

But ineffective as the guns were, they were silenced forever as a frightful beam of destruction stabbed relentlessly through the control room, whiffing out of existence the pilot, gunnery, and lookout panels and the men before them. The air rushed into space, and the suits of the three survivors bulged out into drumhead tightness as the pressure in the room decreased.

Costigan pushed the captain lightly toward a wall, then seized the girl and leaped in the same direction.

"Let's get out of here, quick!" he cried, the miniature radio instruments of the helmets automatically taking up the duty of transmitting speech as the sound disks refused to function. "They can't see us--our ether wall is still up and their spy-sprays can't get through it from the outside, you know. They're working from blue-prints, and they'll probably take your desk next," and even as they bounded toward the door, now become the outer seal of an airlock, the annihilating ray tore through the space which they had just quitted in their flight.

Through the airlock, down through several levels of passengers' quarters they hurried, and into a lifeboat, whose one doorway commanded the full length of the third lounge--an ideal spot, either for defense or for escape outward by means of the miniature cruiser. As they entered their retreat they felt their weight begin to increase. More and more force was applied to the helpless liner, until it was moving at normal acceleration.

"What do you make of that, Costigan?" asked the captain. "Tractor beams?"

"Apparently. They've got something, all right. They're taking us somewhere, fast. I'll go get a couple of Standishes, and another suit of armor--we'd better dig in," and soon the small room became a veritable fortress, housing as it did, those two formidable engines of destruction. Then the first officer made another and longer trip, returning with a complete suit of triplanetary space armor, exactly like those worn by the two men, but considerably smaller.

"Just as an added factor of safety, you'd better put this on, Clio--those emergency suits aren't good for much in a battle. I don't suppose that you ever fired a Standish, did you?"

"No, but I can soon learn how to do it," she replied, pluckily.

"Two is all that can work here at once, but you should know how to take hold in case one of us goes out. And while you're changing suits you'd better put on some stuff I've got here--Service special phones and detectors. Stick this little disk onto your chest with this bit of tape; low down, out of sight. Just under your wishbone is the best place. Take off your wrist-watch and wear this one _continuously_--never take it off for a second. Put on these pearls, and wear them all the time, too. Take this capsule and hide it against your skin, some place where it can't be found except by the most rigid search. Swallow it in an emergency--it goes down easily and works just as well inside as outside. It is the most important thing of all--you can get along with it alone if you lose everything else, but without that capsule the whole system's shot to pieces. With that outfit, if we should get separated, you can talk to us--we're both wearing 'em, although somewhat different forms. You don't need to talk loud--just a mutter will be enough. They're handy little outfits, almost impossible to find, and capable of a lot of things."

"Thanks, Conway--I'll remember that, too," Clio replied, as she turned toward the tiny locker to follow his instructions. "But won't the scouts and patrols be catching us pretty quick? The operator sent a warning."

"Afraid the ether's empty, as far as we're concerned. They could neutralize our detector screens, and the scouts' detectors are the same as ours."

Captain Bradley had stood by in silent astonishment during this conversation. His eyes had bulged slightly at Costigan's "we're both wearing 'em," but he had held his peace and as the girl disappeared a look of dawning comprehension came over his face.

"Oh, I see, sir," he said, respectfully--far more respectfully than he had ever before addressed a mere first officer. "Meaning that we both _will be_ wearing them shortly, I assume. 'Service Specials'--but you didn't specify exactly _what_ Service, did you?"

"Now that you mention it, I don't believe that I did," Costigan grinned.

"That explains several things about you--particularly your recognition of Vee-Two and your uncanny control and speed of reaction. But aren't you...."

"No," Costigan interrupted, positively. "This situation is apt to get altogether too serious to overlook any bets. If we get away, I'll take them away from her and she'll never know that they aren't routine equipment in the Triplanetary Service. As for you, I know that you can and do keep your mouth shut. That's why I'm hanging this junk on you--I had a lot of stuff in my kit, but I flashed it all with the Standish, except what I brought in here for us three. Whether you think so or not, we're in a real jam--our chance of getting away is mightly close to zero. Now that I've gone this far, I might as well tell you that I don't believe these birds are pirates at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. And it may be possible that they're after me, but I don't think so--we've covered up too...."

He broke off as the girl came back, now to all appearances a small Triplanetary officer, and the three settled down to a long and eventless wait. Hour after hour they flew through the ether, but finally there was a lurching swing and an abrupt increase in their acceleration. After a short consultation Captain Bradley turned on the visiray set and, with the beam at its minimum power, peered cautiously downward, in the direction opposite to that in which he knew the pirate vessel must be. All three stared into the plate, seeing only an infinity of emptiness, marked only by the infinitely remote and coldly brilliant stars. While they stared into space a vast area of the heavens was blotted out and they saw, faintly illuminated by a peculiar blue luminescence, a vast ball--a sphere so large and so close that they seemed to be dropping downward toward it as though it were a world! They came to a stop--paused, weightless--a vast door slid smoothly aside--they were drawn _upward_ through an airlock and floated quietly in the air above a small, but brightly-lighted and orderly city of metallic buildings! Gently the _Hyperion_ was lowered, to come to rest in the embracing arms of a regulation landing cradle.

"Well, wherever it is, we're here," remarked Captain Bradley, grimly.

"And now the fireworks start," assented Costigan, with a questioning glance at the girl.

"Don't mind me," she answered his unspoken question. "I don't believe in surrendering, either."

"Right," and both men squatted down behind the ether-walls of their terrific weapons; the girl prone behind them.

They had not long to wait. A group of human beings--men and to all appearance Americans--appeared unarmed in the little lounge. As soon as they were well inside the room, Bradley and Costigan released upon them without compunction the full power of their frightful projectors. From the reflectors, through the doorway, there tore a concentrated double beam of pure destruction--but that beam did not reach its goal. Yards from the men it met a screen of impenetrable density. Instantly the gunners pressed their triggers and a stream of high-explosive shells issued from the roaring weapons. But shells, also, were futile. They struck the shield and vanished--vanished without exploding and without leaving a trace to show that they had ever existed.

Costigan sprang to his feet, but before he could launch his intended attack a vast tunnel appeared beside him--an annihilating ray had swept through the entire width of the liner, cutting instantly a smooth cylinder of emptiness. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum, and the three visitors felt themselves seized by invisible forces and drawn into the tunnel. Through it they floated, up to and over the buildings, finally slanting downward toward the door of a great high-powered structure. Doors opened before them and closed behind them, until at last they stood upright in a room which was evidently the office of a busy executive. They faced a desk which, in addition to the usual equipment of the business man, carried a bewilderingly complete switchboard and instrument panel.

Seated impassively at the desk there was a gray man. Not only was he dressed entirely in gray, but his heavy hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and even his tanned skin seemed to give the impression of grayness in disguise. His overwhelming personality radiated an aura of grayness--not the gentle gray of the dove, but the resistless, driving gray of the super-dreadnaught; the hard, inflexible, brittle gray of the fracture of high-carbon steel.

"Captain Bradley, First Officer Costigan, Miss Marsden," the man spoke quietly, but crisply. "I had not intended you two men to live so long. That is a detail, however, which we will pass by for the moment. You may remove your suits."

Neither officer moved, but both stared back at the speaker unflinchingly.

"I am not accustomed to repeating instructions," the man at the desk continued; voice still low and level, but instinct with deadly menace. "You may choose between removing those suits and dying in them, here and now."

Costigan moved over to Clio and slowly took off her armor. Then, after a flashing exchange of glances and a muttered word, the two officers threw off their suits simultaneously and fired at the same instant; Bradley with his Lewiston, Costigan with a heavy automatic pistol whose bullets were explosive shells of tremendous power. But the man in gray, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of force, only smiled at the fusillade, tolerantly and maddeningly. Costigan leaped fiercely, only to be hurled backward as he struck that unyielding, invisible wall. A vicious beam snapped him back into place, the weapons were snatched away, and all three captives were held in their former positions.

"I permitted that, as a demonstration of futility," the gray man said, his hard voice becoming harder, "but I will permit no more foolishness. Now I will introduce myself. I am known as Roger. You probably have heard nothing of me yet but you will--if you live. Whether or not you two live depends solely upon yourselves. Being something of a student of men, I fear that you will both die shortly. Able and resourceful as you have just shown yourselves to be, you could be valuable to me, but you probably will not--in which case you shall, of course, cease to exist. That, however, in its proper time--you shall be of some slight service to me in the process of being eliminated. In your case, Miss Marsden, I find myself undecided between two courses of action; each highly desirable, but unfortunately mutually exclusive. Your father will be glad to ransom you at an exceedingly high figure, but, in spite of that fact, I may decide to keep you for--well, let us say for certain purposes."

"Yes?" Clio rose magnificently to the occasion. Fear forgotten, her courageous spirit flashed from her clear, young eyes and emanated from her slender, rounded young body, erect in defiance. "Since I am a captive, you can of course do anything you please with me up to a certain point--but no further, believe me!"

With no sign of having heard her outburst Roger pressed a button and a tall, comely woman, appeared--a woman of indefinite age and of uncertain nationality.

"Show Miss Marsden to her apartment," he directed, and as the two women went out a man came in.

"The cargo is unloaded, sir," the newcomer reported. "The two men and the five women indicated have been taken to the hospital," was the report of the man.

"Very well, dispose of the others in the usual fashion." The minion went out, and Roger continued, emotionlessly:

"Collectively, the other passengers may be worth a million or so, but it would not be worth while to waste time upon them."

"What are you, anyway?" blazed Costigan, helpless but enraged beyond caution. "I have heard of mad scientists who tried to destroy the earth, and of equally mad geniuses who thought themselves Napoleons capable of conquering even the Solar System. Whichever you are, you should know that you can't get away with it."

"I am neither. I am, however, a scientist, and I direct many other scientists. I am not mad. You have undoubtedly noticed several peculiar features of this place?"

"Yes, particularly the artificial gravity, which has always been considered impossible, and those screens. An ordinary ether-wall is opaque in one direction, and doesn't bar matter--yours are transparent both ways and something more than impenetrable to matter. How do you do it?"

"You could not understand them if I explained them to you, and they are merely two of our smaller developments. I have no serious designs upon the earth nor upon the Solar System, nor have I any desire to rule over, or to control the destinies of masses of futile and brainless men. I have, however, certain ends of my own in view. To accomplish my plans I require hundreds of millions in gold, other hundreds of millions in platinum and noble metal, and some five kilograms of the bromide of radium--all of which I shall take from the planets of this Solar System before I leave it. I shall take them in spite of the puerile efforts of the fleets of your Triplanetary League.

"This structure, floating in a planetary orbit, was designed by me and built under my direction. It is protected from meteorites by certain forces of my devising. It is undetectable and invisible--your detectors do not touch it and light-waves are bent around it without loss or distortion. I am discussing these points at such length so that you may realize exactly your position. As I have intimated, you can be of assistance to me if you will."

"Now just what could you offer any _man_ to make him join your outfit?" demanded Costigan, venomously.

"Many things." Roger's cold tone betrayed no emotion, no recognition of Costigan's open and bitter contempt. "I have under me many men, bound to me by many ties. Needs, wants, longings and desires differ from man to man, and I can satisfy practically any of them. Personally, I take delight in the society of young and beautiful women, and many men have that same taste; but there are other urges which I have found quite efficient. Greed, thirst for fame, longing for power, and so on, including many qualities usually regarded as 'noble.' And what I promise, I deliver. I demand only loyalty to me, and that only in certain things and for a relatively short period. In all else, my men do as they please. In conclusion, I can use you two conveniently, but I do not need you. Therefore you may choose now between my service and--the alternative."

"Exactly what is the alternative?"

"We will not go into that. Suffice it to say that it has to do with a minor research, which is not progressing satisfactorily. It will result in your extinction, and perhaps I should mention that that extinction will not be particularly pleasant."

"I say NO, you...." Bradley roared. He intended to give an unexpurgated classification, but was rudely interrupted.

"Hold on a minute!" snapped Costigan. "How about Miss Marsden?"

"She has nothing to do with this discussion," returned Roger, icily. "I do not bargain--in fact, I believe that I shall keep her for a time. She has it in mind to destroy herself, if I do not allow her to be ransomed, but she will find that door closed to her until I permit it to open."

"In that case, I string along with the Chief--take what he started to say about you and run it clear across the board for me!" barked Costigan.

"Very well. That decision was to be expected from men of your type." The gray man touched two buttons and two of his creatures entered the room. "Put these men into separate cells on the second level," he ordered. "Search them to the skin: all their weapons may not have been in their armor. Seal the doors and mount special guards, tuned to me here."

Imprisoned they were, and carefully searched; but they bore no arms, and nothing had been said or thought of communicators. Even if such instruments could be concealed, Roger would detect their use instantly. At least, so would have run his thought had the subject entered his mind. But even Roger had no inkling of the possibility of Costigan's "Service Special" phones, detectors and spy-ray--instruments of minute size and of infinitesimal power, but yet instruments which, working as they were, below the level of the ether, were effective at great distances and caused no vibrations in the ether by which their use could be detected. And what could be more innocent than the regulation, personal equipment of every officer of space? The heavy goggles, the wrist-watch and its supplementary pocket chronometer, the flash-lamp, the automatic lighter, the sender, the money-belt?

All these items of equipment were examined with due care; but the cleverest minds of Triplanetary's Secret Service had designated those communicators to pass any ordinary search, however careful, and when Costigan and Bradley were finally locked into the designated cells, they still possessed their ultra-instruments.

CHAPTER II

In Roger's Planetoid

In the hall Clio glanced around her wildly, her bosom heaving, eyes darting here and there, seeking even the narrowest avenue of escape. Before she could act, however, her body was clamped inflexibly, as though in a vise, and she struggled, motionless.

"It is useless to attempt to escape, or to do anything except what Roger wishes," the guide informed her somberly, snapping off the instrument in her hand and thus restoring to the thoroughly cowed girl her freedom of motion.

"His lightest wish is law," she continued as they walked down a long corridor. "The sooner you realize that you must do exactly as he pleases, in all things, the easier your life will be."

"But I wouldn't _want_ to keep on living!" Clio declared, with a flash of spirit. "And I can _always_ die, you know."

"You will find that you cannot," the passionless creature returned, monotonously. "If you do not yield, you will long and pray for death, but you will not die unless Roger wills it. I was like you once. I also struggled, and I became what I am now--whatever it is. Here is your apartment. You will stay here until Roger gives further orders concerning you."

The living automaton opened a door and stood silent and impassive, while Clio, staring at her in unutterable horror, shrank past her and into the sumptuously furnished suite. The door closed soundlessly and utter silence descended as a pall. Not an ordinary silence, but the indescribable perfection of the absolute, complete absence of all sound. In that silence Clio stood motionless. Tense and rigid, hopeless, despairing, she stood there in that magnificent room, fighting an almost overwhelming impulse to scream. Suddenly she heard the cold voice of Roger, speaking from the empty air.

"You are over-wrought, Miss Marsden. You can be of no use to yourself or to me in that condition. I command you to rest; and, to insure that rest, you may pull that cord, which will establish about this room an ether wall: a wall cutting off even this my voice...."

The voice ceased as she pulled the cord savagely and threw herself upon a divan in a torrent of gasping, strangling, but rebellious sobs. Then again came a voice, but not to her ears. Deep within her, pervading every bone and muscle, it made itself felt rather than heard.

"Clio?" it asked. "Don't talk yet...."

"Conway!" she gasped in relief, every fiber of her being thrilled into new hope at the deep, well-remembered voice of Conway Costigan.

"Keep still!" he snapped. "Don't act so happy! He may have a spy-ray on you. He can't hear me, but he may be able to hear you. When he was talking to you you must have noticed a sort of rough, sandpapery feeling under that necklace I gave you? Since he's got an ether-wall around you the beads are dead now. If you feel anything like that under the wrist-watch, breathe deeply, twice. If you don't feel anything there, it's safe for you to talk, as loud as you please.

"I don't feel a thing, Conway!" she rejoiced. Tears forgotten, she was her old, buoyant self again. "So that wall _is_ real, after all? I only about half believed it."

"Don't trust it too much, because he can cut it off from the outside any time he wants to. Remember what I told you: that necklace will warn you of any spy-ray in the ether, and the watch will detect anything below the level of the ether. It's dead now, of course, since our three phones are direct-connected; I'm in touch with Bradley, too. Don't be too scared; we've got a lot better chance that I thought we had."

"What? You don't mean it!"

"Absolutely. I'm beginning to think that maybe we've got something he doesn't know exists--our ultra-wave. Of course I wasn't surprised when his searchers failed to find our instruments, but it never occurred to me that I might have a clear field to use them in! I can't quite believe it yet, but I haven't been able to find any indication that he can even detect the bands we are using. I'm going to look around over there with my spy-ray ... I'm looking at you now--feel it?"

"Yes, the watch feels that way, now."

"Fine! Not a sign of interference over here, either. I can't find a trace of ultra-wave--anything below ether-level, you know--anywhere in the whole place. He's got so much stuff that we've never heard of that I supposed of course he'd have ultra-wave, too; but if he hasn't, that gives us the edge. Well, Bradley and I've got a lot of work to do.... Wait a minute, I just had a thought. I'll be back in about a second."

There was a brief pause, then the soundless, but clear voice went on:

"Good hunting! That woman that gave you the blue willies isn't alive--she's full of the prettiest machinery and communicators you ever saw!"

"Oh, Conway!" and the girl's voice broke in an engulfing wave of thanksgiving and relief. "It was so unutterably horrible, thinking of what must have happened to her and to others like her!"

"He's running a colossal bluff, I think. He's good, all right, but he lacks quite a lot of being omnipotent. But don't get too cocky, either. Plenty has happened to plenty of women here, and men too--and plenty may happen to us unless we put out a few jets. Keep a stiff upper lip, and if you want us, yell. 'Bye!"

The silent voice ceased, the watch upon Clio's wrist again became an unobtrusive timepiece, and Costigan, in his solitary cell far below her tower room, turned his peculiarly goggled eyes toward other scenes. In his pockets his hands manipulated tiny controls, and through the lenses of those goggles Costigan's keen and highly-trained eyes studied every concealed detail of mechanism of the great globe, the while he planned what must be done. Finally, he took off the goggles and spoke in a low voice to Bradley, confined in another windowless room across the hall.

"I think I've got dope enough, Captain. I've found out where he put our armor and guns, and I've located all the main leads, controls, and generators. There are no ether-walls around us here, but every door is shielded, and there are guards outside our doors--one to each of us. They're robots, not men. That makes it harder, since they're undoubtedly connected direct to Roger's desk, and will give an alarm at the first hint of abnormal performance. We can't do a thing until he leaves his desk. See that black panel, a little below the cord-switch to the right of your door? That's the conduit cover. When I give you the word, tear that off and you'll see one red wire in the cable. It feeds the shield-generator of your door. Break that wire and join me out in the hall. Sorry I had only one of these ultra-wave spies, but once we're together it won't be so bad. Here's what I thought we could do," and he went over in detail the only course of action which his surveys had shown to be possible.

"There, he's left his desk!" Costigan exclaimed after the conversation had continued for almost an hour. "Now as soon as we find out where he's going, we'll start something ... he's going to see Clio, the swine! This changes things, Bradley!" His hard voice was a curse.

"Somewhat!" blazed the captain. "I know how you two have been getting on all during the cruise. I'm with you, but what can we do?"

"We'll do something," Costigan declared grimly. "If he makes a pass at her I'll get him if I have to blow this whole sphere out of space, with us in it!"

"Don't do that, Conway." Clio's low voice, trembling but determined, was felt by both men and both gasped audibly: they had forgotten that there were three instruments in the circuit. "If there's a chance for you to get away and do anything about fighting him, don't mind me. Maybe he only wants to talk about the ransom, anyway."

"He wouldn't talk ransom to _you_--he's going to talk something else entirely," Costigan gritted; then his voice changed suddenly. "But say, maybe it's just as well this way. They didn't find our specials when they searched us, you know, and we're going to do plenty of damage right soon now. Roger probably isn't a fast worker--more the cat-and-mouse type, I'd say--and after we get started he'll have something on his mind besides you. Think you can stall him off and keep him interested for about fifteen minutes?"

"I'm sure I can--I'll do _anything_ to help us, or you, get away from this horrible...." Her voice ceased as Roger broke the ether-wall of her apartment and walked toward the divan upon which she crouched in wide-eyed, helpless, trembling terror.

"Get ready, Bradley!" Costigan directed tersely. "He's left Clio's ether-wall off, so that any abnormal signals would be relayed to him from his desk--he knows that there's no chance of anyone disturbing him in _that_ room. But I'm holding my beam on that switch--it's as good a conductor as metal--so that the wall is on, full strength. No matter what we do now, he can't get a warning. I'll have to hold the beam exactly on the switch, though, so you'll have to do the dirty work. Tear out that red wire and kill those two guards. You know how to kill a robot, don't you?"

"Yes--break his eye-lenses and his eardrums and he'll stop whatever he's doing and send out distress calls.... Got 'em both. Now what?"

"Open my door--the shield switch is to the right."

Costigan's door flew open and the Triplanetary captain leaped into the room.

"Now for our armor!" he cried.

"Not yet!" snapped Costigan. He was standing rigid, goggled eyes staring immovably at a spot upon the ceiling. "I can't move a millimeter until you've closed Clio's ether-wall switch. If I take this ray off it for a second we're sunk. Five floors up, straight ahead down a corridor--fourth door on right. When you're at the switch you'll feel my ray on your watch. Snap it up!"

"Right!" and the captain leaped away at a pace to be equaled by few men of half his years.

Soon he was back, and after Costigan had tested the ether-wall of the "bridal suite" to make sure that no warning signal from his desk or his servants could reach Roger within it, the two officers hurried away toward the room in which their discarded space-armor had been stored.

"Too bad they don't wear uniforms," panted Bradley, short of breath from the many flights of stairs. "Might have helped some as disguise."

"I doubt it--with so many robots around, they've probably got signals that we couldn't understand, anyway. If we meet anybody it'll mean a battle. Hold it!" Peering through walls with his spy-ray, Costigan had seen two men approaching, blocking an intersecting corridor into which they must turn. "Two of 'em, a man and a robot--the robot's on your side. We'll wait here, right at the corner--when they round it, take 'em!" And Costigan put away his goggles in readiness for strife.

All unsuspecting, the two pirates came into view, and as they appeared the two officers struck. Costigan, on the inside, drove a short, hard right low into the human pirate's abdomen. The fiercely driven fist sank to the wrist into the soft tissues and the stricken man collapsed. But even as the blow landed, Costigan had seen that there was a third enemy, following close behind the two he had been watching, a pirate who was even then training a ray projector upon him. Reacting automatically, Costigan swung his unconscious opponent around in front of him, so that it was into that insensible body that the vicious ray tore, and not into his own. Crouching down into the smallest possible compass, he straightened his powerful body with the lashing force of a mighty steel spring, hurling the corpse straight at the flaming mouth of the projector. The weapon crashed to the floor and dead pirate and living went down in a heap. Upon that heap Costigan hurled himself, feeling for the enemy's throat. But the pirate had wriggled clear, and countered with a gouging thrust that would have torn out the eyes of a slower man, following it up instantly with a savage kick for the groin. No automaton this, geared and set to perform certain fixed duties with mechanical precision, but a lithe, strong man in hard training, fighting with every foul trick known to his murderous ilk.

But Costigan was no tyro in the art of dirty fighting. Few indeed are the maiming tricks of foul combat unknown to even the rank and file of the highly efficient Secret Service of the Triplanetary League; and Costigan, a Sector Chief of that unknown organization, knew them all. Not for pleasure, sportsmanship, nor million-dollar purses do those secret agents use Nature's weapons. They come to grips only when it cannot possibly be avoided, but when they are forced to fight in that fashion they go into it with but one grim purpose--to kill, and to kill in the shortest possible space of time. Thus it was that Costigan's opening soon came. The pirate launched a particularly vicious kick, the dreaded "coup de sabot," which Costigan avoided by a lightning shift. It was a slight shift, barely enough to make the kicker miss, and two powerful hands closed upon that flying foot in midair like the sprung jaws of a bear-trap. Closed and twisted viciously, in the same fleeting instant. There was a shriek, smothered as a heavy boot crashed to its carefully pre-determined mark: the pirate was out, definitely and permanently.

The struggle had lasted scarcely ten seconds, coming to its close just as Bradley finished blinding and deafening the robot. Costigan picked up the projector, again donned his spy-ray goggles, and the two hurried on.

"Nice work, Chief--it must be a gift to rough-house the way you do," Bradley exclaimed. "That's why you took the live one?"

"Practice helps some, too! I've been in brawls before, and I'm a lot younger and maybe some faster than you are," Costigan explained briefly, penetrant gaze rigidly to the fore as they ran along one corridor after another.

Several more guards, both living and mechanical, were encountered on the way, but they were not permitted to offer any opposition. Costigan saw them first. In the furious beam of the projector of the dead pirate they were riven into nothingness, and the two officers sped on to the room which Costigan had located from afar. The three suits of Triplanetary space armor had been sealed into a cabinet whose doors Costigan literally blew off with a blast of force, rather than consume time in tracing the power leads.

"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it up after we've wrecked the works."

Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the room which housed the pulsating heart of the immense fortress of space. Guards were encountered, and captains--officers who signaled frantically to their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence--but the enemy beams were impotent against the mighty ether-walls of that armor; and the pirates, without armor in the security of their own planet as they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons. As they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio's voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her against her will by the extremity of her position.

"Conway! Hurry! Oh, hurry! I can't last much longer--good-bye, dear!" In the horror-filled tones both men read clearly the girl's dire extremity. Each saw plainly a happy, care-free young earth girl, upon her first trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained, under-conscienced human machine--a super-intelligent but lecherous and unmoral mechanism of flesh and blood, acknowledging no authority, ruled by nothing save his own scientific drivings and the almost equally powerful urges of his desires and passions! She had fought with every resource at her command. She had wept and pleaded, she had stormed and raged, she had feigned submission and had played for time--and her torment had not touched in the slightest degree the merciless and gloating brain of the being who called himself Roger. Now his tantalizing, ruthless cat-play was done, the horrible gray-brown face was close to hers--she wailed her final despairing message to Costigan and attacked that hideous face with the fury of a tigress.

Costigan bit off a bitter imprecation. "Hold him just a second longer, sweetheart!" he cried, and the power room door vanished.

Through the great room the two Lewistons swept at full aperture and at maximum power, two rapidly opening fans of death and destruction. Here and there a guard, more rapid than his fellows, trained a futile projector--a projector whose magazine exploded at the touch of that frightful field of force, liberating instantaneously its thousands upon thousands of kilowatt-hours of stored-up energy. Through the delicately adjusted, complex mechanisms the destroying beams tore. At their touch armatures burned out, high-tension leads volatilized in crashing, high-voltage sparks, masses of metal smoked and burned in the path of vast forces now seeking the easiest path to neutralization, delicate instruments blew up, copper ran in streams like water. As the last machine subsided into a semi-molten mass of metal the two wreckers, each grasping a brace, felt themselves become weightless and knew that they had accomplished the first part of their program.

Costigan leaped for the outer door. His the task to go to Clio's aid.... Bradley would follow more slowly, bringing the girl's armor and taking care of any possible pursuit. As he sailed through the air he spoke.

"Coming, Clio! All right, girl?" Questioningly, half fearfully.

"All right, Conway." Her voice was almost unrecognizable, broken in retching agony. "When everything went crazy he ... found out that the ether-wall was up ... forgot all about me. He shut it off ... and seemed to go crazy, too ... he is floundering around like a wild man now.... I'm trying to keep ... him from ... going down-stairs."

"Good girl--keep him busy one minute more--he's getting all the warnings at once and wants to get back to his board. But what's the matter with you? Did he ... hurt you, after all?"

"Oh, no; not that. But I'm sick--horribly sick. I'm falling.... I'm so dizzy I can scarcely see ... my head is breaking up into little pieces ... I just _know_ I'm going to die, Conway! Oh ... oh!"

"Oh, is _that_ all!" In his sheer relief that they had been in time, Costigan did not think of sympathizing with Clio's very real present distress of mind and body. "I forgot that you're a ground-gripper--that's just a little touch of space-sickness. It'll wear off directly.... All right, I'm coming! Let go of him and get as far away from him as you can!"

He was now in the street. Perhaps two hundred feet distant and a hundred feet above him was the tower room in which were Clio and Roger. He sprang directly toward its large window, and as he floated "upward" he corrected his course and accelerated his pace by firing backward at various angles with his heavy service pistol, uncaring that at the point of impact of each of those shells a small blast of destruction erupted. He missed the window a trifle, but that did not matter--his flaming Lewiston opened a way for him, partly through the window, partly through the wall. As he soared through the opening he trained projector and pistol upon Roger, now almost to the door, noticing as he did so that Clio was clinging convulsively to a lamp-bracket upon the wall. Door and wall vanished in the Lewiston's terrific beam, but the pirate stood unharmed. Neither ravening ray nor explosive shell could harm him--he had snapped on the protective shield whose generator was always upon his person.

But Roger, while not exactly a ground-gripper, did not know how to handle himself without weight; whereas Costigan, given six walls against which to push, was even more efficient in weightless combat than when handicapped by the force of gravitation. Keeping his projector upon the pirate, he seized the first club to hand--a long, slender pedestal of metal--and launched himself past the pirate chief. With all the momentum of his mass and velocity and all the power of his mighty right arm he swung the bar at the pirate's head. That fiercely driven mass of metal should have taken Roger's head from his shoulders, but it did not. That shield of force was utterly rigid and impenetrable; the only effect of the frightful blow was to set him spinning, end over end, like the flying baton of an acrobatic drum-major. As the spinning form crashed against the opposite wall of the room, Bradley floated in, carrying Clio's armor. Without a word the captain loosened the helpless girl's grip upon the bracket and encased her in the suit. Then, supporting her at the window, he held his Lewiston upon the captive's head while Costigan propelled him toward the opening. Both men knew that Roger's shield of force must be threatened every instant--that if he were allowed to release it he probably would bring to bear a hand-weapon even superior to their own.

Braced against the wall, Costigan sighted along Roger's body toward the most distant point of the lofty dome of the artificial planet and gave him a gentle push. Then, each grasping Clio by an arm, the two officers shoved mightily with their feet and the three armored forms darted away toward their only hope of escape--an emergency boat which could be launched through the shell of the great globe. To attempt to reach the _Hyperion_ and to escape in one of her lifeboats would have been useless; they could not have forced the great gates of the main air-locks and no other exits existed. As they sailed onward through the air, Costigan keeping the slowly-floating form of Roger enveloped in his beam, Clio began to recover.

"Suppose they get their gravity fixed?" she asked, apprehensively. "And they're raying us and shooting at us!"

"They may have fixed it already. They undoubtedly have spare parts and duplicate generators, but if they turn it on the fall will kill Roger too, and he wouldn't like that. They'll have to get him down with an airship, and they know that we'll get them as fast as they come up. They can't hurt us with hand-weapons, and before they can bring up any heavy stuff they'll be afraid to use it, because we'll be too close to their shell.

"I wish we could have brought Roger along," he continued, savagely, to Bradley. "But you were right, of course--it'd be altogether too much like a rabbit capturing a wildcat. My Lewiston's about done right now, and there can't be much left of yours--what he'd do to us would be a sin and a shame."

Now at the great wall, the two men heaved mightily upon a lever, the gate of the emergency port swung slowly open, and they entered the miniature cruiser of the void. Costigan, familiar with the mechanism of the craft from careful study from his prison cell, manipulated the controls. Through gate after massive gate they went, until finally they were out in open space, shooting toward distant Tellus at the maximum acceleration of which their small craft was capable.

Costigan cut the other two phones out of circuit and spoke, his attention fixed upon some extremely distant point.

"Samms!" he called, sharply. "Costigan. We're out ... all right ... yes ... sure ... absolutely ... you tell 'em, Sammy; I've got company here."

Through the sound-disks of their helmets the girl and the captain had heard Costigan's share of the conversation. Bradley stared at his erstwhile first officer in amazement, and even Clio had often heard that mighty, half-mythical name. Surely that bewildering young man must rank high, to speak so familiarly to Virgil Samms, the all-powerful head of the space-pervading Secret Service of the Triplanetary League!

"You've turned in a general call-out," Bradley stated, rather than asked.

"Long ago--I've been in touch right along," Costigan answered. "Now that they know what to look for and know that ether-wave detectors are useless, they can find it. Every vessel in seven sectors, clear down to the scout patrols, is concentrating on this point, and the call is out for all battleships and cruisers afloat. There are enough operatives out there with ultra-waves to locate that globe, and once they spot it they'll point it out to all the other vessels."

"But how about the other prisoners?" asked the girl. "They'll all be killed, won't they?"

"Hard telling," Costigan shrugged. "Depends on how things turn out. We lack a lot of being safe ourselves yet, and it's my personal opinion that there's going to be a real war."

"What's worrying me mostly is our own chance," Bradley assented. "They will chase us, of course."

"Sure, and they'll have more speed than we have. Depends on how far away the nearest Triplanetary vessels are. Anyway, we've done everything we can do--it's in the laps of the gods now."

Silence fell, and Costigan cut in Clio's phone and came over to the seat upon which she was reclining, white and stricken--worn out by the horrible and terrifying ordeals of the last few hours. As he seated himself beside her she blushed vividly, but her deep blue eyes met his gray ones steadily.

"Clio, I ... we ... you ... that is," he flushed hotly and stopped. This secret agent, whose clear, keen brain no physical danger could cloud; who had proved over and over again that he was never at a loss in any emergency, however desperate--this quick-witted officer floundered in embarrassment like any schoolboy, but continued, doggedly: "I'm afraid that I gave myself away back there, but...."

"We gave ourselves away, you mean," she filled in the pause. "I did my share, but I won't hold you to it if you don't want--but I _know_ that you love me, Conway!"

"_Love_ you!" The man groaned, his face lined and hard, his whole body rigid. "That doesn't half tell it, Clio. You don't need to hold me--I'm held for life. There never was a woman who meant anything to me before, and there never will be another. You're the only woman that ever existed. It isn't that. Can't you see that it's impossible?"

"Of course I can't--it isn't impossible, at all." She released her finger shields, four hands met and tightly clasped; and her low voice thrilled with feeling as she went on: "You love me and I love you. That is all that matters."

"I wish it were," Costigan returned bitterly, "but you don't know what you'd be letting yourself in for. It's who and what you are and who and what I am that's eating me. You, Clio Marsden, Curtis Marsden's daughter. Nineteen years old. You think you've been places and done things. You haven't. You haven't seen or done anything--you don't know what it's all about. And who am I to love a girl like you? A homeless space-flea who hasn't been on any planet three weeks in three years. A hard-boiled egg. A trouble-shooter and a brawler by instinct and training. A sp...." He bit off the word and went on quickly: "Why, you don't know me at all, and there's a lot of me that you never _will_ know--that I can't let you know! You'd better lay off me, girl, while you can. It'll be best for you, believe me."

"But I can't Conway, and neither can you," the girl answered softly, a glorious light in her eyes. "It's too late for that. On the ship it was just another of those things, but since then we've come really to know each other, and we're sunk. The situation is out of control, and we both know it--and neither of us would change it if we could, and you know that, too. I don't know very much, I admit, but I do know what you thought you'd have to keep from me, and I admire you all the more for it. We all honor the Service, Conway dearest--it is only you men who have made and are keeping the Three Planets fit places to live in--and I know that Virgil Samms' chief lieutenant would have to be a man in four thousand million...."

"What makes you think that?" he demanded sharply.

"You told me so yourself, indirectly. Who else in the known Universe could possibly call him 'Sammy'? You are hard, of course, but you must be so--and I never did like soft men, anyway. And you brawl in a good cause. You are very much a _man_, my Conway; a real, _real_ man, and I love you! Now, if they catch us, all right--we'll die together, at least!" she finished, passionately.

"You're right, sweetheart, of course," he admitted. "I don't believe that I _could_ really let you let me go, even though I know you ought to," and their hands locked together even more firmly than before. "If we ever get out of this jam I'm going to kiss you, but this is no time to be taking off your helmet. In fact, I'm taking too many chances with you in keeping your finger shields off. Snap 'em on, Clio mine; the pirates ought to be getting fairly close by this time."

Hands released and armor again tight, Costigan went over to join Bradley at the control board.

"How're they coming, Captain?" he asked.

"Not so good. Quite a ways off yet. At least an hour, I'd say, before a cruiser can get within range."

"I'll see if I can locate any of the pirates chasing up. If I do, it'll be by accident; this little spy-ray isn't good for much except close work. I'm afraid the first warning we'll have will be when they take hold of us with a beam or spear us with a ray. Probably a beam, though; this is one of their emergency lifeboats and they wouldn't want to destroy it unless they have to. Also, I imagine that Roger wants us alive pretty badly. He has unfinished business with all three of us, and I can well believe that his 'not particularly pleasant extinction' will be even less so after the way we rooked him."

"I want you to do me a favor, Conway." Clio's face was white with horror at the thought of facing again that unspeakable creature of gray. "Give me a gun or something, please. I don't want him to touch me again while I'm alive."

"He won't," Costigan assured her, narrow of eye and grim of jaw. He was, as she had said, hard. "But you don't want a gun. You might get nervous and use it too soon. I'll take care of you at the last possible moment, because if he gets hold of us we won't stand a chance of getting away again."

For minutes there was silence, Costigan surveying the ether in all directions with his ultra-wave device. Suddenly he laughed, deeply and with real enjoyment, and the others stared at him in surprise.

"No, I'm not crazy," he told them. "This is really funny; it had never occurred to me that all these pirate ships are invisible to any ether wave as long as they're using power. I can see them, of course, with this sub-ether spy, but they can't see us! I knew that they should have overtaken us before this. I've finally found them. They've passed us, and are now tacking around, waiting for us to cut off our power for a minute so that they can see us! They're heading right into the Fleet--they think they're safe, of course, but what a surprise they've got coming to them!"

But it was not only the pirates who were to be surprised. Long before the pirate ship had come within extreme visibility range of the Triplanetary Fleet, it lost its invisibility and was starkly outlined upon the lookout plates of the three fugitives. For a few seconds the pirate craft seemed unchanged, then it began to glow redly, with a red that seemed to become darker as it grew stronger. Then the sharp outlines blurred, puffs of air burst outward, and the metal of the hull became a viscous, fluid-like something, flowing away in a long, red streamer into seemingly empty space. Costigan turned his ultra-gaze into that space and saw that it was actually far from empty. There lay a vast something, formless and indefinite even to his sub-ethereal vision; a something into which the viscid stream of transformed metal plunged. Plunged, and vanished.

Powerful interference blanketed his ultra-wave and howled throughout his body; but in the hope that some part of his message might get through he called Samms, and calmly and clearly he narrated everything that had just happened. He continued his crisp report, neglecting not the smallest detail, while their tiny craft was drawn inexorably toward a redly impermeable veil; continued it until their lifeboat, still intact, shot through that veil and he found himself unable to move. He was conscious, he was breathing normally, his heart was beating; but not a voluntary muscle would obey his will.

CHAPTER III

Fleet Against Planetoid

One of the newest and fleetest of the Law Enforcement Vessels of the Triplanetary League, the heavy cruiser _Chicago_, of the North American Division of the Tellurian Contingent, plunged stolidly through interplanetary vacuum. For five long weeks she had patrolled her allotted volume of space. In another week she would report back to the city whose name she bore, where her space-weary crew, worn by their long "trick" in the awesomely oppressive depths of the limitless void, would enjoy to the full their fortnight of refreshing planetary leave.

She was performing certain routine tasks--charting meteorites, watching for derelicts and other obstructions to navigation, checking in constantly with all scheduled space-ships in case of need, and so on--but primarily she was a warship. She was a mighty engine of destruction, hunting for the unauthorized vessels of whatever power or planet it was, that had not only defied the Triplanetary League, but were evidently attempting to overthrow it; attempting to plunge the Three Planets back into the ghastly sink of bloodshed and destruction from which they had so recently emerged. Every space-ship within range of her powerful detectors was represented by two brilliant, slowly moving points of light; one upon a great micrometer screen, the other in the "tank"--the immense, three-dimensional, minutely cubed model of the entire Solar System.

A brilliantly intense red light flared upon a panel and a bell clanged brazenly the furious signals of the sector alarm. Simultaneously a speaker roared forth its message of a ship in dire peril.

"Sector alarm! N. A. T. _Hyperion_ gassed with Vee-Two. Nothing detectable in space, but...."

The half-uttered message was drowned out in a crackling roar of meaningless noise, the orderly signals of the bell became a hideous clamor, and the two points of light which had marked the location of the liner disappeared in widely spreading flashes of the same high-powered interference. Observers, navigators, and control officers were alike dumfounded. Even the captain, in the shell-proof, shock-proof, and doubly ray-proof retreat of his conning compartment, was equally at a loss. No ship or thing could _possibly_ be close enough to be sending out interfering waves of such tremendous power--yet there they were!

"Maximum acceleration, straight for the point where the _Hyperion_ was when her tracers went out," the captain ordered, and through the fringe of that widespread interference he drove a solid beam, reporting concisely to G. H. Q. Almost instantly the emergency call-out came roaring in--every vessel of the Sector, of whatever class or tonnage, was to concentrate upon the point in space where the ill-fated liner had last been known to be.

Hour after hour the great globe drove on at maximum acceleration, captain and every control officer alert and at high tension. But in the Quartermaster's Department, deep down below the generator rooms, no thought was given to such minor matters as the disappearance of a _Hyperion_. The inventory did not balance, and two Q. M. privates were trying, profanely, and without much success, to find the discrepancy.

"Charged cells for model DF Lewistons, none requisitioned, on hand eighteen thous...." The droning voice broke off short in the middle of a word and the private stood rigid, in the act of reaching for another slip, every faculty concentrated upon something, imperceptible to his companion.

"Come on, Cleve--snap it up!" the second commanded, but was silenced by a vicious wave of the listener's hand.

"What!" the rigid one exclaimed. "Reveal ourselves! Why, it's ... Oh, all right.... Oh, that's it.... Uh-huh.... I see.... Yes, I've got it solid. Maybe I'll see you again some time. If not, so long!"

The inventory sheets fell unheeded from his hand, and his fellow private stared after him in amazement as he strode over to the desk of the officer in charge. That officer also stared as the hitherto easy-going and gold-bricking Cleve saluted briskly, showed him something flat in the palm of his left hand, and spoke.

"I've just got some of the funniest orders ever put out, Lieutenant"--his voice was low and intense--"but they came from 'way, 'way up. I'm to join the brass hats in the Center. You'll know about it directly, I imagine. Cover me up as much as you can, will you?" And he was gone.

Unchallenged he made his way to the control room, and his curt "urgent report for the Captain" admitted him there without question. But when he approached the sacred precincts of the Captain's own and inviolate room, he was stopped in no uncertain fashion by no less a personage than the Officer of the Day.

" ... and report yourself under arrest immediately!" the O. D. concluded his brief but pointed speech.

"You were right in stopping me, of course," the intruder conceded, unmoved. "I wanted to get in there without giving everything away, if possible, but it seems that I can't. Well, I've been ordered by Virgil Samms to report to the Captain, at once. See this? Touch it!" He held out a flat, insulated disk, cover thrown back to reveal a tiny golden meteor, at the sight of which the officer's truculent manner altered markedly.

"I've heard of them, of course, but I never saw one before," and the officer touched the shining symbol lightly with his finger, jerking backward involuntarily as there shot through his whole body a thrilling surge of power, shouting into his very bones an unpronounceable syllable--the password of the Secret Service. "Genuine or not, it gets you to the Captain. He'll know, and if it's a fake you'll be breathing space in five minutes."

Projector at the ready, the Officer of the Day followed Cleve into the Holy of Holies. There the grizzled four-striper touched the golden meteor lightly, then drove his piercing gaze deep into the unflinching eyes of the younger man. But that captain had won his high rank neither by accident nor by "pull"--he understood at once.

"It _must_ be an emergency," he growled, half-audibly, still staring at his lowly Q. M. clerk, "to make Samms uncover his whole organization." He turned and curtly dismissed the wondering O. D. Then: "All right! Out with it!"

"Serious enough so that every one of us afloat has just received orders to reveal himself to his commanding officer and to anyone else, if necessary to reach that officer at once--orders never before issued. The enemy have been located. They have built a base, and have ships better than our best. Base and ships cannot be seen nor detected by any ether wave. However, the Service has been experimenting for years with a new type of communicator beam; and, while pretty crude yet, it was given to us when the _Dione_ went out without leaving a trace. One of our men was in the _Hyperion_, managed to stay alive, and has been sending data. I am instructed to attach my new phone set to one of the universal plates in your conning room, and to see what I can find."

"Go to it!" The captain waved his hand and the operative bent to his task.

"Commanders of all vessels of the Fleet!" The Headquarters speaker, receiver sealed upon the wave-length of the Admiral of the Fleet, broke the long silence. "All vessels, in sectors L to R, inclusive, will interlock location signals. Some of you have received, or will receive shortly, certain communications from sources which need not be mentioned. Those commanders will at once send out red K4 screens. Vessels so marked will act as temporary flagships. Unmarked vessels will proceed at maximum to the nearest flagship, grouping about it in regulation squadron cone in order of arrival. Squadrons most distant from objective point designated by flagship observers will proceed toward it at maximum; squadrons nearest it will decelerate or reverse velocity--that point must not be approached until full Fleet formation has been accomplished. Heavy and Light Cruisers of all other sectors inside the orbit of Mars ..." the orders went on, directing the mobilization of the stupendous forces of the League, so that they would be in readiness in the highly improbable event of the failure of the massed power of seven sectors to reduce the pirate base.

In those seven sectors perhaps a dozen vessels threw out enormous spherical screens of intense red light, and as they did so their tracer points upon all the interlocked lookout plates also became ringed about with red. Toward those crimson markers the pilots of the unmarked vessels directed their courses at their utmost power; and while the white lights upon the lookout plates moved slowly toward and clustered about the red ones--the ultra-instruments of the Secret Service operatives were probing into space, sweeping the neighborhood of the computed position of the pirate's stronghold.

But the object sought was so far away that the small spy-ray sets of the Secret Service men, intended as they were for close-range work, were unable to make contact with the invisible planetoid for which they were seeking. In the captain's sanctum of the _Chicago_, the operative studied his plate for only a minute or two, then shut off his power and fell into a brown study, from which he was rudely aroused.

"Aren't you even going to _try_ to find them?" demanded the captain.

"No," Cleve returned shortly. "No use--not half enough power or control. I'm trying to think ... maybe ... say, Captain, will you please have the Chief Electrician and a couple of radio men come in here?"

They came, and for hours, while the other ultra-wave men searched the apparently empty ether with their ineffective beams, the three technical experts and the erstwhile Quartermaster's clerk labored upon a huge and complex ultra-wave projector--the three blindly and with doubtful questions; the one with sure knowledge at least of what he was trying to do. Finally the thing was done, the crude but efficient graduated circles were set, and the tubes glowed redly as their solidly massed output was driving into a tight beam of ultra-vibration. "There it is, sir," Cleve reported, after some ten minutes of delicate manipulation, and the vast structure of the miniature world flashed into being upon his plate. "You may notify the fleet--co-ordinates H 11.62, RA 124-31-16, and Dx about 173.2."

The report made and the assistants out of the room, the captain turned to the observer and saluted gravely.

"We have always known, sir, that the Service had _men_; but I had no idea that any one man could possibly do, on the spur of the moment, what you have just done--unless that man happened to be Lyman Cleveland."

"Oh, it doesn't ..." the observer began, but broke off, muttering unintelligibly at intervals; then swung the visiray beam toward the earth. Soon a face appeared upon the plate, the keen but careworn face of Virgil Samms!

"Hello, Lyman." His voice came clearly from the speaker, and the Captain gasped--his ultra-wave observer and sometime clerk was Lyman Cleveland himself, probably the greatest living expert in beam transmission! "I knew that you'd do something, if it could be done. How about it--can the others install similar sets on their ships? I'm betting that they can't."

"Probably not," Cleveland frowned in thought. "This is a patchwork affair, made of gunny-sacks and hay-wire. I'm holding it together by main strength and awkwardness, and even at that it's apt to go to pieces any minute."

"Can you rig it up for photography?"

"I think so. Just a minute--yes, I can. Why?"

"Because there's something going on out there that neither we nor the so-called pirates know anything about. The Admiralty seems to think that it's the Jovians again, but we don't see how it can be--if it is, they have developed a lot of stuff that none of our agents has even suspected," and he recounted briefly what Costigan had reported to him, concluding: "Then there was a burst of interference--on the _ultra-band_, mind you--and I've heard nothing from him since. Therefore I want you to stay out of the battle entirely. Stay as far away from it as you can and still get good pictures of everything that happens. I will see that orders are issued to the _Chicago_ to that effect."

"But listen ..."

"Those are orders!" snapped Samms. "It is of the utmost importance that we know every detail of what is going to happen. The answer is pictures. The only possibility of obtaining pictures is that machine you have just developed. If the fleet wins, nothing will be lost. If the fleet loses--and I am not half as confident of success as the Admiral is--the _Chicago_ doesn't carry enough power to decide the issue, and we will have the pictures to study, which is all-important. Besides, we've probably lost Conway Costigan to-day, and we don't want to lose _you_, too."

Cleveland remained silent, pondering this startling news, but the grizzled Captain, veteran of the Fourth Jovian War that he was, was not convinced.

"We'll blow them out of space, Mr. Samms!" he declared.

"You just think you will, Captain. I have suggested, as forcibly as possible, that the general attack be withheld until after a thorough investigation is made, but the Admiralty will not listen. They see the advisability of withdrawing a camera ship, but that is as far as they will go."

"And that's plenty far enough!" growled the _Chicago's_ commander, as the beam snapped off. "Mr. Cleveland, I don't like the idea of running away under fire, and I won't do it without direct orders from the Admiral."

"Of course you won't--that's why you are going...."

He was interrupted by a voice from the Headquarters speaker. The captain stepped up to the plate and, upon being recognized, he received the exact orders which had been requested by the Chief of the Secret Service--now not as secret as it had been heretofore.

Thus it was that the _Chicago_ reversed her acceleration, cut off her red screen, and fell rapidly behind, while the vessels following her in their loose cone formation shot away toward another crimson-flaring leader. Farther and farther back she dropped, back to the limiting range of the ultra-cameras upon which Cleveland and his highly trained assistants were furiously and unremittingly at work. And during all this time the forces of the seven sectors had been concentrating. The pilot vessels, with their flaming red screens, each followed by a cone of space-ships, drew closer and closer together, approaching the _Fearless_--the British super-dreadnaught which was to be the flagship of the Fleet--the mightiest and heaviest space-ship which had yet lifted her stupendous mass into the ether.

Now, systematically and precisely, the great Cone of Battle was coming into being; a formation developed during the Jovian Wars while the forces of the Three Planets were fighting in space for their very civilizations' existence, and one never used since the last space-fleets of Jupiter's murderous hordes had been wiped out.

The mouth of that enormous hollow cone was a ring of scout patrols, the smallest and most agile vessels of the fleet. Behind them came a somewhat smaller ring of light cruisers, then rings of heavy cruisers and of light battleships, and finally of heavy battleships. At the apex of the cone, protected by all the other vessels of the formation and in best position to direct the battle, was the flagship. In this formation every vessel was free to use her every weapon, with a minimum of danger to her sister ships; and yet, when the gigantic main projectors were operated along the axis of the formation, from the entire vast circle of the cone's mouth there flamed a cylindrical field of force of such intolerable intensity that in it no conceivable substance could endure for a moment!

The artificial planet of metal was now close enough so that it was visible to the ultra-vision of the Secret Service men, so plainly visible that the warships of the pirates were seen issuing from the enormous air-locks. As each vessel shot out into space it sped straight for the approaching fleet without waiting to go into any formation--gray Roger believed his structures invisible to Triplanetary eyes, thought that the presence of the fleet was the result of mathematical calculations, and was convinced that his mighty vessels of the void would destroy even that vast fleet without themselves becoming known. He was wrong. The foremost globes were allowed actually to enter the mouth of that conical trap before an offensive move was made. Then the vice-admiral in command of the fleet touched a button, and simultaneously every generator in every Triplanetary vessel burst into furious activity. Instantly the hollow volume of the immense cone became a coruscating hell of resistless energy, an inferno which, with the velocity of light, extended itself into a far-reaching cylinder of rapacious destruction. Ether-waves they were, it is true, but vibrations driven with such fierce intensity that the screens of deflection surrounding the pirate vessels could not handle even a fraction of their awful power. Invisibility lost, their defensive screens flared briefly; but even the enormous force backing Roger's inventions, greater far than that of any single Triplanetary vessel, could not hold off the incredible violence of the massed attack of the hundreds of mighty vessels composing the Fleet. Their defensive screens flared briefly, then went down; their great spherical hulls first glowing red, then shining white, then in a brief moment exploding into flying masses of red hot, molten, and gaseous metal.

A full two-thirds of Roger's force was caught in that raging, incandescent beam; caught and obliterated: but the remainder did not retreat to the planetoid. Darting out around the edge of the cone at a stupendous acceleration, they attacked its flanks and the engagement became general. But now, since enough beams were kept upon each ship of the enemy so that invisibility could not be restored, each Triplanetary war vessel could attack with full efficiency. Magnesium flares and star-shells illuminated space for a thousand miles, and from every unit of both fleets was being hurled every item of solid, explosive, and vibratory destruction known to the highly scientific warfare of that age. Offensive beams, rods and daggers of frightful power struck and were neutralized by defensive screens equally capable; the long range and furious dodging made ordinary solid or high-explosive projectiles useless; and both sides were filling all space with such a volume of blanketing frequencies that such radio-dirigible torpedoes as were launched could not be controlled, but darted madly and erratically hither and thither, finally to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space by the touch of some fiercely insistent, probing beam of force.

Individually, however, the pirate vessels were far more powerful than those of the fleet, and that superiority soon began to make itself felt. The power of the smaller ships began to fail as their accumulators became discharged under the awful drain of the battle, and vessel after vessel of the Triplanetary fleet was hurled into nothingness by the concentrated blasts of the pirates' rays. But the Triplanetary forces had one great advantage. In furious haste the Secret Service men had been altering the controls of the radio-dirigible torpedoes, so that they would respond to ultra-wave control; and, few in number though they were, each was highly effective.

A hard-eyed observer, face almost against his plate and both hands and both feet manipulating controls, hurled the first torpedo. Propelling rockets viciously aflame, it twisted and looped around the incandescent rods of destruction so thickly and starkly outlined, under perfect control; unaffected by the hideous distortion of all ether-borne signals. Through a pirate screen it went, and under the terrific blast of its detonation one entire panel of the stricken battleship vanished, crumpled and broken. It should have been out, cold--but, to the amazement of the observers, it kept on fighting with scarcely lessened power! Three more of the frightful space-bombs had to be exploded in it--it had to be reduced to junk--before its terrible rays went out; Not a man in that great fleet had even an inkling of the truth; that those great vessels, those terrible engines of destruction, did not contain a single living creature: that they were manned and fought by automatons; robots controlled by keen-eyed, space-hardened veterans inside the planetoid so distant by means of tight, interference-proof communicator beams!

But they were to receive an inkling of it. As ship after ship of the pirate fleet was blown to pieces, Roger realized that his navy was beaten, and forthwith all his surviving vessels darted toward the apex of the cone, where the heaviest battleships were stationed. There each hurled itself upon a Triplanetary warship, crashing to its own destruction, but in that destruction insuring the loss of one of the heaviest vessels of the enemy. Thus passed the _Fearless_, and twenty of the finest space-ships of the fleet as well. But the ranking officer assumed command, the war-cone was re-formed, and, yawning maw to the fore, the great formation shot toward the pirate stronghold, now near at hand. It again launched its stupendous cylinder of annihilation, but even as the mighty defensive screens of the planetoid flared into incandescently furious defense, the battle was interrupted and pirates and Triplanetarians learned alike that they were not alone in the ether.

Space became suffused with a redly impenetrable opacity, and through that indescribable pall there came reaching huge arms of force incredible; writhing, coruscating beams of power which glowed a baleful, although almost imperceptible, red. A vessel of unheard-of armament and power, hailing from a distant solar system of the Galaxy, had come to rest in that space. For months her commander had been investigating sun after sun in quest of one precious substance. Now his detectors had found it; and, feeling neither fear of Triplanetarian weapons nor reluctance to sacrifice those thousands of Triplanetarian lives, he was about to take it!

CHAPTER IV

Within the Red Veil

Nevia, the home planet of the marauding space-ship, would have appeared peculiar indeed to Terrestrial senses. High in the deep red heavens a fervent blue sun poured down its flood of brilliant purplish light upon a world of water. Not a cloud was to be seen in that flaming sky, and through that dustless atmosphere the eye could see the horizon--a horizon three times as distant as the one to which we are accustomed--with a distinctness and clarity impossible in our Terra's dust-filled air. As that mighty sun dropped below the horizon the sky would fill suddenly with clouds and rain would fall violently and steadily until midnight. Then the clouds would vanish as suddenly as they had come into being, the torrential downpour would cease, and, through that huge world's wonderfully transparent, gaseous envelope, the full glory of the firmament would be revealed. Not the firmament as we know it--for that hot blue sun and Nevia, her one planet-child, were many light-years distant from Old Sol and his numerous brood--but a strange and glorious firmament containing not one constellation familiar to earthly eyes.

Out of the vacuum of space a fish-shaped vessel of the void--the vessel that was shortly to attack so boldly both the massed fleet of Triplanetary and Roger's planetoid--plunged into the rarefied outer atmosphere, and crimson beams of force tore shriekingly the thin air as it braked its terrific speed. A third of the circumference of Nevia's mighty globe was traversed before the velocity of the craft could be reduced sufficiently to make a landing possible. Then, approaching the twilight zone, the vessel dived vertically downward, and it became evident that Nevia was neither entirely aqueous nor devoid of intelligent life. For the blunt nose of the space-ship was pointing toward what was evidently a half-submerged city, a city whose buildings were flat-topped, hexagonal towers, exactly alike in size, shape, color, and material. These buildings were arranged as the cells of a honeycomb would be if each cell were separated from its neighbors by a relatively narrow channel of water, and all were built of the same white metal. Many bridges and more tubes extended through the air from building to building, and the watery "streets" teemed with surface craft, and with submarines.

The pilot, stationed immediately below the conical prow of the space-ship, peered intently through the thick windows of crystal-clear metal which afforded unobstructed vision in every direction except vertically upward and behind him. His four huge and contractile eyes were active, each operating independently in sending its own message to his peculiar but capable brain. One was watching the instruments, the others scanned narrowly the immense, swelling curve of the ship's belly, the water upon which his vessel was to land, and the floating dock to which it was to be moored. Four hands--if hands they could be called--manipulated levers and wheels with infinite delicacy of touch, and with scarcely a splash the immense mass of the Nevian sky-wanderer struck the water and glided to a stop within a foot of its exact berth.

Four mooring bars dropped neatly into their sockets and the captain-pilot, after locking his controls in neutral, released his safety straps and leaped lightly from his padded bench to the floor. Scuttling across the floor and down a runway upon his four short, powerful, heavily scaled legs, he slipped smoothly into the water and flashed away, far below the surface. For Nevians are true amphibians. Their blood is cold; they use with equal comfort and efficiency gills and lungs for breathing; their scaly bodies are equally at home in the water or in the air; their broad, flat feet serve equally well for running about upon a solid surface or for driving their stream-lined bodies through the water at a pace few of our fishes can equal.

Through the water the Nevian commander darted along, steering his course accurately by means of his short, vaned tail. Through an opening in a wall he sped and along a submarine hallway, emerging upon a broad ramp. He scurried up the incline and into an elevator which lifted him to the top floor of the hexagon, directly into the office of the Secretary of Commerce of all Nevia.

"Welcome, Captain Nerado!" The Secretary waved a tentacular arm and the visitor sprang lightly upon a softly cushioned bench, where he lay at ease, facing the official across his low, flat "desk." "We congratulate you upon the success of your final trial flight. We received all your reports, even while you were traveling with many times the velocity of light. With the last difficulties overcome, you are now ready to start?"

"We are ready," the captain-scientist replied, soberly. "Mechanically, the ship is as nearly perfect as our finest minds can make her. She is stocked for two years. All the iron-bearing suns within reach have been plotted. Everything is ready except the iron. Of course the Council refused to allow us any of the national supply--how much were you able to purchase for us in the market?"

"Nearly ten pounds...."

"Ten pounds! Why, the securities we left with you could not have bought two pounds, even at the price then prevailing!"

"No, but you have friends. Many of us believe in you, and have dipped into our own resources. You and your fellow scientists of the expedition have each contributed his entire personal fortune; why should not some of the rest of us also contribute, as private citizens?"

"Wonderful--we thank you. Ten pounds!" The captain's great triangular eyes glowed with an intense violet light. "A full year of cruising. But ... what if, after all, we should be wrong?"

"In that case you shall have consumed ten pounds of irreplaceable metal." The Secretary was unmoved. "That is the viewpoint of the Council and of almost everyone else. It is not the waste of treasure they object to; it is the fact that ten pounds of iron will be forever lost."

"A high price truly," the Columbus of Nevia assented, "And after all, I may be wrong."

"You probably are--of course you are wrong," his host made a startling answer. "It is practically certain--it is almost a demonstrable mathematical fact--that no other sun within hundreds of thousands of light-years of our own has a planet. In all probability Nevia is the only planet in the entire Universe. We are the only intelligent life in the Universe. But there is one chance in numberless millions that, somewhere with the cruising range of your newly perfected space-ship, there may be an iron-bearing planet upon which you can effect a landing, and it is upon that infinitesimal chance that some of us are staking a portion of our wealth. We expect no return whatever, but if you _should_ by some miracle happen to find stores of iron somewhere in space, what then? Deep seas being made shallow, civilization extending itself over the globe, science advancing by leaps and bounds, Nevia becoming populated as she should be peopled--that, my friend, is a chance well worth taking!"

The Secretary called in a group of guards, who escorted the small package of priceless metal to the space-ship, and before the massive door was sealed the friends bade each other farewell.

" ... I will keep in touch with you on the ultra-wave," the Captain concluded. "After all, I do not blame the Council for refusing to allow the other ship to go with us. Ten pounds of iron will be a fearful loss to the world. If we _should_ find iron, however, see to it that the other vessel loses no time in following us."

"No fear of that! If you find iron all space will be full of vessels, as soon as they can possibly be built--good-bye!"

The last opening was sealed and Nerado shot the great vessel into the air. Up and up, out beyond the last tenuous trace of atmosphere, on and on through space it flew with ever-increasing velocity until Nevia's gigantic blue sun had been left so far behind that it became a splendid blue-white star. Then, projectors cut off to save the precious iron whose disintegration furnished them power, for week after week Captain Nerado and his venturesome crew of scientists drifted idly through the illimitable void. Sun after sun, as visible in their ultra-instruments as though the flying vessel were moving slower than light, they studied without finding a single planet.

Three months passed. Nerado had already applied the slight power which was to swing the vessel around in an immense circle, back toward his native world. In that course he was rapidly approaching a sun, an ordinary G-type dwarf, whose spectrum revealed a blaze of lines of the precious element for which he was searching. Now at close observing range--he had long since abandoned his former eager habit of studying a sun as soon as it showed the tiniest perceptible disk in his most powerful telescope--he turned on his powerful visiray beam without enthusiasm, swung it upon that very commonplace sun, and shrieked aloud in exultation. Not only one planet had that yellowish luminary--it had six, seven, eight; yes, possibly nine or ten; and several of those planets were themselves apparently centers of attraction around which were circling other tiny worlds! Nerado thrilled with joy as he applied a full retarding force, and every creature aboard that great vessel had to peer into a plate or through a telescope, before he could believe that planets other than Nevia did in reality exist!

Velocity checked to the merest crawl, as space-speed goes, and with electro-magnetic detector screens full out, the Nevian vessel crept toward our sun. Finally the detectors encountered an obstacle, a conductive substance which the patterns showed conclusively to be practically pure iron. Iron--an enormous mass of it--floating alone out in space! Without waiting to investigate the nature, appearance, or structure of the precious mass, Nerado ordered power into the converters and drove an enormous softening field of force upon the object--a force of such a nature that it would condense the metallic iron into an allotropic modification of much smaller bulk; a red, viscous, extremely dense and heavy liquid which could be stored conveniently in his tanks.

No sooner had the precious fluid been stored away than the detectors again broke into an uproar. In one direction was an enormous mass of iron, scarcely detectable; in another a great number of smaller masses; in a third an isolated mass, comparatively small in size. Space seemed to be full of iron, and Nerado drove his most powerful beam toward distant Nevia and sent an exultant message.

"We have found iron--easily obtained and in unthinkable quantity--not in fractions of milligrams, but in millions upon unmeasured millions of tons! Send our sister ship here as once!"

"Nerado!" The captain was called to one of the observation plates as soon as he had opened his key. "I have been investigating the mass of iron now nearest us, the small one. It is an artificial structure, a small space-boat, and there are three creatures in it--monstrosities certainly, but they must possess some intelligence or they could not be navigating space."

"What? Impossible!" exclaimed the chief explorer. "Probably, then, the other was--but no matter, we had to have the iron. Bring the boat in without converting it, so that we may study at our leisure both the beings and their mechanisms," and Nerado swung his own visiray beam into the emergency boat, seeing there the armored figures of Clio Marsden and the two Triplanetary officers.

"They are indeed intelligent," Nerado commented, as he detected and silenced Costigan's ultra-beam communicator. "Not, however, as intelligent as I had supposed," he went on, after studying the peculiar creatures and their tiny space-ship more in detail. "They have immense stores of iron, yet use it for nothing other than building material. They apparently have a rudimentary knowledge of ultra-waves, but do not use them intelligently--they cannot neutralize even these ordinary forces we are now employing. They are of course more intelligent than the lower ganoids, or even than some of the higher fishes, but by no stretch of the imagination can they be compared to us. I am quite relieved--I was afraid that in my haste I might slay members of a highly developed race."

The helpless boat, all her forces neutralized, was brought up close to the immense flying fish. There flaming knives of force sliced her neatly into sections and the three rigid armored figures, after being bereft of their external weapons, were brought through the air-locks and into the control room, while the pieces of their boat were stored away for future study. The Nevian scientists first analyzed the air inside the space-suits of the Terrestrials, then removed without ado the protective covering of the captives.

Costigan--fully conscious through it all and now able to move a little, since the peculiar temporary paralysis was wearing off--braced himself for he knew not what shock, but it was needless; their grotesque captors were not torturers. The air, while somewhat less dense than earth's and of a peculiar odor, was eminently breathable, and even though the vessel was motionless in space, an almost-normal gravitation gave them a large fraction of their usual weight. The space suits were removed with care, and after the three had been relieved of their pistols and other articles which the Nevians thought might prove to be weapons, the strange paralysis was lifted entirely. The earthly clothing puzzled the captors immensely, but so strenuous were the objections raised to its removal, but they did not press the point, but fell back to study their find in detail.

Then faced each other the representatives of the civilizations of two widely separated solar systems. The Nevians studied the human beings with interest and curiosity blended largely with loathing and repulsion; the three Terrestrials regarded the unmoving, expressionless "faces"--if those coned heads could be said to possess such things--with horror and disgust, as well as with other emotions, each according to his type and training. For to human eyes the Nevian is a fearful thing. Even to-day there are few Terrestrials--or Solarians for that matter--who can look at a Nevian, eye to eye, without feeling a creeping of the skin and experiencing a "gone" sensation in the pit of the stomach. The horny, wrinkled, drought-resisting Martian, whom we all know and rather like, is a hideous being indeed. The bat-eyed, colorless, hairless, practically skinless Venerian is worse. But they both are, after all, remote cousins of Terra's humanity, and we get along with them quite well whenever we are compelled to visit Mars or Venus. But the Nevians--

The horizontal, flat, fish body is not so bad, even supported as it is by four, short, powerful, scaly, flat-footed legs; and terminating as it does in the weird, four-vaned tail. The neck, even, is endurable, although it is long and flexible, heavily scaled, and is carried in whatever eye-wringing loops, knots, or angles the owner considers most convenient or ornamental at the time. Even the smell of a Nevian--a malodorous reek of over-ripe fish--does in time become tolerable, especially if sufficiently disguised with creosote, which purely Terrestrial chemical is the most highly prized perfume of Nevia. But the head! It is that member that makes the Nevian so appalling to earthly eyes, for it is a thing utterly foreign to all Solarian history or experience. As most Tellurians already know, it is fundamentally a massive cone, covered with scales, based spearhead-like upon the neck. Four great sea-green, triangular eyes are spaced equidistant from each other about half way up the cone. The pupils are contractile at will, like the eyes of the cat, permitting the Nevian to see equally well in any ordinary extreme of light or darkness. Immediately below each eye springs out a long, jointless, boneless, tentacular arm; an arm which at its extremity divides into eight delicate and sensitive, but very strong, fingers. Below each arm is a mouth: a beaked, needle-tusked orifice of dire potentialities. Finally, under the overhanging edge of the cone-shaped head are the delicately frilled organs which serve either as gills or as nostrils and lungs, as may be desired. To other Nevians the eyes and other features are highly expressive, but to us they appear utterly cold and unmoving. Terrestrial senses can detect no changes of expression in a Nevian's "face." Such were the frightful beings at whom the three prisoners stared with sinking hearts.

But if we human beings have always considered Nevians grotesque and repulsive, the feeling has always been mutual. For those "monstrous" beings are a highly intelligent and extremely sensitive race, and our--to us--trim and graceful human forms seems to them the very quintessence of malformation and hideousness.

"Good Heavens, Conway!" Clio exclaimed, shrinking against Costigan as his left arm flashed around her. "What monstrosities! And they can't talk--not one of them has made a sound--suppose they can be deaf and dumb?"

But at the same time Nerado was addressing his fellows.

"What hideous, deformed creatures they are! Truly a low form of life, even though they do possess some intelligence. They cannot talk, and have made no signs of having heard our words to them--do you suppose that they communicate by sight? That those weird contortions of their peculiarly placed organs serve as speech?"

Thus both sides, neither realizing that the other had spoken. For the Nevian voice is pitched so high that the lowest note audible to them is far above our limit of hearing. The shrillest note of a Terrestrial piccolo is to them so profoundly low that it cannot be heard.

"We have much to do." Nerado turned away from the captives. "We must postpone further study of the specimens until we have taken aboard a full cargo of the iron which is so plentiful here."

"What shall we do with them, sir?" asked one of the Nevian officers. "Lock them in one of the storage rooms?"

"Oh, no! They might die there, and we must by all means keep them in good condition, to be studied most carefully by the fellows of the College of Science. What a commotion there will be when we bring in this group of strange creatures, living proof that there are other suns possessing planets; planets which are supporting organic and intelligent life! You may put them in three communicating rooms, say in the fourth section--they will undoubtedly require light and exercise. Lock all exits, of course, but it would be best to leave the doors between the rooms unlocked, so that they can be together or apart, as they choose. Since the smallest one, the female, stays so close to the larger male, it may be that they are mates. But since we know nothing of their habits or customs, it will be best to give them all possible freedom compatible with safety."

Nerado turned back to his instruments and three of the frightful crew came up to the human beings. One walked away, waving a couple of arms in an unmistakable signal that the prisoners were to follow him. The three obediently set out after him, the other two guards falling behind.

"Now's our best chance!" Costigan muttered, as they passed through a low doorway and entered a narrow corridor. "Watch that one ahead of you, Clio--hold him for a second if you can. Bradley, you and I'll take the two behind us--now!"

Costigan stopped and whirled. Seizing a cable-like arm, he pulled the outlandish head down, the while the full power of his mighty right leg drove a heavy service boot into the place where scaly neck and head joined. The Nevian fell, and instantly Costigan leaped at the leader, ahead of the girl. Leaped; but dropped to the floor, again paralyzed. For the Nevian leader had been alert, his four eyes covering the entire circle of vision, and he had acted rapidly. Not in time to stop Costigan's first Berserk attack--the First Officer's reactions were practically instantaneous, and he moved like chain lightning--but in time to retain command of the situation. Another Nevian appeared and, while the stricken guard was recovering, all four arms wrapped tightly around his convulsively looping, knotting neck, the three helpless Terrestrials were lifted into the air and carried bodily into the quarters to which Nerado had assigned them. Not until they had been placed upon cushions in the middle room and the heavy metal doors had been locked upon them did they again find themselves able to use arms or legs.

"Well, that's another round we lose," Costigan commented, cheerfully. "A guy can't mix it very well when he can neither kick, strike, nor bite. I expected those lizards to rough me up, but they didn't."

"They don't want to hurt us. They want to take us home with them, wherever that is, as curiosities, like wild animals or something," decided the girl, shrewdly. "They're pretty bad, of course, but I like them a lot better than I do Roger and his robots, anyway."

"I think you have the right idea, Miss Marsden," Bradley rumbled. "That's it, exactly. I feel like a bear in a cage. I should think you'd feel worse than ever. What chance has an animal of escaping from a menagerie?"

"These animals, lots. I'm feeling better and better all the time," Clio answered, and her serene bearing bore out her words. "You two got us out of that horrible place of Roger's, and I'm pretty sure that you will get us away from here, somehow or other. They may think we're stupid animals, but before you two and the Secret Service get done with them they'll have another think coming."

"That's the old fight, Clio!" cheered Costigan. "I haven't got it figured out as close as you have, but I see you, eye to eye. These four-legged fish carry considerably heavier stuff than Roger did, I'm thinking; but they'll be up against something themselves pretty quick, that is NO light-weight, believe me!"

"Do you _know_ something, or are you just whistling in the dark?" Bradley demanded.

"I know a little; not much. The Science Service has been working on a new ship for a long time; a ship to travel so much faster than light that it can go anywhere in the Galaxy and back in a month or so. New sub-ether drive, new power, new armament, new everything. Only bad thing about it is that it doesn't work so good yet--it's fuller of "bugs" than a Venerian's kitchen. It has blown up five times that I know of, and has killed twenty-nine men. But when they get it licked they'll _have something!_"

"When, or if?" asked Bradley, pessimistically.

"I said _when!_" snapped Costigan, his voice cutting like a knife. "When that gang goes after anything they get it, and when they get it it stays...." He broke off abruptly and his voice lost its edge. "Sorry. Didn't mean to get high, but I think we'll have help, if we can keep our heads up a while. And it looks good--these are first-class cages they've given us. All the comforts of home, even to lookout plates. Let's see what's going on, shall we?"

After some experimenting with the unfamiliar controls Costigan learned how to operate the Nevian visiray, and upon the plate they saw the Cone of Battle hurling itself toward Roger's planetoid. They saw the pirate fleet rush out to do battle with Triplanetary's massed forces, and with bated breath they watched every maneuver of that epic battle to its savagely sacrificial end. And that same battle was being watched, also with intense interest, by the Nevians.

"It is indeed a blood-thirsty combat," mused Nerado at his observation plate. "And it is peculiar--or rather, probably only to be expected from a race of such a low stage of development--that they employ only ether-borne forces. Warfare seems universal among primitive types--indeed, it is not so long ago that our own cities, few in number though they are, ceased fighting each other and combined against the semi-civilized fishes of the greater deeps."

He fell silent, and for many minutes watched the furious battle between the two navies of the void. That conflict ended, he watched the Triplanetary fleet reform its battle cone and rush upon the planetoid.

"Destruction, always destruction," he sighed, adjusting his power switches. "Since they are bent upon mutual destruction I can see no purpose in refraining from destroying all of them. We need the iron, and they are a useless race."

He launched his softening, converting field of dull red energy. Vast as that field was, it could not encompass the whole of the fleet, but half of the lip of the gigantic cone soon disappeared, its component vessels subsiding into a sluggishly flowing stream of allotropic iron. Instantly the fleet abandoned the attack upon the planetoid and swung its cone around, to bring the flame-erupting axis to bear upon the inchoate something dimly perceptible to the ultra-vision of the Secret Service observers. Furiously the gigantic composite beam of the massed fleet was hurled, nor was it alone.

For Roger in his floating citadel had realized at once that something untoward was happening; something altogether beyond even his knowledge and experience. He could not see anything--space was apparently empty--but he took his rays off the battleships and directed his every force just beyond the point in space where that red stream of transformed metal was disappearing. Then, for the first time in Triplanetary history, the forces of law and order joined hands with those of piracy and banditry against a common foe. Rods, beams, planes, and stilettoes of unbearable energy the doomed fleet launched, in addition to its main beam of annihilation, and Roger also hurled out into space every weapon at his command. Bombs, high-explosive shells, and deadly radio-dirigible torpedoes--all alike disappeared ineffective in that redly murky veil of nothingness. And the fleet was being melted. In quick succession the vessels flamed red, shrank together, gave out their air, and merged their component iron into the intensely red, sullenly viscous stream which was flowing through the impenetrable veil upon which Triplanetarians and pirates alike were directing their every possible weapon of offense.

The last vessel of the Triplanetary armada converted and the resulting metal stored away in their capacious reservoirs, the Nevians turned their attention upon the stronghold of the pirates. There ensued a battle royal. For this vast planetoid was no feeble warship, depending solely upon the limited power available in its accumulators. It was the product of a really mighty brain, a brain re-enforced by the many perverted but powerful intellects which Roger had won over to his cause. It was powered by the incalculable force of cosmic radiation, powered to drive its unimaginable mass through space, against any possible attractions, for an indefinite number of years. It was armed and equipped to meet any emergency which Roger's coldly analytical mind had been able to foresee.

The fact that the scientists of the Secret Service had discovered ultra-waves as yet unknown to him was unfortunate. That Service was itself unfortunate--impenetrable as it was, and incorruptible. He could learn nothing whatever about it. He had heard vague rumors of certain experiments--but even if they should discover something it would be too late to do them any good. Even without invisibility he would have no trouble in annihilating the massed Grand Fleet of the Triplanetary League. He would very shortly collect his tribute and disappear. And this new enemy, himself invisible and armed with heretofore unknown weapons of dire power, who was apparently unaffected by his beams--even he would discover that Roger the Great was no puny opponent. He would analyze those unknown forces, regenerate them, and hurl them back upon their senders.

Thinking thus, the man of gray sat coldly motionless at his great multi-shielded desk, whose top was now swung up to become a board of massed and tiered instruments and controls. He shut off his offensive beams and surrounded the entire planetoid with the peculiarly rigid and substantial shield which had so easily warded off Costigan's fiercest attacks. And that shield was more effective than even its designer had supposed--gray Roger had builded even better than he knew. For the voracious and all-powerful converting beam of the Nevians, below the level of the ether though it was, struck that perfectly transparent wall and rebounded, defeated and futile. Struck and rebounded, then struck and clung hungrily, licking out over that impermeable surface in darting tongues of red flame as the surprised Nerado doubled and then quadrupled his power. Fiercer and fiercer drove in the Nevian flood of force until the whole immense globe of the planetoid was one scintillant ball of scarlet energy, but still the pirates' shield remained intact--at what awful drain of resource, Roger alone knew.

"Here is the analysis of his screen, sir." A Nevian computer handed his chief a sheet of metal, upon which were engraved rows of symbols.

"Ah, a sixth-phase polycyclic. A screen of that type was scarcely to have been expected from such a low form of life," Nerado commented, and rapidly adjusted the many dials and switches before him.

As he did so the character of the clinging mantle of force changed. From red it flamed quickly through the spectrum, became unbearably violet, then disappeared; and as it disappeared the shielding wall began to give way. It did not cave in abruptly, but softened locally, sagging into a peculiar grouping of valleys and ridges--contesting stubbornly every inch of position lost. And gray Roger knew that the planetoid was doomed. His supposedly impregnable screen was failing in spite of its utmost measure of energy, and, that defense down, the citadel would not last a minute. Therefore he summoned a chosen few of his motley crew of renegade scientists and issued brief instructions. For minutes a host of robots toiled mightily, then a portion of the shield bulged out, extended into a tube beyond the attacking layers of force, and from it there erupted a beam of violence incredible. A beam behind which was every volt and ampere that the gigantic generators and accumulators of the planetoid could yield. A beam that tore screamingly through the ether; that by the very vehemence of its incalculable energy tore a hole through the redly impenetrable Nevian field and hurled itself upon the inner screen of the fish-shaped cruiser in frenzied incandescence. And was there, or was there not, a lesser eruption upon the other side--an almost imperceptible flash, as though something had shot from the doomed planetoid out into space?

Nerado's looped neck straightened convulsively as his tortured drivers whined and shrieked at the terrific overload; but Roger's effort was far too intense to be long maintained. Even before his accumulators failed, generator after generator burned out, the defensive screen collapsed, and the red converter beam attacked voraciously the unresisting metal of those prodigious walls. Soon there was a terrific explosion as the pent-up air of the planetoid broke through its weakening container, and the sluggish river of allotropic iron flowed in an ever larger stream, ever faster.

"It is well that we had an unlimited supply of iron." Nerado tied a knot in his neck and spoke in huge relief. "With but the seven pounds remaining of our original supply, I fear that it would have been difficult to parry that last thrust."

"Difficult?" asked the second in command. "We would now be swimming in space. But what shall I do with this iron? Our reservoirs will not hold it all."

"Seal up one or two of the lower storage compartments, to make room for this lot. Immediately it is loaded, we return to Nevia. There we shall install reservoirs in all the spare space, and come back here for more."

The last drop of the precious liquid secured, the vessel moved away, sluggishly now because of its prodigious load. In their quarters in the fourth section the three Terrestrials, who had watched with strained attention the downfall and absorption of the planetoid, stared at each other with drawn faces. Clio broke the silence.

"Oh, Conway, this is ghastly! It's ... it's just simply perfectly horrible!" she gasped, then recovered a measure of her customary spirit as she stared in surprise at Costigan's face. For it was thoughtful, his eyes were bright and keen--no trace of fear or disorganization was visible in any line of his hard young face.

"It's not so good," he admitted frankly. "I wish I wasn't such a dumb cluck--if Lyman Cleveland or Ford Rodebush were here they could help a lot, but I don't know enough about any of their stuff to flag a hand-car. I can't even interpret that funny flash--if it really was a flash--that we saw."

"Why bother about one little flash, after all that really did happen?" asked Clio, curiously.

"You think Roger launched something? He couldn't have--I didn't see a thing," Bradley argued.

"I don't know what to think. I've never seen anything material sent out so fast that I couldn't trace it with an ultra-wave--but on the other hand, Roger's got a lot of stuff that I never saw anywhere else. However, I don't see that it has anything to do with the fix we're in right now--but at that, we might be worse off. We're still breathing air, you notice, and if they don't blanket my wave I can still talk."

He put both hands in his pockets and spoke.

"Samms? Costigan. Put me on a recorder, quick--I probably haven't got much time," and for ten minutes he talked, concisely and as rapidly as he could utter words, reporting clearly and exactly everything that had transpired. Suddenly he broke off, writhing in agony. Frantically he tore his shirt open and hurled a tiny object across the room.

"Wow!" he exclaimed. "They may be deaf, but they can certainly detect an ultra-wave, and the interference they can set up on it is enough to pulverize your bones. No, I'm not hurt," he reassured the anxious girl, now at his side, "but it's a good thing I had you out of circuit--it would have jolted you loose from six or seven of your back teeth."

"Have you any idea where they're taking us?" she asked, soberly.

"No," he answered flatly, looking deep into her steadfast eyes. "No use lying to you--if I know you at all you'd rather take it standing up. That talk of Jovians or Neptunians is the bunk--nothing like that ever grew in our Solarian system. All the signs say that we're going for a long, long ride!"

CHAPTER V

Nevian Strife

The Nevian space-ship was hurtling upon its way. Space-navigators both, the two Terrestrial officers soon discovered that it was even then moving with a velocity far above that of light and that it must be accelerating at a stupendous rate, even though to them it seemed stationary--they could feel only a gravitational force somewhat less than that of their native earth.

Bradley, seasoned old campaigner that he was, had retired promptly as soon as he had completed a series of observations, and was sleeping soundly upon a pile of cushions in the first of the three inter-connecting rooms. In the middle room, which was to be Clio's, Costigan was standing very close to the girl, but was not touching her. His body was rigid, his face was tense and drawn.

"You are wrong, Conway; all wrong," Clio was saying, very seriously. "I know how you feel, but it's false chivalry."

"That isn't it, at all," he insisted, stubbornly. "It isn't only that I've got you out here in space, in danger and alone, that's stopping me. I know you and I know myself well enough to know that what we start now we'll go through with for life. It doesn't make any difference, that way, whether I start making love to you now or whether I wait until we're back on Tellus--I've been telling you for half an hour that for your own good you'd better pass me up entirely. I've got enough horsepower to keep away from you if you tell me to--not otherwise."

"I know it, both ways, dear, but...."

"But nothing!" he interrupted. "Can't you get it into your skull what you'll be letting yourself in for if you marry me? Assume that we get back, which isn't sure, by any means. But even if we do, some day--and maybe soon, too, you can't tell--somebody is going to collect fifty grams of radium for my head."

"Fifty grams--and everybody knows that Samms himself is rated at only sixty? I _knew_ that you were somebody, Conway!" Clio exclaimed, undeterred. "But at that, something tells me that any pirate will earn even that much reward several times over before he collects it. Don't be silly, dear heart--good-night."

She tipped her head back, holding up to him her red, sweetly curved, smiling lips, and his eager arms, hitherto kept away from her by sheer force of will, swept around her in almost fierce intensity. As his hot lips met hers, her arms crept up around his neck and they stood, clasped together in the motionless ecstasy of love's first embrace.

"Girl, girl, how I love you!" Costigan's voice was husky, his usually hard eyes were glowing with a tender light. "That settles that. I'll really _live_ now, anyway, while...."

"Stop it!" she commanded, sharply. "You're going to live until you die of old age--see if you don't. You'll simply _have_ to, Conway!"

"That's so, too--no percentage in dying now. All the pirates between Tellus and Andromeda couldn't take me after this--I've got too much to live for. Well, good-night, sweetheart, I'd better beat it--you need some sleep."

The lovers' parting was not as simple and straightforward a procedure as Costigan's speech would indicate, but finally he did seek his own room and relaxed upon a pile of cushions, his stern visage transformed. Instead of the low metal ceiling he saw a beautiful, oval, tanned young face, framed in a golden-blonde corona of hair. His gaze sank into the depths of loyal, honest, dark-blue eyes; and looking deeper and deeper into those blue wells he fell asleep. Upon his face, too set and grim by far for a man of his years--the lives of Sector Chiefs of the T. S. S. are never easy, nor as a rule are they long--there lingered as he slept that newly acquired softness of expression, the reflection of his transcendent happiness.

For eight hours he slept soundly, as was his wont; then, also according to his habit and training, he came wide awake, with no intermediate stage of napping.

"Clio?" he whispered. "Awake, girl?"

"Awake!" Her voice came through the ultra-phone, relief in every syllable. "Good heavens, I thought you were going to sleep until we got to wherever it is that we're going! Come on in, you two--I don't see how you can possibly sleep, just as though you were home in bed."

"You've got to learn to sleep anywhere if you expect to keep in...." Costigan broke off as he opened the door and saw Clio's wan face. She had evidently spent a sleepless and wracking eight hours. "Good Lord, Clio, why didn't you call me?"

"Oh, I'm all right, except for being a little jittery. No need of asking how _you_ feel, is there?"

"No--I feel hungry," he answered cheerfully. "I'm going to see what we can do about it--or say, guess I'll see whether they're still interfering on Samms' wave."

He took out a small, insulated case and touched the contact stud lightly with his fingers. His arm jerked away powerfully.

"Still at it," he gave the necessary explanation. "They don't seem to want us to talk outside, but his interference is as good as my talking--they can trace it, of course. Now I'll see what I can find out about our breakfast."

He stepped over to the plate and shot its projector beam forward into the control room, where he saw Nerado lying, doglike, at his instrument panel. As Costigan's beam entered the room a blue light flashed on and the Nevian turned an eye and an arm toward his own small observation plate. Knowing that they were now in visual communication, Costigan beckoned an invitation and pointed to his mouth in what he hoped was the universal sign of hunger. The Nevian waved an arm and fingered controls, and as he did so a wide section of the floor of Clio's room slid aside. The opening thus made revealed a table which rose upon its low pedestal, a table equipped with three softly cushioned benches and spread with a glittering array of silver and glassware. Bowls and platters of dazzlingly white metal, narrow-waisted goblets of sheerest crystal; all were hexagonal, beautifully and intricately carved or etched in apparently conventional marine designs. And the table utensils of this strange race were peculiar indeed. There were tearing forceps of sixteen needle-sharp curved teeth; there were flexible spatulas; there were deep and shallow ladles with flexible edges; there were many other peculiarly curved instruments at whose uses the Terrestrials could no even guess; all having delicately fashioned handles to fit the long, slender fingers of the Nevians.

But if the table and its appointments were surprising to the Terrestrials, revealing as they did a degree of culture which none of them had expected to find in a race of beings so monstrous, the food was even more surprising, although in another sense. For the wonderful crystal goblets were filled with a grayish-green slime of a nauseous and overpowering odor, the smaller bowls were full of living sea spiders and other such delicacies; and each large platter contained a fish fully a foot long, raw and whole, garnished tastefully with red, purple, and green strands of seaweed!

Clio looked once, then gasped, shutting her eyes and turning away from the table, but Costigan flipped the three fish into a platter and set it aside before he turned back to the visiplate.

"They'll go good fried," he remarked to Bradley, signaling vigorously to Nerado that the meal was not acceptable and that he wanted to talk to him, _in person_. Finally he made himself clear, the table sank down out of sight, and the Nevian commander cautiously entered the room.

At Costigan's insistence, he came up to the plate, leaving near the door three guards armed with projectors in instant readiness. The operative then shot the beam into the galley of the pirate's lifeboat, suggesting that they should be allowed to live there. For some time the argument of arms and fingers raged--though not exactly a fluent conversation, both sides managed to convey their meanings quite clearly. Nerado would not allow the Terrestrials to visit their own ship--he was taking no chances--but after a thorough ultra-ray inspection he did finally order some of his men to bring into the middle room the electric range and a supply of Terrestrial food. Soon the Nevian fish were sizzling in a pan and the appetizing odors of coffee and of browning biscuit permeated the room. But at the first appearance of those odors the Nevians departed hastily, content to watch the remainder of the curious and repulsive procedure in their visiray plates.

Breakfast over and everything made tidy and shipshape, Costigan turned to Clio.

"Look here, girl; you've got to learn how to sleep. You're all in. Your eyes look like you'd been on a Martian picnic and you didn't eat half enough breakfast. You've got to sleep and eat to keep fit. We don't want you passing out on us, so I'll put out this light, and you'll lie down here and sleep until noon."

"Oh, no; don't bother. I'll sleep to-night. I'm quite...."

"You'll sleep now," he informed her, levelly. "I never thought of you being nervous, with Bradley and me on each side of you. We're both right here now, though, and we'll stay here. We'll watch over you like a couple of old hens with one chick between them. Come on; lie down and go bye-bye."

Clio laughed at the simile, but lay down obediently. Costigan sat upon the edge of the great divan, holding her hand, and they chatted idly. The silences grew longer, Clio's remarks became fewer, and soon her long-lashed lids fell and her deep, regular breathing showed that she was sound asleep. The man stared at her, his very heart in his eyes. So young, so beautiful, so lovely--and _how_ he did love her! He was not formally religious, but his every thought was a sincere prayer. If he could only get her out of this mess ... he wasn't fit to live on the same planet with her, but ... just give him one chance, just one!

But Costigan had been laboring for days under a terrific strain, and had been going very short on sleep. Half hypnotized by his own mixed emotions and by his staring at the smooth curves of Clio's cheek, his own eyes closed and, still holding her hand, he sank down into the soft cushions beside her and into oblivion.

Thus sleeping hand-in-hand like two children Bradley found them, and a tender, fatherly expression came over his face as he looked down at them.

"Nice little girl, Clio," he mused, "and when they made Costigan they broke the mould. They'll do--about as fine a couple of kids as old Tellus ever produced. I could do with some more sleep myself." He yawned prodigiously, lay down at Clio's left, and almost instantly was himself asleep.

Hours later, both men were awakened by a merry peal of laughter. Clio was sitting up, regarding them with sparkling eyes. She was refreshed, buoyant, ravenously hungry and highly amused. Costigan was amazed and annoyed at what he considered a failure in a self-appointed task; Bradley was calm and matter-of-fact.

"Thanks for being such a nice bodyguard, you two," Clio laughed again, but sobered quickly. "I slept wonderfully well, but I wonder if I can sleep to-night without making you hold my hand all night?"

"Oh, he doesn't mind doing that," Bradley commented.

"Mind it!" Costigan exclaimed, and his eyes and his tone spoke volumes that his tongue left unsaid.

They prepared and ate another meal, one to which Clio did full justice; and, rested and refreshed, had begun to discuss possibilities of escape when Nerado and his three armed guards entered the room. The Nevian scientist placed a box upon a table and began to make adjustments upon its panels, eyeing the Terrestrials attentively after each setting. After a time a staccato burst of articulate speech issued from the box, and Costigan saw a great light.

"You've got it--hold it!" he exclaimed, waving his arms excitedly. "You see, Clio, their voices are pitched either higher or lower than ours--probably higher--and they've built an audio-frequency changer. He's nobody's fool, that fish!"

Nerado heard Costigan's voice; there was no doubt of that. His long neck looped and angled in Nevian gratification, and, although neither side could understand the other, both knew that intelligent speech and hearing were attributes common to the two races. This fact altered markedly the relations between captors and captives. The Nevians admitted among themselves that the strange bipeds might be quite intelligent, after all; and the Terrestrials at once became more hopeful.

"It isn't so bad, if they can talk," Costigan summed up the situation. "We might as well take it easy and make the best of it, particularly since we haven't been able to figure out any possible way of getting away from them. They can talk and hear, and we can learn their language in time. Maybe we can make some kind of a deal with them to take us back to our own system, if we can't make a break."

The Nevians being as eager as the Terrestrials to establish communication, Nerado kept the newly devised frequency-changer in constant use. There is no need of describing at length the details of that interchange of languages. Suffice it to say that starting at the very bottom they learned as babies learn, but with the great advantage over babies of possessing fully developed and capable brains. And while the human beings were learning the tongue of Nevia, several of the amphibians (and incidentally Clio Marsden) were learning Triplanetarian; the two officers knowing well that it would be much easier for the Nevians to learn the logically-built common language of the Three Planets than to master the senseless intricacies of English.

In a few weeks the two parties were able to understand each other after a fashion, by using a weird mixture of both languages. As soon as a few ideas had been exchanged, the Nevian scientists built transformers small enough to be worn collar-like by the Terrestrials, and the captives were allowed to roam at will throughout the great vessel; only the compartment in which was stored the dismembered pirate lifeboats being sealed to them. Thus it was that they were not left long in doubt, when another fish-shaped cruiser of the world was revealed upon their lookout plates in the awful emptiness of interstellar space.

"That is our sister-ship, going to your Solarian system for a cargo of the iron which is so plentiful there," Nerado explained to his involuntary guests.

"I hope the gang has got the bugs worked out of our super-ship," Costigan muttered savagely to his companions as Nerado turned away. "If they have, that outfit will get something more than a load of iron when they get there!"

More weeks passed; weeks during which a blue-white star separated itself from the infinitely distant firmament and began to show a perceptible disk. Larger and larger it grew, becoming bluer and bluer as the flying space-ship approached it, until finally Nevia could be seen, apparently close beside her parent orb.

Heavily laden though the vessel was, such was her power that she was soon dropping vertically toward a large lagoon in the middle of the Nevian city. That bit of open water was strangely devoid of life, for this was to be no ordinary landing. Under the terrific power of the beams braking the descent of that unimaginable load of allotropic iron the water seethed and boiled; and instead of floating gracefully upon the surface of the sea, this time the huge ship of space sank like a plummet to the bottom. Having accomplished this delicate feat of docking the vessel safely in the immense cradle prepared for her, Nerado turned to the Terrestrials, who, now under guard, had been brought before him.

"While our cargo of iron is being discharged, I am to take you three Tellurians to the College of Science, where you are to undergo a thorough physical and psychological examination. Follow me."

"Wait a minute!" protested Costigan, with a quick and furtive wink at his companions. "Do you expect us to go _through water_, and at this frightful depth?"

"Certainly," replied the Nevian, in surprise. "You are air-breathers, of course, but you must be able to swim a little, and this slight depth--but little more than thirty of your meters--will not trouble you."

"You are wrong, twice," declared the Terrestrial, convincingly. "If by 'swimming' you mean propelling yourself in or through the water, we know nothing of it. In water over our heads we drown helplessly in a minute or two, and the pressure at this depth would kill us instantly."

"Well, I could take a lifeboat, of course, but that...." The Nevian Captain began, doubtfully, but broke off at the sound of a staccato call from his signal panel.

"Captain Nerado, attention!"

"Nerado," he acknowledged into a microphone.

"The Third City is being attacked by the fishes of the greater deeps. They have developed new and powerful mobile fortresses mounting unheard-of weapons and the city reports that it cannot long withstand their attack. The inhabitants are asking for all possible help. Your vessel not only has vast stores of iron, but also mounts weapons of power. You are requested to proceed to their aid at the earliest possible moment."

Nerado snapped out orders and the liquid iron fell in streams from wide-open ports, forming a vast, red pool in the bottom of the dock. In a short time the great vessel was in equilibrium with the water she displaced, and as soon as she had attained a slight buoyancy the ports snapped shut and Nerado threw on the power.

"Go back to your own quarters and stay there until I send for you," the Nevian directed, and as the Terrestrials obeyed the curt orders the fish-shaped cruiser of space tore herself from the water and flashed up into the crimson sky.

"What a barefaced liar!" Bradley exclaimed. The three, transformers cut off, were back in the middle room of their suite. "You can outswim an otter, and I happen to know that you came up out of the old DZ83 from a depth of...."

"Maybe I did exaggerate a trifle," Costigan interrupted him, "but the more helpless he thinks we are the better for us. And we want to stay out of any of their cities as long as we can, because they may be hard places to escape from. I've got a couple of ideas, but they aren't ripe enough to pick yet.... Wow! how this bird's been traveling! We're there already! If he hits the water going like this, he'll split himself, sure!"

With undiminished velocity they were flashing downward in a long slant toward the beleaguered Third City, and from the flying vessel there was launched toward the city's central lagoon a torpedo. No missile this, but a capsule containing a full ton of allotropic iron, which would be of more use to the Nevian defenders than millions of men. For the Third City was sore pressed indeed. Around it was one unbroken ring of boiling, exploding water--water billowing upward with searing, blinding bursts of superheated steam, or being hurled bodily in all directions in solid masses by the cataclysmic forces being released by the embattled fishes of the greater deeps. Her outer defenses were already down, and even as the Terrestrials stared in amazement another of the immense hexagonal buildings burst into fragments; its upper structure flying wildly into scrap metal, its lower half subsiding drunkenly below the surface of the boiling sea.

The three Terrestrials involuntarily seized whatever supports were at hand as the Nevian space-ship struck the water with undiminished speed, but the precaution was needless--Nerado knew thoroughly his vessel, its strength and its capabilities. There was a mighty splash, but that was all. The artificial gravity was unchanged by the impact; to the passengers the vessel was still motionless and on even keel as, now a submarine, she snapped around like a very fish and attacked the rear of the nearest fortress.

For fortresses they were; vast structures of green metal, plowing forward implacably upon immense caterpillar treads. And as they crawled they destroyed, and Costigan, exploring the strange submarine with his visiray beam, watched and marveled. For the fortresses were full of water; water artificially cooled and aerated, entirely separate from the boiling flood through which they moved. They were manned by fish some five feet in length. Fish with huge, goggling eyes; fish plentifully equipped with long, armlike tentacles; fish poised before control panels or darting about intent upon their various duties. Fish with intelligent brains, waging desperate war upon a hated foe!

Nor was their warfare ineffectual. Their heat-rays boiled the water for hundreds of yards before them and their torpedoes were exploding against the Nevian defenses in one appallingly continuous concussion. But most potent of all was a weapon unknown to Triplanetary warfare. From a fortress there would shoot out, with the speed of a meteor, a long, jointed, telescopic rod, tipped with a tiny, brilliantly shining ball. Whenever this glowing tip encountered any obstacle, that obstacle disappeared in an explosion world-wracking in its intensity. Then what was left of the rod, dark now, would be retracted into the fortress--only to emerge again in a moment with a tip once more shining and potent.

Nerado, apparently as unfamiliar with the peculiar weapon as were the Terrestrials, attacked cautiously; sending out far to the fore his murkily impenetrable screens of red. But the submarine was entirely non-ferrous, and its officers were apparently quite familiar with the Nevian beams which licked at and clung to the green walls in impotent fury. Through the red veil came stabbing tiny ball after brilliant ball, and only the most frantic dodging saved the space-ship from destruction in those first few furious seconds. And now the Nevian defenders of the Third City had secured and were employing the vast store of allotropic iron so opportunely delivered by Nerado.

From the city there pushed out immense nets of metal, extending from the surface of the ocean to its bottom; nets radiating such terrific forces that the very water itself was beaten back and stood motionless in vertical, glassy walls. Torpedoes were futile against that wall of energy. The most fiercely driven rays of the fishes flamed incandescent against it, in vain. Even the incredible violence of a concentration of every available force-ball against one point could not break through. At that unimaginable explosion water was hurled for miles. The bed of the ocean was not only exposed, but in it there was blown a crater at whose dimensions the Terrestrials dared not even guess. The crawling fortresses themselves were thrown backward violently and the very world was rocked to its core by the concussion, but that iron-driven wall held. The massive nets swayed and gave back, and tidal waves hurled their mountainously destructive masses through the Third City, but the mighty barrier remained intact. And Nerado, still attacking two of the powerful tanks with his every weapon, was still dodging those flashing balls charged with the quintessence of destruction. The fishes could not see through the sub-ethereal veil, but all the rod-gunners of the two fortresses were combing it thoroughly with ever-lengthening, ever-thrusting rods, in a desperate attempt to wipe out the new and apparently all-powerful Nevian submarine, whose sheer power was slowly but inexorably crushing even their gigantic walls.

"Well, I think that right now's the best chance we'll ever have of doing something for ourselves." Costigan turned away from the absorbing scenes pictured upon the visiplate and faced his two companions.

"But what can we possibly do?" asked Clio, and

"Whatever it is, we'll try it!" Bradley exclaimed.

"Anything's better than staying here and letting them analyze us--no telling what they'd do to us," Costigan went on. "I know a lot more about things than they think I do. They never did catch me using my spy-ray--it's on an awfully narrow beam, you know, and uses almost no power at all--so I've been able to dope out quite a lot of stuff. I can open most of their locks, and I know how to run their small boats. This battle, fantastic as it is, is deadly stuff, and it isn't one-sided, by any means, either, so that every one of them, from Nerado down, seems to be on emergency duty. There are no guards watching us, or stationed where we want to go--our way out is open. And once out, this battle is giving us our best possible chance to get away from them. There's so much emission out there already that they probably couldn't detect the driving rays of the lifeboat, and they'll be too busy to chase us, anyway."

"Once out, then what?" asked Bradley, eagerly.

"We'll have to decide that before we start, of course. I'd say make a break back for our own Solarian system. We know the direction, from our own observation, and we'll have plenty of power."

"But good Heavens, Conway, it's so far!" exclaimed Clio. "How about food, water, and air--would we ever get there?"

"You know as much about that as I do. I think so, but of course anything might happen. This ship is none too big, is considerable slower than the big space-ship, and we're a long ways from home. Another bad thing is the food question. The boat is well stocked according to Nevian ideas, but it's pretty foul stuff for us to eat. However, it's nourishing, and we'll have to eat it, since we can't carry enough of our own supplies to the boat to last long. Even so, we may have to go on short rations, but I think that we'll be able to make it. On the other hand, what happens if we stay here? We will certainly strike trouble sooner or later, and we don't know any too much about these ultra-weapons. We are land-dwellers, and there is mighty little land on this planet. Then, too, we don't know where to look for what little land there is, and, even if we could find it, we know that it is all over-run with amphibians already. There's a lot of things that might be better, but they might be a lot worse, too. How about it? Do we try it or do we stay here?"

"We try it!" exclaimed Clio and Bradley as one.

"All right. I'd better not waste any more time talking--let's go!"

Stepping up to the locked and shielded door, he took out a peculiarly built torch and pointed it briefly at the Nevian lock. There was no light, no noise, but the massive portal swung smoothly open. They stepped out and Costigan relocked and reshielded the entrance.

"How ... what ...?" Clio demanded, almost stuttering in her surprise.

"I've been going to school for the last few weeks," Costigan grinned, "and I've picked up quite a few things here and there--literally as well as figuratively speaking. Snap it up, guys! Our armor is stored away with the pieces of the pirates' lifeboat, and I'll feel a lot better when we've got it on and have hold of a few fresh Lewistons."

They hurried down corridors, up ramps, and along hallways, with Costigan's spy-ray investigating the course ahead for chance Nevians. Bradley and Clio were unarmed, but the secret agent had found a piece of flat metal and had ground it to a razor edge.

"I think I can throw this thing straight enough and fast enough to chop off a Nevian's head before he can put a paralyzing ray on us," he explained grimly, but he was not called upon to show his skill with the improvised cleaver.

As he had concluded from his careful survey, every Nevian was at some control or weapon, doing his part in that frightful combat with the denizens of the greater deeps. Their part was open, they were neither molested nor detected as they ran toward the compartment within which was sealed all their Terrestrial belongings. The door of that room opened, as had the other, to Costigan's knowing beam; and all three set hastily to work. They made up packs of food, filled their capacious pockets with emergency rations, recharged and buckled on Lewistons and automatics, donned their armor, and clamped into their external holsters a full complement of additional weapons.

"Now comes the ticklish part of the business," Costigan informed them. His helmet was slowly turning this way and that, and the others knew that through his spy-ray goggles he was studying their route. "There's only one boat we stand a chance of reaching, and somebody's mighty apt to see us. There's a lot of detectors up there, and we'll have to cross a corridor full of communicator beams. There, that line's off ... scoot!"

At his word they dashed out into the hall and hurried along for minutes, dodging to right or left as the leader snapped out orders. Finally he stopped.

"Here's those beams I told you about. We'll have to roll under 'em. They're less than waist high--right there's the lowest one. Watch me do it, and when I give you the word, one at a time, you do the same. _Keep low_--don't let an arm or a leg get up into the path of a ray or they may see us."

He threw himself flat, rolled upon the floor a yard or so, and scrambled to his feet. He gazed intently at the blank wall for a space, then:

"Bradley--now!" he snapped, and the Interplanetary captain duplicated his performance.

But Clio, unused to the heavy and cumbersome space-armor she was wearing, could not roll in it with any degree of success. When Costigan barked his order she tried, but stopped, floundering, almost directly below the invisible network of communicator beams. As she struggled one mailed arm went up, and Costigan saw in his ultra-goggles the faint flash as the beam encountered the interfering field. But already he had acted. Crouching low, he struck down the arm, seized it, and dragged the girl out of the zone of visibility. Then in furious haste he opened a nearby door and all three sprang into a tiny compartment.

"Shut off all the fields of your suits, so that they can't interfere!" he hissed into the utter darkness. "Not that I'd mind killing a few of them, but if they start an organized search we're sunk. But even if they did get a warning by touching your glove, Clio, they probably won't suspect us. Our rooms are still shielded, and the chances are that they're too busy to bother much about us, anyway."

He was right. A few beams darted here and there, but the Nevians saw nothing amiss and ascribed the interference to the falling into the beam of some chance bit of charged metal. With no further misadventures the Terrestrials gained entrance to the Nevian lifeboat, where Costigan's first act was to disconnect one steel boot from his armor of space. With a sigh of relief he pulled his foot out of it, and from it carefully poured into the small power-tank of the craft fully thirty pounds of allotropic iron!

"I pinched it off them," he explained, in answer to amazed and inquiring looks, "and maybe you don't think it's a relief to get it out of that boot! I couldn't steal a flask to carry it in, so this was the only place I could put it in. These lifeboats are equipped with only a couple of grams of iron apiece, you know, and we couldn't get half-way back to Tellus on that, even with smooth going; and we may have to fight. With this much to go on, though, we could go to Andromeda, fighting all the way. Well, we'd better break away."

Costigan watched his plate closely, and, when the maneuvering of the great vessel brought his exit port as far away as possible from the Third City and the warring citadels of the deep, he shot the little cruiser out and away. Straight out into the ocean it sped, through the murky red veil, and darted upward toward the surface. The three wanderers sat tense, hardly daring to breathe, staring into the plates--Clio and Bradley pushing at metal levers and stepping down hard upon metal brakes in unconscious efforts to help Costigan dodge the beams and rods of death flashing so appallingly close upon all sides. Out of the water and into the air the darting, dodging lifeboat flashed in safety; but in the air, supposedly free from menace, came disaster. There was a crunching, grating shock and the vessel was thrown into a dizzy spiral, from which Costigan finally leveled it into headlong flight away from the scene of battle. Watching the pyrometers which recorded the temperature of the outer shell, he drove the lifeboat ahead at the highest safe atmospheric speed while Bradley went to inspect the damage.

"Pretty bad, but better than I thought," the captain reported. "Outer and inner plates broken away on a seam. Inter-wall vacuum all lost, and we wouldn't hold carpet-rags, let alone air. Any tools aboard?"

"Some--and what we haven't got we'll make," Costigan declared. "We'll put a lot of distance behind us, then we'll fix her up and get away from here."

"What are those fish, anyway, Conway?" Clio asked, as the lifeboat tore along. "The Nevians are bad enough, Heaven knows, but the very idea of intelligent and _educated_ FISH is enough to drive one mad!"

"You know Nerado mentioned several times the 'semi-civilized fishes of the greater deeps'?" he reminded her. "I gather that there are at least three intelligent races here. We know two--the Nevians, who are amphibians, and the fishes of the greater deeps. The fishes of the lesser deeps are also intelligent. As I get it, the Nevian cities were originally built in very shallow water, or perhaps were upon islands. The development of machinery and tools gave them a big edge on the fish; and those living in the shallow seas, nearest the islands, gradually became tributary nations, if not actually slaves. Those fish not only serve as food, but work in the mines, hatcheries, and plantations, and do all kinds of work for the Nevians. Those so-called 'lesser deeps' were conquered first, of course, and all their races of fish are docile enough now. But the deep-sea breeds, who live in water so deep that the Nevians can hardly stand the pressure down there, were more intelligent to start with, and more stubborn besides. But the most valuable metals here are deep down--this planet is very light for its size, you know--so the Nevians kept at it until they conquered some of the deep-sea fish, too, and put 'em to work. But those high-pressure boys were nobody's fools. They realized that as time went on the amphibians would get further and further ahead of them in development, so they let themselves be conquered, learned how to use the Nevians' tools and everything else they could get hold of, developed a lot of new stuff of their own, and now they're out to wipe the amphibians off the slate completely, before they get too far ahead of them to handle."

"And the Nevians are afraid of them, and want to kill them all, as fast as they possibly can," guessed Clio.

"That would be the logical thing, of course," commented Bradley. "Got pretty nearly enough distance now, Costigan?"

"There isn't enough distance on the planet to suit me," Costigan replied. "We'll need all we can get. A full diameter away from that crew of amphibians is too close for comfort--their detectors are keen."

"Then they can detect us?" Clio asked. "Oh, I wish they hadn't hit us--we'd have been away from here long ago."

"So do I," Costigan assented, feelingly. "But they did--no use squawking. We can rivet and weld those seams and pump out the shell, and we'd have to fill our air-tanks to capacity for the trip, anyway. And things could be a lot worse--we are still breathing air!"

In silence the lifeboat flashed onward, and half of Nevia's mighty globe was traversed before it was brought to a halt, in the emptiest reaches of the planet's desolate and watery waste. Then in furious haste the two officers set to work, again to make their small craft sound and spaceworthy.

CHAPTER VI

Worm, Submarine, and Freedom

Since both Costigan and Bradley had often watched their captors at work during the long voyage from the Solar System to Nevia, they were quite familiar with the machine tools of the amphibians. Their stolen lifeboat, being an emergency craft, of course carried full repair equipment; and to such good purpose did the two officers labor that even before their air-tanks were fully charged, all the damage had been repaired.

The lifeboat lay motionless upon the mirror-smooth surface of the ocean. Captain Bradley had opened the upper port and the three stood in the opening, gazing in silence toward the incredibly distant horizon, while powerful pumps were forcing the last possible ounces of air into the practically unbreakable storage cylinders. Mile upon strangely flat mile stretched that waveless, unbroken expanse of water, merging finally into the violent redness of the Nevian sky. The sun was setting; a vast ball of purple flame dropping rapidly toward the horizon. Darkness came suddenly as that seething ball disappeared, and the air became bitterly cold, in sharp contrast to the pleasant warmth of a moment before. And as suddenly clouds appeared in blackly banked masses and a cold, driving rain began to beat down in torrents.

"Br-r-r, it's cold! Let's go in--Oh! _Shut the door!_" Clio shrieked, and leaped wildly down into the compartment below, out of Costigan's way, for he and Bradley also had seen slithering toward them the frightful arm of the Thing.

Almost before the girl had spoken Costigan had leaped to the levers, and not an instant too soon; for the tip of that horrible tentacle flashed into the rapidly narrowing crack just before the door clanged shut. As the powerful toggles forced the heavy screw threads into engagement and drove the massive disk home into its bottle-tight, insulated seat, that grisly tip fell severed to the floor of the compartment and lay there, twitching and writhing with a loathsome and unearthly vigor. Two feet long the piece was, and larger than a strong man's leg. It was armed with spiked and jointed metallic scales, and instead of sucking disks it was equipped with a series of _mouths_--mouths filled with sharp metallic teeth which gnashed and ground together furiously, even though sundered from the horrible organism which they were designed to feed.

The little submarine shuddered in every plate and member as monstrous coils encircled her and tightened inexorably in terrific, rippling surges eloquent of mastodonic power; and a strident vibration smote sickeningly upon Terrestrial eardrums as the metal spikes of the monstrosity crunched and ground upon the outer plating of their small vessel. Costigan stood unmoved at the plate, watching intently; hands ready upon the controls. Due to the artificial gravity of the lifeboat it seemed perfectly stationary to its occupants. Only the weird gyrations of the pictures upon the lookout screens showed that the craft was being shaken and thrown about like a rat in the jaws of a terrier; only the gauges revealed that they were almost a mile below the surface of the ocean already, and were still going downward at an appalling rate. Finally Clio could stand no more.

"Aren't you going to do something, Conway?" she cried.

"Not unless I have to," he replied, composedly. "I don't believe that he can really hurt us, and if I use a ray of any kind I'm afraid that it will kick up enough disturbance to bring Nerado down on us like a hawk after a chicken. However, if he takes us much deeper I'll have to go to work on him. We're getting down pretty close to our limit, and the bottom's a long way down yet."

Deeper and deeper the lifeboat was dragged by its dreadful opponent, whose spiked teeth still tore savagely at the tough outer plating of the craft until Costigan reluctantly threw in his power switches. Against the full propellant thrust the monster could draw them no lower, but neither could the lifeboat make any headway toward the surface. The Terrestrial then turned on his rays, but found that they were ineffective. So closely was the creature wrapped around the submarine that his weapons could not be brought to bear upon it without melting the vessel's own outer skin.

"What can it possibly be, anyway, and what can we do about it?" Clio asked.

"I thought at first it was something like a devilfish, or possibly an overgrown starfish, but it's too flat, and has no body that I can see," Costigan made answer. "It must be a kind of flat worm. That doesn't sound reasonable--the thing must be all of a hundred meters long--but there it is. The only thing left to do now, as I see it, is to try to boil him alive."

He closed other circuits, diffusing a terrific beam of pure heat, and the water all about them burst into furious clouds of steam. The boat leaped upward as the metallic fins of the gigantic worm fanned vapor instead of water, but the creature neither released its hold nor ceased its relentlessly grinding attack. Minute after minute went by, but finally the worm dropped limply away--cooked through and through; vanquished only by death.

"Now we've put our foot in it, clear to the knee!" Costigan exclaimed, as he shot the lifeboat upward at its maximum power. "Look at that! I knew that Nerado could trace us, but I didn't have any idea that _they_ could. It's a good thing these ultra-vision plates don't need light to see by or we'd be _'spurlos versenkt'_ in a hurry!"

Staring with Costigan into the plate, Bradley and the girl saw, not the Nevian sky-rover they had expected, but a fast submarine cruiser, manned by the frightful fishes of the greater deeps. It was coming directly toward the lifeboat, and even as Costigan hurled the little vessel off at an angle and then upward into the air one of the deadly offensive rods, tipped with its glowing ball of pure destruction, flashed through the spot where they would have been had they held their former course.

But powerful as were the propellant forces and fiercely though Costigan applied them, the denizens of the deep clamped a tractor ray upon the flying vessel before it had gained a mile of altitude. Costigan aligned his every driving projector as his vessel came to an abrupt halt in the invisible grip of the beam, then experimented with various dials.

"There ought to be some way of cutting that beam," he pondered audibly, "but I don't know enough about their system to do it, and I'm afraid to monkey around with things too much, because I might accidentally release the screens we've already got out, and they're stopping altogether too much stuff for us to do without them right now."

He frowned as he studied the flaring defensive screens, now radiating an incandescent violet under the concentration of the forces being hurled against them by the warlike fishes, then stiffened suddenly.

"I thought so--they _can_ shoot 'em!" he exclaimed, throwing the lifeboat into a furious corkscrew turn, and the very air blazed into flaming splendor as a dazzlingly scintillating ball of energy sped past them and high into the air beyond.

Then for minutes a spectacular battle raged. The twisting, turning, leaping airship, small as she was agile, kept on eluding the explosive projectiles of the fishes, and her screens neutralized and re-radiated the full power of the attacking beams. More--since Costigan did not need to think of sparing his iron, the ocean around the great submarine began furiously to boil under the full-driven offensive beams of the tiny Nevian ship. But escape Costigan could not. He could not cut that tractor beam and the utmost power of his drivers could not wrest the lifeboat from its tenacious clutch. And slowly but inexorably the ship of space was being drawn downward toward the ship of ocean's depths. Downward, in spite of the utmost possible effort of every projector and penetrator, and the two Terrestrial spectators, sick at heart, looked once at each other. Then they looked at Costigan, who, jaw hard set and eyes unflinchingly upon his plate, was concentrating his attack upon one turret of the green monster as they settled lower and lower.

"If this is ... if our number is going up, Conway," Clio began, unsteadily.

"Not yet, it isn't!" he snapped. "Keep a stiff upper lip, girl. We're still breathing air, and the battle's not over yet!"

Nor was it; but it was not Costigan's efforts, mighty though they were, that ended the attack of the fishes of the greater deeps. The tractor beam snapped without warning, and so prodigious were the forces being exerted by the lifeboat that, as it hurled itself away, the three passengers were thrown violently to the floor, in spite of the powerful gravity controls. Scrambling up on hands and knees, bracing himself as best he could against the terrific forces, Costigan managed finally to force a hand up to his panel. He was barely in time; for even as he cut the driving power to its normal value the outer shell of the lifeboat was blazing at white heat from the friction of the atmosphere through which it had been tearing with such an insane acceleration!

"Oh, I see--Nerado to the rescue," Costigan commented, after a glance into the plate. "I hope that those fish blow him clear out of the Galaxy!"

"Why?" demanded Clio. "I should think that you'd...."

"Think again," he advised her. "The worse Nerado gets licked the better for us. I don't really expect that, but if they can keep him busy long enough, we can get far enough away so that he won't bother about us any more."

As the lifeboat tore upward through the air at the highest permissible atmospheric velocity Bradley and Clio peered over Costigan's shoulders into the plate, watching in absorbed interest the scene which was being kept in focus upon it. The Nevian ship of space was plunging downward in a long, slanting dive, her terrific beams of force screaming out ahead of her. The rays of the little lifeboat had boiled the waters of the ocean; those of the parent craft seemed literally to blast them out of existence. All about the green submarine there had been volumes of furiously-boiling water and dense clouds of vapor; now water and fog alike disappeared, converted into transparent superheated steam by the blasts of Nevian energy. Through that tenuous gas the enormous mass of the submarine fell like a plummet, her defensive screens flaming an almost invisible violet, her every offensive weapon vomiting forth solid and vibratory destruction toward the Nevian cruiser so high in the angry, scarlet heavens.

For miles the submarine dropped, until the frightful pressure of the depth drove water into Nerado's beam faster than his forces could volatilize it. Then in that seething funnel there was waged desperate conflict. At that funnel's wildly turbulent bottom lay the submarine, now apparently trying to escape, but held fast by the tractor rays of the space-ship; at its top, smothered almost to the point of invisibility by billowing masses of steam, hung poised the Nevian cruiser.

As the atmosphere had grown thinner and thinner with increasing altitude Costigan had regulated his velocity accordingly, keeping the outer shell of the vessel at the highest temperature consistent with safety. Now beyond measurable atmospheric pressure, the shell cooled rapidly and he applied full touring acceleration. At an appalling and constantly increasing speed the miniature space-ship shot away from the strange, red planet; and smaller and smaller upon the plate became its picture. Long since the great vessel of the void had plunged beneath the surface of the sea, more closely to come to grips with the vessel of the fishes; for a long time nothing of the battle had been visible save immense clouds of steam, blanketing hundreds of square miles of the ocean's surface. But just before the picture became too small to reveal details a few tiny dark spots appeared above the banks of cloud, now brilliantly illuminated by the rays of the rising sun--dots which might have been fragments of either vessel, blown bodily from the depths of the ocean and, riven asunder, hurled high into the air by the incredible forces at the command of the other.

Nevia a tiny moon and the fierce blue sun rapidly growing smaller in the distance, Costigan swung his visiray beam into the line of travel and turned to his companions.

"Well, we're off," he said, scowling. "I hope it was Nerado that got blown up back there, but I'm afraid it wasn't. He whipped two of those submarines that we know of, and probably half their fleet besides. There's no particular reason why that one should be able to take him, so it's my idea that we should get ready for great gobs of trouble.

"They'll chase us, of course; and I'm afraid that with their immense power, they'll catch us."

"But what can we do, Conway?" asked Clio.

"Several things," he grinned. "I managed to get quite a lot of dope on that paralyzing ray and some of their other stuff, and we can install the necessary equipment in our suits easily enough."

They removed their armor, and Costigan explained in detail the changes which must be made in the Triplanetary field generators. All three set vigorously to work--the two officers deftly and surely; Clio uncertainly and with many questions, but with undaunted spirit. Finally, having done all they could do to strengthen their position, they settled down to the watchful routine of the flight, with every possible instrument set to detect any sign of the pursuit they so feared.

CHAPTER VII

The Hill

The heavy cruiser _Chicago_ hung motionless in space, thousands of miles distant from the warring fleets of space-ships so viciously attacking and so stubbornly defending the planetoid of the enemy. In the captain's sanctum Lyman Cleveland crouched tensely above his ultra-cameras, his sensitive fingers touching lightly their micrometric dials. His body was rigid, his face was set and drawn. Only his eyes moved: flashing back and forth between the observation plates and smoothly-running rolls which were feeding into the cameras the hardened steel tapes upon which were being magnetically recorded the frightful scenes of carnage and destruction there revealed.

Silent and bitterly absorbed, though surrounded by staring officers, whose fervent, almost unconscious cursing was prayerful in its intensity, the visiray expert kept his ultra-instruments upon that awful struggle to its dire conclusion. Flawlessly those instruments noted every detail of the destruction of Roger's fleet, of the transformation of the armada of Triplanetary into an unknown fluid, and finally of the dissolution of the gigantic planetoid itself. Then furiously Cleveland drove his beams against the crimsonly opaque obscurity into which the peculiar, viscous stream of substance was disappearing. Time after time he applied his every watt of power, with no result. A vast volume of space, roughly ellipsodial in shape, was closed to him by forces entirely beyond his experience or comprehension. But suddenly, while his rays were still trying to pierce that impenetrable murk, it disappeared instantly and, without warning, the illimitable infinity of space once more lay revealed upon his plates and his beams flashed on and on through the void, unimpeded.

"Back to Tellus, sir?" The _Chicago_'s captain broke the strained silence.

"I wouldn't say so, if I had the say." Cleveland, baffled and frustrate, straightened up and shut off his cameras. "We should report back as soon as possible, of course, but there seems to be a lot of wreckage out there yet, that we can't photograph in detail at this distance. A close study of it might help us a lot in understanding what they did and how they did it. I'd say that we should get close-ups of whatever is left, and do it right away, before it gets scattered all over space; but of course I can't give you orders."

"You can, though," the captain made surprising answer. "My orders are that you are in command of this vessel."

"In that case we will proceed at full emergency acceleration to investigate the wreckage," Cleveland replied, and the cruiser--sole survivor of Triplanetary's supposedly invincible force--shot away with every projector delivering its maximum blast.

As the scene of the disaster was approached there was revealed upon the plates a confused mass of debris; a mass whose individual units were apparently moving at random: yet which was as a whole still following the orbit of Roger's planetoid. Space was full of machine parts, structural members, furniture, flotsam of all kinds; and everywhere were the bodies of men. Some were encased in space-suits, and it was to these that the rescuers turned first--space-hardened veterans though the men of the _Chicago_ were, they did not care even to look at the others. Strangely enough, however, not one of the floating figures spoke or moved, and space-line men were hurriedly sent out to investigate.

"All dead." Quickly the dread report came back. "Been dead a long time. The armor is all stripped off the suits, and the generators and the other apparatus are all shot. Something funny about it, too--none of them seem to have been touched, but the machinery of the suits seems to be about half of it missing."

"I've got it all on the spools, sir." Cleveland, his close-up survey of the wreckage finished, turned to the captain. "What they've just reported checks up with what I've photographed everywhere. I've got an idea of what might have happened, but it's so dizzy that I'll have to have a lot of reenforcement before I'll believe it myself. But you might have them bring in a few of the armored bodies, a couple of those switchboards and panels floating around out there, and half a dozen miscellaneous pieces of junk--the nearest things they get hold of, whatever they happen to be."

"Then back to Tellus at maximum?"

"Right--back to Tellus, as fast as we can possibly go there."

While the _Chicago_ hurtled through space at full power, Cleveland and the ranking officers of the vessel grouped themselves about the salvaged wreckage. Familiar with space-wrecks as were they all, none of them had ever seen anything like the material before them. For every part and instrument was weirdly and meaninglessly disintegrated. There were no breaks, no marks of violence, and yet nothing was intact. Bolt-holes stared empty, cores, shielding cases and needles had disappeared, the vital parts of every instrument hung awry, disorganization reigned rampant and supreme.

"I never imagined such a mess," the captain said, after a long and silent study of the objects. "If you have any theory to cover _that_, Cleveland, I would like to hear it!"

"I want you to notice something first," the visiray expert replied. "But don't look for what's there--look for what _isn't_ there."

"Well, the armor is gone. So are the shielding cases, shafts, spindles, the housings and stems...." The captain's voice died away as his eyes raced over the collection. "Why, everything that was made of wood, bakelite, copper aluminum, silver, bronze, or anything but steel hasn't been touched, and every bit of steel is gone. But that doesn't make sense--what does it mean?"

"I don't know--yet," Cleveland replied, slowly. "But I'm afraid that there's more, and worse." He opened a space-suit reverently, revealing the face; a face calm and peaceful, but utterly, sickeningly white. Still reverently, he made a deep incision in the brawny neck, severing the jugular vein, then went on, soberly:

"You never imagined such a thing as _white_ blood, either, but it all checks up. Someway, somehow, every particle--probably every atom--of free or combined iron in this whole volume of space was made off with."

"Huh? How come? And above all, _why_?" from the amazed and staring officers.

"You know as much as I do," grimly, ponderingly. "If it were not for the fact that there are solid asteroids of iron out beyond Mars, I would say that somebody wanted iron badly enough to wipe out the fleets and the planetoid to get it. But anyway, whoever they were, they carried enough power so that our armament didn't bother them at all. They simply took the metal they wanted and went away with it--so fast that I couldn't trace them with an ultra-beam. There's only one thing plain; but that's so plain that it scares me stiff. This whole affair spells intelligence, with a capital "I", and that intelligence is anything but friendly. As for me I want to get Fred Rodebush at work on this soon--think I'll hurry it up a little."

He stepped over to his ultra-projector and called the Terrestrial headquarters of the T. S. S. Samms' face soon appeared upon his screen.

"We got it all, Virgil," he reported.

"It's something extraordinary--bigger, wider, and deeper than any of us dreamed. It may be urgent, too, so I think I had better shoot the pictures in on the ultra-wave and save a few days. Fred has a telemagneto recorder there that he can synchronize with this camera outfit easily enough. Right?"

"Right. Good work, Lyman--thanks," came back terse approval and appreciation, and soon the steel tapes were again flashing between the feed-rolls. This time, however, their varying magnetic charges were modulating an ultra-wave so that every detail of that calamitous battle of the void was being screened and recorded in the innermost private laboratory of the Triplanetary Secret Service.

Eager though he naturally was to join his fellow-scientists, Cleveland did not waste his time during the long, but uneventful journey back to earth. There was much to study, many improvements to be made in his comparatively crude first ultra-camera. Then, too, there were long conferences with Samms, and particularly with Rodebush, the mathematical physicist, whose was the task of solving the riddles of the energies and weapons of the Nevians. Thus it did not seem long before green Terra grew large beneath the flying sphere of the _Chicago_.

"Going to have to circle at once, aren't you?" Cleveland asked the chief pilot. He had been watching that officer closely for minutes, admiring the delicacy and precision with which the great vessel was being maneuvered preliminary to entering the earth's atmosphere.

"Yes," the pilot replied. "We had to come in in the shortest possible time, and that meant a velocity here that we can't check without a spiral. However, even at that we saved a lot of time. You can save quite a bit more, though, by having a rocket-plane come out to meet us somewhere around fifteen or twenty thousand kilometers, depending upon where you want to land. With their power-to-mass ratio they can match our velocity and still make the drop direct."

"Guess I'll do that--thanks," and the operative called his chief, only to learn that his suggestion had already been acted upon.

"We beat you to it, Lyman," Samms smiled. "The _Silver Sliver_ is out there now, looping to match your course, acceleration, and velocity at twenty-two thousand kilometers. You'll be ready to transfer?"

"I'll be ready!" and the Quartermaster's ex-clerk went to his quarters and packed his dunnage-bag.

In due time the long, slender body of the rocket-plane came into view, creeping 'down' upon the space-ship from 'above,' and Cleveland bade his friends good-bye. Donning a space-suit, he stationed himself in the starboard airlock. Its atmosphere was withdrawn, the outer door opened, and he glanced across a bare hundred feet of space at the rocket-plane which, keel ports fiercely aflame, was braking her terrific speed to match the slower pace of the gigantic ship of war. Shaped like a toothpick, needle-pointed fore and aft, with ultra-stubby wings and vanes, with flush-set rocket ports everywhere, built of a lustrous silvery alloy of noble and almost infusible metals--such was the private speedboat of the chief of the T. S. S. The fastest thing known, whether in planetary air, the stratosphere, or the vacuus depth of interplanetary space, her first flashing trial spins had won her the nickname of the _Silver Sliver_. She had had a more formal name, but that title had long since been buried in the Departmental files.

Lower and slower dropped the _Silver Sliver_, her rockets flaming even brighter, until her slender length lay level with the airlock door. Then her blasting discharges subsided to the power necessary to match exactly the _Chicago_'s deceleration.

"Ready to cut, _Chicago_! Give me a three-second call!" snapped from the pilot room of the _Sliver_.

"Ready to cut!" the pilot of the _Chicago_ replied. "Seconds! Three! Two! One! CUT!"

At the last word the power of both vessels was instantly cut off and everything in them became weightless. In the tiny airlock of the slender craft crouched a space-line man with coiled cable in readiness, but he was not needed. As the flaring exhausts ceased Cleveland swung out his heavy bag and stepped lightly off into space, and in a right line he floated directly into the open doorway of the rocket-plane. The door clanged shut behind him and in a matter of moments he stood in the control room of the racer, divested of his armor and shaking hands with his friend and co-laborer, Frederick Rodebush.

"Well, Fred, what do you know?" Cleveland asked, as soon as greetings had been exchanged. "How do the various reports dovetail together? I know that you couldn't tell me anything on the wave, but there's no danger of eavesdroppers _here_."

"You can't tell," Rodebush soberly replied. "We're just beginning to wake up to the fact that there are a lot of things we don't know anything about. Better wait until we're back at the Hill. We have a full set of ultra-screens around there now. There's a couple of other good reasons, too--it would be better for both of us to go over the whole thing with Virgil, from the ground up; and we can't do any more talking, anyway. Our orders are to get back there at maximum, and you know what that means aboard the _Sliver_. Strap yourself solid in that shock-absorber there, and here's a pair of ear-plugs."

"When the _Sliver_ really cuts loose it means a rough party, all right," Cleveland assented, snapping about his body the heavy spring-straps of his deeply cushioned seat, "but I'm just as anxious to get back to the Hill as anybody can be to get me there. All set."

Rodebush waved his hand at the pilot and the purring whisper of the exhausts changed instantly to a deafening, continuous explosion. The men were pressed deeply into their shock-absorbing chairs as the _Silver Sliver_ spun around her longitudinal axis and darted away from the _Chicago_ with such a tremendous acceleration that the spherical warship seemed to be standing still in space. In due time the calculated mid-point was reached, the slim space-plane rolled over again, and, mad acceleration now reversed, rushed on toward the earth, but with constantly diminishing speed. Finally a measurable atmospheric pressure was encountered, the needle prow dipped downward, and the _Silver Sliver_ shot forward upon her tiny wings and vanes, nose-rockets now drumming in staccato thunder. Her metal grew hot: dull red, bright red yellow, blinding white; but it neither melted nor burned. The pilot's calculations had been sound, and though the limiting point of safety of temperature was reached and steadily held, it was not exceeded. As the density of the air increased so decreased the velocity of the man-made meteorite. So it was that a dazzling lance of fire sped high over Seattle, lower over Spokane, and hurled itself eastward, a furiously flaming arrow; slanting downward in a long, screaming dive toward the heart of the Rockies. As the now rapidly cooling greyhound of the skies passed over the western ranges of the Bitter Roots it became apparent that her goal was a vast, flat-topped, and conical mountain, shrouded in livid light; a mountain whose height awed even its stupendous neighbors.

While not artificial, the Hill had been altered markedly by the Triplanetary engineers who had built into it the headquarters of the Secret Service. Its mile-wide top was a jointless expanse of gray armor steel; the steep, smooth surface of the truncated cone was a continuation of the same immensely thick sheet of metal. No known vehicle could climb that smooth, hard, forbidding slope of steel; no known projectile could mar that armor; no known craft could even approach the Hill without detection. Could not approach it at all, in fact, for it was constantly inclosed in a vast hemisphere of lambent violet flame through which neither material substance nor destructive ray could pass.

As the _Silver Sliver_, crawling along at a bare three-hundred miles an hour, approached that transparent, brilliantly violet wall of destruction, a violet light filled her control room and as suddenly went out; flashing on and off again and again.

"Giving us the once-over, eh?" Cleveland asked. "That is something new, isn't it, Fred?"

"Yes, it's a high-powered ultra-wave spy," Rodenbush returned. "The light is simply a warning, which can be carried if desired. It can also carry voice and vision...."

"Like this," Samms' voice interrupted from the powerful dynamic speaker upon the pilots' panel and his clear-cut face appeared upon the television screen. "I don't suppose Fred thought to mention it, but this is one of his inventions of the last few days. We are just trying it out on you. It doesn't mean a thing though, as far as the _Sliver_ is concerned. Come ahead!"

A circular opening appeared in the wall of force, an opening which disappeared as soon as the plane had darted through it; and at the same time her landing-cradle rose into the air through a great trap-door. Slowly and gracefully the space-plane settled downward into that cushioned embrace. Then cradle and nestled _Sliver_ sank from view and, turning smoothly upon mighty trunnions, the plug of armor drove solidly back into its place in the metal pavement of the mountain's lofty summit. The cradle-elevator dropped rapidly, coming to rest many levels down in the heart of the Hill, and Cleveland and Rodebush leaped lightly out of their transport, through her still hot outer walls. A door opened before them and they found themselves in a large room of full daylight illumination; the anteroom of the private office of Virgil Samms. Chiefs of Departments sat at their desks, concentrated upon problems or at ease, according to the demands of the moment; televisotypes and recorders flashed busily but silently; calmly efficient men and women went wontedly about the all-embracing business of Triplanetary's space-pervading Secret Service.

"Right of way, Norma?" Rodebush paused briefly before the desk of the Chief's private secretary; but even before he had spoken she had pressed a button and the door behind her swung wide.

"You two do not need to be announced," the attractive young woman smiled. "Go right in."

Samms met them at the door eagerly, shaking hands particularly vigorously with Cleveland.

"Congratulations on that camera, Lyman!" he exclaimed. "You did a wonderful piece of work on that. Help yourselves to smokes and sit down--there are a lot of things we want to talk over. Your pictures carried most of the story, but they would have left us pretty much at sea without Costigan's reports. But as it was, Fred here and his crew worked out most of the answers from the dope the two of you got; and what few they haven't got yet they soon will have."

"Nothing new on Conway?" Cleveland was almost afraid to ask the question.

"No." A shadow came over Samms' face. "I'm afraid ... but I'm hoping it's only that those creatures, whatever they are, have taken him so far away that he can't reach us."

"They certainly are so far away that we can't reach them." Rodenbush volunteered. "We can't even get their ultra-wave interference any more."

"Yes, that's a hopeful sign," Samms went on. "I hate to think of Conway Costigan checking out. There, fellows, was a real observer. He was the only man, I have ever known, who combined the two qualities of the perfect witness. He could actually see everything he looked at, and could report it truly, to the last, least detail. Take all this stuff, for instance; especially their ability to transform iron into a fluid allotrope, and in that form to use its intra-atomic energy as power. Something brand new--unheard of except in the ravings of imaginative fiction--and yet he described their converters and projectors so minutely that Fred was able to work out the underlying theory in three days, and to tie it in with our own super-ship. My first thought was that we'd have to rebuild it iron-free, but Fred showed me my error--you found it first yourself, of course."

"It wouldn't do any good to make the ship non-ferrous unless you could so change our blood chemistry that we could get along without hemoglobin, and that would be quite a feat," Cleveland agreed. "Then, too, our most vital electrical machinery is built around iron cores. No, we'll have to develop a screen for those forces--screens, rather, so powerful that they can't drive anything through them."

"We've been working along those lines ever since you reported," Rodebush said, "and we're beginning to see light. And in that same connection it's no wonder that we couldn't handle our super-ship. We had some good ideas, but they were wrongly applied. However, things look quite promising now. We have that transformation of iron all worked out in theory, and as soon as we get a generator going we can straighten out everything else in short order. And think what that unlimited power means! All the power we want--power enough even to try out such hitherto purely theoretical possibilities as the neutralization of gravity, and even of the inertia of matter!"

"Hold on!" protested Samms. "You certainly can't do _that_! Inertia is--_must_ be--a basic attribute of matter, and surely cannot be done away with without destroying the matter itself. Don't start anything like that. Fred--I don't want to lose you and Lyman, too."

"Don't worry about us, Chief." Rodebush replied with a smile. "If you will tell me what matter is, fundamentally, I may agree with you ... No? Well, then, don't be surprised at anything that happens. We are going to do a lot of things that nobody ever thought of doing before."

Thus for a long time the argument and discussion went on, to be interrupted by the voice of the secretary.

"Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Samms, but some things have come up that you will have to handle. Knobos is calling from out near Mars. He has caught the _Endymion_, and has killed about half her crew doing it. Milton has finally reported from Venus, after being out of touch for five days. He trailed the Wintons into Thalleron swamp. They crashed him there, but he won out and has what he went after. And just now I got a flash from Fletcher, in the asteroid belt. I think that he has finally traced that dope line. But Knobos is on now--what do you want him to do about the _Endymion_?"

"Tell him to--no, put him on here, I'd better tell him myself," Samms directed, and his face hardened in ruthless decision as the horny, misshapen face of the Martian lieutenant appeared upon the screen. "What do you think, Knobos? Shall they come to trial or not?"

"No."

"I don't think so, either. It is better that a few gangsters should disappear in space than run the risk of another uprising. See to it."

"Right." The screen darkened and Samms spoke to his secretary. "Put Milton and Fletcher on whenever their rays come in." He then turned to his guests. "We've covered the ground quite thoroughly. Good-bye--I wish I could go with you, but I'll be pretty well tied up for the next week or two."

"Tied up, doesn't half express it," Rodebush remarked as the two scientists walked along a corridor toward an elevator. "He probably is the busiest man on the three planets."

"As well as the most powerful," Cleveland supplemented. "And very few men could use his power as fairly--but he's welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned. I'd have the pink fantods for a month if I had to do only once what he's just done--and to him it's just part of a day's work."

"You mean the _Endymion_? What else could he do?"

"Nothing--that's just what I'm talking about. It had to be done, since bringing them to trial would probably mean killing half the people of Morseca; but at the same time it's a ghastly thing to have to order a job of deliberate, cold-blooded, and illegal murder."

"You're right, of course, but you would...." he broke off, unable to put his thoughts into words. For while inarticulate, manlike, concerning their deepest emotions, in both men was ingrained the code of their organization; both knew that to every man chosen for it _The Service_ was everything, himself nothing.

"But enough of that, we'll have plenty of grief of our own right here," Rodebush changed the subject abruptly as they stepped into a vast room, almost filled by the immense bulk of the _Boise_--the sinister space-ship which, although never flown, had already lined with black so many pages of Triplanetary's roster. She was now, however, the center of a furious activity. Men swarmed over her and through her, in the orderly confusion of a fiercely driven but carefully planned program of reconstruction.

"I hope your dope is right, Fred!" Cleveland called, as the two scientists separated to go to their respective laboratories. "If it is, we'll make a perfect lady out of this unmanageable man-killer yet!"

CHAPTER VIII

The Super-Ship Is Launched

After weeks of ceaseless work, during which was lavished upon her every resource of mind and material afforded by three planets, the _Boise_ was ready for her maiden flight. As nearly ready, that is, as the thought and labor of man could make her. Rodebush and Cleveland had finished their last rigid inspection of the craft and, standing beside the center door of the main airlock, were talking with their chief.

"You say that you think that it's safe, and yet you won't take a crew," Samms argued. "In that case it isn't safe enough for you men, either. We need you too badly to permit you to take such chances."

"You've _got_ to let us go; because we are the only ones who are thoroughly familiar with her theory," Rodebush insisted. "I said, and still say, that I _think_ it is safe. I can't prove it, however, except mathematically; because she's altogether too full of too many new and untried mechanisms, too many extrapolations beyond all existing or possible data. Theoretically, she is sound, but you know that theory can go only so far, and that mathematically negligible factors may become operative at those velocities. We do not need a crew for a short trip. We can take care of any minor mishaps, and if our fundamental theories are wrong, all the crews between here and Jupiter wouldn't do any good. Therefore we two are going--alone."

"Well, be very careful, anyway. Start out slow and take it easy."

"Start out slow? We can't! We can't neutralize half of gravity, nor half of the inertia of matter--it's got to be everything or nothing, as soon as the neutralizers go on. We could start out on the projectors, of course, instead of on the neutralizers, but that wouldn't prove anything and would only prolong the agony."

"Well, then, be as careful as you can."

"We'll do that, Chief," Cleveland put in. "We think a lot of us, and we aren't committing suicide just yet if we can help it. And remember about everybody staying inside when we take off--it's barely possible that we'll take up a lot of room. Good-bye to all of you."

"Good-bye, fellows!"

The massive insulating doors were shut, the metal side of the mountain opened, and huge, squat caterpillar tractors came roaring and clanking into the room. Chains and cables were made fast and, mighty steel rails groaning under the load, the space-ship upon her rolling ways was dragged out of the Hill and far out upon the level floor of the surface before the tractors cast off and returned to the fortress.

"Everybody is under cover." Samms informed Rodebush. The chief was staring intently into his plate, upon which was revealed the control room of the untried super-ship. He heard Rodebush speak to Cleveland; heard the observer's brief reply; saw the navigator throw his switches--then the communicator plate went blank. Not the ordinary blankness of a cut-off, but a peculiarly disquieting fading out into darkness. And where the great space-ship had rested there was for an instant nothing. Exactly nothing--a vacuum. Vessel, falsework, rollers, trucks, the enormous steel I-beams of the tracks, even the deep-set concrete piers and foundations and a vast hemisphere of the solid ground; all had disappeared utterly and instantaneously. But almost as suddenly as it had been formed the vacuum was filled by a cyclonic rush of air. There was a detonation as of a hundred vicious thunderclaps made one, and, through the howling, shrieking blasts of wind, there rained down upon the valley, plain and metaled mountain a veritable avalanche of debris: bent, twisted, and broken rails and beams, splintered timbers, masses of concrete, and thousands of cubic yards of soil and rock. For inertia and gravitation had not been neutralized at precisely the same instant, and for a moment everything within the radius of action of the iron-driven gravity nullifiers of the _Boise_ had continued its absolute motion with inertia unimpaired. Then, left behind immediately by the almost infinite velocity of the cruiser, all this material had again become subject to all of Nature's everyday laws and had crashed back to the ground.

"Could you hold your beam, Randolph?" Samm's voice cut sharply through the daze of stupefaction which held spellbound most of the denizens of the Hill. But all were not so held--no conceivable emergency could take the attention of the chief ultra-wave operator from his instruments.

"No, sir," Radio Center shot back. "It faded out and I couldn't recover it. I put everything I've got behind a tracer on that beam, but haven't been able to lift a single needle off the pin."

"And no wreckage of the vessel itself," Samms went on, half audibly. "Either they have succeeded far beyond their wildest hopes or else ... more probably...." He fell silent and switched off the plate. Were his two friends, those intrepid scientists, alive and triumphant, or had they gone to lengthen the list of victims of that man-killing space-ship? Reason told him that they were gone. They _must be_ gone, or else his ultra-beams--energies of such unthinkable velocity of propagation that man's most sensitive instruments had never been able even to estimate it--would have held the ship's transmitter in spite of any velocity attainable by any matter under any conceivable conditions. The ship must have been disintegrated as soon as Rodebush released his forces. And yet, had not the physicist dimly foreseen the possibility of such an actual velocity--or had he? However, individuals could came and could go, but Triplanetary went on. Samms squared his shoulders unconsciously, and slowly, grimly, made his way back to his private office.

He had scant time to mourn. Scarcely had he seated himself at his desk when an emergency call came snapping in; a call of such import that his secretary's usually calm voice trembled as she put it on his plate.

"Commissioner Hinkle is calling, sir," she announced. "Something terrible is going on again, out toward Orion. Here he is," and there appeared upon the screen the face of the Commissioner of Public Safety, the commander of Triplanetary's every armed force--whether of land or of water, of air or of empty space.

"They've come back, Samms!" the Commissioner rapped out, without preliminary or greeting. "Four vessels gone--a freighter and a passenger liner, with her escort of two heavy cruisers. All in Sector M; Dx about 151. I have ordered all traffic out of space for the duration of the emergency, and since even our warships seem useless, every ship is making for the nearest dock at maximum. How about that new flyer of yours--got anything that will do us any good?" No one beyond the "Hill's" shielding screens knew that the _Boise_ had already been launched.

"I don't know. We don't even know whether we have a super-ship or not," and Samms described briefly the beginning--and very probably the ending--of the trial flight, concluding: "It looks bad, but if there was any possible way of handling her, Rodebush and Cleveland did it. All our tracers are negative yet, so nothing definite has...."

He broke off as a frantic call came in from the Pittsburgh station for the Commissioner, a call which Samms both heard and saw.

"The city is being attacked!" came the urgent message. "We need all the reinforcements you can send us!" and a picture of the beleaguered city appeared in ghastly detail upon the screens of the observers; a view being recorded from the air. It required only seconds for the commissioner to order every available man and engine of war to the seat of conflict; then, having done everything they could, Hinkle and Samms stared in helpless, fascinated horror into their plates, watching the scenes of carnage and destruction depicted there.

* * * * *

The Nevian vessel--the sister-ship, the craft which Costigan had seen in mid-space as it hurtled earthward in response to Nerado's summons--hung poised in full visibility, high above the metropolis. Scornful of the pitiful weapons wielded by man she hung there, her sinister beauty of line sharply defined against the cloudless sky. From her shining hull there reached down a tenuous but rigid rod of crimson energy; a rod which slowly swept hither and thither as the detectors of the amphibians searched out the richest deposits of the precious iron for which the inhuman visitors had come so far. Iron, once solid, now a viscous red liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up that intangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of the Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin, destruction, and death. Office buildings, skyscrapers towering majestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed into heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into the ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wake as the mazes of underground piping disappeared. And the humanity of the buildings died: instantaneously and painlessly, never knowing what struck them, as the life-bearing iron of their bodies went to swell the Nevian stream.

Pittsburgh's defenses had been feeble indeed. A few antiquated railway rifles had hurled their shells upward in futile defiance, and had been quietly absorbed. The district planes of Triplanetary, newly armed with iron-driven ultra-beams, had assembled hurriedly and had attacked the invader in formation, with but little more success. Under the impact of their beams the stranger's screens had flared white, then poised ship and flying squadron alike had been lost to view in a murkily opaque shroud of crimson flame. The cloud had soon dissolved, and from the place where the planes had been there had floated or crashed down a litter of non-ferrous wreckage. And now the cone of space-ships from the Buffalo base of Triplanetary was approaching Pittsburgh, hurling itself toward the Nevian plunderer and toward known, gruesome and hopeless defeat.

"Stop them, Hinkle!" Samms cried. "It's sheer slaughter! They haven't got a thing--they aren't even equipped yet with the iron drive!"

"I know it," the commissioner groaned, "and Admiral Barnes knows it as well as we do, but it can't be helped--wait a minute! The Washington cone is reporting. They're as close as the other, and they have the new armament. Philadelphia is close behind, and so is New York. Now perhaps we can do something!"

The Buffalo flotilla slowed and stopped, and in a matter of minutes the detachments from the other bases arrived. The cone was formed and iron-driven vessels in the van, the old-type craft far in the rear, it bore down upon the Nevian, vomiting from its hollow front a solid cylinder of annihilation. Once more the screens of the Nevian flared into brilliance, once more the red cloud of destruction was flung abroad. But these vessels were not entirely defenseless. Their iron-driven ultra-generators threw out screens of the Nevians' own formulae, screens of prodigious power to which the energies of the amphibians clung and at which they clawed and tore in baffled, wildly coruscant displays of power unthinkable. For minutes the furious conflict raged, while the inconceivable energy being dissipated by those straining screens hurled itself in terribly destructive bolts of lightning upon the city far beneath.

No battle of such incredible violence could long endure. Triplanetary's ships were already exerting their utmost power, while the Nevians, contemptuous of Solarian science, had not yet uncovered their full strength. Thus the last desperate effort of mankind was proved futile as the invaders forced their beams deeper and deeper into the overloaded, defensive screens of the war-vessels; and one by one the supposedly invincible space-ships of humanity dropped in horribly dismembered wreckage upon the ruins of what had once been Pittsburgh.

CHAPTER IX

Specimens

Only too well founded was Costigan's conviction that the submarine of the deep-sea fishes had not been able to prevail against Nerado's formidable engines of destruction. For days the Nevian lifeboat with its three Terrestrial passengers hurtled through the interstellar void without incident, but finally the operative's fears were realized--his far-flung detector screens reacted; upon his observation plate lay revealed Nerado's mammoth space-ship, in full pursuit of its fleeing lifeboat!

"On your toes, folks--it won't be long now!" Costigan called, and Bradley and Clio hurried into the tiny control room.

Armor donned and tested, the three Terrestrials stared into the observation plates, watching the rapidly enlarging pictures of the Nevian space-ship. Nerado had traced them and was following them, and such was the power of the great vessel that the nearly inconceivable velocity of the lifeboat was the veriest crawl in comparison to that of the pursuing cruiser.

"And we've hardly started to cover the distance back to Tellus. Of course you couldn't get in touch with anybody yet?" Bradley stated, rather than asked.

"I kept on trying until they blanketed my wave, but all negative. Thousands of times too far for my transmitter. Our only hope of reaching anybody was the mighty slim chance that our super-ship might be prowling around out here already, but it isn't, of course. Here they are!"

Reaching out to the control panel, Costigan shot out against the great vessel wave after wave of lethal vibrations, under whose fiercely clinging impacts the Nevian defensive screens flared white; but, strangely enough, their own screens did not radiate. As if contemptuous of any weapons the lifeboat might wield, the mother ship simply defended herself from the attacking beams, in much the same fashion as a wildcat mother wards off the claws and teeth of her spitting, snarling kitten who is resenting a touch of needed maternal discipline.

"They probably won't fight us, at that," Clio first understood the situation. "This is their own lifeboat, and they want us alive, you know."

"There's one more thing we can try--hang on!" Costigan snapped, as he released his screens and threw all his power into one enormous pressor beam.

The three were thrown to the floor and held there by an awful weight, as if the lifeboat darted away at the stupendous acceleration of the beam's reaction against the unimaginable mass of the Nevian sky-rover; but the flight was of short duration. Along that pressor beam there crept a dull rod of energy, which surrounded the fugitive shell and brought it slowly to a halt. Furiously then Costigan set and reset his controls, launching his every driving force and his every weapon, but no beam could penetrate that red murk, and the lifeboat remained motionless in space. No, not motionless--the red rod was shortening, drawing the truant craft back toward the launching port from which she had so hopefully emerged a few days before. Back and back it was drawn; Costigan's utmost efforts futile to affect by a hair's breadth its line of motion. Through the open port the boat slipped neatly, and as it came to a halt in its original position within the multilayered skin of the monster, the prisoners heard the heavy doors clang shut behind them, one after another.

And then sheets of blue fire snapped and crackled all about the three suits of Triplanetary armor--the two large human figures and the small one were outlined starkly in blinding blue flame.

"That's the first thing that has come off according to schedule." Costigan laughed, a short, fierce bark. "That is their paralyzing ray; we've got it stopped cold, and we've each got enough iron to hold it forever."

"But it looks as though the best we can do is to stalemate," Bradley argued. "Even if they can't paralyze us, we can't hurt them, and we are heading back for Nevia."

"I think Nerado will come in for a conference, and we'll be able to make terms of some kind. He must know what these Lewistons will do, and he knows that we'll get a chance to use them, some way or other, before he gets to us again," Costigan asserted confidently--but again he was wrong.

The door opened, and through it there waddled, rolled, or crawled a metal-clad monstrosity--a thing with wheels, legs, and writhing tentacles of jointed bronze; a thing possessed of defensive screens sufficiently powerful to absorb the full blast of the Triplanetary projectors without effort. Three brazen tentacles reached out through the ravening beams of the Lewistons, smashed them to bits, and wrapped themselves in unbreakable shackles about the armored forms of the three human beings. Through the door the machine or creature carried its helpless load, and out into and along a main corridor. And soon the three Terrestrials, without armor, without arms, and almost without clothing, were standing in the control room, again facing the calm and unmoved Nerado. To the surprise of the impetuous Costigan, the Nevian commander was entirely without rancor.

"The desire for freedom is perhaps common to all forms of animate life," he commented, through the transformer. "As I told you before, however, you are specimens to be studied by the College of Science, and you shall be so studied in spite of anything you may do. Resign yourselves to that."

"Well, say that we don't try to make any more trouble; that we co-operate in the examination and give you whatever information we can," Costigan suggested. "Then you will probably be willing to give us a ship and let us go back to our own world?"

"You will not be allowed to cause any more trouble," the amphibian declared, coldly. "Your co-operation will not be required. We will take from you whatever knowledge and information we wish. In all probability you will never be allowed to return to your own system, because as specimens you are too unique to lose. But enough of this idle chatter--take them back to their quarters!"

And back to their inter-communicating rooms the prisoners were led under heavy guard.

True to his word, Nerado made certain that they had no more opportunities to escape. All the way back to far-distant Nevia the space-ship sped, where at once, in manacles, the Terrestrials were taken to the College of Science, there to undergo the physical and psychical examinations which Nerado had promised them.

Clio and Costigan learned that the Nevian scientist-captain had not erred in stating that their co-operation was neither needed nor desired. Furious but impotent, the human beings were studied in laboratory after laboratory by the coldly analytical, unfeeling scientists of Nevia, to whom they were nothing more nor less than specimens; and in full measure they came to know what it meant to play the part of an unknown, lowly organism in a biological research. They were photographed, externally and internally. Every bone, muscle, organ, vessel, and nerve was studied and charted. Every reflex and reaction was noted and discussed. Meters registered every impulse and recorders filmed every thought, every idea, and every sensation. Endlessly, day after day, the nerve-wracking torture went on, until the frantic subjects could bear no more. White-faced and shaking, Clio finally screamed wildly, hysterically, as she was being strapped down upon a laboratory bench; and at the sound Costigan's nerves, already at the breaking point, gave way in an outburst of Berserk fury.

The man's struggles and the girl's shrieks were alike futile, but the surprised Nevians, after a consultation, decided to give the specimens a vacation. To that end they were installed, together with their earthly belongings, in a three-roomed structure of transparent metal, floating in the large central lagoon of the city. There they were left undisturbed for a time--undisturbed, that is, except by the continuous gaze of the crowd of hundreds of amphibians which constantly surrounded the floating cottage.

"First we're bugs under a microscope," Bradley growled, "then we're goldfish in a bowl. I don't know that...."

He broke off as two of their jailers entered the room. Without a word into the transformers, they seized Bradley and the girl. As those tentacular arms stretched out toward Clio, Costigan leaped. A vain attempt. In midair the paralyzing ray of the Nevians touched him and he crashed heavily to the crystal floor; and from that floor he looked on in helpless, raging fury while his sweetheart and his captain were carried out of their prison and into a waiting submarine.

CHAPTER X

The _Boise_ Acts

But what of the super-ship? What happened after that inertialess, that terribly destructive take-off?

Doctor Frederick Rodebush sat at the control panel of Triplanetary's newly reconstructed space-ship, his hands grasping the gleaming, ebonite handles of two double-throw switches. Facing the unknown though the physicist was, yet he grinned whimsically at his friend.

"Something, whatever it is, is about to take place. The _Boise_ is taking off, under full neutralization. Ready for anything to happen, Cleve?"

"All ready--shoot!" Laconically. Cleveland also was constitutionally unable to voice his deeper sentiments in time of stress.

Rodebush flipped the switches clear over in flashing arcs, and instantly over both men there came a sensation akin to a tremendously intensified vertigo; but a vertigo as far beyond the space-sickness of weightlessness, as that horrible sensation is beyond mere terrestrial dizziness. The pilot tried to reverse the switches he had just thrown, but his leaden hands utterly refused to obey the dictates of his reeling mind. His brain was a writhing, convulsive mass of torment indescribable; expanding, exploding, swelling out with an unendurable pressure against its confining skull. Fiery spirals, laced with streaming, darting lances of black and green, flamed inside his bursting eyeballs. The Universe spun and whirled in mad gyrations about him as he reeled drunkenly to his feet, staggering and sprawling. He fell. He realized that he was falling, yet he could not fall! Thrashing wildly, grotesquely in agony, he struggled madly and blindly across the room, directly toward the thick steel wall. The tip of one hair of his unruly thatch touched the wall, and the slim length of that single hair did not even bend as its slight strength brought to an instant halt the hundred-and-eighty-odd pounds of mass--mass now entirely without inertia--that was his body.

But finally the sheer brain power of the man began to triumph over his physical torture. By indomitable force of will he compelled his groping hands to seize a life-line, almost meaningless to his dazed intelligence; and through that nightmare incarnate of hellish torture he fought his way back to the control board. Hooking one leg around a standard, he made a seemingly enormous effort and drove the two switches back into their original positions; then fell flat upon the floor, weakly but in a wave of relief and thankfulness, as his racked body felt again the wonted phenomena of weight and of inertia. White, trembling, frankly and openly sick, the two men stared at each other in half-amazed joy.

"It worked." Cleveland smiled wanly as he recovered sufficiently to speak, then leaped to his feet. "Snap it up, Fred! We must be falling fast--we'll be wrecked when we hit!"

"We're not falling anywhere." Rodebush, foreboding in his eyes, walked over to the main observation plate and scanned the heavens. "However, it's not as bad as I was afraid it might be. I can still recognize a few of the constellations, even though they are all pretty badly distorted. That means that we can't be more than a couple of light-years or so away from the Solar System. Of course, since we had so little thrust on, practically all of our time and energy was spent in getting out of the atmosphere; but, even at that, it's a good thing that space isn't an absolutely perfect vacuum or we would have been clear out of the Universe by this time."

"Huh? Impossible--where are we anyway? Then we must be making mil ... Oh, I see!" Cleveland exclaimed in disjointed sentences as he also stared into the plate.

"Right. We aren't traveling at all _now_." Rodebush replied. "We are perfectly stationary relative to Tellus, since we made the hop without inertia. We must have attained one hundred percent neutralization, which we didn't quite expect, and therefore we must have stopped instantaneously when our inertia was restored. But it isn't _where_ we are that is worrying me the most--we can fix our place in space accurately enough by a few observations--it's _when_."

"That's right, too. Say we're two light-years away. You think maybe we're two years older than we were ten minutes ago, then? That's possible, of course, maybe probable: there's been a lot of discussion on that theory. Now's a good time to prove or to disprove it. Let's snap back to Tellus and find out."

"We'll do that, after a little more experimenting. You see, I had no intention of giving us such a long push. I was going to throw the switches over and back, but you know what happened. However, there's one good thing about it--it's worth two years of anybody's life to settle that relativity-time thing definitely, one way or the other."

"I'll say it is. But say, we've got a lot of power on our ultra-wave: enough to reach Tellus, I think. Let's locate the sun and get in touch with Samms."

"Let's work on these controls a little first, so we'll have something to report. Out here's a fine place to try the ship out--nothing in the way."

"All right with me. But I _would_ like to find out whether I'm two years older than I think I am, or not!"

Then for hours they put the great super-ship through her paces, just as test-pilots check up on every detail of performance of an airplane of new and radical design. They found that the horrible vertigo could be endured, perhaps in time even conquered as space-sickness could be conquered, by a strong will in a sound body; and that their new conveyance had possibilities of which even Rodebush had never dreamed. Finally, their most pressing questions answered, they turned their most powerful ultra-beam communicator toward the yellowish star which they knew to be Old Sol.

"Samms ... Samms." Cleveland spoke slowly and distinctly. "Rodebush and Cleveland reporting from the 'Space-Eating Wampus', now directly in line with Beta Ursae Minoris from the sun, distance about two point two light years. It will take six banks of tubes on your tightest beam, LSV3, to reach us. Barring a touch of an unusually severe type of space-sickness, everything worked beautifully; even better than our calculations showed. There's something we want to know right away--have we been gone four hours and some odd minutes, or better than two years?"

He shut off the power, turned to Rodebush, and went on:

"Nobody knows how fast this ultra-wave travels, but if it goes as fast as we did coming out it's certainly moving. I'll give him about thirty minutes, then shoot in another call."

But in less than two minutes the care-ravaged face of their chief appeared sharp and clear upon their plates and his voice snapped curtly from the speaker.

"Thank God you're alive, and twice that the ship works!" he exclaimed. "You've been gone four hours, eleven minutes, and forty-one seconds, but never mind about abstract theorizing. Get back here, to Pittsburgh, as fast as you can drive. That Nevian vessel or another like her is mopping up the city, and has destroyed half the Fleet already!"

"We'll be back there in nine minutes!" Rodebush snapped into the transmitter. "Two to get from here to atmosphere, four from atmosphere down to the Hill, and three to cool off. Notify the full four-shift crew--everybody we've picked out. Don't need anybody else. Ship, batteries, and armament are _ready_!"

"Two minutes to atmosphere, and it took ten coming out? Think you can do it?" Cleveland asked, as Rodebush flipped off the power and leaped to the control panel.

"We could do it in a few seconds if we had to. We used scarcely any power at all coming out, and I'm not using very much going back," the physicist explained rapidly, as he set the dials which would determine their flashing course.

The master switches were thrown and the pangs of inertialessness again assailed them--but weaker far this time than ever before--and upon their lookout plates they beheld a spectacle never before seen by eye of man. For the ultra-beam, with its heterodyned vision, is not distorted by any velocity yet attained, as are the ether-borne rays of light. Converted into light only at the plate, it showed their progress as truly as though they had been traveling at a pace to be expressed in the ordinary terms of miles per hour. The yellow star that was the sun detached itself from the firmament and leaped toward them, swelling visibly, momentarily, into a blinding monster of incandescence. And toward them also flung the earth, enlarging with such indescribable rapidity that Cleveland protested involuntarily, in spite of his knowledge of the peculiar mechanism of the vessel in which they were.

"Hold it, Fred, hold it! Way 'nuff!" he exclaimed.

"I'm using only ten thousand dynes, so she'll stop herself as soon as we touch atmosphere, long before she can even begin to heat," Rodebush explained. "Looks bad, but we'll stop without a jar."

And they did. Weightless and without inertia, gravitation powerless against her neutralizing generators, the great super-ship came from her practically infinite velocity to an almost instantaneous halt in the outermost, most tenuous layer of the earth's atmosphere. Her halt was but momentary. Inertia restored and gravitation allowed again to affect her mass, she dropped at a sharp angle downward. More than dropped; she was forced downward by one full battery of projectors; projectors driven by iron-powered generators. Soon they were over the Hill, whose violet screens went down at a word.

Flaming a dazzling white from the friction of the atmosphere through which she had torn her way, the _Boise_ slowed abruptly as she neared the ground, plunging toward the surface of the small but deep artificial lake below the Hill's steel apron. Into the cold waters the space-ship dove, and even before they could close over her, furious geysers of steam and boiling water erupted as the stubborn alloy gave up its heat to the cooling liquid. Endlessly the three necessary minutes dragged their slow way into time, but finally the water ceased boiling and Rodebush tore the ship from the lake and hurled her into the gaping doorway of her dock. The massive doors of the air-locks opened, and while the full crew of picked men hurried aboard with their personal equipment, Samms talked earnestly to the two scientists in the control room.

" ... and about half the fleet is still in the air. They aren't attacking; they are just trying to keep her from doing much more damage until you can get there. How about your take-off? We can't launch you again--the tracks are gone--but you handled her easily enough coming in?"

"That was all my fault," Rodebush admitted. "I should have neutralized inertia first, but I had no idea that the fields would extend beyond the hull, nor that they wouldn't act simultaneously. We'll take her out on the projectors this time, though, the same as we brought her in--she handles like a bicycle. The projector blast tears things up a little, but nothing serious. Have you got that Pittsburgh beam for me yet? We're about ready to go."

"Here it is, Doctor Rodebush," came the secretary's voice, and upon the screen there flashed into being the view of the events transpiring above that doomed city. "The dock is empty and sealed against your blast," and thereupon "Good-bye, and power to your tubes!" came Samms' ringing voice.

As the words were being spoken, mighty blasts of power raved from the driving projectors and the immense mass of the super-ship shot out through the portals and upward into the stratosphere. Through the tenuous atmosphere the huge ship rushed with ever-mounting speed, and while the hope of Triplanetary drove eastward Rodebush studied the ever-changing scene of battle upon his plate and issued detailed instructions to the highly trained specialists manning every offensive and defensive weapon.

But the Nevians did not wait to join battle until the newcomers arrived. Their detectors were sensitive--operative over untold thousands of miles--and the ultra-screen of the Hill had already been noted by the invaders as the earth's only possible source of trouble. Thus the departure of the _Boise_ had not gone unnoticed, and the fact, that, not even with his most penetrant rays could he see into her interior, had already given the Nevian commander some slight concern. Therefore, as soon as it was determined that the great ship was being directed toward Pittsburgh the fish-shaped cruiser of the void went into action.

High in the stratosphere, speeding eastward, the immense mass of the _Boise_ slowed abruptly, although no projector had slackened its effort. Cleveland, eyes upon interferometer grating and spectrophotometer charts, fingers flying over calculator keys, grinned as he turned toward Rodebush.

"Just as you thought, Skipper; an ultra-band pusher. C4V63L29. Shall I give him a little pull?"

"Not yet; let's feel him out a little before we force a close-up. We've got plenty of mass. See what he does when I put full push on the projectors."

As the full power of the Terrestrial vessel was applied the Nevian was forced backward, away from the threatened city, against the full drive of her every projector. Soon, however, the advance was again checked, and both scientists read the reason upon their plates. The enemy had put down re-enforcing rods of tremendous power. Three compression members spread out fanwise behind her, bracing her against the low mountainside, while one huge tractor beam was thrust directly downward, holding in an unbreakable grip a cylinder of earth extending deep down into bedrock.

"Two can play at that game!" And Rodebush drove down similar beams, and forward-reaching tractors as well. "Strap yourselves in solid, everybody!" he sounded a general warning. "Something is going to give way somewhere soon, and when it does we'll get a jolt!"

And the promised jolt did indeed come soon. Prodigiously massive and powerful as the Nevian was, the _Boise_ was even more massive and more powerful; and as the already enormous energy feeding the tractors, pushers, and projectors was raised to its inconceivable maximum, the vessel of the enemy was hurled upward, backward; and that of earth shot ahead with a bounding leap that threatened to strain even her mighty members. The Nevian anchor-rods had not broken; they had simply pulled up the vast cylinders of solid rock that had formed their anchorages.

"Grab him now!" Rodebush yelled, and even while an avalanche of falling rock was burying the countryside, Cleveland snapped a tractor ray upon the flying fish and pulled tentatively.

Nor did the Nevian now seem averse to coming to grips. The two warring super-dreadnaughts darted toward each other, and from the invader there flooded out the dread crimson opacity which had theretofore meant the doom of all things Solarian. It flooded out and engulfed the immense mass of humanity's hope in its spreading cloud of redly impenetrable murk. But not for long. Triplanetary's super-ship boasted no ordinary Terrestrial defense, but was sheathed in screen after screen of ultra-vibrations: imponderable walls, it is true, but barriers impenetrable to any unfriendly wave. To the outer screen the red veil of the Nevians clung tenaciously, licking greedily at every square inch of the shielding sphere of force, but unable to find an opening through which to feed upon the steel of the _Boise_'s armor.

"Get back--'way back! Go back and help Pittsburgh!" Rodebush drove an ultra-communicator beam through the murk to the instruments of the Terrestrial admiral; for the surviving warships of the Fleet--its most powerful units--were hurling themselves forward, to plunge into that red destruction. "None of you will last a second in this red field. And watch out for a violet field pretty soon--it'll be worse than this. We can handle them alone, I think; but if we can't, there's nothing in the System that can help us!"

And now the hitherto passive screen of the super-ship became active. At first invisible, it began to glow in livid, violet light, and as the glow brightened to unbearable intensity the entire spherical shield began to increase in size. Driven outward from the super-ship as a center, its advancing surface of seething energy consumed the crimson murk as a billow of blast-furnace heat consumes a cloud of snowflakes in the air above its shaft. Nor was the red death-mist all that was consumed. Between that ravening surface and the armor skin of the _Boise_ there was nothing. No debris, no atmosphere, no vapor, no single atom of material substance--the first time in Terrestrial experience that an absolute vacuum had ever been attained!

Stubbornly contesting every foot of way lost, the Nevian fog retreated before the violet sphere of nothingness. Back and back it fell, disappearing altogether from all space as the violet tide engulfed the enemy vessel; but the flying fish did not disappear. Her triple screens flashed into furiously incandescent splendor and she entered, unscathed, that vacuous sphere, which collapsed instantly into an enormously elongated ellipsoid, at each focus a madly warring ship of space.

Then in that tube of vacuum was waged a spectacular duel of ultra-weapons--weapons impotent in air, but deadly in empty space. Beams, rays, and rods of Titanic power smote cracklingly against ultra-screens equally capable. Time after time each contestant ran the gamut of the spectrum with his every available ultra-force, only to find all channels closed. For minutes the terrible struggle went on, then:

"Cooper, Adlington, Spencer, Dutton!" Rodebush called into his transmitter. "Ready? Can't touch him on the ultra, so I'm going onto the macro-bands. Give him everything you have as soon as I collapse the violet. Go!"

At the word the violet barrier went down, and with a crash as of a disrupting Universe the atmosphere rushed into the void. And through the hurricane there shot out the deadliest material weapons of Triplanetary. Torpedoes--non-ferrous, ultra-screened, beam-dirigible torpedoes charged with the most effective forms of material destruction known to man. Cooper hurled his canisters of penetrating gas, Adlington his atomic iron explosive bombs, Spencer his indestructible armor-piercing projectiles, and Dutton his shatterable flasks of the quintessence of corrosion--a sticky, tacky liquid of such dire potency that only one rare Solarian element could contain it. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred were thrown as fast as automatic machinery could launch them; and the Nevians found themselves adversaries not to be despised. Size for size, their screens were quite as capable as those of the _Boise_. The Nevians' destructive rays glanced harmlessly from their shields, and the Nevians' elaborate screens, neutralized at impact by those of the torpedoes, were impotent to impede their progress. Each projectile must needs be caught and crushed individually by beams of the most prodigious power; and while one was being annihilated dozens more were rushing to the attack. Then, while the twisting, dodging invader was busiest with the tiny but relentless destroyers, Rodebush launched his heaviest weapon.

The macro-beams! Prodigious streamers of bluish-green flame which tore savagely through course after course of Nevian screen! Malevolent fangs, driven with such power and velocity that they were biting into the very walls of the enemy vessel before the amphibians knew their defensive shells of force had been punctured! And the emergency screens of the invaders were equally futile. Course after course was sent out, only to flare viciously through the spectrum and to go black!

Outfought at every turn, the now frantically dodging Nevian leaped away in headlong flight, only to be brought to a staggering, crashing halt as Cleveland nailed her with a tractor beam. But the Terrestrials were to learn that the Nevians held in reserve a means of retreat. The tractor snapped--sheared off squarely by a sizzling plane of force--and the fish-shaped cruiser faded from Cleveland's sight, just as the _Boise_ had disappeared from the communicator plates of Radio Center, back in the Hill, when she was launched. But though the plates in the control room could not hold the Nevian, she did not vanish beyond the ken of Randolph, now Communications Officer in the super-ship. For, warned and humiliated by his losing one speeding vessel from his plates in Radio Center, he was now ready for any emergency. Therefore as the Nevian fled, Randolph's spy-ray held her, automatically behind it as there was the full output of twelve special banks of iron-driven power tubes; and thus it was that the vengeful Terrestrials flashed immediately along the Nevians' line of flight. Inertialess now, pausing briefly from time to time to enable the crew to accustom themselves to the new sensations, the _Boise_ pursued the invader; hurtling through the void with a velocity unthinkable.

"He was easier to take than I thought he would be," Cleveland grunted, staring into the plate.

"I thought he had more stuff, too," Rodebush assented; "but I guess Costigan got almost everything they had. If so, with all our own stuff and most of theirs besides, we should be able to take them. They must have neutralization, too, to take off like that; and if it's one hundred per cent we'll never catch them ... but it isn't--there they are!"

"And this time I'm going to hold her or burn out all our generators trying," Cleveland declared, grimly. "Are you fellows down there able to handle yourselves yet? Fine! Start throwing out your cans!"

Space-hardened veterans all, the other Terrestrial officers had fought off the horrible nausea of inertialessness, just as Rodebush and Cleveland had done. Again the ravening green macro-beams tore at the flying cruiser, again the mighty frames of the two space-ships shuddered sickeningly as Cleveland clamped on his tractor rod, again the highly dirigible torpedoes dashed out with their freights of death and destruction. And again the Nevian shear-plane of force slashed at the Terrestrial's tractor beam; but this time the mighty puller did not give way. Sparkling and spitting high-tension sparks, the plane bit deeply into the stubborn rod of energy. Brighter, thicker, and longer grew the discharges as the gnawing plane drew more and more power; but in direct ratio to that power the rod grew larger, denser, and ever harder to cut. More and more vivid became the pyrotechnic display of electric brilliance, until suddenly the entire tractor rod disappeared. At the same instant a blast of intolerable flame erupted from the _Boise_'s flank and the whole enormous fabric of her shook and quivered under the force of a terrific detonation.

"Randolph! I don't see them! Are they attacking or running?" Rodebush demanded. He was the first to realize what had happened.

"Running--fast!"

"Just as well, perhaps, but get their line. Adlington!"

"Here!"

"Good! Was afraid you were gone--that was one of your bombs, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Well launched, just inside the screens. Don't see how it could have detonated unless something hot and hard struck it in the tube; it would need about that much time to explode. Good thing it didn't go off any sooner, or none of us would have been here. As it is, Area Six is pretty well done in, but the bulkheads held the damage to Six. What happened?"

"We don't know, exactly. Both generators on the tractor beam went out. At first, I thought that was all, but my neutralizers are dead and I don't know what else. When the G-4's went out the fusion must have shorted the neutralizers. They would make a mess; it must have burned a hole down into number six tube. Cleveland and I will come down, and we'll all look around."

Donning space-suits, the scientists let themselves into the damaged compartment through the emergency air-locks, and what a sight they saw! Both outer and inner walls of alloy armor had been blown away by the awful force of the explosion. Jagged plates hung awry; bent, twisted, and broken. The great torpedo tube, with all its intricate automatic machinery, had been driven violently backward and lay piled in hideous confusion against the backing bulkheads. Practically nothing remained whole in the entire compartment.

"Nothing much we can do here," Rodebush said finally, through his transmitter, "Let's go see what number four generator room looks like."

That room, although not affected by the explosion from without, had been quite as effectively wrecked from within. It was still stiflingly hot; its air was still reeking with the stench of burning lubricant, insulation, and metal; its floor was half covered by a semi-molten mass of what had once been vital machinery. For with the burning out of the generator bars the energy of the disintegrating allotropic iron had had no outlet, and had built up until it had broken through its insulation and in an irresistible flood of power had torn through all obstacles in its path of neutralization.

"Hm-m-m. Should have had an automatic shut-off--one detail we overlooked," Rodebush mused. "The electricians _can_ rebuild this stuff here, though--that hole in the hull is something else again."

"I'll say it's something else," the grizzled Chief Engineer agreed. "She's lost all her spherical strength--anchoring a tractor with this ship now would turn her inside out. Back to the nearest Triplanetary shop for us, I would say."

"Come again, Chief!" Cleveland advised the engineer. "None of us would live long enough to get there. We can't travel inertialess until the repairs are made, so if they can't be made without very much traveling, it's just too bad."

"I don't see how we could support our jacks...." The engineer paused, then went on. "If you can't give me Mars or Tellus, how about some other planet? I don't care about atmosphere, or about anything but mass. I can stiffen her up in three or four days if I can sit down on something heavy enough to hold our jacks and presses; but if we have to rig up space-cradles around the ship herself it'll take a long time--months, probably. Haven't got a spare planet on hand, have you?"

"We might have, at that," Rodebush made surprising answer. "A couple of seconds before we engaged we were heading toward a sun with at least two planets. I was just getting ready to dodge them when we cut the neutralizers, so they should be fairly close somewhere--yes, there's the sun, right over there. Rather pale and small; but it's close, comparatively speaking. We'll go back up into the control room and find out about the planets."

The strange sun was found to have three large and easily located children, and observation showed that the crippled space-ship could reach the nearest of these in about five days. Power was therefore fed to the driving projectors, and each scientist, electrician, and mechanic bent to the task of repairing the ruined generators; rebuilding them to handle any load which the converters could possibly put upon them. For two days the _Boise_ drove on; then her acceleration was reversed, and finally a landing was effected upon the forbidding, rocky soil of the strange world.

It was larger than the earth, and of a somewhat stronger gravitation. Although its climate was bitterly cold, even in its short daytime, it supported a luxuriant but outlandish vegetation. Its atmosphere, while rich enough in oxygen and not really poisonous, was so rank with indescribably fetid vapors as to be scarcely breathable.

But these things bothered the engineers not at all. Paying no attention to temperature or to scenery and without waiting for chemical analysis of the air, the space-suited mechanics leaped to their tasks; and in only a little more time than had been mentioned by the chief engineer the hull and giant frame of the super-ship were as staunch as of yore.

"All right, Skipper!" came finally the welcome word. "You might try her out with a fast hop around this world before you shove off in earnest."

Under the fierce blast of her projectors the vessel leaped ahead, and time after time, as Rodebush hurled her mass upon tractor beam or pressor, the engineers sought in vain for any sign of weakness. The strange planet half girdled and the severest tests passed flawlessly, Rodebush reached for his neutralizer switches. Reached and paused, dumfounded, for a brilliant purple light had sprung into being upon his panel and a bell rang out insistently.

"What the blue blazes!" Rodebush shot out an exploring beam along the detector line and gasped. He stared, mouth open, then yelled:

"_Roger_ is here, rebuilding his planetoid! _STATIONS ALL_!"

CHAPTER XI

Roger Carries On

For gray Roger had not perished in the floods of Nevian energy which had destroyed his planetoid. While those terrific streamers of force emanating from the crimson obscurity surrounding the amphibians' space-ship were driving into his defensive screens, Roger sat impassive and immobile at his desk. His hard gray eyes moved methodically over his instruments and recorders; and after a few minutes he smiled coldly, while an expression of relief struggled fleetingly to move his expressionless face. Even though his screens were better than anyone had supposed, why admit it?

"Baxter, Hartkopf, Chatelier, Anandrusung, Penrose, Nishimura, Mirsky...." He called off a list of names. "Report to me here at once!"

"The planetoid is lost," he informed his select group of scientists when they had assembled, "and we must abandon it in exactly fifteen minutes, which will be the time required for the robots to fill this first section with our most necessary machinery and instruments. Pack each of you one box of the things he most wishes to take with him, and report back here in not more than thirteen minutes. Say nothing to anyone else."

They filed out calmly, and as they passed out into the hall Baxter, perhaps a trifle less case-hardened than his fellows, at least voiced a thought for those they were so brutally deserting.

"I say, it seems a bit thick to dash off this way and leave the rest of them; but still, I suppose...."

"You suppose correctly." Bland and heartless Nishimura filled in the pause. "A small part of the planetoid may be able to escape; which, to me at least, is pleasantly surprising news. It cannot carry all of our men and mechanisms, therefore only the most important of both are saved. What would you? For the rest it is simply what you call 'the fortune of war,' no?"

"But the beautiful...." began the amorous Chatelier.

"Hush, fool!" snorted Hartkopf. "One word of that to the ear of Roger and you too are left behind. Of such non-essentials the Universe is full, to be collected in times of ease, but in times hard to be disregarded. Und this is a time of schrecklichkeit indeed!"

The group broke up, each man going to his own quarters; to meet again in the First Section a few minutes before the zero time. Roger's "office" was now packed so tightly with machinery and supplies that but little room was left for the scientists. The gray monstrosity still sat unmoved behind his dials.

"But of what use is it, Roger?" the Russian physicist demanded. "Those waves are of some ultra-band, of a frequency immensely higher than anything heretofore known. Our screens should not have stopped them for an instant. It is a mystery that they have held so long, and certainly this single section will not be permitted to leave the planetoid without being destroyed."

"There are many things you do not know, Mirsky," came the cold and level answer. "Our screens, which you think are of your own devising, have several improvements of my own in the formulae, and would hold forever had I the power to drive them. The screens of this section, being smaller, can be held as long as will be found necessary."

"Power!" the dumfounded Russian exclaimed. "Why, we have almost infinite power--unlimited--sufficient for a lifetime of high expenditure!"

But Roger made no reply, for the time of departure was at hand. He pressed down a tiny lever, and a robot in the power room threw in the gigantic plunger switches which launched against the Nevians the stupendous beam which so upset the complacence of Nerado the amphibian--the beam into which was poured recklessly every resource of power afforded by the planetoid, careless alike of burn-out and of exhaustion. Then, all the attention of the Nevians and the greater part of their power output devoted to the neutralization of that last desperate thrust, the metal wall of the planetoid opened and the First Section shot out into space. Full-driven as they were, Roger's screens flared white as he drove through the temporarily lessened attack of the Nevians; but in their preoccupation the amphibians did not notice the additional disturbance and the section tore on, unobserved and undetected. Far out in space, Roger raised his eyes from the instrument panel and continued the conversation as though it had not been interrupted.

"Everything is relative, Mirsky, and you have misused gravely the term 'unlimited.' Our power was, and is, very definitely limited. True, it then seemed ample for our needs, and is far superior to that possessed by the inhabitants of any solar system with which I am familiar; but the beings behind that red screen, whoever they are, have sources of power as far above ours as ours are above those of the Solarians."

"How do you know?"

"That power, what is it?" "We have, then, the analyses of those fields recorded!" Came simultaneous questions and explanations.

"Their power-source is very probably the intra-atomic energy of iron; and if so, much remains to be done before I can proceed with my plan. I must have the most powerful structure in the known Universe before I can act. In the light of what I have just learned, the loss of the planetoid is but a trifle." Roger, as unmoved as one of his own automatons, was coldly analyzing the situation, thinking the thing through to its logical conclusion, paying no attention whatever to the losses of life, time and treasure now behind him.

"But what can you do about it?" growled the Russian.

"Many things. From the charts of the recorders we can compute their fields of force, and from that point it is only a step to their method of liberating the energy. We shall build robots. They shall build other robots, who shall in turn construct another planetoid; one this time that, wielding the theoretical maximum of power, will be suited to my needs."

"And where will you build it? We are marked. Invisibility now is useless. Triplanetary will find us, even if we take up an orbit beyond that of Pluto!"

"We have already left your Solarian system far behind. We are going to another system; one far enough removed so that the spy-rays of Triplanetary will never find us, and yet one that we can reach in a reasonable length of time with the energies at our command. Some fifteen days will be required for the journey, however, and our quarters are cramped. Therefore make places for yourselves wherever you can, and lessen the tedium of those fifteen days by working upon whatever problems are most pressing in your respective researches."

The gray monster fell silent, immersed in what thoughts no one knew, and the scientists set out to obey his orders. Baxter, the British chemist, followed Penrose, the lantern-jawed, saturnine American engineer and inventor, as he made his way to the furthermost cubicle of the section.

"I say, Penrose, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don't mind?"

"Go ahead. Ordinarily it's dangerous to be a cackling hen anywhere around _him_, but he can't hear anything here now. His system is pretty well shot to pieces. You want to know all I know about Roger?"

"Exactly so. You have been with him so much longer than I have, you know. In some ways he impresses one as being scarcely human, if you know what I mean. Ridiculous, of course, but of late I have been wondering whether he really _is_ human. He knows too much, about too many things. He seems to be acquainted with many solar systems, to visit which would require life-times. Then, too, he has dropped remarks which would imply that he actually saw things that happened long before any living man could possibly have been born. Finally, he looks--well, peculiar--and certainly does not act human. I have been wondering, and have been able to learn nothing about him; as you have said, such talk as this aboard the planetoid was impossible."

"You needn't worry about being paid your price; that's one thing. If we live--and that was part of the agreement, you know--we will all get what we sold out for. You will become a belted earl. I have already made millions, and shall make many more. Similarly, Chatelier has had and will have his women, Anandrusung and Nishimura their cherished revenges. Hartkopf his power, and so on." He eyed the other speculatively, then went on:

"I might as well spill it all, since I'll never have a better chance and since you should know what the rest of us do. You're in the same boat with us and tarred with the same brush. There's a lot of gossip, that may or may not be true, but I know one very startling fact. Here it is. My great-great-grandfather left some notes which, taken in connection with certain things I myself saw on the planetoid, prove beyond question that our Roger went to Harvard University at the same time he did. Roger was a grown man then, and the elder Penrose noted that he was marked, like this," and the American sketched a cabalistic design.

"What!" Baxter exclaimed. "An adept of North Polar Jupiter--_them?_"

"Yes. That was before the First Jovian War, you know, and it was those medicine-men--really high-caliber scientists--that prolonged that war so...."

"But I say, Penrose, that's really a bit thick. When they were wiped out it was proved a lot of hocus-pocus...."

"Some of it was, but most of it wasn't," Penrose interrupted in turn. "I'm not asking you to believe anything except that one fact; I'm just telling you the rest of it. But it is also a fact that those adepts knew things and did things that take a lot of explaining. Now for the gossip, none of which is guaranteed. Roger is undoubtedly of Tellurian parentage, and the story is that his father was a moon-pirate, his mother a Greek adventuress. When the pirates were chased off the moon they went to Ganymede, you know, and some of them were captured by the Jovians. It seems that Roger was born at an instant of time sacred to the adepts, so they took him on. He worked his way up through the Forbidden Society as all adepts did, by various kinds of murder and job lots of assorted deviltries, until he got clear to the top--the seventy-seventh mystery...."

"The secret of eternal youth!" gasped Baxter, awed in spite of himself.

"Right, and he stayed Chief Devil, in spite of all the efforts of all his ambitious sub-devils to kill him, until the turning-point of the First Jovian War. He cut away then in a space-ship, and ever since then he has been working--and working hard--on some stupendous plan of his own that nobody else has ever got even an inkling of. That's the story. True or not, it explains a lot of things that no other theory can touch. And now I think you'd better shuffle along; enough of this is a great plenty!"

Baxter went to his own cubby, and each man of the adept's cold-blooded crew methodically took up his task. True to prediction, in fifteen days a planet loomed beneath them and their vessel settled through a reeking atmosphere toward a rocky and forbidding plain. Then for another day they plunged along, a few thousand feet above the surface of that strange world, while Roger with his analytical detectors sought the most favorable location from which to wrest the materials necessary for his program of construction.

It was a world of cold; its sun was distant, pale, and wan. It had monstrous forms of vegetation, of which each branch and member writhed and fought with a grotesque and horrible individual activity. Ever and anon a struggling part broke from its parent plant and darted away in independent existence; leaping upon and consuming or being consumed by a fellow creature equally monstrous. This flora was of a uniform color--a lurid, sickly yellow. In form some of it was fern-like, some cactus-like, some vaguely tree-like; but it was all outrageous, inherently repulsive to all Solarian senses. And no less hideous were the animal-like forms of life, which slithered and slunk rapaciously through that fantastic pseudo-vegetation. Snake-like, reptile-like, bat-like, the creatures squirmed, crawled, and flew; each covered with a dankly oozing yellow hide and each motivated by twin common impulses--to kill and insatiably and indiscriminately to devour. Over this reeking wilderness Roger drove his vessel, untouched by its disgusting, its appalling ferocity and horror.

"There should be intelligence, of a kind," he mused, and swept the surface of the planet with an exploring beam. "Ah, yes, there is a city, of sorts," and in a few minutes the outlaws were looking down upon a metal-walled city of roundly conical buildings.

Inside these structures and between and around them there scuttled formless blobs of matter, one of which Roger brought up into his vessel by means of a tractor ray. Held immovable by the beam it lay upon the floor, a strangely extensile, amoeba-like metal-studded mass of leathery substance. Of eyes, ears, limbs, or organs it apparently had none, yet it radiated an intensely hostile aura; a mental effluvium concentrated of rage and of hatred.

"Apparently the ruling intelligence of the planet," Roger commented. "Such creatures are useless to us; we can build robots in half the time required for their subjugation and training. Still, it should not be permitted to carry back what it may have learned of us." As he spoke the adept threw the peculiar being out into the air and dispassionately rayed it out of existence.

"That thing reminds me of a man I used to know, back in Penobscot." Penrose was as coldly callous as his unfeeling master. "The evenest-tempered man in town--mad all the time!"

Eventually Roger found a location which satisfied his requirements of raw materials, and made a landing upon that unfriendly soil. Sweeping beams denuded a great circle of life, and into that circle leaped robots. Robots requiring neither rest nor food, but only lubricants and power; robots insensible alike to that bitter cold and to that noxious atmosphere.

But the outlaws were not to win a foothold upon that inimical planet easily, nor were they to hold it without effort. Through the weird vegetation of the circle's bare edge there scuttled and poured along a horde of the metal-studded men--if "men" they might be called--who, ferocity incarnate, rushed the robot line. Mowed down by hundreds, still they came on; willing, it seemed to expend any number of lives in order that one living creature might once touch a robot with one out-thrust metallic stud. Whenever that happened there was a flash as of lightning, the heavy smoke of burning insulation, grease and metal, and the robot went down out of control. Recalling his remaining automatons, Roger sent out a shielding screen, against which the defenders of their planet raged in impotent fury. For days they hurled themselves and their every force against that impenetrable barrier, then withdrew: temporarily stopped, but by no means acknowledging defeat.

Then, while Roger and his cohorts directed affairs from within their comfortable and now sufficiently roomy vessel, there came into being around it an industrial city of metal, peopled by metallic and insensate mechanisms. Mines were sunk, furnaces were blown in, smelters belched forth into the already unbearable air their sulphurous fumes, rolling mills and machine shops were built and equipped: and as fast as new enterprises were completed additional robots were ready to man them. In record time the heavy work of girders, members, and plates was well under way; and shortly thereafter light, deft, and multi-fingered mechanical men began the interminable task of building and installing the prodigious amount of precise machinery required for the vast structure. Roger was well content: but one day he was rudely awakened from his dream of complete isolation.

Even though he had no reason to believe that there was anything dangerous within hundreds of millions of miles, it was Roger's cautious custom to release the screens from time to time, in order to allow his detectors to range out. This day, as he sent out his beams, his hard gray eyes grew even harder.

"Mirsky! Nishimura! Come here!" he snapped, and showed them upon his plate an enormous sphere of steel, its rays flaming viciously. "Is there any doubt whatever in your minds as to the System to which that ship belongs?"

"None at all--Triplanetarian," replied the Russian. "While larger than any I have seen before, its construction is unmistakable. They managed to trace us, and are testing out their weapons before attacking. Do we attack or do we run away?"

"If Triplanetarian, and it surely is, we attack," coldly. "This one section is armed and powered to defeat Triplanetary's entire navy. We shall take that ship, and shall add its slight resources to our own. And it may even be that they have picked up the three who escaped me.... I have never yet been balked for long. Yes, we shall take that vessel. And those three sooner or later. Bradley I care nothing about ... but Costigan handled me ... and the woman...." Diamond-hard eyes glared balefully at the urge of thoughts to a clean and normal mind unthinkable.

"To your posts," he ordered. "The robots will continue to function under their automatic controls during the short time it will require to abate this nuisance."

"_One moment!_" A strange voice roared from the speakers. "Consider yourselves under arrest, by order of the Triplanetary Council! Surrender and you shall receive impartial hearing; fight us and you shall never come to trial. From what we have learned of Roger, we do not expect him to surrender, but if any of you other men wish to avoid immediate death, leave your vessel at once. We will come back for you later."

"Any of you wishing to leave this vessel have my full permission to do so," Roger announced, disdaining any reply to the challenge of the _Boise_. "Any such, however, will not be allowed inside the planetoid area after the rest of us return from wiping out that patrol. We attack in one minute."

"Would not one do better by stopping on?" Baxter, in the quarters of the American, was in doubt as to the most profitable course to pursue. "I should leave immediately if I thought that that ship could win; but I do not fancy that it can, do you?"

"That ship? _One_ Triplanetary ship against _us_?" Penrose laughed raucously. "Do as you please. I'd go in a minute if I thought that there was any chance of us losing; but there isn't, so I'm staying. I know which side _my_ bread's buttered on. Those cops are bluffing, that's all. Not bluffing exactly, either, because they'll go through with it as long as they last. Foolish, but it's a way they have--they'll die trying every time, instead of running away, even when they know they're licked before they start. They don't use good judgment."

"None of you are leaving? Very well, you each know what to do," came Roger's emotionless voice. The stipulated minute having elapsed, he advanced a lever and the outlaw cruiser slid quietly into the air.

Toward the poised _Boise_ Roger steered. Within range, he flung out a weapon new-learned and supposedly irresistible to any ferrous thing or creature, the red converter-field of the Nevians. For Roger's analytical detectors had stood him in good stead during those frightful minutes in the course of which the planetoid had borne the brunt of Nerado's superhuman attack; in such good stead that from the records of those ingenious instruments he and his scientists had been able to reconstruct not only the generators of the attacking forces, but also the screens employed by the amphibians in the neutralization of similar beams. With a vastly inferior armament the smallest of Roger's vessels had defeated the most powerful battleships of Triplanetary; what had he to fear in such a heavy craft as the one he now was driving, one so superlatively armed and powered? Well it was for his peace of mind that he had no inkling that the harmless-looking sphere he was so blithely attacking was in reality the much-discussed, half-mythical "super-ship" of Triplanetary's Secret Service; nor that its already unprecedented armament had been re-enforced, thanks to that hated Costigan, with Roger's own every worth-while idea, as well as with every weapon and defense known to that arch-Nevian, Nerado!

Unknowing and contemptuous, Roger launched his converter field, and instantly found himself fighting for his very life. For from Rodebush at the controls down, the men of the Secret Service countered with wave after wave and with salvo after salvo of vibratory and material destruction. No thought of mercy for the men of the pirate ship could enter their minds. The outlaws had each been given a chance to surrender, and each had refused it. Refusing, they knew, as the Triplanetarians knew and as all modern readers know, meant that they were staking their lives upon victory. For with modern armaments it is seldom indeed that a single man lives through the defeat in battle of a war-vessel of space.

Roger launched his field of red opacity, but it did not reach even _Boise_'s screens. All space seemed to explode into violet splendor as Rodebush neutralized it, drove it back with his obliterating zone of force; but even that all-devouring zone could not touch Roger's peculiarly efficient screen. The outlaw vessel stood out, unharmed. Ultra-violet, infra-red, pure heat, infra-sound, solid beams of high-tension high-frequency current in whose paths the most stubborn metals would be volatilized instantly; all iron-driven, every deadly and torturing vibration known was hurled against that screen; but it, too, was iron-driven, and it held. Even the awful force of the macro-beam was dissipated by it--reflected, hurled away on all sides in coruscating torrents of blinding, dazzling energy. Cooper, Adlington, Spencer, and Dutton hurled against it their bombs and torpedoes--and still it held. But Roger's fiercest blasts and heaviest projectiles were equally impotent against the force-shields of the super-ship. The adept, having no liking for a battle upon anything like equal terms, sought safety in flight, only to be brought to a crashing, stunning halt by a massive tractor beam.

"That must be that sixth-phase polycyclic screen that Conway reported on," Cleveland frowned in thought. "I've been doing a lot of work on that, and I think I've calculated an opener for it, Fred, but I'll have to have number ten projector and the whole output of number ten power room. Can you let me play with that much juice for a while? All right, Blake, tune her up to fifty-five thousand--there, hold it! Now, you other fellows, listen! I'm going to try to drill a hole through that screen with a hollow, quasi-solid beam: like a diamond drill cutting out a core. You won't be able to shove anything into the hole from outside the beam, so you'll have to steer your cans out through the central orifice of number ten projector--that'll be cold, since I'm going to use only the edge. I don't know how long I'll be able to hold the hole open, though so shoot them along as fast as you can. Ready? Here goes!"

He pressed a series of contacts. Far below, in number ten converter room, massive switches drove home and the enormous mass of the vessel quivered under the terrific reaction of the newly-calculated, semi-material beam of energy that was hurled out, backed by the mightiest of all the mighty converters and generators of Triplanetary's super-dreadnaught. That beam, a pipe-like hollow cylinder of intolerable energy, flashed out, and there was a rending, tearing crash as it struck Roger's hitherto impenetrable wall. Struck and clung, grinding, boring in, while from the raging inferno that marked the circle of contact of cylinder and shield the pirates' screen radiated scintillating torrents of cracking, streaming sparks, lightning-like in length and in intensity.

Deeper and deeper the gigantic drill was driven. It was through! Pierced Roger's polycyclic screen; exposed the bare metal of Roger's walls! And now, concentrated upon one point, flamed out in seemingly redoubled fury Triplanetary's raging rays--in vain. For even as they could not penetrate the screen, neither could they penetrate the wall of Cleveland's drill, but rebounded from it in the cascaded brilliance of thwarted lightning.

"Oh, what a dumb-bell I am!" groaned Cleveland. "Why, oh why didn't I have somebody rig up a secondary SX7 beam on Ten's inner rings? Hop to it, will you, Blake, so that we'll have it in case they are able to stop the cans?"

But the pirates could not stop all of Triplanetary's projectiles, now hurrying along inside the pipe as fast as they could be driven. In fact, for a few minutes desperate Roger, knowing that he faced his long life's gravest crisis, paid no attention to them at all, nor to any of his own useless offensive weapons: he struggled only and madly to break away from the savage grip of the _Boise_'s tractor rod. Futile. He could neither cut nor stretch that inexorably anchoring beam. Then he devoted his every resource to the closing of that unbelievable breach in his shield; the barrier which through all previous emergencies had kept death at bay. Equally futile. His most desperate efforts resulted only in more frenzied displays of incandescence along the curved surface of contact of that penetrant cylinder. And through that terrific conduit came speeding package after package of destruction. Bombs, and armor-piercing shells, gas shells, and shells of poisonous and corrosive fluids followed each other in close succession. The surviving scientists of the planetoid, expert gunners and ray-men all, destroyed many of the projectiles, but it was not humanly possible to frustrate them all. And the breach could not be forced shut against the all but irresistible force of Cleveland's "opener". And with all his power Roger could not shift his vessel's position in the grip of Triplanetary's tractors sufficiently to bring a projector to bear upon the super-ship along the now unprotected axis of that narrow, but deadly tube.

Thus it was that the end came soon. A war-head touched steel plating and there ensued a world-wracking explosion of atomic iron. Gaping wide, helpless, with all defenses down, other torpedoes entered the stricken hulk and completed its destruction even before they could be recalled. Explosive bombs literally tore the pirate vessel to fragments, while vials of pure corrosion dissolved her substance into dripping corruption and reeking gases filled every cranny of the wreckage as its torn and dismembered fragments began their long plunge to the ground. The space-ship followed the pieces down, and Rodebush sent out an exploring ray.

" ... resistance was such that it was necessary to use corrosive, and ship and contents were completely disintegrated," he dictated into his vessel's log, some time later. "While there were of course no remains recognizable as human, it is practically certain that Roger and his last eleven men died.

"Look here, Fred," Cleveland called his attention to the plate, upon which was pictured a horde of the peculiar inhabitants of the ghastly planet, wreaking their frenzied electrical wrath upon everything within the circle bared by Roger. "I was just going to suggest that we clean up that planetoid Roger started, but I see that the local boys are attending to it."

"Just as well, perhaps. I would like to stay and study these people a little while, but we must get back on the trail of the Nevians," and the _Boise_ leaped away into space, toward the line of flight of the amphibians.

They reached that line and along it they traveled at full normal blast. As they traveled their detecting receivers and amplifiers were reaching out with their utmost power; ultra-instruments capable of rendering audible any signal originating within many light-years of them, upon any known frequency. And constantly at least two men were listening to those instruments with every sense concentrated in their ears. Listening--straining to distinguish in the deafening roar of background noise from the over-driven tubes any sign of voice or signal. Listening--while, millions upon untold millions of miles beyond even the prodigious reach of those ultra-instruments, three human beings, pitted against overwhelming odds, were even then sending out into empty space an almost hopeless appeal for the aid so desperately needed!

CHAPTER XII

The Specimens Escape

Knowing well that conversation with its fellows is one of the greatest needs of any intelligent being, the Nevians had permitted the Terrestrial specimens to retain possession of their ultra-beam communicators. Thus it was that Costigan had been able to keep in touch with his sweetheart and with Bradley. He learned that each had been placed upon exhibition in a different Nevian city: that the three had been separated in response to an insistent popular demand for such a distribution of the peculiar, but highly interesting creatures from a distant solar system. They had not been harmed. In fact, each was visited daily by a specialist, who made sure that his charge was being kept in the pink of condition.

As soon as he became aware of this condition of things Costigan became morose. He sat still, drooped, and pined away visibly. He refused to eat, and of the worried specialist he demanded liberty. Then, failing in that as he knew he would fail, he demanded something to _do_. They pointed out to him, reasonably enough, that in such a civilization as theirs there was nothing he _could_ do. They assured him that they would do anything they could to alleviate his mental suffering, but that since he was a museum piece he must see, himself, that he must be kept on display for a short time. Wouldn't he please behave himself and eat, as a reasoning being should? Costigan sulked a little longer, then wavered. Finally he agreed to compromise. He would eat and exercise if they would fit up a laboratory in his apartment, so that he could continue the studies he had begun upon his own native planet. To this they agreed, and thus it came about that one day the following conversation was held:

"Clio? Bradley? I've got something to tell you this time. Haven't said anything before, for fear things might not work out, but they did. I went on a hunger strike and made them give me a complete laboratory. As a chemist I'm a darn good electrician; but luckily, with the sea-water they've got here, it's a very simple thing to make...."

"Hold on!" snapped Bradley. "Somebody may be listening in on us!"

"They aren't. They can't, without my knowing it, and I'll cut off the second anybody tries to synchronize with my beam. To resume--making Vee-Two is a very simple process, and I've got everything around here that's hollow clear full of it...."

"How come they let you?" asked Clio.

"Oh, they don't know what I'm doing. They watched me for a few days, and all I did was make up and bottle the weirdest messes imaginable. Then I finally managed to separate oxygen and nitrogen, after trying hard all of one day; and when they thought they saw that I didn't know anything about either one of them or what to do with them after I had them, they gave me up in disgust as a plain dumb ape and haven't paid any attention to me since. So I've got me plenty of kilograms of liquid Vee-Two, all ready to touch off. I'm getting out of here in about three minutes and a half, and I'm coming over after you folks, in a new, iron-powered space-speedster that they don't know I know anything about. They've just given it its final tests, and it's the slickest thing you ever saw."

"But Conway, dearest, you can't possibly rescue me," Clio's voice broke. "Why, there are thousands of them, all around here. If you can get away, go, dear, but don't...."

"I said I was coming after you, and if I can get away I'll be there. A good whiff of this stuff will lay out a thousand of them just as easily as it will one. Here's the idea. I've made a gas mask for myself, since I'll be in it where it's thick, but you two won't need any. The gas is soluble enough in water so that three or four thicknesses of wet cloth over your noses will be enough. I'll tell you when to wet down. We're going to break away or go out trying--there aren't enough amphibians between here and Andromeda to keep us humans cooped up like menagerie animals forever! But here comes my specialist with the keys to the city; time for the overture to start. See you later!"

The Nevian physician directed his key-tube upon the transparent wall of the chamber and an opening appeared, an opening which vanished as soon as he had stepped through it; Costigan kicked a valve open; and from various innocent tubes there belched forth into the water of the central lagoon and into the air over it a flood of deadly vapor. As the Nevian turned toward the prisoner there was an almost inaudible hiss and a tiny jet of the frightful, outlawed stuff struck his open gills, just below his huge, conical head. He tensed momentarily, twitched convulsively just once, and fell motionless to the floor. And outside, the streams of avidly soluble liquefied gas rushed out into air and into water. It spread, dissolved, and diffused with the extreme mobility which is one of its characteristics; and as it diffused and was borne outward the Nevians, in their massed hundreds, died. Died not knowing what killed them; not knowing even that they died. Costigan, bitterly resentful of the inhuman treatment accorded the three and fiercely anxious for the success of his plan of escape, held his breath and, grimly alert, watched the amphibians die. When he could see no more motion anywhere he donned his gas-mask, strapped upon his back a large canister of the poison--his capacious pockets were already full of smaller containers--and two savagely exultant sentences escaped him.

"I am a poor, ignorant specimen of ape, that can be let play with apparatus, am I?" he rasped, as he picked up the key-tube of the specialist and opened the door of his prison. "Maybe they'll learn sometime that it ain't always safe to judge by the looks of a flea how far he can jump!"

He stepped out through the opening into the water, and, burdened as he was, made shift to swim to the nearest ramp. Up it he ran, toward a main corridor. But ahead of him there was wafted a breath of dread Vee-Two, and where that breath went, went also unconsciousness--an unconsciousness which would deepen gradually into permanent oblivion save for the prompt intervention of one who possessed, not only the necessary antidote, but the equally important knowledge of exactly how to use it. Upon the floor of that corridor were strewn Nevians, who had dropped in their tracks. Past or over their bodies Costigan strode, pausing only to direct a jet of lethal vapor into whatever branching corridor or open doorway caught his eye. He was going to the intake of the city's ventilation plant, and no unmasked creature dependent for life upon oxygen could bar his path. He reached the intake, tore the canister from his back, and released its full, vast volume of horrid contents into the primary air stream of the entire city.

And all throughout that doomed city Nevians dropped; quietly and without a struggle, unknowing. Busy executives dropped upon their cushioned, flat-topped desks; hurrying travelers and messengers dropped upon the floors of the corridors or relaxed in the noxious waters of the ways; lookouts and observers dropped before their flashing screens; central operators of communications dropped under the winking lights of their panels. Observers and centrals in the outlying sections of the city wondered briefly at the unwonted universal motionlessness and stagnation; then the racing taint in water and in air reached them, too, and they ceased wondering--forever.

Then through those quiet halls Costigan stalked to a certain storage room, where with all due precaution he donned his own suit of Triplanetary armor. Making an ungainly bundle of the other Solarian equipment stored there, he dragged it along behind him as he clanked back toward his prison, until he neared the dock at which was moored the Nevian space-speedster which he was determined to take. Here, he knew, was the first of many critical points. The crew of the vessel was aboard, and, with its independent air-supply, unharmed. They had weapons, were undoubtedly alarmed, and were very probably highly suspicious. They, too, had ultra-beams and might see him, but his very closeness to them would tend to protect him from ultra-beam observation. Therefore he crouched tensely behind a buttress, staring through his spy-ray goggles, waiting for a moment when none of the Nevians would be near the entrance, but grimly resolved to act instantly should he feel any touch of a spying ultra-beam.

"Here's where the pinch comes," he growled to himself. "I know the combination, but if they're suspicious enough and act quick enough they can seal that door on me before I can get it open, and then rub me out like a blot; but ... ah!"

The moment had arrived, before the touch of any revealing ray. He trained the key-tube, the entrance opened, and through that opening in the instant of its appearance there shot a brittle bulb of glass, whose breaking meant death. It crashed into fragments against a metallic wall and Costigan, entering the vessel, consigned its erstwhile crew one by one to the already crowded waters of the lagoon. He then leaped to the controls and drove the captured speedster through the air, to plunge it down upon the surface of the lagoon beside the door of the isolated structure which had for so long been his prison. Carefully he transferred to the vessel the motley assortment of containers of Vee-Two, and after a quick check-up to make sure that he had overlooked nothing, he shot his craft straight up into the air. Then only did he close his ultra-wave circuits and speak.

"Clio, Bradley--I got away clean, without a bit of trouble. Now I'm coming after you, Clio."

"Oh, it's wonderful that you got away, Conway!" the girl exclaimed. "But hadn't you better get Captain Bradley first? Then, if anything should happen, he would be of some use, while I...."

"I'll knock him into an outside loop if he does!" the captain snorted, and Costigan went on:

"You won't need to. You come first, Clio, of course. But you're too far away for me to see you with my spy, and I don't want to use the high-powered beam of this boat for fear of detection; so you'd better keep on talking, so that I can trace you."

"That's one thing I _am_ good at!" Clio laughed in sheer relief. "If talking were music, I'd be a full brass band!" and she kept up a flow of inconsequential chatter, until Costigan told her that it was no longer necessary; that he had established the line.

"Any excitement around there yet?" he asked her then.

"Nothing unusual that I can see," she replied. "Why? Should there be some?"

"I hope not, but when I made my get-away I couldn't kill them all, of course, and I thought maybe they might connect things up with my jail-break and tell the other cities to take steps about you two. But I guess they're pretty well disorganized back there yet, since they can't know who hit them, or what with, or why. I must have got about everybody that wasn't sealed up somewhere, and it doesn't stand to reason that those who are left can check up very closely for a while yet. But they're nobody's fools--they'll certainly get conscious when I snatch you, maybe before ... there, I see your city, I think."

"What are you going to do?"

"Same as I did back there, if I can. Poison their primary air and all the water I can reach...."

"Oh, Conway!" Her voice rose to a scream. "They must know--they're all getting out of the water and are rushing inside the buildings as fast as they possibly can!"

"I see they are," grimly. "I'm right over you now, 'way up. Been locating their primary intake. They've got a dozen ships around it, and have guards posted all along the corridors leading to it; and _those guards are wearing masks!_ They're clever birds, all right, those amphibians--they know what they got back there and how they got it. That changes things, girl! If we use gas here we won't stand a chance in the world of getting old Bradley. Stand by to jump when I open that door!"

"Hurry, dear! They are coming out here after me!"

"Sure they are." Costigan had already seen the two Nevians swimming out toward Clio's cage, and had hurled his vessel downward in a screaming power dive. "You're too valuable a specimen for them to let you be gassed, but if they can get there before I do they're traveling fast!"

He miscalculated slightly, so that instead of coming to a halt at the surface of the liquid medium the speedster struck with a crash that hurled solid masses of water for hundreds of yards. But no ordinary crash could harm that vessel's structure, her gravity controls were not overloaded, and she shot back to the surface; gallant ship and reckless pilot alike unharmed. Costigan trained his key-tube upon the doorway of Clio's cell, then tossed it aside.

"Different combinations over here!" he barked. "Got to cut you out--lie down in that far corner!"

His hands flashed over the panel, and as Clio fell prone without hesitation or question a heavy beam literally blasted away a large portion of the roof of the structure. The speedster shot into the air and dropped down until she rested upon the tops of opposite walls; walls still glowing, semi-molten. The girl piled a stool upon the table and stood upon it, reached upward, and seized the mailed hands extended downward toward her. Costigan heaved her up into the vessel with a powerful jerk, slammed the door shut, leaped to the controls, and the speedster darted away.

"Your armor's in that bundle there. Better put it on, and check your Lewistons and pistols--no telling what kind of jams we'll get into," he snapped, without turning. "Bradley, start talking ... all right, I've got your line. Better get your wet rags ready and get organized generally--every second will count by the time we get there. We're coming so fast that our outer plating's white hot, but it may not be fast enough, at that."

"It isn't fast enough, quite," Bradley announced, calmly. "They're coming out after me now."

"Don't fight them and probably they won't paralyze you. Keep on talking, so that I can find out where they take you."

"No good, Costigan." The voice of the old space-flea did not reveal a sign of emotion as he made his dread announcement. "They have it all figured out. They're not taking any chances at all--they're going to paral...." His voice broke off in the middle of the word.

With a bitter imprecation Costigan flashed on the powerful ultra-beam projector of the speedster and focused the plate upon Bradley's prison; careless now of detection, since the Nevians were already warned. Upon that plate he watched the Nevians carry the helpless body of the captain into a small boat, and continued to watch as they bore it into one of the largest buildings of the city. Up a series of ramps they took the still form, placing it finally upon a soft couch in an enormous and heavily guarded central hall. Costigan turned to his companion, Clio, and even through the helmets she could see plainly the white agony of his expression. He moistened his lips and tried twice to speak--tried and failed: but he made no move either to cut off their power or to change their direction.

"Of course," she approved, steadily. "We are going through. I know that you _want_ to run with me, but if you actually did it, I would never want to see you or hear of you again, and you would hate me forever."

"Hardly that." The anguish did not leave his eyes and his voice was hoarse and strained, but his hands did not vary the course of the speedster by so much as a hair's breadth. "You're the finest little fellow that ever waved a plume, and I would love you no matter what happened. I'd trade my immortal soul to the devil if it would get you out of this mess, but we're both in it up to our necks and we can't dog it now. If they kill him we beat it--he and I both knew that it was on the chance of that happening that I took you first--but as long as all three of us are alive it's all three or none."

"Of course," she said again, as steadily, thrilled this time to the depths of her being by the sheer manhood of him who had thus simply voiced his Code; a man of such fiber that neither love of life, nor the infinitely more powerful love of her which she knew he bore, could make him lower its high standard.

"We are going through. Forget that I am a woman. We are three human beings, fighting a world full of monsters. I am simply one of us three. I will steer your ship, fire your projectors, or throw your bombs. What can I do best?"

"Throw bombs," he directed, briefly. He knew what must be done were they to have even the slightest chance of winning clear. "I'm going to blast a hole down into the auditorium, and when I do you stand by that port and start dropping bottles of perfume. Throw a couple of big ones right down the shaft I make, and the rest of them most anywhere, after I cut the wall open. They'll do good wherever they hit, land or water."

"But Captain Bradley--he'll be gassed, too." Her fine eyes were troubled.

"Can't be helped. I've got the antidote, and it'll work any time under an hour. That'll be lots of time--if we aren't gone in less than ten minutes we'll be staying here. They're bringing in platoons of militia in full armor, and if we don't beat those boys to it we're in for plenty of grief. All right--start throwing!"

The speedster had come to a halt directly over the imposing edifice within which Bradley was incarcerated, and a mighty beam had flared downward, digging a fiery well through floor after floor of stubborn metal. The ceiling of the amphitheater pierced, the beam expired; and down into that assembly hall there dropped two canisters of Vee-Two; to crash and to fill its atmosphere with imperceptible death. Then the beam flashed on again, this time at maximum power, and with it Costigan burned away half of the gigantic building. Burned it away until room above room gaped open, shelf-like, to outer atmosphere; the great hall now resembling an over-size pigeon-hole surrounded by smaller ones. Into that largest pigeon-hole the speedster darted, and cushioned desks and benches crashed down, crushed flat under its enormous weight as it came to rest upon the floor.

Every available guard had been thrown into that room, regardless of customary occupation or of equipment. Most of them had been ordinary watchmen, not even wearing masks, and all such were already down. Many, however, were protected by masks, and a few were dressed in full armor. But no portable armor could mount defenses of sufficient power to withstand the awful force of the speedster's weapons, and one flashing swing of a projector swept the hall almost clear of life.

"Can't shoot very close to Bradley with this big beam, but I'll mop up on the rest of them by hand. Stay here and cover me, Clio!" Costigan ordered, and went to open the door.

"I can't--I won't!" Clio replied instantly. "I don't know the controls well enough. I'd kill you or Captain Bradley, sure; but I _can_ shoot, and I'm going to!" and she leaped out, close upon his heels.

Thus, flaming Lewiston in one hand and barking automatic in the other, the two mailed figures advanced toward Bradley; now doubly helpless: paralyzed by his enemies and gassed by his friends. For a time the Nevians melted away before them, but as they approached more nearly the couch, upon which the captain was, they encountered six figures encased in armor fully as capable as their own. The beams of the Lewistons rebounded from that armor in futile pyrotechnics, the bullets of the automatics spattered and exploded impotently against it. And behind that single line of armored guards were massed perhaps twenty unarmored, but masked, soldiers; and scuttling up the ramps leading into the hall were coming the platoons of heavily-armored figures which Costigan had previously seen.

Decision instantly made, Costigan ran back toward the speedster, but he was not deserting his companions.

"Keep the good work up!" he instructed the girl as he ran. "I'll pick those jaspers off with a pencil ray and then stand off the bunch that's coming while you rub out the rest of that crew there and drag Bradley back here."

Back at the control panel, he trained a narrow, but intensely dense pencil of livid flame, and one by one the six armored figures fell. Then, knowing that Clio could handle the remaining opposition, he devoted his attention to the reenforcements so rapidly approaching from the sides. Again and again the heavy beam lashed out, now upon this side, now upon that, and in its flaming path Nevians disappeared. And not only Nevians--in the incredible energy of that beam's blast, floor, walls, ramps, and every material thing vanished in clouds of thick and brilliant vapor. The room temporarily clear of foes, he sprang again to Clio's assistance, but her task was nearly done. She had "rubbed out" all opposition and, tugging lustily at Bradley's feet, had already dragged him almost to the side of the speedster.

"'At-a-girl, Clio!" cheered Costigan, as he picked up the burly captain and tossed him through the doorway. "Highly useful, girl of my dreams, as well as ornamental. In with you, and we'll start out to go places!"

But getting the speedster out of the now completely ruined hall proved to be much more of a task than driving it in had been, for scarcely had the Terrestrials closed their locks than a section of the building collapsed behind them, cutting off their retreat. Nevian submarines and airships were beginning to arrive upon the scene, and were raying the building viciously in an attempt to entrap or to crush the Terrestrials in its ruins. Costigan managed finally to blast his way out, but the Nevians had had time to assemble in force and he was met by a concentrated storm of beams and of metal from every inimical weapon within range.

But not for nothing had Conway Costigan selected for his dash for liberty the craft which, save only for the two immense interstellar cruisers, was the most powerful vessel ever built upon red Nevia. And not for nothing had he studied minutely and to the last, least detail every item of its controls and of its armament during wearily long days and nights of solitary imprisonment. He had studied it under test, in action, and at rest; studied it until he knew thoroughly its every possibility--and what a ship it was! The iron-driven generators of his shielding screens handled with ease the terrific load of the Nevians' assault, his polycyclic screens were proof against any material projectile, and the machines supplying his offensive beams with power were more than equal to their tasks. Driven now at full rating those frightful weapons lashed out against the Nevian blocking the way, and under their impacts her screens flared brilliantly through the spectrum and went down. And in the instant of their failure the enemy vessel was literally blown into nothingness--no unprotected metal, however resistant, could exist for a moment in the pathway of those iron-driven tornadoes of pure energy.

Ship after ship of the Nevians plunged toward the speedster in desperately suicidal attempts to ram her down, but each met the same flaming fate before its mass could collide with the ship of the Terrestrials. Then, from the grouped submarines far below, there reached up red rods of force, which seized the space-ship and began relentlessly to draw her down.

"What are they doing that for, Conway? _They_ can't fight us!"

"They don't want to fight us. They want to hold us, but I know what to do about that, too," and the powerful tractor rods snapped as a plane of lurid light drove through them. Upward now at the highest permissible velocity the speedster leaped, and past the few ships remaining above her she dodged; there was nothing now between her and the freedom of boundless space.

"You did it, Conway; you did it!" Clio exulted. "Oh, Conway, you're just simply wonderful!"

"I haven't done it yet," Costigan cautioned her. "The worst is yet to come. Nerado. He's why they wanted to hold us back, and why I was in such a hurry to get away. That boat of his is bad medicine, girl, and we want to put plenty of kilometers behind us before he gets started."

"But do you think he will chase us?"

"_Think_ so? I _know_ so! The mere facts, that we are rare specimens and that he told us that we were going to stay there all the rest of our lives, would make him chase us clear to Dustheimer's Nebula. Besides that, we stepped on their toes pretty heavily before we left. We know altogether too much now to be let get back to Tellus; and finally, they'd all die of acute enlargement of the spleen if we get away with this prize ship of theirs. I hope to tell you they'll chase us!"

He fell silent, devoting his whole attention to his piloting, driving his craft onward at such velocity that its outer plating held steadily at the highest point of temperature compatible with safety. Soon they were out in open space, hurtling toward the sun under the drive of every possible iota of power, and Costigan took off his armor and turned toward the helpless body of the captain.

"He looks so ... so ... so _dead_, Conway! Are you really sure that you can bring him to?"

"Absolutely. Lots of time yet. Just three simple squirts in the right places will do the trick." He took from a locked compartment of his armor a small steel box, which housed a surgeon's hypodermic and three vials. One, two, three, he injected small, but precisely measured amounts of the fluids into the three vital localities, then placed the inert form upon a deeply cushioned couch.

"There! That'll take care of the gas in five or six hours. The paralysis will wear off before that, so he'll be all right when he wakes up; and we're going away from here with every watt of power we can put out. We have done everything I know how to do, for the present."

Then only did Costigan turn and look down, directly into Clio's eyes. Wide, eloquent blue eyes that gazed back up into his, tender and unafraid; eyes freighted with the oldest message of woman to chosen man. His hard young face softened wonderfully as he stared at her; there were two quick steps and they were in each other's arms. Clio's lithely rounded form nestled against Costigan's powerful body as his mighty arms tightened around her; his neck and shoulder were no less enthusiastically clasped, and less strongly only because of her woman's slighter musculature. Lips upon eager lips, blue eyes to gray, motionless they stood clasped in ecstasy; thinking nothing of the dreadful past, nothing of the fearful future, conscious only of the glorious, the wonderful present.

"Clio mine ... darling ... girl, girl, how I love you!" Costigan's deep voice was husky with emotion. "I haven't kissed you for seven thousand years! I don't rate you, by hundreds of steps; but if I can just get you out of this mess, I swear by all the space...."

"You needn't, lover. Rate _me_? Good Heavens, Conway? It's just the other way...."

"Chop it!" he commanded in her ear. "I'm still dizzy at the idea of your loving me at all, to say nothing of loving me _this_ way! But you do, and that's all I ask, here or hereafter!"

"Love you? _Love_ you!" Their mutual embrace tightened and her low voice thrilled brokenly as she went on: "Conway, dearest.... I can't say a thing, but you know.... Oh, Conway!"

After a time Clio drew a long and tremulous, but supremely happy breath as the realities of their predicament once more obtruded themselves upon her consciousness. She released herself gently from Costigan's arms.

"Do you really think that there is a chance of us getting back to the earth, so that we can be together ... always?"

"A chance, yes. A probability, no," he replied, unequivocally. "It depends upon two things. First, how much of a start we got on Nerado. His ship is the biggest and fastest thing I ever saw, and if he strips her down and drives her--which he will--he'll catch us long before we can make Tellus. On the other hand, I gave Rodebush a lot of data, and if he and Lyman Cleveland can add it to their own stuff and get that super-ship of ours rebuilt in time, they'll be out here on the prowl; and they'll have what can give even Nerado plenty of argument. No use worrying about it, anyway. We won't know anything until we can detect one or the other of them, and then will be the time to do something about it."

"If Nerado catches us, will you...." She paused.

"Rub you out? I will not. Even if he does catch us, and takes us back to Nevia, I won't. There's lots more time coming onto the clock. Nerado won't hurt either of us badly enough to leave scars, either physical, mental, or moral. I'd kill you in a second if it were Roger; he's dirty and he's thoroughly bad. But Nerado's a good enough old scout, in his way. He's big and he's clean. You know, I could really like that fish, if I could meet him on terms of equality sometime?"

"_I_ couldn't!" she declared, vigorously. "He's crawly and scaly and snaky; and he smells so ... so...."

"So rank and fishy?" Costigan laughed deeply. "Details, girl; mere details. I've seen people who looked like money in the bank and who smelled like a bouquet of violets that you couldn't trust half the length of Nerado's neck."

"But look what he did to us!" she protested. "And they weren't trying to recapture us back there; they were trying to kill us."

"That was perfectly all right, what he did and what they did--what else could they have done?" he wanted to know. "And while you're looking, look at what we did to them--plenty, I'd say. But we all had it to do, and neither side will blame the other for doing it. He's a square shooter, I tell you."

"Well, maybe, but I don't like him a bit, and let's not talk about him any more. Let's talk about us. Remember what you said once, when you advised me to 'let you lay,' or whatever it was?" Woman-like, she wished to dip again lightly into the waters of pure emotion, even though she had such a short time before led the man out of their profoundest depths. But Costigan, into whose hard life love of woman had never before entered, had not yet recovered sufficiently from his soul-shaking plunge to follow her lead. Inarticulate, distrusting his newly found supreme happiness, he must needs stay out of those enchanted waters or plunge again. And he was afraid to plunge--diffident, still deeming himself unworthy of the miracle of this wonder-girl's love--even though every fiber of his being shrieked its demand to feel again that slender body in his clasping arms. He did not consciously think those thoughts. He acted them without thinking; they were inherent in his personality.

"I do remember, and I still think it's a sound idea, even though I am too far gone now to let you put it into effect," he assured her, half seriously. He kissed her, tenderly and reverently, then studied her carefully. "But you look as though you'd been on a Martian picnic. When did you eat last?"

"I don't remember, exactly. This morning, I think."

"Or maybe last night, or yesterday morning? I thought so! Bradley and I can eat anything that's chewable, and drink anything that will pour, but you can't. I'll scout around and see if I can't fix up something that you'll be able to eat."

He rummaged through the store-rooms, emerging with sundry viands from which he prepared a highly satisfactory meal.

"Think you can sleep now, sweetheart?" After supper, once more within the circle of Costigan's arms, Clio nodded her head against his shoulder.

"Of course I can, dear. Now that you are with me, out here alone, I'm not a bit afraid any more. You will get us back to the earth some way, sometime; I just know that you will. Good-night, Conway."

"Good-night, Clio ... little sweetheart," he whispered, and went back to Bradley's side.

In due time the captain recovered consciousness, and slept. Then for days the speedster flashed on toward our distant solar system; days during which her wide-flung detector screens remained cold.

"I don't know whether I'm afraid they'll hit something or afraid that they won't," Costigan remarked more than once, but finally those tenuous sentinels did in fact encounter an interfering vibration. Along the detector line a visibeam sped, and Costigan's face hardened as he saw the unmistakable outline of Nerado's interstellar cruiser, far behind them.

"Well, a stern chase always was a long one," Costigan said finally. "He can't catch us for plenty of days yet ... now what?" for the alarms of the detectors had broken out anew. There was still another point of interference to be investigated. Costigan traced it; and there, almost dead ahead of them, between them and their sun, nearing them at the incomprehensible rate of the sum of the two vessels' velocities, came another cruiser of the Nevians!

"Must be the sister-ship, coming back from our System with a load of iron," Costigan deduced. "Heavily loaded as she is, we may be able to dodge her; and she's coming so fast that if we can stay out of her range we'll be all right--she won't be able to stop for probably three or four days. But if our super-ship is anywhere in these parts, now's the time for her to rally 'round!"

He gave the speedster all the side-thrust she would take; then, putting every available communicator tube behind a tight beam, he drove it sunward and began sending out a long-continued call to his fellows of Triplanetary's Secret Service.

Nearer and nearer the Nevian flashed, trying with all her power to intercept the speedster; and it soon became evident that, heavily laden though she was, she could make enough sideway to bring her within range at the time of meeting.

"Of course, they've got partial neutralization of inertia, the same as we have," Costigan cogitated, "and by the way he's coming I'd say that he had orders to blow us out of the ether--he knows as well as we do that he can't capture us alive at anything like the relative velocities we've got now. I can't give her any more side thrust without overloading the gravity controls, so overloaded they've got to be. Strap down, you two, because they may go out entirely."

"Do you think that you can pull away from them, Conway?" Clio was staring in horrified fascination into the plate, watching the pictured vessel increase in size, moment by moment.

"I don't know, girl, but I'm going to try. Just in case we don't, though, I'm going to keep on yelling for help. In solid? All right, boat, DO YOUR STUFF!"

CHAPTER XIII

The Meeting of the Giants

"Check your blast, Fred, I think I hear something trying to come through!" Cleveland called out, sharply. For days the _Boise_ had torn through the illimitable reaches of empty space, and now the long vigil of the keen-eared listeners was to be ended. Rodebush cut off his power, and through the deafening roar of tube-noise an almost inaudible voice made itself heard.

" ... all the help you can give us. Samms--Cleveland--Rodebush--anybody of Triplanetary who can hear me, listen! This is Costigan, with Miss Marsden and Captain Bradley, heading for where we think the sun is, from right ascension about six hours, declination about plus fourteen degrees. Distance unknown, but probably hundreds of light-years. Trace my call. One Nevian ship is overhauling us slowly, another is coming toward us from the sun. We may or may not be able to dodge it, but we need all the help you can give us. Samms--Rodebush--Cleveland--anybody of Triplanetary...."

Endlessly the faint, faint voice went on, but Rodebush and Cleveland were no longer listening. Sensitive ultra-loops had been swung, and along the indicated line shot Triplanetary's super-ship at a velocity which she had never before even approached; the utterly incomprehensible, almost incalculable velocity attained by inertialess matter, driven through an almost perfect vacuum by the _Boise_'s maximum projector blast--a blast which would lift her stupendous normal tonnage against a gravity five times that of earth's! At the full frightful measure of that velocity the super-ship literally annihilated distance, while ahead of her the furiously driven, but scarcely faster spy-ray beam tore on in quest of the three Terrestrials who were calling for help.

"Got any idea how fast we're going?" Rodebush demanded, glancing up for an instant from the observation plate. "We should be able to see him, since we could hear him, and our range is certainly as great as anything he can have."

"No, can't figure velocity without any reliable data on how many atoms of matter exist per cubic meter out here." Cleveland was staring at the calculator. "It's constant, of course, at the value at which the friction of the medium is equal to our thrust. Incidentally, we can't hold it long. We're running a temperature, which shows that we're stepping along faster than anybody ever computed before. Taking Throckmorton's estimates it figures somewhere near the order of magnitude of ten to the twenty-seventh. Fast enough, anyway, so you'd better bend an eye on that plate. Even after you see him you won't know anything about where he really is, because we don't know any of the velocities involved--our own, his, or that of the beam--and we may be right on top of him."

"Or, if we are outrunning the beam, we won't see him at all. That makes it nice piloting."

"How are you going to handle things when we get there?"

"Lock to them and take them aboard if we're in time. If not, if they are fighting already--_there they are_!"

The picture of the speedster's control room flashed upon the plate and Costigan's voice greeted them from the speaker.

"Hello, fellows, welcome to our city! Where are you?"

"We don't know," Cleveland snapped back, "and we don't know where you are, either. Can't figure anything without data. I see you're still breathing air. Where are the Nevians? How much time we got yet?"

"Not enough, I'm afraid. By the looks of things they will be within range of us in a couple of hours, and you're so far away yet that it took our voices four minutes and about fifty seconds to make the round trip, _on the ultra_! Play that on your calculator, Lyman! You haven't even touched our detector screen yet. I'm mighty glad to have seen you fellows again, though, anyway."

"A couple of hours!" In his relief Cleveland almost shouted the words. "That's time to burn. We can be clear out of the Galaxy in less than...." He broke off at a yell from Rodebush.

"Broadcast, Conway, broadcast!" that worthy had cried, as Costigan's image had disappeared utterly from his plate.

Now he cut off the _Boise_'s power, stopping her instantaneously in mid-space, but the connection had been broken. Costigan could not possibly have heard the orders to change his beam signal to a broadcast, so that they could pick it up; nor would it have done any good if he had heard and had obeyed. So immeasurably great had been their velocity that they had flashed past the speedster without seeing it, even upon the ultra-plates, and now they were unknown billions of miles beyond the fugitives they had come so far to help--far beyond the range of any possible broadcast. But Cleveland had understood instantly what had happened. He now had a little data upon which to work, and his fingers were flying over the keys of the calculator.

"Back blast, maximum, seventeen seconds!" he directed, crisply. "Not exact, of course, but that'll put us close enough to find 'em with our detectors!"

Then for the calculated seventeen seconds the super-ship retraced her path, at the same awful speed with which she had come so far. The blast expired and there, plainly limned upon the observation plates, was the Nevian speedster.

"As a computer you're good," Rodebush applauded. "So close that we can't use the neutralizers to catch him. If we use a dyne of driving force we'll overshoot him a million kilometers before I can snap the switches out."

"And yet he's so far away and going so fast that if we keep our inertia on it'll take all day at full drive to overtake him." Cleveland was frankly puzzled. "What to do? Shunt in a potentiometer?"

"No, we don't need it." Rodebush turned to the transmitter. "Costigan! We are going to take hold of you with a very light tractor. Don't cut it!"

"A tractor--inertialess?" Cleveland wondered.

"Why not?" Rodebush launched the tractor, set at its absolute minimum of power, and threw in his master switches.

While hundreds of thousands of miles separating the two vessels and the tractor beam was exerting the least effort of which it was capable, yet the super-ship leaped toward the smaller craft at a pace which covered that distance in the twinkling of an eye. So rapidly were the objectives enlarging upon the plates that the automatic focusing devices could scarcely function rapidly enough to keep them in place. Cleveland flinched involuntarily and seized his arm-rests in a spasmodic clutch as he watched this, the first inertialess space-approach; and even Rodebush, who knew better than anyone else what to expect, held his breath and swallowed hard at the unbelievable rate at which the two vessels were rushing together.

And if these two, who had rebuilt the space-flyer, could hardly control themselves, what of the three in the speedster, who knew nothing whatever of the super-ship's potentialities? Clio, staring into the plate with Costigan, uttered a piercing shriek, as she sank her fingers into his shoulders. Bradley swore a mighty deep-space oath and braced himself against certain annihilation. Costigan stared for an instant, unable to believe his eyes, then his hand darted to the contacts which would cut the beam. Too late. Before his flying fingers could reach the studs the _Boise_ was upon them; had struck them in direct central impact. Moving at the full measure of her unthinkable velocity though the super-ship was at the moment of impact, yet the most delicate recording instruments of the speedster could not detect the slightest shock as the enormous globe struck the comparatively tiny torpedo and clung to it; accommodating instantly and effortlessly her own terrific pace to that of the smaller and infinitely slower craft. Clio sobbed in relief and Costigan, one arm around her, sighed hugely.

"Hey, you space-fleas!" he cried. "Glad to see you and all that, but you might as well kill a man outright as scare him to death! So that's the super-ship, huh? SOME ship!"

"Hello, Conway!" "Clear ether, Conway!" The two scientists answered the hail of their fellow.

"I didn't realize that an inertialess approach would be quite such a terrifying spectacle, or I would have warned you," Rodebush went on. "Yes, thanks to you, the super-ship works as she should, at last. But you had better put on your suits and transfer. You might get your things ready...."

"'Things' is good!" Costigan laughed, and Clio giggled sunnily.

"We've made so many transfers already that what you see us in is all we have," Bradley explained. "We'll bring ourselves, and we'll hurry; that Nevian is coming up fast."

"Is there anything on this ship you fellows want?" Costigan asked.

"There may be, but we haven't any locks big enough to let her inside and we haven't time to study her now. You might leave her controls in neutral, so that Lyman can calculate her position if we should want her later on."

"All right." The three armor-clad figures stepped into the _Boise_'s open lock, the tractor beam was cut off, and the speedster flashed away from the now stationary super-ship.

"Better let formalities go for a while," Captain Bradley interrupted the general introduction taking place. "I was scared out of nine years' growth when I saw you coming at us, and maybe I've still got the humps; but that Nevian is coming up fast, and if you don't already know it I can tell you that he's no light cruiser."

"That's so, too," Costigan concurred. "Have you fellows got enough stuff so that you think you can take him? You've got the legs on him, anyway--you can certainly run if you want to!"

"Run?" Cleveland laughed. "We have a bone of our own to pick with that ship. We licked her to a standstill once, until we burned out a set of generators, and since we got them fixed we've been chasing her all over space. We were chasing her when we picked up your call. See there? She's doing the running."

The Nevian was running, in truth. Her commander had seen and had recognized the great vessel which had flashed out of nowhere to the rescue of the three Terrestrials; and, having once been at grips with that vengeful super-dreadnaught, he had little stomach for another encounter. Therefore his side-thrust was now being exerted in the opposite direction; he was frankly trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Triplanetary's formidable cruiser. In vain. A light tractor was clamped on and the _Boise_ flashed up to close range before Rodebush threw on her inertia and Cleveland brought the two vessels relatively to rest by increasing gradually his tractor's pull. And this time the Nevian could not cut the tractor. Again that shearing plane of force bit into it and tore at it, but it neither yielded nor broke. The rebuilt generators of Number Four were designed to carry the load, and they carried it. And again Triplanetary's every mighty weapon was brought into play.

The "cans" were thrown, ultra-and infra-beams were driven, the furious macro-beam gnawed hungrily at the Nevian's defenses; and one by one those defenses went down. In desperation the enemy commander threw his every generator behind a polycyclic screen; only to see Cleveland's even more powerful drill bore relentlessly through it. Punctured that last defense, the end came soon. A secondary SX7 beam was now in place on mighty Ten's inner rings, and one fierce blast blew a hole completely through the Nevian cruiser. Into that hole entered Adlington's terrific bombs and their gruesome fellows, and where they entered, life departed. All defenses vanished, and under the blasts of the _Boise_'s projectors, now unopposed, the metal of the Nevian vessel exploded instantly into a widely spreading cloud of vapor. Sparkling vapor, with perhaps here and there a droplet or two of material which had only been liquefied.

So passed the sister-ship, and Rodebush turned his plates upon the vessel of Nerado. But that highly intelligent amphibian had seen all that had occurred. He had long since given over the pursuit of the speedster, and he did not rush in to do hopeless battle beside his fellow Nevians against the Terrestrials. His analytical detectors had written down each detail of every weapon and of every screen employed; and even while prodigious streamers of red force were raving out from his vessel, braking her terrific progress and swinging her around in an immense circle back toward far Nevia, his scientists and mechanics were doubling and redoubling the power of his already Titanic installations, to match and if possible to overmatch those of Triplanetary's super-dreadnaught.

"Do we kill him now or do we let him suffer a while longer?" Costigan demanded.

"I don't think so, yet," replied Rodebush. "Would you, Lyman?"

"Not yet," replied Cleveland, grimly, reading the thought of the other and agreeing with it. "Let him pilot us to Nevia; we might not be able to find it without a guide. While we're at it we want to so pulverize that crowd that if they never come near the Solarian system again they'll think it's twenty minutes too soon!"

Thus it was that the _Boise_, under only a few dynes of propulsion, pursued the Nevian ship. Apparently exerting every effort, she never came quite within range of the fleeing raider; yet never was she so far behind that the Nevian space-ship was not in clear register upon her observation plates. Nor was Nerado alone in strengthening his vessel. Costigan knew well and respected highly the Nevian scientist-captain, and at his suggestion the entire time of the long and uneventful flight was spent in re-enforcing the super-ship's armament to the iron-driven limit of theoretical and mechanical possibility.

Thus, when Nevia and her hot, blue sun appeared upon his plates Rodebush was ready for any emergency, and hurled his battleship upon the Nevian with every weapon aflame. But so was Nerado ready; and, unlike her sister-ship, his vessel was manned by scientists well versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought. Beams, rods, and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed, and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtain of annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full beam control; only to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be rayed into nothingness, or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens. Both vessels were equipped completely with iron-driven mechanisms; both were manned by scientists capable of wringing the last possible watt of power from their sources. They were approximately equal in size, and each ship now wielded the theoretical ultimate of power for her mass; therefore neither could harm the other, furiously though each was trying. And more and more nearly they were approaching the red atmosphere of the world of the amphibians. Down into that crimson blanket the two warring space-ships dropped, down toward a city which Costigan recognized as that in which Nerado made his headquarters.

"Better hold off a bit," Costigan cautioned. "If I know that bird at all, he's cooking up something," and even as he spoke there shot upward from the city a multitude of flashing balls. The Nevians had mastered the secret of the explosive of the fishes of the greater deeps and were launching it in a veritable storm against the Terrestrial visitor.

"Those?" asked Rodebush, calmly. The detonating balls of destruction were literally annihilating even the atmosphere beyond the polycyclic screen, but that barrier was scarcely affected.

"No, that," pointing out a hemispherical dome which, redly translucent, surrounded a group of buildings towering high above their neighbors. "Neither those high towers nor those screens were there the last time I was in this town. They're stalling for time down there, that's all those fireballs are for. Good sign, too--maybe they aren't ready for us yet. If not, you'd better take 'em while the taking's good; and if they _are_ ready for us, we'd better get out of here while we're all in one piece."

And in fact Nerado had been in touch with the scientists of his city; had been instructing them in the construction of converters and generators of such weight and power that they could crush even the defenses of the super-ship. They were not, however, quite done; the entirely unsuspected possibilities of speed inherent in absolute inertialessness had not entered into Nerado's calculations.

"Better drop a few cans down on that dome, fellows, before they make trouble for us," suggested Rodebush to his gunners.

"We can't," came Adlington's instant reply. "We've been trying it, but that's a polycyclic screen. Can you drill it? If you can, I've got a real bomb here--that special we built--that will do the trick if you can protect it from their beams until it gets down into the water."

"I'll try it," Cleveland answered, at a nod from the physicist. "I couldn't drill Nerado's polycyclics, but I couldn't use any momentum on him. Couldn't ram him--he fell back with my thrust. But that screen down there can't back off, so maybe I can work on it. Get your special ready, and hang on, everybody!"

The _Boise_ looped upward, and from an altitude of miles dove downward through a storm of force-balls, rays, and shells; a dive checked abruptly as the hollow tube of energy, which was Cleveland's drill, snarled savagely down ahead of her and struck the shielding hemisphere with a grinding, lightning-splitting shock. As it struck, backed by all the enormous momentum of the plunging space-ship and driven by the full power of her mightiest generators, it bored in, clawing and gouging viciously through the tissue of that rigid and unyielding barrier of pure energy. Then, mighty drill and plunging mass against iron-driven wall, eye-tearing and furiously spectacular warfare was waged. Well it was for Triplanetary, that day, that its super ship carried ample supply of allotropic iron; well it was that her originally Gargantuan converters and generators had been doubled and quadrupled in power on the long Nevian way! For that oven-girdled fortress was powered to withstand any conceivable assault; but the _Boise_'s power and momentum were now inconceivable, and every watt and every dyne was solidly behind that hellishly flaming, that voraciously tearing, that irresistibly ravening cylinder of energy incredible!

Through the Nevian shield that cylinder gnawed its frightful way, and down its protecting length there drove Adlington's "Special" bomb. "Special" it was indeed; so great of girth that it could barely pass through the central orifice of Ten's mighty projector, so heavily charged with sensitized atomic iron that its detonation upon any planet would not have been considered for an instant if that planet's integrity meant anything to its attackers. Down the shielding pipe of force the "Special" screamed under full propulsion, and beneath the surface of Nevia's ocean it plunged.

"Cut!" yelled Adlington, and as the scintillating drill expired, the bomber snapped his detonating switch.

For a moment the effect of the explosion seemed unimportant. A dull, low rumble was all that was to be heard of a concussion that jarred red Nevia to her very center; and all that could be seen was a slow heaving of the water. But that heaving did not cease. Slowly, _so_ slowly it seemed to the observers now high in the heavens, the waters rose up and parted; revealing a vast chasm blown deep into the ocean's rocky bed. Higher and higher the lazy, mountains of water reared; effortlessly to pick up, to smash, to grind into fragments, and finally to toss aside every building, every structure, every scrap of material substance pertaining to the whole Nevian city.

Flattened out, driven backward for miles the tortured waters were urged, leaving exposed bare ground and broken rock where once had been the ocean's busy floor; while tremendous blasts of incandescent gas raved upward, buffeting even the enormous masses of the two space-ships, poised by their breathless crews so high above the site of the explosion. Then the displaced millions of tons of water rushed back into that newly rived pit, seeming to seek in that mad rush to make even more complete the already total destruction of the city. The raging torrents poured into that yawning cavern, filled it, and piled mountainously above it; receding and piling up, again and again, causing tidal waves which swept a full half of Nevia's mighty, watery globe.

The city forever silenced, Rodebush again directed his weapons upon Nerado's vessel, but the Nevian was no longer fighting. For the first time in that long and bitter engagement, not a Nevian beam was in operation. His screens, however, were as capable as ever, and after a few fruitless attempts to make an impression upon them, Rodebush cut off his own offensive and turned to Costigan.

"What do you make of it, Conway? You know these people better than we do; what are they up to?"

"I wish to talk to you," Nerado's voice came from the speaker, "and I could not do so while the beams were operating. You are, I now perceive, a much higher form of life than any of us had thought possible; a form perhaps as high in evolution as our own. It is a pity that we did not meet you when we first neared your planet, so that much life, both Tellurian and Nevian, might have been spared. But what is past cannot be recalled. As reasoning beings, however, you will see the futility of continuing a contest in which neither of us is capable of injuring the other. You may, of course, destroy more of our Nevian cities, in which case I should be compelled to go and destroy similarly upon your earth; but, to reasoning minds, such a course of procedure is sheerest folly."

Rodebush cut the communicator beam.

"Does he mean it?" he demanded of Costigan. "It sounds reasonable, but...."

"But fishy," broke in Cleveland. "Altogether too reasonable for a...."

"Yes, he means it; every word of it," interrupted Costigan in turn. "That's the way they are. Reasonable, passionless. Funny--they lack a lot of things we have, but they've got a lot of things that I wish more of us Tellurians had too. Give me the plate--I'll talk for Triplanetary," and the beam was restored.

"Captain Nerado." he greeted the Nevian commander. "Having been with you and among your people, I know that you mean what you say and that you speak for your race. Similarly, I believe that I can speak for the Triplanetary Council--the government of three of the planets of our solar system--in saying that there need be no more conflict between our peoples. I also was compelled by circumstances to do certain things which I now wish could be undone; but as you have said, the past is past. Our two races have much to gain from each other by friendly exchanges of materials and of ideas, while we can expect nothing except mutual extermination, if we elect to continue this warfare. I offer you the friendship of Triplanetary. Will you release your screens and come aboard to sign a treaty?"

"I will come; my screens are down." Rodebush likewise cut off his power, although somewhat apprehensively, and a Nevian lifeboat entered the main airlock of the _Boise_.

* * * * *

Then, at a table in the control room of Triplanetary's first super-ship, there was written the first Inter-Systemic Treaty. Upon one side the three Nevians; amphibious, cone-headed, loop-necked, scale-bodies, four-legged things to us monstrosities: upon the other the three humans, air-breathing, rounded-headed, shortnecked, smooth-bodied, two-legged creatures equally monstrous to the fastidious Nevians. Yet each of these representatives, of two races so different, felt respect for the other race increase within him minute by minute as the conversation went on.

The Nevians had destroyed Pittsburgh, but Adlington's bomb had blown an equally populous Nevian city out of existence. One Nevian vessel had wiped out an entire unit of Triplanetary's fleet; but Costigan, practically unaided, had depopulated one Nevian city and had seriously damaged another. He had also beamed down many Nevian ships. Therefore loss of life and material could be balanced. The Solarian system was rich in iron, to which the Nevians were welcome; red Nevia possessed abundant stores of substances which upon earth were extremely rare and of vital importance. Therefore commerce was to be encouraged. The Nevians had knowledges and skills unknown to earthly science, but were entirely ignorant of many things, to us commonplace. Therefore interchange of students and of books was highly desirable. And so on.

Thus was signed the Triplanetario-Nevian Treaty of Eternal Peace. Nerado and his two companions were escorted ceremoniously to their vessel, and the _Boise_ took off in an inertialess dash toward earth, bearing the good news that the Nevian menace was no more.

Clio, now a hardened space-flea, immune even to the horrible nausea of inertialessness, wriggled lithely in the curve of Costigan's arm and laughed up at him.

"You can talk all you want to, Conway, but I don't like them a bit. They give me the purple jitters! I suppose that they are really estimable folks; talented, cultured, and everything; but just the same I'll bet that it will be a long, long time before anybody on earth will really, truly _like_ them!"

       VORTEX BLASTER

by E. E. SMITH, Ph.D.

_Author of "The Skylark," "Skylark Three," "The Skylark of Valeron," the Lensman stories, etc._

Safety devices that do not protect.

The "unsinkable" ships that, before the days of Bergenholm and of atomic and cosmic energy, sank into the waters of the earth.

More particularly, safety devices which, while protecting against one agent of destruction, attract magnet-like another and worse. Such as the armored cable within the walls of a wooden house. It protects the electrical conductors within against accidental external shorts; but, inadequately grounded as it must of necessity be, it may attract and upon occasion has attracted the stupendous force of lightning. Then, fused, volatilized, flaming incandescent throughout the length, breadth, and height of a dwelling, that dwelling's existence thereafter is to be measured in minutes.

Specifically, four lightning rods. The lightning rods protecting the chromium, glass, and plastic home of Neal Cloud. Those rods were adequately grounded, grounded with copper-silver cables the bigness of a strong man's arm; for Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, knew his lightning and he was taking no chances whatever with the safety of his lovely wife and their three wonderful kids.

He did not know, he did not even suspect, that under certain conditions of atmospheric potential and of ground-magnetic stress his perfectly designed lightning-rod system would become a super-powerful magnet for flying vortices of atomic disintegration.

And now Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, sat at his desk in a strained, dull apathy. His face was a yellowish-gray white, his tendoned hands gripped rigidly the arms of his chair. His eyes, hard and lifeless, stared unseeingly past the small, three-dimensional block portrait of all that had made life worth living.

For his guardian against lightning had been a vortex-magnet at the moment when a luckless wight had attempted to abate the nuisance of a "loose" atomic vortex. That wight died, of course--they almost always do--and the vortex, instead of being destroyed, was simply broken up into an indefinite number of widely-scattered new vortices. And one of these bits of furious, uncontrolled energy, resembling more nearly a handful of material rived from a sun than anything else with which ordinary man is familiar, darted toward and crashed downward to earth through Neal Cloud's new house.

That home did not burn; it simply exploded. Nothing of it, in it, or around it stood a chance, for in a fractional second of time the place where it had been was a crater of seething, boiling lava--a crater which filled the atmosphere to a height of miles with poisonous vapors; which flooded all circumambient space with lethal radiations.

Cosmically, the whole thing was infinitesimal. Ever since man learned how to liberate intra-atomic energy, the vortices of disintegration had been breaking out of control. Such accidents had been happening, were happening, and would continue indefinitely to happen. More than one world, perhaps, had been or would be consumed to the last gram by such loose atomic vortices. What of that? Of what real importance are a few grains of sand to an ocean beach five thousand miles long, a hundred miles wide, and ten miles deep?

And even to that individual grain of sand called "Earth"--or, in modern parlance, "Sol Three," or "Tellus of Sol", or simply "Tellus"--the affair was of negligible importance. One man had died; but, in dying, he had added one more page to the thick bulk of negative results already on file. That Mrs. Cloud and her children had perished was merely unfortunate. The vortex itself was not yet a real threat to Tellus. It was a "new" one, and thus it would be a long time before it would become other than a local menace. And well before that could happen--before even the oldest of Tellus' loose vortices had eaten away much of her mass or poisoned much of her atmosphere, her scientists would have solved the problem. It was unthinkable that Tellus, the point of origin and the very center of Galactic Civilization, should cease to exist.

* * * * *

But to Neal Cloud the accident was the ultimate catastrophe. His personal universe had crashed in ruins; what was left was not worth picking up. He and Jo had been married for almost twenty years and the bonds between them had grown stronger, deeper, truer with every passing day. And the kids.... It _couldn't_ have happened ... fate COULDN'T do this to him ... but it had ... it could. Gone ... gone ... GONE....

And to Neal Cloud, atomic physicist, sitting there at his desk in torn, despairing abstraction, with black maggots of thought gnawing holes in his brain, the catastrophe was doubly galling because of its cruel irony. For he was second from the top in the Atomic Research Laboratory; his life's work had been a search for a means of extinguishment of exactly such loose vortices as had destroyed his all.

His eyes focussed vaguely upon the portrait. Clear, honest gray eyes ... lines of character and of humor ... sweetly curved lips, ready to smile or to kiss....

He wrenched his eyes away and scribbled briefly upon a sheet of paper. Then, getting up stiffly, he took the portrait and moved woodenly across the room to a furnace. As though enshrining it he placed the plastic block upon a refractory between the electrodes and threw a switch. After the flaming arc had done its work he turned and handed the paper to a tall man, dressed in plain gray leather, who had been watching him with quiet, understanding eyes. Significant enough to the initiated of the importance of this laboratory is the fact that it was headed by an Unattached Lensman.

"As of now, Phil, if it's QX with you."

The Gray Lensman took the document, glanced at it, and slowly, meticulously, tore it into sixteen equal pieces.

"Uh, uh, Storm," he denied, gently. "Not a resignation. Leave of absence, yes--indefinite--but not a resignation."

"Why?" It was scarcely a question; Cloud's voice was level, uninflected. "I won't be worth the paper I'd waste."

"Now, no," the Lensman conceded, "but the future's another matter. I haven't said anything so far, because to anyone who knew you and Jo as I knew you it was abundantly clear that nothing could be said." Two hands gripped and held. "For the future, though, four words were uttered long ago, that have never been improved upon. 'This, too, shall pass.'"

"You think so?"

"I don't think so, Storm--I know so. I've been around a long time. You are too good a man, and the world has too much use for you, for you to go down permanently out of control. You've got a place in the world, and you'll be back--" A thought struck the Lensman, and he went on in an altered tone. "You wouldn't--but of course you wouldn't--you couldn't."

"I don't think so. No, I won't--that never was any kind of a solution to any problem."

Nor was it. Until that moment, suicide had not entered Cloud's mind, and he rejected it instantly. His kind of man did not take the easy way out.

After a brief farewell Cloud made his way to an elevator and was whisked down to the garage. Into his big blue DeKhotinsky Sixteen Special and away.

Through traffic so heavy that front-, rear-, and side-bumpers almost touched he drove with his wonted cool skill; even though, consciously, he did not know that the other cars were there. He slowed, turned, stopped, "gave her the oof," all in correct response to flashing signals in all shapes and colors--purely automatically. Consciously, he did not know where he was going, nor care. If he thought at all, his numbed brain was simply trying to run away from its own bitter imaging--which, if he had thought at all, he would have known to be a hopeless task. But he did not think; he simply acted, dumbly, miserably. His eyes saw, optically; his body reacted, mechanically; his thinking brain was completely in abeyance.

Into a one-way skyway he rocketed, along it over the suburbs and into the transcontinental super-highway. Edging inward, lane after lane, he reached the "unlimited" way--unlimited, that is, except for being limited to cars of not less than seven hundred horsepower, in perfect mechanical condition, driven by registered, tested drivers at speeds not less than one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour--flashed his registry number at the control station, and shoved his right foot down to the floor.

* * * * *

Now everyone knows that an ordinary DeKhotinsky Sporter will do a hundred and forty honestly-measured miles in one honestly measured hour; but very few ordinary drivers have ever found out how fast one of those brutal big souped-up Sixteens can wheel. They simply haven't got what it takes to open one up.

"Storm" Cloud found out that day. He held that two-and-a-half-ton Juggernaut on the road, wide open, for two solid hours. But it didn't help. Drive as he would, he could not outrun that which rode with him. Beside him and within him and behind him. For Jo was there. Jo and the kids, but mostly Jo. It was Jo's car as much as it was his. "Babe, the big blue ox," was Jo's pet name for it; because, like Paul Bunyan's fabulous beast, it was pretty nearly six feet between the eyes. Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead--a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He couldn't stand much more of--

High over the roadway, far ahead, a brilliant octagon flared red. That meant "STOP!" in any language. Cloud eased up his accelerator, eased down his mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and a trimly-uniformed officer made a gesture.

"Sorry, sir," the policeman said, "but you'll have to detour here. There's a loose atomic vortex beside the road up ahead--

"Oh! It's Dr. Cloud!" Recognition flashed into the guard's eyes. "I didn't recognize you at first. You can go ahead, of course. It'll be two or three miles before you'll have to put on your armor; you'll know when better than anyone can tell you. They didn't tell us they were going to send for _you_. It's just a little new one, and the dope we got was that they were going to shove it off into the canyon with pressure."

"They didn't send for me." Cloud tried to smile. "I'm just driving around--haven't my armor along, even. So I guess I might as well go back."

He turned the Special around. A loose vortex--new. There might be a hundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family--the hellish spawn of that accursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow up.... Into his mind there leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like a blow from a fist.

He thought. _Really_ thought, now; cogently, intensely, clearly. If he could do it ... could actually blow out the atomic flame of an atomic vortex ... not exactly revenge, but.... By Klono's brazen bowels, it would work--it'd _have_ to work--he'd _make_ it work! And grimly, quietly, but alive in every fiber now, he drove back toward the city practically as fast as he had come away.

* * * * *

If the Lensman was surprised at Cloud's sudden reappearance in the laboratory he did not show it. Nor did he offer any comment as his erstwhile first assistant went to various lockers and cupboards, assembling meters, coils, tubes, armor, and other paraphernalia and apparatus.

"Guess that's all I'll need, Chief," Cloud remarked, finally. "Here's a blank check. If some of this stuff shouldn't happen to be in usable condition when I get done with it, fill it out to suit, will you?"

"No," and the Lensman tore up the check just as he had torn up the resignation. "If you want the stuff for legitimate purposes, you're on Patrol business and it is the Patrol's risk. If, on the other hand, you think that you're going to try to snuff a vortex, the stuff stays here. That's final, Storm."

"You're right--and wrong, Phil," Cloud stated, not at all sheepishly. "I'm going to blow out Number One vortex with duodec, yes--but I'm _really_ going to blow it out, not merely make a stab at it as an excuse for suicide, as you think."

"How?" The big Lensman's query was skepticism incarnate. "It can't be done, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident. You yourself have been the most bitterly opposed of us all to these suicidal attempts."

"I know it--I didn't have the solution myself until a few hours ago--it hit me all at once. Funny I never thought of it before; it's been right in sight all the time."

"That's the way with most problems," the Chief admitted. "Plain enough after you see the key equation. Well, I'm perfectly willing to be convinced, but I warn you that I'll take a lot of convincing--and someone else will do the work, not you."

"When I get done you'll see why I'll pretty nearly have to do it myself. But to convince you, exactly what is the knot?"

"Variability," snapped the older man. "To be effective, the charge of explosive at the moment of impact must match, within very close limits, the activity of the vortex itself. Too small a charge scatters it around, in vortices which, while much smaller than the original, are still large enough to be self-sustaining. Too large a charge simply rekindles the original vortex--still larger--in its original crater. And the activity that must be matched varies so tremendously, in magnitude, maxima, and minima, and the cycle is so erratic--ranging from seconds to hours without discoverable rhyme or reason--that all attempts to do so at any predetermined instant have failed completely. Why, even Kinnison and Cardynge and the Conference of Scientists couldn't solve it, any more than they could work out a tractor beam that could be used as a tow-line on one."

"Not exactly," Cloud demurred. "They found that it could be forecast, for a few seconds at least--length of time directly proportional to the length of the cycle in question--by an extension of the calculus of warped surfaces."

"Humph!" the Lensman snorted. "So what? What good is a ten-second forecast when it takes a calculating machine an hour to solve the equations.... Oh!" He broke off, staring.

"Oh," he repeated, slowly, "I forgot that you're a lightning calculator--a mathematical prodigy from the day you were born--who never has to use a calculating machine even to compute an orbit.... But there are other things."

"I'll say there are; plenty of them. I'd thought of the calculator angle before, of course, but there was a worse thing than variability to contend with...."

"What?" the Lensman demanded.

"Fear," Cloud replied, crisply. "At the thought of a hand-to-hand battle with a vortex my brain froze solid. Fear--the sheer, stark, natural human fear of death, that robs a man of the fine edge of control and brings on the very death that he is trying so hard to avoid. That's what had me stopped."

"Right ... you may be right," the Lensman pondered, his fingers drumming quietly upon his desk. "And you are not afraid of death--now--even subconsciously. But tell me, Storm, please, that you won't invite it."

"I will not invite it, sir, now that I've got a job to do. But that's as far as I'll go in promising. I won't make any superhuman effort to avoid it. I'll take all due precautions, for the sake of the job, but if it gets me, what the hell? The quicker it does, the better--the sooner I'll be with Jo."

"You believe that?"

"Implicitly."

"The vortices are as good as gone, then. They haven't got any more chance than Boskone has of licking the Patrol."

"I'm afraid so," almost glumly. "The only way for it to get me is for me to make a mistake, and I don't feel any coming on."

"But what's your angle?" the Lensman asked, interest lighting his eyes. "You can't use the customary attack; your time will be too short."

"Like this," and, taking down a sheet of drafting paper, Cloud sketched rapidly. "This is the crater, here, with the vortex at the bottom, there. From the observers' instruments or from a shielded set-up of my own I get my data on mass, emission, maxima, minima, and so on. Then I have them make me three duodec bombs--one on the mark of the activity I'm figuring on shooting at, and one each five percent over and under that figure--cased in neocarballoy of exactly the computed thickness to last until it gets to the center of the vortex. Then I take off in a flying suit, armored and shielded, say about here...."

"If you take off at all, you'll take off in a suit, inside a one-man flitter," the Lensman interrupted. "Too many instruments for a suit, to say nothing of bombs, and you'll need more screen than a suit can deliver. We can adapt a flitter for bomb-throwing easily enough."

"QX; that would be better, of course. In that case, I set my flitter into a projectile trajectory like this, whose objective is the center of the vortex, there. See? Ten seconds or so away, at about this point, I take my instantaneous readings, solve the equations at that particular warped surface for some certain zero time...."

"But suppose that the cycle won't give you a ten-second solution?"

"Then I'll swing around and try again until a long cycle _does_ show up."

"QX. It will, sometime."

"Sure. Then, having everything set for zero time, and assuming that the activity is somewhere near my postulated value...."

"Assume that it isn't--it probably won't be," the Chief grunted.

"I accelerate or decelerate--"

"Solving new equations all the while?"

"Sure--don't interrupt so--until at zero time the activity, extrapolated to zero time, matches one of my bombs. I cut that bomb loose, shoot myself off in a sharp curve, and Z-W-E-E-E-T--POWIE! She's out!" With an expressive, sweeping gesture.

"You hope," the Lensman was frankly dubious. "And there you are, right in the middle of that explosion, with two duodec bombs outside your armor--or just inside your flitter."

"Oh, no. I've shot them away several seconds ago, so that they explode somewhere else, nowhere near me."

"_I_ hope. But do you realize just how busy a man you are going to be during those ten or twelve seconds?"

"Fully." Cloud's face grew somber. "But I will be in full control. I won't be afraid of anything that can happen--_anything_. And," he went on, under his breath, "that's the hell of it."

"QX," the Lensman admitted finally, "you can go. There are a lot of things you haven't mentioned, but you'll probably be able to work them out as you go along. I think I'll go out and work with the boys in the lookout station while you're doing your stuff. When are you figuring on starting?"

"How long will it take to get the flitter ready?"

"A couple of days. Say we meet you there Saturday morning?"

"Saturday the tenth, at eight o'clock. I'll be there."

* * * * *

And again Neal Cloud and Babe, the big blue ox, hit the road. And as he rolled the physicist mulled over in his mind the assignment to which he had set himself.

Like fire, only worse, intra-atomic energy was a good servant, but a terrible master. Man had liberated it before he could really control it. In fact, control was not yet, and perhaps never would be, perfect. Up to a certain size and activity, yes. They, the millions upon millions of self-limiting ones, were the servants. They could be handled, fenced in, controlled; indeed, if they were not kept under an exciting bombardment and very carefully fed, they would go out. But at long intervals, for some one of a dozen reasons--science knew _so_ little, fundamentally, of the true inwardness of the intra-atomic reactions--one of these small, tame, self-limiting vortices flared, nova-like, into a large, wild, self-sustaining one. It ceased being a servant then, and became a master. Such flare-ups occurred, perhaps, only once or twice in a century on Earth; the trouble was that they were so utterly, damnably _permanent_. They never went out. And no data were ever secured: for every living thing in the vicinity of a flare-up died; every instrument and every other solid thing within a radius of a hundred feet melted down into the reeking, boiling slag of its crater.

Fortunately, the rate of growth was slow--as slow, almost, as it was persistent--otherwise Civilization would scarcely have had a planet left. And unless something could be done about loose vortices before too many years, the consequences would be really serious. That was why his laboratory had been established in the first place.

Nothing much had been accomplished so far. The tractor beam that would take hold of them had never been designed. Nothing material was of any use; it melted. Pressors worked, after a fashion: it was by the use of these beams that they shoved the vortices around, off into the waste places--unless it proved cheaper to allow the places where they had come into being to remain waste places. A few, through sheer luck, had been blown into self-limiting bits by duodec. Duodecaplylatomate, the most powerful, the most frightfully detonant explosive ever invented upon all the known planets of the First Galaxy. But duodec had taken an awful toll of life. Also, since it usually scattered a vortex instead of extinguishing it, duodec had actually caused far more damage than it had cured.

No end of fantastic schemes had been proposed, of course; of varying degrees of fantasy. Some of them sounded almost practical. Some of them had been tried; some of them were still being tried. Some, such as the perennially-appearing one of building a huge hemispherical hull in the ground under and around the vortex, installing an inertialess drive, and shooting the whole neighborhood out into space, were perhaps feasible from an engineering standpoint. They were, however, potentially so capable of making things worse that they would not be tried save as last-ditch measures. In short, the control of loose vortices was very much an unsolved problem.

* * * * *

Number One vortex, the oldest and worst upon Tellus, had been pushed out into the Badlands; and there, at eight o'clock on the tenth, Cloud started to work upon it.

The "lookout station," instead of being some such ramshackle structure as might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology, was in fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large--eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each--but the instruments! To develop them had required hundreds of man-years of time and near-miracles of research, not the least of the problems having been that of developing shielded conductors capable of carrying truly through five-ply screens of force the converted impulses of the very radiations against which those screens were most effective. For the observatory, and the one long approach to it as well, had to be screened heavily; without such protection no life could exist there.

This problem and many others had been solved, however, and there the instruments were. Every phase and factor of the vortex's existence and activity were measured and recorded continuously, throughout every minute of every day of every year. And all of these records were summed up, integrated, into the "Sigma" curve. This curve, while only an incredibly and senselessly tortuous line to the layman's eye, was a veritable mine of information to the initiate.

Cloud glanced along the Sigma curve of the previous forty-eight hours and scowled, for one jagged peak, scarcely an hour old, actually punched through the top line of the chart.

"Bad, huh, Frank?" he grunted.

"Plenty bad, Storm, and getting worse," the observer assented. "I wouldn't wonder if Carlowitz were right, after all--if she ain't getting ready to blow her top I'm a Zabriskan fontema's maiden aunt."

"No periodicity--no equation, of course." It was a statement, not a question. The Lensman ignored as completely as did the observer, if not as flippantly, the distinct possibility that at any moment the observatory and all that it contained might be resolved into their component atoms.

"None whatever," came flatly from Cloud. He did not need to spend hours at a calculating machine; at one glance he _knew_, without knowing how he knew, that no equation could be made to fit even the weighted-average locus of that wildly-shifting Sigma curve. "But most of the cycles cut this ordinate here--seven fifty-one--so I'll take that for my value. That means nine point nine oh six kilograms of duodec basic charge, with one five percent over and one five percent under that for alternates. Neocarballoy casing, fifty-three millimeters on the basic, others in proportion. On the wire?"

"It went out as you said it," the observer reported. "They'll have 'em here in fifteen minutes."

"QX--I'll get dressed, then."

The Lensman and the observer helped him into his cumbersome, heavily-padded armor. They checked his instruments, making sure that the protective devices of the suit were functioning at full efficiency. Then all three went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a torpedo bearing the stubby wings and the ludicrous tail-surfaces, the multifarious driving-, braking-, side-, top-, and under-jets so characteristic of the tricky, cranky, but ultra-maneuverable breed. But this one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did not carry; spaced around the needle beak there yawned the open muzzles of a triplex bomb-thrower.

[Illustration: _Ten seconds in which to solve the equation--to choose, fire, move clear--the flitter bucked._]

More checking. The Lensman and the armored Cloud both knew that every one of the dozens of instruments upon the flitter's special board was right to the hair; nevertheless each one was compared with the master-instrument of the observatory.

* * * * *

The bombs arrived and were loaded in; and Cloud, with a casually-waved salute, stepped into the tiny operating compartment. The massive door--flitters have no airlocks, as the whole midsection is scarcely bigger than an airlock would have to be--rammed shut upon its fiber gaskets, the heavy toggles drove home. A cushioned form closed in upon the pilot, leaving only his arms and lower legs free.

Then, making sure that his two companions had ducked for cover, Cloud shot his flitter into the air and toward the seething inferno which was Loose Atomic Vortex Number One. For it was seething, no fooling; and it was an inferno. The crater was a ragged, jagged hole a full mile from lip to lip and perhaps a quarter of that in depth. It was not, however, a perfect cone, for the floor, being largely incandescently molten, was practically level except for a depression at the center, where the actual vortex lay. The walls of the pit were steeply, unstably irregular, varying in pitch and shape with the hardness and refractoriness of the strata composing them. Now a section would glare into an unbearably blinding white puffing away in sparkling vapor. Again, cooled by an inrushing blast of air, it would subside into an angry scarlet, its surface crawling in a sluggish flow of lava. Occasionally a part of the wall might even go black, into pock-marked scoriae or into brilliant planes of obsidian.

For always, somewhere, there was an enormous volume of air pouring into that crater. It rushed in as ordinary air. It came out, however, in a ragingly-uprushing pillar, as--as something else. No one knew--or knows yet, for that matter--exactly what a loose vortex does to the molecules and atoms of air. In fact, due to the extreme variability already referred to, it probably does not do the same thing for more than an instant at a time.

That there is little actual combustion is certain; that is, except for the forced combination of nitrogen, argon, xenon, and krypton with oxygen. There is, however, consumption: plenty of consumption. And what that incredibly intense bombardment impinges up is ... is altered. Profoundly and obscuredly altered, so that the atmosphere emitted from the crater is quite definitely no longer air as we know it. It may be corrosive, it may be poisonous in one or another of a hundred fashions, it may be merely new and different; but it is no longer the air which we human beings are used to breathing. And it is this fact, rather than the destruction of the planet itself, which would end the possibility of life upon Earth's surface.

* * * * *

It is difficult indeed to describe the appearance of a loose atomic vortex to those who have never seen one; and, fortunately, most people never have. And practically all of its frightful radiation lies in those octaves of the spectrum which are invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it had an average effective surface temperature of about fifteen thousand degrees absolute--two and one-half times as hot as the sun of Tellus--and that it was radiating every frequency possible to that incomprehensible temperature, and let it go at that.

And Neal Cloud, scurrying in his flitter through that murky, radiation-riddled atmosphere, setting up equations from the readings of his various meters and gauges and solving those equations almost instantaneously in his mathematical-prodigy's mind, sat appalled. For the activity level was, and even in its lowest dips remained, far above the level he had selected. His skin began to prickle and to burn. His eyes began to smart and to ache. He knew what those symptoms meant; even the flitter's powerful screens were not stopping all the radiation; even his suit-screens and his special goggles were not stopping what leaked through. But he wouldn't quit yet; the activity might--probably would--take a nose-dive any instant. If it did, he'd have to be ready. On the other hand, it might blow up at any instant, too.

There were two schools of mathematical thought upon that point. One held that the vortex, without any essential change in its physical condition or nature, would keep on growing bigger. Indefinitely, until, uniting with the other vortices of the planet, it had converted the entire mass of the world into energy.

The second school, of which the forementioned Carlowitz was the loudest voice, taught that at a certain stage of development the internal energy of the vortex would become so great that generation-radiation equilibrium could not be maintained. This would, of course, result in an explosion; the nature and consequences of which this Carlowitz was wont to dwell upon in ghoulishly mathematical glee. Neither school, however, could prove its point--or, rather, each school proved its point, by means of unimpeachable mathematics--and each hated and derided the other, loudly and heatedly.

And now Cloud, as he studied through his almost opaque defenses that indescribably ravening fireball, that esuriently rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strongly inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn't seem possible that anything _could_ get any worse than that without exploding. And such an explosion, he felt sure, would certainly blow everything for miles around into the smitheriest kind of smithereens.

The activity of the vortex stayed high, 'way too high. The tiny control room of the flitter grew hotter and hotter. His skin burned and his eyes ached worse. He touched a communicator stud and spoke.

"Phil? Better get me three more bombs. Like these, except up around...."

"I don't check you. If you do that, it's apt to drop to a minimum and stay there," the Lensman reminded him. "It's completely unpredictable, you know."

"It may, at that ... so I'll have to forget the five percent margin and hit it on the nose or not at all. Order me up two more, then--one at half of what I've got here, the other double it," and he reeled off the figures for the charge and the casing of the explosive. "You might break out a jar of burn-dressing, too. Some fairly hot stuff is leaking through."

"We'll do that. Come down, fast!"

Cloud landed. He stripped to the skin and the observer smeared his every square inch of epidermis with the thick, gooey stuff that was not only a highly efficient screen against radiation, but also a sovereign remedy for new radiation burns. He exchanged his goggles for a thicker, darker, heavier pair. The two bombs arrived and were substituted for two of the original load.

"I thought of something while I was up there," Cloud informed the observers then. "Twenty kilograms of duodec is nobody's firecracker, but it may be the least of what's going to go off. Have you got any idea of what's going to become of the energy inside that vortex when I blow it out?"

"Can't say that I have." The Lensman frowned in thought. "No data."

"Neither have I. But I'd say that you better go back to the new station--the one you were going to move to if it kept on getting worse."

"But the instruments...." the Lensman was thinking, not of the instruments themselves, which were valueless in comparison with life, but of the records those instruments would make. Those records were priceless.

"I'll have everything on the tapes in the flitter," Cloud reminded.

"But suppose...."

"That the flitter stops one, too--or doesn't stop it, rather? In that case, your back station won't be there, either, so it won't make any difference." How mistaken Cloud was!

"QX," the Chief decided. "We'll leave when you do--just in case."

* * * * *

Again in air, Cloud found that the activity, while still high, was not too high, but that it was fluctuating too rapidly. He could not get even five seconds of trustworthy prediction, to say nothing of ten. So he waited, as close as he dared remain to that horrible center of disintegration.

The flitter hung poised in air, motionless, upon softly hissing under-jets. Cloud knew to a fraction his height above the ground. He knew to a fraction his distance from the vortex. He knew with equal certainty the density of the atmosphere and the exact velocity and direction of the wind. Hence, since he could also read closely enough the momentary variations in the cyclonic storms within the crater, he could compute very easily the course and velocity necessary to land the bomb in the exact center of the vortex at any given instant of time. The hard part--the thing that no one had as yet succeeded in doing--was to predict, for a time far enough ahead to be of any use, a usably close approximation to the vortex's quantitative activity. For, as has been said, he had to over-blast, rather than under-, if he could not hit it "on the nose:" to under-blast would scatter it all over the state.

Therefore Cloud concentrated upon the dials and gauges before him; concentrated with every fiber of his being and every cell of his brain.

Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, the Sigma curve gave signs of flattening out. In that instant Cloud's mind pounced. Simultaneous equations: nine of them, involving nine unknowns. An integration in four dimensions. No matter--Cloud did not solve them laboriously, one factor at a time. Without knowing how he had arrived at it, he knew the answer; just as the Posenian or the Rigellian is able to perceive every separate component particle of an opaque, three-dimensional solid, but without being able to explain to anyone how his sense of perception works. It just _is_, that's all.

Anyway, by virtue of whatever sense or ability it is which makes a mathematical prodigy what he is, Cloud knew that in exactly eight and three-tenths seconds from that observed instant the activity of the vortex would be slightly--but not too far--under the coefficient of his heaviest bomb. Another flick of his mental trigger and he knew the exact velocity he would require. His hand swept over the studs, his right foot tramped down, hard, upon the firing lever; and, even as the quivering flitter shot forward under eight Tellurian gravities of acceleration, he knew to the thousandth of a second how long he would have to hold that acceleration to attain that velocity. While not really long--in seconds--it was much too long for comfort. It took him much closer to the vortex than he wanted to be; in fact, it took him right out over the crater itself.

But he stuck to the calculated course, and at the precisely correct instant he cut his drive and released his largest bomb. Then, so rapidly that it was one blur of speed, he again kicked on his eight G's of drive and started to whirl around as only a speedster or a flitter can whirl. Practically unconscious from the terrific resultant of the linear and angular accelerations, he ejected the two smaller bombs. He did not care particularly where they lit, just so they didn't light in the crater or near the observatory, and he had already made certain of that. Then, without waiting even to finish the whirl or to straighten her out in level flight, Cloud's still-flying hand darted toward the switch whose closing would energize the Bergenholm and make the flitter inertialess.

Too late. Hell was out for noon, with the little speedster still inert. Cloud had moved fast, too; trained mind and trained body had been working at top speed and in perfect coordination. There just simply hadn't been enough time. If he could have got what he wanted, ten full seconds, or even nine, he could have made it, but....

* * * * *

In spite of what happened, Cloud defended his action, then and thereafter. Damnitall, he _had_ to take the eight-point-three second reading! Another tenth of a second and his bomb wouldn't have fitted--he didn't have the five percent leeway he wanted, remember. And no, he couldn't wait for another match, either. His screens were leaking like sieves, and if he had waited for another chance they would have picked him up fried to a greasy cinder in his own lard!

The bomb sped truly and struck the target in direct central impact, exactly as scheduled. It penetrated perfectly. The neocarballoy casing lasted just long enough--that frightful charge of duodec exploded, if not exactly at the center of the vortex, at least near enough to the center to do the work. In other words, Cloud's figuring had been close--very close. But the time had been altogether too short.

The flitter was not even out of the crater when the bomb went off. And not only the bomb. For Cloud's vague forebodings were materialized, and more; the staggeringly immense energy of the vortex merged with that of the detonating duodec to form an utterly incomprehensible whole.

In part the hellish flood of boiling lava in that devil's cauldron was beaten downward into a bowl by the sheer, stupendous force of the blow; in part it was hurled abroad in masses, in gouts and streamers. And the raging wind of the explosion's front seized the fragments and tore and worried them to bits, hurling them still faster along their paths of violence. And air, so densely compressed as to be to all intents and purposes a solid, smote the walls of the crater. Smote them so that they crumbled, crushed outward through the hard-packed ground, broke up into jaggedly irregular blocks which hurtled, screamingly, away through the atmosphere.

Also the concussion wave, or the explosion front, or flying fragments, or something, struck the two loose bombs, so that they too exploded and added their contribution to the already stupendous concentration of force. They were not close enough to the flitter to wreck it of themselves, but they were close enough so that they didn't do her--or her pilot--a bit of good.

The first terrific wave buffeted the flyer while Cloud's right hand was in the air, shooting across the panel to turn on the Berg. The impact jerked the arm downward and sidewise, both bones of the forearm snapping as it struck the ledge. The second one, an instant later, broke his left leg. Then the debris began to arrive.

Chunks of solid or semi-molten rock slammed against the hull, knocking off wings and control-surfaces. Gobs of viscous slag slapped it liquidly, freezing into and clogging up jets and orifices. The little ship was hurled hither and yon, in the grip of forces she could no more resist than can the floating leaf resist the waters of a cataract. And Cloud's brain was as addled as an egg by the vicious concussions which were hitting him from so many different directions and so nearly all at once. Nevertheless, with his one arm and his one leg and the few cells of his brain that were still at work, the physicist was still in the fight.

By sheer force of will and nerve he forced his left hand across the gyrating key-bank to the Bergenholm switch. He snapped it, and in the instant of its closing a vast, calm peace descended, blanket-like. For, fortunately, the Berg still worked; the flitter and all her contents and appurtenances were inertialess. Nothing material could buffet her or hurt her now; she would waft effortlessly away from a feather's lightest possible touch.

Cloud wanted to faint then, but he didn't--quite. Instead, foggily, he tried to look back at the crater. Nine-tenths of his visiplates were out of commission, but he finally got a view. Good--it was out. He wasn't surprised; he had been quite confident that it would be. It wasn't scattered around, either. It _couldn't_ be, for his only possibility of smearing the shot was on the upper side, not the lower.

* * * * *

His next effort was to locate the secondary observatory, where he had to land, and in that too he was successful. He had enough intelligence left to realize that, with practically all of his jets clogged and his wings and tail shot off, he couldn't land his little vessel inert. Therefore he would have to land her free.

And by dint of light and extremely unorthodox use of what jets he had left in usable shape he did land her free, almost within the limits of the observatory's field; and having landed, he inerted her.

But, as has been intimated, his brain was not working so well; he had held his ship inertialess quite a few seconds longer than he thought, and he did not even think of the buffetings she had taken. As a result of these things, however, her intrinsic velocity did not match, anywhere near exactly, that of the ground upon which she lay. Thus, when Cloud cut his Bergenholm, restoring thereby to the flitter the absolute velocity and inertia she had had before going free, there resulted a distinctly anti-climactic crash.

There was a last terrific bump as the motionless vessel collided with the equally motionless ground; and "Storm" Cloud, vortex blaster, went out like the proverbial light.

Help came, of course; and on the double. The pilot was unconscious and the flitter's door could not be opened from the outside, but those were not insuperable obstacles. A plate, already loose, was sheared away; the pilot was carefully lifted out of his prison and rushed to Base Hospital in the "meat-can" already in attendance.

And later, in a private office of that hospital, the gray-clad Chief of the Atomic Research Laboratory sat and waited--but not patiently.

"How is he, Lacy?" he demanded, as the Surgeon-General entered the room. "He's going to live, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes, Phil--definitely yes," Lacy replied, briskly. "He has a good skeleton, very good indeed. The burns are superficial and will yield quite readily to treatment. The deeper, delayed effects of the radiation to which he was exposed can be neutralized entirely effectively. Thus he will not need even a Phillips's treatment for the replacement of damaged parts, except possibly for a few torn muscles and so on."

"But he was smashed up pretty badly, wasn't he? I know that he had a broken arm and a broken leg, at least."

"Simple fractures only--entirely negligible." Lacy waved aside with an airy gesture such small ills as broken bones. "He'll be out in a few weeks."

"How soon can I see him?" the Lensman-physicist asked. "There are some important things to take up with him, and I've got a personal message for him that I must give him as soon as possible."

Lacy pursued his lips. Then:

"You may see him now," he decided. "He is conscious, and strong enough. Not too long, though, Phil--fifteen minutes at most."

"QX, and thanks," and a nurse led the visiting Lensman to Cloud's bedside.

"Hi, Stupe!" he boomed, cheerfully. "'Stupe' being short for stupendous, not 'stupid'."

"Hi, Chief. Glad to see somebody. Sit down."

"You're the most-wanted man in the Galaxy," the visitor informed the invalid, "not excepting even Kimball Kinnison. Look at this spool of tape, and it's only the first one. I brought it along for you to read at your leisure. As soon as any planet finds out that we've got a sure-enough vortex-blower-outer, an expert who can really call his shots--and the news travels mighty fast--that planet sends in a double-urgent, Class A-Prime demand for first call upon your services.

"Sirius IV got in first by a whisker, it seems, but Aldebaran II was so close a second that it was a photo finish, and all the channels have been jammed ever since. Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Spica. They all want you. Everybody, from Alsakan to Vandemar and back. We told them right off that we would not receive personal delegations--we had to almost throw a couple of pink-haired Chickladorians out bodily to make them believe that we meant it--and that the age and condition of the vortex involved, not priority of requisition, would govern, QX?"

"Absolutely," Cloud agreed. "That's the only way it could be, I should think."

"So forget about this psychic trauma.... No, I don't mean that," the Lensman corrected himself hastily. "You know what I mean. The will to live is the most important factor in any man's recovery, and too many worlds need you too badly to have you quit now. Not?"

"I suppose so," Cloud acquiesced, but somberly. "I'll get out of here in short order. And I'll keep on pecking away until one of those vortices finishes what this one started."

"You'll die of old age then, son," the Lensman assured him. "We got full data--all the information we need. We know exactly what to do to your screens. Next time nothing will come through except light, and only as much of that as you feel like admitting. You can wait as close to a vortex as you please, for as long as you please; until you get exactly the activity and time-interval that you want. You will be just as comfortable and just as safe as though you were home in bed."

"Sure of that?"

"Absolutely--or at least, as sure as we can be of anything that hasn't happened yet. But I see that your guardian angel here is eyeing her clock somewhat pointedly, so I'd better be doing a flit before they toss me down a shaft. Clear ether, Storm!"

"Clear ether, Chief!"

And that is how "Storm" Cloud, atomic physicist, became the most narrowly-specialized specialist in all the annals of science: how he became "Storm" Cloud, Vortex Blaster--the Galaxy's only vortex blaster.